By Steven S. Drachman

Back in 1988, I was working as an editorial assistant at St. Martin’s Press, when a literary agent I’d never heard of cold-called me, or maybe he was just cold-calling the publishing house and I happened to answer. (That’s the way telephones worked, back then.) Either way, he was calling to pitch the reprint of a book called Loving John, which I had never heard of before, but which I quickly discerned was by and about a young woman named May Pang who, a decade-and-a-half earlier, had been secretly hired by Yoko Ono to consort with her husband, John Lennon. 

One morning at the Dakota, the publicity materials shrieked, Yoko informed May that she was to begin Loving John. 

The book had been originally published in 1983, less than three years after Lennon’s death. 

“The author,” he said, “would really like to see it back in print.” 

Of course she would! I thought. 

I didn’t approve. 

If there was one thing I knew, it was that if a woman pays you to sleep with her husband, there is kind of an unwritten understanding that you won’t write a book about it after the guy dies. 

Plus, I was Team Yoko: I loved her music, her art, her poetry, even her singing, and I say that not just to be contrarian. 

Still, it wasn’t my decision to make. I passed the query along to my boss, the storied editor, Hope Dellon. I don’t know what happened after that, because Hope fired me pretty quickly, just a few months after I started working there. 

For the thirty-eight years that followed, this was all I knew about May Pang, though I admit that I didn’t give her much thought. 

Turns out, it didn’t really happen that way, and there is nothing about her story that warrants my disapproval of May’s behavior.

Sensationalism Wins Out

How was it that I didn’t know the truth, and how did I finally find out? I didn’t know, because I didn’t bother to know. And I found out on Facebook, plus my own dogged follow-up research. 

How was it that May Pang’s story was publicized so misleadingly?

“They wanted to sensationalize it,” May Pang says today, speaking of Warner Books, the publisher of Loving John. “And I didn’t want that.”

So let’s get this out of the way upfront: Neither Yoko nor anyone else ever paid May Pang to love John Lennon. 

Here are the facts: 

When she worked as John and Yoko’s very young assistant in the early 1970s, Yoko made the suggestion. 

May said no. 

Later, while John and Yoko were separated, and May was no longer on the payroll, May and John lived together in a house in California, and later an apartment in New York. She was his girlfriend. So even news reports today that describe an “affair” are entirely inaccurate. 

These eighteen months, furthermore, coincided with John’s most productive period as a solo artist, which is undeniably May’s doing; he recorded three records, Mind Games, Walls and Bridges and Rock ’n’ Roll, the second of which resulted in his only solo Number One hit song. May collaborated with him on every one of them, and it is clearly a fact that if not for John Lennon’s collaboration with (and love for) May Pang, those records would at the very least have turned out very differently and probably would not even exist at all. 

May Pang’s story about those years is a chronicle of love and musical collaboration. A chapter of historical interest, which is not at all lewd or sordid. Still, Yoko’s “indecent proposal” must have seemed sensational back in the 1980s to an agent looking for a book deal and a publisher who wished to move copies.

In fact, the manuscript she delivered with her co-writer, Henry Edwards, was full of stories about the making of the music that got left on the publishing house floor after Warners ruthlessly cut the book back to emphasize the supposedly salacious elements of her story. 

Furthermore, at the time the agent called me, May Pang was almost certainly not “the author” eager to see her book back in print. She was busy planning for her wedding to the great record producer, Tony Visconti, who had produced landmark albums by David Bowie and T. Rex, another period that was productive both professionally (she and Visconti produced several records together) and personally (she and Visconti produced a few children together as well). She had also publicly stated that she did not want the book back in print, since she’d written a book about music, not a kiss-and-tell. 

“Would I have done certain things differently?” she says today. “Yes. I would have told my co-author I wanted more control.” 

The Untold Story

She has talked about her Lennon period periodically over the years; she is talking again now because she is taking her traveling exhibition, a collection of candid photographs of Lennon taken during their life together, around the country.

The story of her Lennon adventure is heartbreaking and haunting. May, a young college dropout, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, raised in Spanish Harlem by a mother who operated a laundry, chosen by one of the great princes of popular music to reign as queen by his side for a thousand brief days. (Not really a thousand days, barely half, but you get the reference.) Suddenly, she was hobnobbing with Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Elizabeth Taylor, Elton John, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and so many others. She lived in a house in Los Angeles that she and John shared with Ringo Starr, Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson (the same house where John Kennedy slept with Marilyn Monroe)! Imagine what this was like. Then she moved to a penthouse in Manhattan, where she and John saw a flying saucer from the terrace! She helped John Lennon make his greatest music. She urged him to reacquaint himself with old friends and reconnect with his son, Julian, whom he had not seen in years, and take time to make amends with his first wife, Cynthia, activities that were mostly verboten during his years with Yoko. (To this day, Julian seems to regard May as a sort of stepmother; he doesn’t feel that way about Yoko.) 

She was a great facilitator; during this period, she assisted John as he produced Harry Nilsson’s album Pussy Cats and Mick Jagger’s “Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup),” and worked on tracks for Ringo Starr’s Goodnight Vienna. She was in the room, offering a subtle suggestion or two when she could be helpful, as Lennon, David Bowie and guitarist Carlos Alomar created the great hit single “Fame.”

“I was happy to be in the background,” she says today. “If they wanted to have my opinion, they would start asking me questions.” 

More often than not, they would. 

Pictures from that period show a period of bliss. The camera loved her: May had the kind of visual charisma that leaps out of the picture, a sort of confident guilelessness and an effortless gorgeousness that appears all the more striking when she mimics John’s poses and dons her own take on his iconic round glasses. “She was just beautiful,” her friend, Chris O’Dell recalled a few years ago. “When she walked into a room, you couldn’t miss her, because these long legs kind of took off across the room.” In photos, she is wide-eyed and thrilled at the lucky life that had been bestowed upon her and seemingly unaware that she would inevitably (inevitably) crash to Earth. 

John was even luckier. 

“You know Larry, I may have been the happiest I’ve ever been,” he later told his friend and biographer Larry Kane. “I loved this woman. I made some beautiful music.”

It is a fairy tale, but it is also a terrible story about a young innocent, barely out of high school, misused by an older and more powerful woman: Yoko was, by all reports, including her own, delighted to see her husband run off temporarily with another woman, and had no particular concern for how May would be hurt. “I thought it’s better to give him a rest and me a rest,” she said coldly in 2012. “May Pang was a very intelligent, attractive woman and extremely efficient. I thought they’d be OK.” 

Yoko wanted space for her own affair, reportedly with guitarist David Spinozza. But only for a while.

Once she’d tired of the separation and her alleged relationship with Spinozza, Yoko did everything she could to reel John back in, including calling on Paul McCartney (undisputed), and possibly even using a form of hypnosis that verged on brainwashing. (Unconfirmed … but I believe it.)

May and John had plans for the future. John was working on an album of new songs. John and May planned to buy a second home in Montauk. But John walked out the door of their East 52nd Street apartment one day and didn’t return. He went back to Yoko, without any warning. May says she and John remained lovers for years afterward while she struggled to sustain relationships with other men, although the later encounters had no witnesses. “Towards the end, nobody saw us,” she told me.

Imagine what it was like for May Pang, still in her early twenties; one day, she lived in a penthouse with John Lennon, where they planned their future together; the next day, she was without a home, unemployed, everything gone. 

It was predictable; she didn’t predict it. 

“I thought this relationship might have a real future,” she said a few years ago. 

I think it would probably be easier for an older woman to move on, but not someone so young. The pain was worsened by Yoko’s public attempt to belittle her and to erase her from John’s story.

What happened after she loved John Lennon? What happened before? 

Her book was marketed as “The Untold Story,” but most of her story still remains untold. 

The Rest of the Story

Her parents’ story has the sweep of a great literary immigrant novel: a man who came to America on his own, leaving his young wife behind in China, where she gave birth alone to a baby girl. When he learned that he was the father of a girl, not a boy, he demanded that she abandon the child in China and join him in America.

When her mother gave birth to another girl, May, in 1950, her father was so disappointed that he reportedly refused to visit her in the hospital. He then adopted Peter, a ten-year-old boy from rural China. May and Peter were estranged for thirty years. He died sometime in the last ten years, out in California, where he lived with his second wife.

Her sister came to America at the age of twenty-three and settled in Chinatown, where she lives today.

“We have no relationship,” May says, “because to her, I was the one that was born in America, and I was lucky, and that was it. So, in her mind, you know, I’m the spoiled kid.”

May dropped out of New York City Community College after a year and, through a combination of nerve and luck, managed to win a job at ABKCO Records, for which, by her own admission, she was entirely unqualified, but eager to learn and able to ingratiate herself. At ABKCO, Yoko and John took an interest in the nineteen-year-old office floater and soon lured her away. Her life as their assistant was glamorous enough, shuttling among the Dakota, recording studios and film sets, but it was nothing compared to her eighteen magical months on John’s arm.

And then, when it all came crashing down, what did she do?

At first, she found herself unemployable in the music industry, allegedly blacklisted by her ex-boyfriend’s vengeful wife. She and publicist Kris DiLorenzo created a publicity firm called Two Pennies Unlimited in March 1977, though it didn’t last long; she eventually broke through the blacklist at Island Records, which led to a few years of increasingly prominent positions throughout the industry. She had some real achievements during those years: At United Artists Music, she helped Jon Bon Jovi, before he was famous, find songs for a recording project. She also placed “Love Lies,” written by Allan Chapman and Michael Hanna, with Diana Ross, and “Two Less Lonely People in the World,” written by Howard Greenfield and United Artists songwriter Ken Hirsch, with Air Supply. Most famously, she took Bob Halligan Jr., then writing Christian music, pushed him toward a harder-rock sound and placed “(Take These) Chains” with Judas Priest for Screaming for Vengeance. Halligan followed it with “Some Heads Are Gonna Roll” for the band’s next album, Defenders of the Faith.

She didn’t entirely abandon the limelight: she appeared in David Bowie’s video for “Fashion” in 1980, for example. And though her life was not as glamorous as it had been, by 1983, she was creative director in New York at Famous Music, the music-publishing division of Paramount Pictures, a notably senior position and a significant achievement for an Asian American woman in the music business at the time.

But what she describes as the chauvinism and racism of the era rankled.

She saw male colleagues rise in the industry faster than she did. And she had another obstacle as well.

“I am not white,” she says flatly, before launching into an awful story about an ASCAP dinner during CMA Week in Nashville, during her United Artists phase: she received worse accommodations than her West Coast male counterpart; the woman handing out name tags ignored her until the president of her company sternly intervened. And when she joined a group photograph with her colleagues, things got worse.

“The photographer looks into his camera,” she recalled, “and he looks up, and he goes, ‘You, get out of the photo.’ I had a strange feeling I knew who he was talking about. And he goes, ‘No, you, get out of the photo.’ And [my colleagues were] all puzzled. And I point to myself. I said, ‘Me?’ And he goes, ‘Yes, you.’ And the whole group just yelled out, ‘She’s the East Coast professional manager!’” The photographer took the picture. The next day, ASCAP called and asked to take her out for a drink. “I said, ‘No, I’m leaving town.’ So that was what was happening at that time. So, to get any further, it wasn’t going to happen for a while.”

By 1983, she was ready for a change. She signed a deal to publish Loving John, left her job at Famous Music and went on a whirlwind press tour. Interviewers included Joan Rivers, Maury Povich and Geraldo Rivera. 

Still, the book wasn’t what she’d hoped it would be, and both Warner Books and interviewers were more interested in the soapy aspects of her saga than the recording of “#9 Dream.” Her book was decidedly discreet, and in interviews she sidestepped more personal questions with non-answer answers. 

“People ask what John was like as a lover,” she noted at the time. “OK. John was great. He was my friend. He was definitely the closest friend I had at that time. As a lover, he was my teacher.” Laughing in embarrassment, she asked, “Does that answer…?”

Um, no.

Her book tour ended; her book went out of print. Despite her earlier success and indisputable capability, she never held another full-time job in the music industry, a career derailment she blames partly on racism and chauvinism, but also significantly on the impact of Loving John.

“It was very hard to get a job,” she says, “even though I was qualified. I was too well-known.”

She supported herself with the advance she had received for Loving John and with acting work, much of it as an extra. She appeared in Heartburn, among other things, and eventually joined SAG, which meant better pay, health insurance and pension contributions. “It kept me alive,” she says. She missed the music industry, though, and people continued to seek her advice. “I never asked for money,” she remembers.

She stayed at the industry’s periphery. She had first met producer Tony Visconti during her time with Lennon. A few years after her book came out, Pang saw Visconti speaking on a panel at a New Music Seminar in New York. They recognized each other and spent a few days together before losing touch again. Four years later, Pang was in London, sitting at the Groucho Club with a friend, when Visconti walked into the room.

They married in 1989. Their wedding song was the Beatles’ “In My Life,” which John Lennon sang.

“I asked him if it was okay,” she says. “It wasn’t because it was the Beatles. But it was because of the words. Words meant a lot.” 

“In My Life” had meant something to her when she was a teenager, long before she ever met Lennon. If she had wanted to play “Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)”, a love song that John wrote specifically about her, she says, that would have been different.

She says Tony didn’t mind. Still, maybe it wasn’t easy.

They were married for eleven years. She worked on a few record albums that he produced, as a string contractor and assistant producer. She no longer made John Lennon the center of her public life.

Her marriage to Visconti ended in 2000, amicably by all indications; they still share Thanksgiving with their children. Eight years later, she turned back to the past in earnest and published a book of photographs from those eighteen months, the altogether excellent Instamatic Karma. A good book, and a good pun. The Los Angeles Times called the book a “joyously disarming visual travelogue.”

What Does May Pang Mean to Us? 

People on social media have strong opinions about her (yet another thing she has in common with Yoko).

“I so wish things had turned out differently,” writes Bob, with a heart and a crying emoji.

“Wish he had stayed with May!” Mare Susen mourns.

“Should have kept May, John,” advises Aldo Lovati.

And Joeann Rufe writes, “May was great for John. I am sorry May that he broke your heart.”  

A few decades ago, some women from Philadelphia started a garage-rock band named after her.

Other commenters have a different point of view. 

“I like May Pang a lot,” writes LM Garr. “When I met her, she was very nice. But I do agree … that she’s been milking the adultery thing for years.” And Johann Heyss writes, “May Pang in the ass is a parasite and disgrace.”

Some people imagine a counterfactual in which John stayed with May. She would have inspired him to continue writing and recording, as he had during those eighteen months, rather than retreating from public life, as he did with Yoko. Indeed, a divorce from Yoko would have cost him considerably — during the ’seventies, she controlled the money and even had the power to cut him off during his time with May — and he would have had to work. We would have many more albums of great John Lennon music, inspired by May. “John was going to surprise the world,” she wrote in 2008, “by writing and recording with Paul.” So the rapprochement with the other Beatles, which May encouraged and Yoko later kiboshed, would have continued. If he were a working musician, living with May in their nice but very small apartment on East 52nd Street, far from the more conspicuously tony Dakota, his assassin, Mark David Chapman, might not have fixated on the contrast between Lennon’s provocatively lavish lifestyle and his public idealism. In this counterfactual, if he’d never left May, John would be with us even today, making music with Paul. 

May Pang is neither a great victim nor a great villain. She documents a historically important period of rock history, through photographs, interviews and books, because she was there, which is entirely appropriate; still, some people see her as an opportunist cashing in on an old romance. May Pang had a rockstar boyfriend during the 1970s, and they ultimately broke up, as these relationships generally do; still, some people insist on mourning it for her. 

“Those people will never get past it,” she says. “I have seen that. And you just … you know, you have to move on.”

A few minutes later, she adds, “Listen, I can give people closure of what actually happened during that time period. A lot of people have found closure from the fact that they said to me, I’m glad he found some happiness during this whole time, and he had some happiness with Paul or George, or Julian, for that matter. And I was able to also give Cynthia and John time to get their closure that they never got.”

And what about closure for her?

“Obviously,” she says, “I won’t get the closure. But the closure will only be … you know, there won’t be any for me. But at least I’m able to do better, you know?”

She says she’s still “fighting the machine. You know? I’m fighting the party line.”

But what machine, what party, is she fighting, and what is she fighting about?

Lip-Syncing As Erasure

I think it comes down to three awful things:

First, the lavish amazingness of those 18 months, the suddenness with which it was taken from her, Lennon’s terrible death just a few years after that and the perfectly normal years that followed. Who would not want to return, again and again and again, to the magical Camelot of Before-Times, especially if people wanted to listen?

The second is the way the Lennons tried to reframe the separation in the course of publicizing Double Fantasy, the album they released together in 1980, which was presented as new material, but which actually included music Lennon had begun while living with May: the melody that later became “Beautiful Boy,” and a piano piece called “Tennessee,” which later became “Watching the Wheels.”

“It was the lost weekend that lasted 18 months,” John said in a Playboy interview. “I’ve never drunk so much in my life.”

In fact, he had begun framing the separation this way almost as soon as it ended. In February 1975, Lisa Robinson of the New Musical Express noted that he seemed happy to be back with Yoko.

“Well I am,” John replied. “It’s like — and this is no disrespect to anybody else I was having relationships with — but I feel like I was running around with me head off, and now I’ve got me head back on…. We knew we were getting back together. It was just a matter of when. We knew. Everybody else might not have, but we did.”

While the NME interview, given while May was still reeling from the breakup, seems the most heartlessly tone deaf, the Playboy interview left the deepest wound. She used the “lost weekend” terminology as the title of a reprint of Loving John, her touring gallery show and a documentary that premiered in 2022. A “lost weekend,” of course, is a binge that one can’t remember afterwards, during which one might have one or more meaningless flings, an especially humiliating and inaccurate way for him to describe his time with May. Imagine how it must have felt to a young woman, to have the first and most meaningful relationship of her life described in the worldwide press — media all around the world! — as though it were a drunken mistake.

We understand why, after a man returns to his wife, he might want to inaccurately describe a genuinely loving extramarital relationship as some kind of lapse of judgment. Though it’s understandable, it’s hurtful and wrong, nonetheless. (See, also, Clinton, William J.)

Wouldn’t you want to correct the record?

The third awful thing is the controversy of “#9 Dream.”

This is a beautiful song on the Walls and Bridges album. At one point, John sings, “I thought I could hear / Somebody call out my name,” and we hear a breathy voice — a “sexy whisper” — call, John … John.

That was May. She received her own gold record for her work on Walls and Bridges.

Yet after John’s death, Yoko created a new video for the song for the 2003 DVD Lennon Legend: The Very Best of John Lennon, which she edited to make it look as though she were the one singing those words, rather than May.

“Well,” May says, “it was her Milli Vanilli moment.”

That’s a good joke, but how would you feel to be erased from the story of your own gold record? 

Just one more thing: she wants you to know that John loved her, no matter what he had to say later to stay on his wife’s good side.

“He loved Cynthia,” she said in 2023. “He loved Yoko. And yes, he loved me.”

Some of us, though, think he loved May most of all.

What I Would Wish for May Pang

Both Yoko and May have won, at this point in their long lives.

Yoko has achieved an overdue acknowledgment that her art has value, that she is a visionary, not a leech who fed off her more-famous husband. (Or, to be more precise, not just a leech who fed off her more-famous husband.)

May has gained recognition for her historic role in inspiring and collaborating on some of the greatest music of the twentieth century; and who would doubt now that John loved her? Loving John created a new public misperception and thus didn’t really help correct the record, but with the double whammy of her traveling photographic exhibition and her recent documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, there is now a wider sympathy for the life she lived and appreciation for the work she did.

Writing of the documentary in Variety, Owen Gleiberman noted that Pang relates her story “with a dailiness that’s convincing,” describing the relationship as “rooted in a genuine affection.” The film even won over some skeptics, such as critic Roger Moore, who began his review: “I did not expect to like May Pang’s latest remembrance of her time with her former employer, then lover, John Lennon.”

Yoko has received overdue recognition of her contribution to the great song “Imagine.” And May has received overdue recognition of her contribution to the three albums John released during his life with her.

What comes next for these two women? Yoko will collect accolades, sit contentedly in her wheelchair as the world, finally and just in time, organizes retrospectives and recognizes her genius.

May is also an artistic person: a published author; a filmmaker; a photographer. Her story isn’t over. Maybe a new chapter is just beginning. 

Yoko’s gallery shows are all about Yoko. May’s gallery shows are all about John. 

“You’re a really great photographer,” I told her when we spoke recently. Isn’t it possible that she may have stumbled into her true calling?

“Listen,” she said. “I’m honored that professionals have come up to me and said it. You know, I take it.”

“But what do you do with that?” I asked her. “You can take some non-John Lennon photographs. You could take other celebrities. You could take anything that you want and sell those at the galleries. Have you ever thought about that?”

Most aspiring artistic photographers, after all, don’t have legions of galleries across the country and around the world eager to book them. She starts with a decided advantage.

“The things that I like taking,” she laughs, “people think I’m crazy. I like to take the landscape.” Photographs of a changing city, she adds. The Twin Towers in 1974, still new on the skyline. “People have seen some of my moon shots at night, when I used to stand out in the cold to take it, or just the combination of buildings in New York City. I started thinking, maybe I just should put a little booklet of all these things that I’ve done, ’cause I have hundreds and hundreds of those over the years.”

And what about love? She says she hasn’t given up.

“I think my soulmate is not the person I’m looking for now,” she says. “I’m looking for more of a companion as opposed to a soulmate.”

She thinks.

“I don’t know if I would say I’m out looking. If it happens, it happens. It’s been so long, it’s just … if it happens. That’s all.”

^^^

Certain quotes have been edited for clarity.

See May Pang’s tour calendar for more information about galleries exhibiting her photos.

Lead images: photo of young May by Iain Macmillan; present day photo by Michael Collopy.

Follow May Pang on Facebook.

Steven S. Drachman is a novelist.