![April 4, 2005 -- Liverpool Echo]( "April 4, 2005 -- Liverpool Echo")
April 4, 2005 -- Liverpool Echo
My love for 'lost' Lennon - How the woman Yoko asked to be a companion to John ended up having an affair with him.
John Lennon was close to only a few women in his lifetime. There was his beloved mum Julia, his two sisters Julia and Jacqueline, Aunt Mimi, Cynthia, Yoko ... and someone called 'me'.
May Pang is the 'me'. She is very clear about that fact, as she explains in a soft trans-Atlantic accent.
"I know," she says, "because I was there."
May first met John and Yoko Ono while working in music boss Alan Klein's office in New York in 1970.
Her first request from John and Yoko was to buy a prop for one of their first avant garde films - flies. They were to be used in the production simply entitled "Fly".
"A Beatle wanting flies ..." May still laughs at the irony.
It was a bizarre introduction to John and Yoko's world, but events would soon turn more complicated. Working for one of the world's most famous couples shaped May Pang's life leding to an 18 month love affair with John, which gave John some unwelcome publicity.
Today, however, sitting in Liverpool's Hope Street Hotel - where Yoko Ono recently stayed in a suite on the floor above - May is delighted to be back in John's home town.
She was very touched to be given a small statue of John by the tourist information office on her arrival. The Beatles Story welcomed her like an old friend and visiting John Lennon Airport was another moving moment for the late Beatles' onetime girlfriend.
May has been to Liverpool before for Beatles conventions - even introducing the bands in some cases.
"I feel at home here," she says, looking out at the view of Liverpool.
It is a view her former lover John knew so well, taking in the Liverpool Art College, as well as local pubs such as Ye Cracke, and the music venues where he played his heart out before going to Hamburg and tightening up a skiffle band who, in his own words, were going to "make it very very big".
And John's love for the city wasn't the only thing that rubbed off on May - she has also picked up a nice line in Scouse.
May Pang on her first visit to Liverpool back in the 1980s
May, 55, has been in Liverpool searching for a suitable venue for a planned photographic exhibition.
She has with her a contact sheet of photographs of John Lennon, a reflection of their time spent together. There are about 100 of them, but she is not showing them just yet.
"I feel like I am getting air- brushed out of the whole Lennon story," she says.
"In fact, there is a musical show in progress in New York about John and I saw the synopsis - there is not one reference to me at all - I'm airbrushed out again."
When the then New York-based John turned 33, Yoko sent him away from the Dakota Building in June 1973 with her then PA, May.
She was ordered to "look after him as his companion", as Yoko felt she and John "needed a break". May was a 23-year-old native New Yorker from the Spanish Harlem district. He was 10 years older, insecure and lost.
It turned into an affair that became known as the infamous "Lost Weekend", named after a film about a serial drinker. When John was photographed in bars with Harry Nilsson, he seemed to be having a hellraising time of it, drinking brandy Alexanders and, according to the papparazi, getting wasted.
May frowns when she recalls the period: "That lost weekend was a misleading quote used by John. He said he had to say something to the press and that summed
up the evenings he had enjoying himself after working hard. That was his most productive period in which he wrote his first number one, Whatever Gets You Through The Night, which was inspired by a certain Reverend he heard on the TV saying that very line.
"John was working hard at that time," says May.
"I was there with him organising and co-ordinating music projects such as his Walls and Bridges and Rock 'n' Roll albums. It is an expensive business and studio time has to be used by the hour.
"You can't do that amount of work if you are high on drink and drugs.
"He was very disciplined in the studio and would tell off anyone who turned up even 10 minutes late."
May, who sips a cola as we chat, says she herself was never one for the excessive life, but will sometimes have just one glass of wine.
When John eventually returned to Yoko in 1975, after their separation, May resettled in the Big Apple from Los Angeles.
She later became a professional manager of United Artists music business and worked on albums by Bob Marley and Robert Palmer.
"I would still see him. He would 'sneak out' from the Dakota and he would come to my apartment on the other side of town, my place on the East River. We would talk about this and that."
