As Yoko Ono enters her 90s, it is perhaps a tactless time to release a documentary about the woman with whom John Lennon had a love affair during a rough patch in his marriage from about 1973 to 1975, what he ungallantly called his “lost weekend”. This is the couple’s then assistant, the extremely smart Chinese-American May Pang, in her early 20s at the time, who emerges with grace and dignity from this engrossing film. The Apple Records A&R man and LA music eminence grise Tony King is quoted here saying of Pang: “She wasn’t just a little scrubber …” That Withnailesque phrase hardly does justice to an intelligent, beautiful and sweet-natured woman who gave unquestioning love to Lennon and appeared to single-handedly repair his relationship with his son Julian.
It seems to have been a real love match, but founded on a strange, dysfunctional situation: Ono herself, by her own cautious admission, encouraged the liaison as a way of managing and controlling what she saw as Lennon’s increasing tendency to stray. Ono virtually ordered Pang to “date” Lennon and the resulting semi-official coupledom coincided with a poignant flowering of creativity and relaxation in Lennon’s life, both in LA where he and Pang briefly hung out, and back in New York. But Ono was always there in the background, perhaps in more direct contact with Lennon than Pang quite realised or this film acknowledges.
Finally, it was Ono herself who called time on the liaison and Lennon sheepishly informed the heartbroken May that he was going back to live with Ono in their home in the Dakota building, outside which he would five years later meet his terrible fate. This documentary fortunately refrains from making glib comparisons between Ono breaking up this affair to the way some saw her as breaking up the Beatles, but the film (based on Pang’s two previous books on the subject, and using the resulting TV interview footage) is implicitly critical of both Ono and Lennon and their self-absorption. A sterner commentary might have called their attitude abusive. At all events, it is a vivid snapshot of a troubled private life at the apex of the US music scene.
• The Lost Weekend: A Love Story is released on 20 November on the Icon Film Channel and on 18 December on DVD, Blu-ray and digital platforms.
