Mysterious, dark, contradictory. Beatles fans made no secret of their dislike of Yoko Ono, the woman who is said to have caused Fab 4 to break up and molested her. John Lennon to heroin. However, there are details of her symbiotic and all-encompassing relationship with her husband that have not yet been known and which today, 50 years later, tell May Pangformer personal secretary of the singer, as well as his beloved. As the Chinese-American writer herself told Corriere della Sera, on the occasion of the release documentary Lost Weekend: A Love Storytheir relationship began when she was only 22 years old, and John was going through a moment of severe crisis with his wife. in 1973.
But what we didn’t know was that Yoko Ono herself invited her on a date with her husband. “He came to my office,” he tells everyone. Courier at the presentation of an exhibition of photographs he took between New York and Los Angeles. I worked for them for three years. And he started, “John and I don’t get along.” Everyone who worked with them knew about it, but we did not talk about it, they were our bosses. “He’ll start dating other people.” And then she added: “You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?” I looked up and said, “I’m not interested.” But she’s like, “I think you’d be perfect.” I said no, she insisted. Then she got up and left. And I stayed there crying.” The meeting is somewhat traumatic and confusing. “In a way, Yoko took advantage of me because I was naive. But he also gave me a present: John and I fell in love”.
“I didn’t start dating him because she asked me to. He was the one who looked after me. Later, John told me that Yoko had also gone to him: “It’s all sorted out. You can date Mei.” But John was just as shocked as I was. All “the beginning did not want.” In short, Yoko Ono was the architect of this love story that otherwise might never have been born. Cause? Perhaps she was afraid that he would fall into the arms of other women and that then she would lose him forever. However, with this gesture, Yoko confirmed the relationship, which ended when the couple managed to mend their relationship. “She was surprised that our relationship lasted so long, she thought it would end in two weeks.” And instead, what the singer-songwriter himself defined as the “lost weekend” from the title of Billy Wilder’s 1945 film about the alcoholic writer was anything but a passing parenthesis to be forgotten.
It was a personal and creative turning point for Lennon. who, after leaving the Dakota Building, the New York building where he lived with his wife, went into exile in Los Angeles, he started dating old friends againincluding Paul McCarteny, and to record with colleagues – in those months he met with Stevie Wonder, Harry Nilsson, Jesse Ed Davis and Bobby Keys for a jam session at Lennon’s beach house in Santa Monica, from which the famous bootleg was made. Hoot and snore in ’74 –. It was a very active and fruitful period for John, who he also resumed seeing his son Julian, born from his first marriage to Cynthia Powell, with whom there was almost no relationship for four and a half years. It, on the other hand, did not relay his son’s phone calls to the singer, keeping him in emotional tether for months, according to Pang.
In short, May was to Lennon what she in many ways could not be and never will be. Yoko, on the other hand, stretches and possesses the singer to the point of encouraging isolation from the world rather than opening up new spaces for creativity.. While dismissing the vicious rumors of those who feared Ono’s bad influence on the singer, Lennon will always say that their relationship was fundamental to exploring unprecedented creative frontiers. The point is that Mei Pang brought out the best in the last years of John’s life, both as a person and as an artist. Not that there was no shortage of episodes of violence: it happened that he was drunk or under the influence of substances, even laid hands on May a couple of times, but they had in their thoughts to build a new life.
However, the idyll ended and John returned to his wife.. “She was 17 years older than me. John said that the reason was that he was afraid that he would be denied a green card to stay in the US: so Yoko told him. It was a shock for me: we were going to buy a house together.” Half a century after their relationship, narrated by Pang in the book. Loving John from 1983 but rewritten many times by others, May wanted to recreate a unique season in a documentary that kind of coincided with John’s second youth. Realizing that she was not the only woman in her life, she knows that she was one of them, and no one can take this memory away from her.
Source: Elle