I once told Dick Clark that ‘American Bandstand’ helped me get through my childhood as a girl in a Chinese family, which was not particularly welcomed. I used to study the liner notes to learn about the songwriters and producers. The music was what got me to where I was. But I was eager to learn the music business. It just so happened I was working with a famous rock star. “I was definitely an innocent,” says Pang, who appears as wide-eyed and more than a bit naive in the footage. But with the encouragement of her mother, who basically supported the family with her cleaning business, Pang got herself a job working for the Beatles’ company. He grew up on American films.”ĭismissed by her stern father, who imagined he was still “king of the roost” back in China, May found herself subject to the ancient cultural tradition of sons being superior to daughters.
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“At one point, George turned to me and said, ‘May, this is the third party we’ve been to this week… People are going to start talking about us.’ He was such a lovely man. The film shows her and Lennon decades later attending an AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony in Los Angeles in Cagney’s honor, where the one-time Beatle and Mick Jagger mingled amid the likes of Hollywood icons John Wayne, Steve McQueen, Mae West, Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas, then-governor Ronald Reagan and George Burns. Francis, where James Cagney once served as an altar boy. Her mother sent her to Catholic school at nearby St. Pang was born to an industrious mother who opened her own business, OK Laundry, at the corner of 124th Street and Amsterdam, not far from where they lived before being forced to leave their tenement housing for the newly built George Washington projects at 97th Street and Third Ave. Just be aware that people are going to be talking about you. He used to say to me, ‘May, it’s your opinion. Why should I let somebody else talk about my time with John? He understood better than anybody. Who better to tell the story than me? I lived it. I figured, if there was going to be a film about my life, I should be involved. “I decided it was time to reclaim my own history. “People have been taking my narrative and talking about my life as if they knew everything about me, and they didn’t,” she explains. Yoko wasn’t even aware we had gone until after we left.”Īlthough May has written a pair of books about her relationship with Lennon - including 1983’s “Loving John: The Untold Story” and 2008’s “Instamatic Karma: Photographs by John Lennon” - she has hesitated until now to participate in a documentary, finally agreeing to work with a trio of producer-directors in Eve Brandstein (best known as the casting director for “This Is Spinal Tap”), Richard Kaufman (“Real Life: The Musical”) and Stuart Samuels (docs on Bob Marley and Midnight Movies).
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But John spontaneously decided to go to L.A. They were having problems in their marriage they actually weren’t talking to each other. “Yes, Yoko did approach me, and I thought it was insane,” she says about being Lennon’s lover. Pang, who was plucked from that Apple job by Ono herself to serve as her and Lennon’s personal assistant before May’s fling with Lennon, insists the phrase “Lost Weekend” doesn’t do justice to the pair’s year-and-a-half affair.
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The pair headed to Los Angeles for what has become known as “The Lost Weekend” for the former Beatle’s drunken escapades with his pals Alice Cooper, Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon and Micky Dolenz, collectively known as the Hollywood Vampires, their hangout upstairs at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Blvd. She’s still going for it with her involvement in the new documentary, which captures the whirlwind affair between a 22-year-old Pang and John Lennon that began when Yoko Ono tried to set them up during a period of turmoil in their marriage.