Back in April 2012 I elevated May Fung Yee Pang to the Mistress of the Month pantheon here at Mistress Manifesto. And I posted when her Lost Weekend documentary was premiered in June 2022. That film is now in theaters. If you're a Beatles fan or a John Lennon fan or you want to hear the story from an ex-Mistress's side, make an effort to see this film.
VIDEO EXPIRED TAKEN DOWN JULY 18 2023 (Check YouTube!)
May, a Chinese-American born and residing in New York, worked as a very young woman for a manager who was in the music business. From there she was enlisted to work as a personal assistant to ex-Beatle John Lennon, who had moved into a solo music career, and was married to the artist Yoko Ono. Yoko, from an elite Japanese banking family, was a seven years older than John, had been married before, and had a daughter who was with her father and had been, shall we say, kept from her, for some time. John had started his relationship with Yoko while still married to his first wife, Cynthia, with whom he had a son, Julian. I recall reading in another book, though I can't remember the title, that John and Yoko had been nasty to Cynthia, letting her come home from a trip to find the two together in her marital home.
John Lennon's father had been missing from his life, and he was raised by an aunt, his mother's older sister. He was not much of a father to Julian. His absence from his marriage and fatherhood to Julian was, in part, because of the Beatle's traveling for performing and that career. Maybe John had moved on from this marital life and love of Cynthia, who has been married to him for about a decade but he sure didn't handle it right. John seems to have come under a spell.
According to May, Yoko was controlling the phone messages and keeping John from Julian, as she was instructed not to tell him about calls that came in. It was not until she and John were in their relationship, living together in a smaller apartment while Yoko continued to live in the marital home, that John was reunited with his son.
Frankly, although it may not be fair, one of the reasons that relationships in which older women get together with younger men is criticized, is the assumption that the older woman will be controlling.
May was not silent about her relationship with John or the circumstances of their breakup when she was still young and hot. It had been Yoko's wish that she have an affair with John, her husband, and May says John was her first boyfriend. May says that at first she protested. She was an employee and one who worked extreme hours without complaint, even taking calls in the middle of the night. (And she was never paid for the many hours she put in even before the job description got blurred by becoming John's mistress.)
As part of my research into May that is more recent, I found a video on YouTube in which Geraldo Rivera, who had his own show at the time, had May on and lambasted her for being a Mistress with his questions and moralizing tone. Thinking of what I know of Geraldo and his inability to be a faithful husband himself, his womanizing in general, it struck me as how sexist this really was, implying that May should have known better... Well, John should have known better? Yoko should have?
It was complicated.
Over time I've come to realize that any person who expects an employee to have disrupted sleep on their behalf is abusive.
I want to mention this because I have believed that Yoko was entirely controlling the situation, that Yoko was entirely controlling the relationship May had with John. That Yoko was playing him like a yoyo, letting him out on a string, reeling him back in. May says Yoko was not entirely controlling of John and also that some of her reason for the documentary was that she wanted to set the record straight, so to speak, to counter things people were saying about her that was untrue.
Since Yoko suggested May and John go out, thinking it would be a better option for her if John was going to have extra-marital sex, it may as well be someone she knew, she quite possibly ended it too. May says that through the entire eighteen months - which has been trivialized as a "lost weekend" -that Yoko called many times a day.
Because she was finally ready to do this documentary, May has gotten on various social media to promote it and has her own web site: MAY PANG OFFICIAL SITE THE LOST WEEKEND
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