MAY FUNG YEE PANG ON HER NEW DOCUMENTARY

The word Mistress seems to bring fantasies of riches and great beauty, women in their youth, and with much older men. But as we learn more about the real lives of women who have been in relationships other than traditional marriage, we also learn that being a Mistress rarely lasts an entire lifetime, and that Mistresses too get older.

May Fung Yee Pang was born in 1950 and John Lennon, the famous ex-Beatle, was born in 1940, ten years earlier. He was married to Yoko Ono at the time.  She was born in 1933.  Does age matter?

My feeling is often it does, but not always. Sometimes experiencing life means a person gains wisdom, sometimes not. What strikes me is that Yoko was raised in a Japanese upper class culture in which women thought a man having a mistress was not such a big deal.  I tend to think that attitude is also because marriages were arranged or at least highly encouraged and there was not and still is not much support for a woman or a man remaining unmarried.

As May Pang says, Yoko might have been a Japanese wife but she herself was not, she was a Chinese-American woman.  (And while John was a decade older than May, Yoko was seventeen years older.)

Through her documentary, which is respected, May's place in Rock and Roll History remains.  In recent weeks a concert called The Lost Weekend took place at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, one of the clubs most associated with Rock and Roll.  May was there to celebrate the music of John Lennon.  As she says, during their time together he was especially productive writing and recording songs.

In this YouTube video, May, now officially a senior, talks about those days in her life in which she was in love with John.  In keeping with my policy not to embed videos that have commercials, I'll just give you the link.

YAHOO Inteview of MAY PANG DETAILS LOST WEEKEND

C 2023 Mistress Manifesto - BlogSpot

MAY PANG : LOVING JOHN and INSTAMATIC KARMA

May Pang's memoir, Loving John, came out in 1983.  The story goes that her 500 page manuscript was edited down to 300 pages, to focus on the more sensational aspects of her relationship with John.

Editors for publishers have been known to do that but perhaps this also lead to her wish to do a documentary.

Excerpt from an article in Daily Mail, 2008, 

'My lost weekend with Lennon': May Pang breaks her silence over their relationship

By MAY PANG

Last updated at 23:44 09 February 2008

Most people have come to know the time that John Lennon and I spent together as The Lost Weekend. I am always surprised by how many people are under the impression that our time together lasted only a single weekend.

John and I were together "officially" for 18 months, but our relationship actually spanned ten years - from December 1970 to December 1980.

***

May also published this book Instamatic Karma full of photographs she took of John during their relationship.  She says he encouraged her to take photos and also talked to her about how fame might effect her life.

MAY FUNG YEE PANG REVISTED! JOHN LENNON'S MISTRESS FINALLY DOES A DOCUMENTARY ON THEIR RELATIONSHIP

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

MAY FUNG YEE PANG PREMIERS "THE LOST WEEKEND" FILM ABOUT HER RELATIONSHIP WITH EX-BEATLE JOHN LENNON

MAY FUNG YEE PANG : MISTRESS  OF EX-BEATLE JOHN LENNON was MISTRESS OF THE MONTH in  APRIL 2012 here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot.  Here is an update on May's latest, a film called "The Lost Weekend" about her relationship with John.

A year and a half  plus love affair is not a "Lost Weekend" but that's what May Fung Yee Pang's relationship with then ex-Beatle, John Lennon, has been called. May was about a decade younger than John Lennon and 17 years younger than Yoko Ono, who encouraged the relationship, one in which she would not loose control.

VARIETY :Review: May Pang Tells Her Story, and a Piece of John Lennon’s, in a Compelling Documentary  This article linked has an 8 minute recording

Excerpt: In the photos that we saw at the time of her and John, she always had a waifish beauty, and a certain mystery behind those tinted hexagon glasses.  But in "The Lost Weekend," we see that May Pang was a tough ambitious city girl, who spoke with a slight but blunt New York accent, and that after dropping our of college she had the chutzpah to talk her way into a job at the Apple Records offices on Broadway.  She was a schmoozer, and when she began to work for John and Yoko, doing every makeshift task available - avant-garde film production assistant, costume designer - she had an ebullient smile and an easy-to-be-with vivacity.  She was fun but circumspect (she didn't drink or do drugs.)

Excellent review worth your time reading and so, though I haven't seen it yet, apparently a well done and revealing documentary.

This clip is not from the film but a fairly recent interview.  May is about 70 years old now.

DANIELLE STEEL'S THE MISTRESS : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

I "read" the book by listening to it and about half way through, I couldn't take it anymore. This New York Times best seller listed book is so dependent on stereotypes I was so very disappointed.

Though set in and around Monaco (one of the best places on earth for mistresses, my opinion), and the reality of Russian billionaires with gorgeous young women as Mistresses, unfortunately, while profiling a Classic Mistress as isolated, friendless, spoiled and pampered with unlimited shopping trips, but always servile, in wait, with very little to decide about her life on her own, the author, who has experienced numerous best seller love stories, clearly writes this young, beautiful, appealing, and pleasing young woman as having to run out of her prison of being Kept, by perhaps being seduced by a wealthy by most people's standards but much less wealthy by the one's she's become accustomed to. Can she be less materialistic because the young, more age appropriate man who is taken with her has just dumped his girlfriend - who comes from no money - for being too materialistic and expecting him to support her!  (She's realistic but he hates her for that.)

Sensitive to the nuances due to close listening, I was aware that Steel drops hints that sometimes the Russian billionaire is also commanding and a little rough with his mistress sexually. She provides motivation for the beautiful young woman to leave her man.

Being a Mistress is one of the greatest literary fantasies there is, dozens of books being written about the lifestyle, so you have to wonder who is reading these books and having Mistress fantasies?

Are they women who are bored of but believing in their marriages?  Are these readers the same people who think in real life Mistresses are horrible people - women who live to get other women's husbands?

So here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot, you have the opportunity to read all around Mistresses - the motivations, the reasons why, the failures and the successes, and you can "try on" if it's a lifestyle for YOU by learning about Kept Women and Men who actually lived the life!

Will you style yourself after "Coutesan of the 20th Century" Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman or  Revolutionary Dancer Isadora Duncan? Liberace's "BoyToy" Scott Thorson or ex Beatle John Lennon's May Fung Yee Pang?

C 2019 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot

MAY PANG : ON HER BOOK TITLED INSTAMATIC KARMA

Here's an article from 2008 which has some of the pictures in the Instamatic book of John Lennon, his son Julian, and May.  (click on the title!)

April 2023 Update:  Well, the days are over in which clicking on the title will get you there so here is the link to the article from Daily Mail circa 2008... and it appears the photos are gone...

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-513300/My-lost-weekend-Lennon-May-Pang-breaks-silence-relationship.html

LOVING JOHN : MAY PANG - A CHINESE AMERICAN MISTRESS TO JOHN LENNON AS ARRANGED BY HIS JAPANESE WIFE

page 74-76  MAY PANG on JOHN LENNON, YOKO ONO, and herself...

"During my workdays, from the time John and I became involved, I tried to avoid being in the same room with both John and Yoko. I was successful for nearly two weeks, until, for the first time since my affair with John had begun, the three of us wound up together in the living room. I felt very uncomfortable. I sneaked a look at John, but his head was averted. Yoko, however, seemed quite at ease. She looked at me with a rather merry smile and began to giggle. John looked at Yoko and also began to laugh. I didn't feel like laughing at all...

"John was in the middle of a strange situation: His wife and mistress were coexisting, for the most part, under the same roof. the way he chose to deal with the strangeness was to ignore it. Yoko, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy watching and attempting to supervise the situation. I knew that it was a tradition in Japan for wives of the upper class to understand the need of their husbands to have a mistress. In Japan often the wife and mistress were friends. I was not a Japanese mistress, however, and the arrangement did make me uncomfortable and embarrassed."

C May Pang and Literary Adventures Association 1983
Paperback - Warner Communications Company

JOHN LENNON : SURPRISE SURPRISE (SWEET BIRD OF PARADOX) THE SONG HE WROTE FOR MAY PANG

MAY PANG thought Los Angeles was so dull and boring that people needed something to do so badly that they acted out. People included John who spent several months in Los Angeles recording an album of classic rock and roll standards, drank too much, and destroyed property and even hit her in alcoholic blackouts. At the same time, though Yoko called every day and knew where they were, she didn't understand Rock and Roll, and May did. It was her kind of music. During the time May and John spent living together, he got out of his angry radical mode and it out to be very productive and successful creative period for him.

INSTAMATIC KARMA BY MAY PANG

Excerpt : Page Xii

"Most people have come to know the time that John Lennon and I spent together as "The Lost Weekend." I am always surprised at how many people are under the impression that our time together lasted only a single weekend. John and I were together "officially" for eighteen months but our relationship actually spanned ten years - from December 1970 through December 1980....

But the biggest surprise came in the summer of 1973, as I was coordinating press for Yoko's new album... Early one morning, Yoko came to my office in their apartment at the Dakota and told me that she and John were "not getting alone." It was obvious to all of us who worked there that things were a bit tense between them, so this wasn't exactly a bombshell. Yoko went on to say that John would start seeing someone new, and she wanted it to be "someone who would treat John well."...

"I think you should go out with him." ... "If John asks you out, you should go!" Yoko announced, making it sound a little stronger than a suggestion.

C 2008 May Pang. Saint Martin's Press

MAY FUNG YEE PANG : MISTRESS OF EX BEATLE JOHN LENNON - MISTRESS OF THE MONTH

Some think of her as a groupie, but if you read the latest greatest book on John Lennon called John Lennon: the Man, the Myth, the Music -The Definitive Life by Tim Riley, you'll find out otherwise. May Pang was not a groupie.

May was an employee of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's, a personal assistant handling thousands of details from making coffee to finding flies for one of Yoko's movies, working first for their manager and then in their home. Ten years younger than John, she was hesitant when she began to have an affair with John. Yoko set it up. Then John and May fell in love.

May herself has two books. One is called "Loving John" which came out years ago. In 2011 she put out a book of photographs that she took during her affair with John called "Instamatic Karma"! I read them both.

May Pang was John Lennon's mistress. She calls her relationship that. She was in his life in some capacity for ten years and continued to have sex with him or see him once in a while years after he went back to his wife, even when he and Yoko were more interested in PRing their relationship than giving May the support she deserved; she was left near penniless and her career ruined with a hard recover.

In the years that she was John Lennon's mistress, she traveled with the ex Beatle. While Yoko set out to eliminate John's relationship with his son Sean, May encouraged him to reignite it.

Many of John's friends liked her and thought she was very good for him. It was a while before May learned that Yoko had cancelled her salary, while she continued to, through all of this work hard to make Lennon's life easy. Though he was wealthy, he had no cash flow. Perhaps this accounts for how cheap the multimillionaire really was. Or maybe he just wanted to find out if May loved him even if they had no real money to spend.

When it ended, and John ended it, rather mysteriously, just when they were planning to buy a house and live together, it was not a total shock to May's mind, just to her heart. Yoko, it is said in more than one book, may have even had John hypnotised to break the relationship and have him back to her. Maybe, simply, John was a coward or passive agressive and wanted some way out.

What's strange with this picture? Yoko.

MAY PANG'S OFFICIAL WEB SITE LINKED HERE.

C 2012 All Rights Reserved Mistress Manifesto/Missy Rapport