The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, opening April 13, is a documentary about John Lennon’s relationship with his personal assistant May Pang. It began in 1973 when Lennon and Yoko Ono were on a break, with Ono encouraging Pang to become her husband’s girlfriend, although Pang wasn’t on board at first.
“I refused,” Pang tells People. “I respected their marriage. I said, ‘That’s not what I want to do.’ I was very happy as a worker.”
When they finally got together, Pang says she cried after their first sexual encounter because she didn’t know “where it was going to lead.” She says Lennon told her, “‘I don’t know where this is going to lead, but let’s just do the jump.'”
They eventually moved in together, and their relationship lasted 18 months. “He was just an interesting person. He really loved everything, and wanted to explore,” Pang says of The Beatles member. “He loved to get up, have his coffee in the morning. He loved blueberry pancakes, he loved swimming. He was just an awesome person who wanted to discover things.”
Lennon and Ono reconciled in 1975, although Pang says she and Lennon continued to see each other until his death in 1980.
“He’d secretly come over to see me. He would say, ‘You know, I still love you,'” she offers. “He said things to me that were really very intimate and you could sense there was something still. It was gnawing at him. It was not a finished situation.”
All in all, Pang seems grateful for the relationship. “The beginning was still raw. Now, I see it as a gift. Our relationship was a gift and it was meant to be,” she says. “I was happy I could give him something that he felt good about, that he never felt before.”
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