John got very drunk at the party. There was a girl there. He took her into a room and had sex with her. Everyone knew what was going on. It was the room where all the coats had been left on the bed. It was late. People wanted to go home, but they couldn’t get their coats. That, in a nutshell, was what Yoko told me some time later, in a call from New York. ‘It was,’ she said, ‘very embarrassing.’
‘Embarrassing’ wasn’t the word that most wives would have chosen to describe the situation. But most wives aren’t Yoko. She’d long known that when John got drunk he would begin to behave irrationally and could be sometimes violent, and for this reason she always limited the amount of alcohol in their apartment. But there was no limit on drinks and drugs at the party in the Village. Other partygoers that night would say that they tried to calm John down, that he was blabbering and shouting and pushing them off, before he disappeared into the bedroom with the young lady. Exactly what Yoko was feeling, other than embarrassment and probably anger, is impossible to say. While she would always be happily indiscreet about events in her life that others might have tried to hide about their own lives, she rarely explained her emotions. When I sympathised, the most she would say to me was: ‘John can be very hard to live with sometimes.’ Cynthia had known all about that.
The following day John was full of remorse. But a line had been crossed. After nearly five years together – literally together, night and day – the myth of perfect love that the two had woven around themselves, ‘like Cathy and Heathcliff’ as Yoko liked to say, had been shattered.
But what were they going to do about it? They didn’t know. The allure of being a bohemian living in the East Village had gone for John. Becoming involved in that scene had been largely at Yoko’s behest. The area had always appealed more to her than it had to him. Anyway, the apartment on Bank Street was too small. Nor did John want to hang out with Rubin and Hoffman and their friends any more.
Since the scattering of the Apple staff upon Allen Klein’s arrival in London, Brian Epstein’s former right-hand man Peter Brown was now living in New York and working for impresario Robert Stigwood. Invited to Peter’s apartment on Central Park West one afternoon, John and Yoko enthused at the view it provided. That, John decided on the spot, was the view they should have.
There were no apartments available in the block in which Peter Brown lived. But one was available in the building next door, the huge, brooding, gargoyle-adorned building on the corner of West 72nd Street – the Dakota, the late-nineteenth-century mansion block they’d first visited eighteen months earlier. With Leonard Bernstein, the critic Rex Reed and Gloria Swanson as neighbours, and a guard on the door to keep the fans at bay, it was one of the most fashionable and secure addresses in New York. They set up home in the Dakota in February 1973 – just a few weeks after the incident at the party. They would be happy there, they thought.
They were wrong. The problem was within themselves. John would spend hours sleeping or staring mutely at the TV, or tinkering listlessly with his guitar, wondering why he wasn’t able to function in the way he used to. Even Yoko was losing interest in her projects, closing down a film she had planned with her friend Dan Richter. The visa problem didn’t help, and, though it might seem impossible to believe considering the millions the Beatles had generated, there were money problems, too. Since Paul had taken the other Beatles to court in 1970 to break up their legal relationship, the band’s joint income had been frozen in the hands of a receiver nominated by the court. That meant that vast sums from royalties were mounting up for all four, but it wasn’t money they could get their hands on. John was rich, for sure, but until the legal differences were resolved, and they were numerous, he had a cash-flow problem – at least, if he wanted to spend cash in the way he, and especially Yoko, liked.
That was irksome enough for someone who was used to never considering the cost of anything. But the real problem for the two was that the dazzle had gone out of their lives, their marriage and their sex. They were suffocating each other.
They talked about their marital problems, about the girl at the party and John’s unsated sex drive. Yoko would say later that she suggested that perhaps he should go out with other women, if that was what he wanted. She would understand. John felt he needed to get away, but he couldn’t go alone. He always had to have someone at his side. So they discussed who he might go away with. Mal Evans, the faithful roadie whom John never criticised, was now living in Los Angeles, so he was a suggestion.
But Yoko had a better idea. What about May? May Pang, the pretty young woman they’d met when she worked for Allen Klein, but who now worked full time for them at the Dakota? John liked May, Yoko pointed out. Everyone liked May. Twenty-two years old in her jeans, T-shirt and big round glasses, she was always busy, cheerful and willing, as bright as a button and, as Paul would say, ‘the voice of common sense’. She was also very efficient. What she wasn’t, having been brought up in a Chinese immigrant family, was an expensively educated, sophisticated, elite posh girl.
John was excited by the suggestion, but he left it to Yoko to make the first move on May. At the time, John was writing songs for a new album, which would become Mind Games, and May had been delegated by Yoko to help him.
Then one morning, as May would record in her memoir Loving John, Yoko made her suggestion. According to May, the conversation, which might sound like a scene from a movie, but which tallies very closely with what Yoko told me, went like this. ‘Listen, May, John and I are not getting along . . . John will probably start going out with other people. Who knows who he will go out with? I know he likes you a lot. So . . . ?’
May would write later that she was stunned by the proposal. She was out of her depth. It seemed wrong. John was her boss, and he was married. Unwittingly she’d become caught up in the games of this older, much more experienced, worldly wise couple: ‘I’d been trained to believe that men like John, men who were talented and famous, never picked women like me. We worked for men like John. We did not have affairs with them,’ she would say.
She batted back the proposition. But, she says, Yoko persisted. To her it seemed a logical, happy solution that the two should get together.
‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ Yoko told the assistant. ‘It’s cool. I’ll take care of everything.’
A few nights later, at Yoko’s continued encouragement, May went to the studio with John and, when recording was over, allowed him to go back with her to her apartment and went to bed with him.
Yoko was so delighted with the arrangement that, shortly after John’s album was delivered to Capitol Records and she had to go to a feminist convention in Chicago for a few days, she suggested that May move into the Dakota while she was away. It would be more convenient for her and John, she told the young assistant.
In the event, it turned out to be more convenient for the new lovers to run away to Los Angeles, John’s excuse to himself being that he was going to help Ringo with an album. From that moment John and May would be together for the best part of the next eighteen months.
That Yoko had so casually arranged for her husband to take a mistress astonished not only May. But for Yoko, it made perfect sense. Some upper-class wives in Japan, as in many other cultures, had traditionally welcomed a mistress into the family home. Yoko might be a feminist, but she was now following a long tradition. If the pain of John’s escape to California with May hurt her, it wasn’t something she ever admitted. On the contrary, she would always say that it was she who sent John and May to Los Angeles. That was what she told me.
That isn’t how May remembers the episode. But then, much of what happened during the following year and a half is murky. It depends upon whose interpretation of events, and the motivations of the principal players in the ménage, we want to believe. In May’s eyes, Yoko’s pride couldn’t abide that word might get around that she’d been abandoned by her husband for a pretty younger woman. It was important to her that she was seen to be in control.
As for John, he’d been given permission to enjoy himself. He was off the leash. He’d been married for virtually all his adult life. Now he felt like a teenager again, with a girl, actually not long out of her teens, who liked nothing so much as to talk about and listen to rock and roll music.
In fact, as May soon began to realise, he wasn’t off the leash at all. As she and John settled into the Los Angeles rock and roll lifestyle, Yoko would phone regularly, morning and night, sometimes over a dozen times a day, reminding May that her job was to make John happy, to take care of him and keep a careful watch so that he didn’t get into any trouble. That was how Yoko saw the affair. May was just doing a job.
Yoko would say that John phoned her a lot, too. Quite what he thought Yoko’s motivations might have been for suggesting his relationship with May is uncertain. He knew that she had a crush on a guitarist with whom she had been working. Was she secretly thinking that if she and John had an open marriage she could have an affair of her own? That was what he implied in a phone conversation with his old friend Pete Shotton.
At first, John enjoyed a holiday in Los Angeles with May, living in an apartment owned by his lawyer, Harold Seider, but soon he wanted to get back to work. With the release of the movie American Graffiti a rock and roll revival was taking place, and he wanted to be a part of it. Reverting to his old life as a rock and roller, a new album of the kind of songs he’d started out playing in Liverpool seemed to be the way in. And who better to produce the album than the most famous rock producer of them all, Phil Spector?
When Yoko was told of Spector’s involvement, she was immediately, and not without cause, alarmed. May was worried too, and didn’t like the guy. ‘Into the jaws of the dragon,’ John joked as he and May first visited Spector’s house. But, although he would secretly call Spector ‘the Vampire’, and Yoko continued to warn him against the producer, he insisted on working with him and gave him ‘total control’ over the album. He liked what Spector had done with Imagine. He wanted another hit like that.
However, no sooner had recording begun than things started to go wrong. Beatle sessions under George Martin had been closed affairs of hard work, but with Spector, on his home patch of Los Angeles, the studio soon became open house. Star friends like Cher, or Joni Mitchell who turned up one night with Warren Beatty and on another with Jack Nicholson, would drop by to chat, and of course to meet John Lennon. Once the place where Charlie Chaplin had made his films, the studio at A&M Records was set up to take only eight musicians, but at one time May counted twenty-seven – including Steve Cropper from Memphis, Leon Russell and virtuoso guitarist Jesse Ed Davis. And with Phil Spector displaying every facet of his hysterical megalomania, the drink never stopped flowing.
Now May was to discover the Jekyll and Hyde effect that drink could have on her lover-boss. Angry that every song was taking so long to record as Spector demanded take after take of the musicians, the longer John waited to sing, the drunker he got. One night after becoming involved in a heated argument with the producer, he drank so much he was in no fit state to record.
With the help of a bodyguard, Spector got John into a car and drove him to the Bel Air house of another rock producer, Lou Adler, where John and May were living while Adler was away. The argument then turned into a fight before Spector and the bodyguard settled it by dragging John up to the bedroom, tying him up hand and foot, taking off his glasses and leaving, telling May not to release him until he was sober. Inevitably John broke free, and, as May ran down the lane to the nearby Bel Air Hotel seeking help, he trashed the house, pulling down and smashing platinum albums from Lou Adler’s walls. ‘Taking his glasses off was the worst thing they could have done,’ May remembers. ‘He was blind without them and in the dark, too.’
The following morning he was mortified, frighteningly unable to remember what he’d done. When Yoko learned what had happened she blamed May for not doing her job properly and letting John drink. But how could May have stopped him? Yoko had been right about Spector’s malign influence. When John had recorded with him in England, it had been at his home where he had been in control.
The sessions struggled on. It bothered May that Spector wore a gun in a shoulder holster, but John was convinced that the bullets in it were blank. Then one night, a provoked Spector pulled out the gun, waved it above his head and pulled the trigger. Bang! The bullet had been real, and it lodged in the ceiling. Shaken, John tried to make a joke of it. ‘Listen, Phil, if you’re going to kill me, kill me. But don’t fuck with my ears. I need them.’
With Yoko on the phone from New York more and more often demanding progress reports – or, in Yoko’s version of events, John calling her frequently for reassurance – his behaviour continued to be unpredictable. As fond as he was of May, and even Yoko never denied that, on one occasion he had sex with a groupie and ordered May back to New York. Deeply upset, she went, but when she arrived there Yoko took her out to dinner and asked her to return to Los Angeles to take care of her husband. He needed her to nurse him through these moments, Yoko insisted. So May, looking more like a Californian rock chick with every day that passed, was now a nurse as well as an assistant and girlfriend.
May did as she was told. She was in love with John. It was, she would later reflect, a crazy lifestyle in which she didn’t know from one moment to the next where she stood.
The sessions continued but soon there would be headlines about how a drunken John had been thrown out of the Troubadour nightclub with a sanitary towel strapped to his forehead. This was followed by more stories about how he ruined a Smothers Brothers comeback performance by constant heckling with his friend Harry Nilsson. He would be embarrassed to see the Los Angeles Times the next day.
Usually, John’s anger would be directed towards others, but at lunch one day when he thought May had been flirting with David Cassidy, he violently berated her. She denied it, but, enraged with the jealousy that was never far away, he accused her of being with him only because she wanted his money, ending a tirade of abuse by smashing her glasses and telling her that their relationship was over, and that they must go back to New York. May wouldn’t have known it, but it was almost a rerun of how he had verbally threatened and thrown his father out of the home he had provided for him three years earlier.
Twenty-four hours later John and May were in New York again, only for John to change his mind, ask forgiveness and for the two of them to get back on a plane to Los Angeles.