May Pang

May Pang is an American former music executive, production coordinator, photographer and author. She is best known as John Lennon's companion during the eighteen months he later called his "Lost Weekend," and in the decades since she has become the keeper of that chapter's visual record.

Her photographs of Lennon, most of them shot on an Instamatic, are now shown in galleries across the United States. She published the memoir Loving John in 1983 and the photo collection Instamatic Karma in 2008, and she appears as a central voice in the 2022 documentary The Lost Weekend: A Love Story. Fans of Lennon's solo years treat her archive as the most intimate surviving portrait of him in the mid-1970s. [edit]

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, May Fung Yee Pang grew up in New York, in and around Manhattan's Chinatown, with her parents and an adopted sibling. Her Chinese given name, Fung Yee, translates as "phoenix bird." She went on to City College of New York.

Music was not the plan. The downtown New York scene of the late 1960s pulled her in sideways. In 1970, at roughly twenty, she answered a job posting and was hired as a secretary at ABKCO Industries, the company run by Allen Klein, who managed both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. That desk put her inside the Beatles' business operation in New York. Within a year she was assigned to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's staff, initially as a production coordinator on their film and music projects. She was in the room before she was in the story. [edit]

Her real career began in 1971, when she started working directly for Lennon and Ono. Through 1973 and 1974 she was present in the studio for sessions that became Mind Games and Walls and Bridges, and she can be heard singing backing vocals on "#9 Dream." She was also in Los Angeles for the Phil Spector-produced Rock 'n' Roll sessions.

The books came later. Loving John, written with Henry Edwards, was published by Warner Books in 1983 and remains a primary source for Lennon biographers. Instamatic Karma followed from St. Martin's Press in 2008, gathering her candid Lennon photographs into a single volume. Between and after those projects she worked as a music production coordinator and as a jewelry designer.

Then the archive found a second life. From 2024 into 2026 Pang toured galleries around the country with exhibitions of the Lennon photographs, with stops in Menlo Park, Missoula, Tucson, Santa Barbara, Lake Oswego, Las Vegas and Phoenix. She appears at each one, telling the story herself. [edit]

For decades the press cast her as the other woman. That framing has largely fallen away. Coverage of her 2026 gallery tour consistently describes her as a photographer and storyteller, someone who kept a record rather than someone who caused a scandal.

Her voice is warm and retrospective. On Instagram she leans on a single line: few people knew John Lennon as intimately as she did. The content matches the tone, all candid frames, gallery talks and anecdotes from a period she witnessed up close. There is no performance of glamour in any of it. She comes across as a witness who decided, late, to show her evidence. [edit]

Measured by iFANN's Global Fame Engine, which tracks worldwide attention across signals like Wikipedia readership and global search interest, Pang has been evaluated but does not currently hold a placement in the published rankings. Her fame is real but narrow, concentrated almost entirely among Beatles and Lennon followers rather than a general audience. She is not on the September 2026 iFAMOUS Rankings flagship list.

The audience she does have is borrowed from the Beatles fandom, and it is sympathetic. Threads on r/beatles discussing her tend to argue that she was a good influence on Lennon during a difficult stretch, pointing to his renewed contact with Julian and his return to recording. There is no fandom name, no organized campaign, no birthday billboard. What exists instead is a steady, decades-long curiosity: people who have read every Lennon biography want to know what the woman in the middle of those eighteen months has to say, and in 2026 they turn up at galleries to hear it in person. [edit]

Her Chinese given name, Fung Yee, means "phoenix bird," a detail she has shared in interviews over the years.

The photographs that now hang in galleries were mostly shot on a simple Instamatic camera, not professional gear. That limitation is part of why they read as domestic and unguarded rather than posed.

Her Facebook bio, written in her own words, reads: "A person who worked in Rock'n'Roll music & loved every minute of it!"

A story fans still retell is that Ono herself proposed Pang as Lennon's companion during the 1973 separation. It is Pang's own account, repeated in the 2022 documentary, and some Lennon biographers dispute it. Treat it as testimony, not settled record.

She has said she pushed Lennon to reconnect with his son Julian and to get back into the studio, and both things happened during those months. [edit]

Pang was born to Chinese immigrant parents and grew up in New York with them and an adopted sibling. She has kept most of her family life private; the names of her two children with Tony Visconti are not consistently documented in published sources.

She married Visconti, the record producer known for his work with David Bowie and T. Rex, in 1989. The marriage lasted eleven years and ended in divorce in 2000. She has not remarried and does not discuss a partner publicly. [edit]

John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Allen Klein, Tony Visconti, Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, Phil Spector, Julian Lennon and Leon Russell. Her professional life was built inside the Lennon and Ono operation, and her later work circles the same cast of musicians from the mid-1970s Los Angeles scene. [edit]

The relationship that defines the public record began in 1973. Lennon and Ono had separated, and by Pang's account Ono suggested Pang as his companion. She was twenty-two; Lennon was thirty-two. What started as an arrangement, she has always insisted, turned into a real romance. They lived together in Los Angeles and later back in New York, and Lennon later gave the period its name, the "Lost Weekend." It ran roughly eighteen months and ended in early 1975, when Lennon reconciled with Ono and returned to her. No children. Pang has said the decision was his and that Ono's influence was decisive.

Her next documented relationship came more than a decade later. In 1989 she married Tony Visconti, the producer behind David Bowie's Berlin records and much of T. Rex's catalog. They had two children and divorced in 2000 after eleven years.

As of 2026, Pang is divorced and no current partner is publicly documented. She keeps that side of her life out of interviews, which over the past few years have been almost entirely about the photographs. [edit]

Pang has never had a big payday to point at. No charting records, no film roles, no endorsement deals. Her income has come in small streams accumulated over fifty years: a salary as a production coordinator and music executive, a stretch as a jewelry designer, royalties and advances from two books, and now a touring exhibition business built on her own photographic archive.

The books matter financially as well as historically. Loving John (1983) and Instamatic Karma (2008) both drew advances and continue to sell in the Beatles-adjacent market. The gallery shows that ran through 2026, from Lake Oswego to Santa Barbara to Tucson, generate print sales of the Lennon photographs, and those prints have become the most reliable revenue she has.

Her 1989 marriage to Tony Visconti ended in a 2000 divorce, and no settlement figure has ever been published. She has not remarried and there is no public record of major property holdings or investments.

No celebrity net worth site has published a sourced figure for her, which is itself telling. iFANN's editorial estimate puts her fortune at roughly $1 million in 2026, a number built from book earnings, print and exhibition sales, and decades of modest industry salaries rather than from any single windfall. [edit]