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May Pang was almost the Yoko Ono of Yoko Ono’s marriage.
The then-22-year-old was working as an assistant to Ono and John Lennon when, at Ono’s own request, she reluctantly became Lennon’s girlfriend in 1973.
As Pang remembers Ono putting it, “He needs someone nice, like you.”
But Ono was likely not expecting things to go as well as they did, or for Pang to almost break up her marriage to the former Beatle.
Looking back, Pang — a lifelong Beatles fan and subject of the new documentary “The Lost Weekend: A Love Story,” in theaters April 13 — told The Post, “It’s almost surreal. In one way, Yoko took advantage because I was naïve. But she also gave me a gift. John and I fell in love.”
Beyond the expected sexual liaisons, their time together included gunplay, stoned-out jam sessions, Paul McCartney playing spy for Yoko, drunken carousing through the nightclubs of Hollywood, and at least one house trashing.
It began in 1969 when 19-year-old Pang fluked into a job as an office assistant for Apple Records, the Fab Four’s label.
“I asked if the Beatles ever come here,” Pang, now 72 and living in Queens, recalled. “[The office manager] just chuckled and said, ‘No.’”
But he was wrong.
In 1970, Lennon and Ono relocated from London to New York and visited the office. “Apple’s VP said to me, ‘Get your ass upstairs and see what they need,’” Pang recalled.
What they needed was an assistant. Pang landed the gig.
It was heady work for a first-generation Chinese American who grew up in Spanish Harlem and, previously, had gotten no closer to rock stars than dancing to their records.
Early tasks included procuring flies from restaurant dumpsters for Ono’s art film “Fly.”
The footage captured actress Virginia Lust, allegedly sedated, as some 200 flies, shown one at a time, exploring her body.
But the most outrageous assignment came from Ono in 1973.
It seemed like a typical morning in the couple’s Manhattan apartment at the Dakota building when, Pang told The Post, “Yoko said, ‘John and I have not been getting along. He is going to start going out with other people. I think you will be good for him.’”
Astonished, Pang protested. She did not want to be the girlfriend of her married, 32-year-old boss. “Yoko said, ‘You should [do it].’ Then she walked out of the room,” Pang recalled.
She did not know it at the time, but, she now believes, “Yoko wanted me to be his girlfriend so she could control the relationship.”
With neither Pang nor Lennon naturally interested, the arranged romance started slow.
After a week Lennon stole a kiss from her in the Dakota elevator. “A week later, he got to second base,” she said. “Days after, he hit a home run.”
As for the quality and frequency of the sex, she euphemistically says in the documentary, “It was cock-a-doodle-do all the time … John Lennon charmed the pants off of me. After we made love [for the first time], I started to cry.”
Things accelerated in September 1973. Early one afternoon, Lennon said, “We have to get out of New York, May. Just the two of us. Away from Yoko.”
By 6 p.m. that day, they were en route to LA.
So began an 18-month-long affair that has come to be known as John Lennon’s Lost Weekend.
