May Pang's Candid Lennon Photos Reach Las Vegas Gallery

May Pang's candid photographs of John Lennon go on display Friday through Sunday at the Desert Valley Gallery in Tivoli Village, 410 S. Rampart, Suite 145, Las Vegas. The traveling exhibition, "The Lost Weekend: The Photography May Pang," shows a Beatle at home, unguarded, and shot by someone who never intended publication.

Pang took the pictures during the 18 months from late 1973 through 1975 that fans call "The Lost Weekend." It was the period Lennon spent with Pang, his lover, in a pairing that his wife, Yoko Ono, initially encouraged and arranged. The show coincides with the digital release of the documentary "The Lost Weekend: A Lost Story," which chronicles the relationship.

The takeaway: a major retrospective of rare Lennon images has landed in a Las Vegas gallery for one weekend only.

What do the photographs actually show?

The earliest picture in the story sets the tone. A bearded Lennon, hair tangled, holds up a Dr Pepper can and grins. Pang shot the black-and-white portrait in a room at New York's Regency Hotel in 1970. She was nervous.

"I picked up my camera, and I thought, 'He's going to scream, but I'm going to take it,'" Pang recalls. "I aimed it at him, and he turned around. He saw it and he smiled."

Over more than four years, she captured Lennon snuggling with their cat Major in bed and posing shirtless with his son Julian while sailing around Long Island Sound. One frame, taken in a Santa Monica beach house after a Harry Nilsson recording session, ranks among the last known photographs of Lennon and Paul McCartney together.

"All these photos are candid," Pang says. "I didn't take these photos for any news article or magazine. It was just us at home. I wanted the world to see the John that I knew — not the John that everybody read about."

The takeaway: these are domestic pictures, not press pictures, and that rarity drives the show's appeal.

Why did Pang wait fifty years?

Pang says she spent years believing nobody cared about the images. Producers pursued her for six years before she agreed to mount the exhibition.

"I wasn't ready," she says. "And then I made the documentary, and I said, 'This might be the time.'"

Her account of how the relationship began is unusual. Pang, a New Yorker, landed a secretary job at the U.S. branch of Apple Records as a teenager by fibbing about her qualifications. When Lennon and Ono arrived in New York to film two experimental films, Pang became their personal assistant, grew close to the couple and lived with them in their London mansion. Then Ono made a startling request.

"'John and I are not getting along, and I know he's going to start seeing other people,'" Pang recalls Ono telling her. "'I want you to go out with him, because I know he needs someone nice like you.'"

Pang declined at first. The two grew closer anyway. "When the tide turned and it became a different kind of relationship, I was quite surprised, because I wasn't ready for that," she says.

The takeaway: the exhibition rests on images their author nearly never shared.

How does Las Vegas figure in the story?

Las Vegas supplies some of Pang's sharpest memories. On her first trip with Lennon, the airport slot machines stunned her.

"I was shocked with everything, getting off the plane and the first thing you see is a one-armed bandit," Pang recalls. "They had these machines at an airport! It was fascinating."

The couple stayed at Caesars Palace. "By the time we woke up the next morning, I looked up and I went, 'There's a mirror up on the ceiling!'" she says. They saw Fats Domino and Frankie Valli perform at the Flamingo. A return trip the next year brought Harry Nilsson, who lost $2,000 at blackjack before the group even reached the reception desk, then threw down his American Express card.

The takeaway: the city itself was a character in the couple's story, which makes the gallery choice pointed.

What did the period mean for Lennon's work?

Pang frames the 18 months as a creative rebirth. Lennon, then 32 and famous since 23, felt fried by stardom. He reconnected with Julian at Pang's behest, rode New York buses, visited Disneyland and the Calico ghost town, and partied with rock friends.

The stretch produced the albums "Mind Games," "Walls and Bridges" and "Rock 'n' Roll," plus collaborations with Elton John, David Bowie and Mick Jagger. "He was in such a good mood to write songs, record them, have fun — that's what was most important," Pang says.

Lennon eventually reconciled with Ono. Pang later married record producer Tony Visconti and had two children. She says Lennon told her on the phone, "I have to say certain things," and she did not pressure him.

"Every photograph has a story," she says. With the documentary now streaming and the exhibition touring, those stories are reaching audiences Lennon never had to face.