Sunday, March 30, 2008

INSTAMATIC KARMA

Photographs of John Lennon

By May Pang

St. Martin's. 141 pp. $29.95

John Lennon was only kidding -- tossing off a characteristically brilliant one-liner, not aiming to define forever a critical time in his life -- when he described his 18-month affair with personal assistant May Pang, from 1973 to '75, as his "Lost Weekend." Yet those words, like almost everything else that escaped Lennon's lips, have stuck with us. Their connotation of a brief, besotted and pointless interlude, best left safely buried, has long done a disservice both to Pang and to one of the most creatively fertile, commercially successful periods of Lennon's solo career.

Fortunately, Pang has published Instamatic Karma, a coffee table collection of private snapshots recovered from a shoebox in her closet. A visual complement to Loving John, Pang's 1983 memoir, Instamatic Karma bursts with intimate and previously unpublished images of the ex-Beatle in his early 30s: a vibrant, muscular character forever clowning or lounging, equally comfortable in Pang's embroidered bell bottoms, snug swimming trunks and his own skin.

During a rough patch in their marriage, Yoko Ono had decided Lennon should take a respite, and a lover. For the role, she chose Pang, who overcame her reluctance, and the inherent weirdness of the situation, to become the songwriter's constant companion. Thus was Pang in a position to facilitate -- and capture on film -- many defining moments in Lennon's life after the Beatles. These included his reconciliation with his 10-year-old son, Julian, whom Lennon had essentially abandoned four years earlier, when he divorced Cynthia Lennon; and the recording sessions for the "Mind Games," "Walls and Bridges" and "Rock 'n' Roll" albums, which yielded Lennon's first solo No. 1 hit ("Whatever Gets You Thru The Night" in 1974) and memorable collaborations with Elton John, David Bowie and meshuggah producer Phil Spector.

Two of Pang's photographs are truly historic. One shows Lennon, during a stay at Disney World's Polynesian Village Hotel on Dec. 29, 1974, penning his signature, right below those of Paul McCartney and George Harrison, on the legal document that officially disbanded the Beatles. The other shows Lennon amiably relaxing with McCartney in Los Angeles seven months earlier -- the first photograph of them taken after 1970 to surface, two '60s icons all duded up for the '70s.

-- James Rosen is a Fox News correspondent and author of "The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate," to be published in May.