Instamatic Karma


Posted on Mar 27, 2008
By Julia Szabo

St. Martin's Press, 160 pages, $29.95   

Available on Amazon.com

It's extremely rare for unconditional love - the kind we get from dogs - to exist between complicated humans, but John Lennon and Yoko Ono appear to have gotten lucky.  

In 1973, Ono encouraged her and Lennon's personal assistant, 22-year-old May Pang, to seduce Lennon with the aim of relieving tension in the couple's marriage. "If John asks you out, you should go!" Ono said. It was an offer Pang couldn't refuse. She was handy with a camera, and she had a willing subject. So she amassed a shoe boxful of extraordinarily candid Lennon photos during her year-and-a-half-long affair with the former Beatle. All these years, the pix were stashed in her closet until she finally undertook to publish them as a book.  

It's a beautiful book. In its lovingly-designed pages, we see Lennon eating soup, hanging out, writing and recording famous songs, being his whimsical self. Especially poignant are the shots that capture Lennon's love of animals, notably a pair of kittens named Major and Minor. Later, he's seen enjoying a hike in the country with two big, black dogs, a restaurateur friend's best friends; Lennon liked one of these shots so much, he used it as the picture sleeve of the "Imagine" single (which would later inspire a shrine in New York's Central Park). In another shot, Lennon is joined on a rocky Hamptons beach by a handsome Husky.

Pang was much more than a love struck shutterbug; she helped heal a serious family rift, enabling Lennon's first wife, Cynthia, to reunite her son with his father after four years apart (young Julian Lennon is seen enjoying Disneyland, Disney World, and a swim with his dad in the ocean off Long Island). "She was a good friend when my son and I needed one, and is a dear, close friend now," the first Mrs. Lennon writes of Pang in a blurb printed on Instamatic Karma's back cover.  

Remembering a visit to Montauk, Pang recalls the day she and John saw a cottage overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. "John decided it was time for us to have our own home and asked the real estate agent to show us the place. We fell in love with it and were about to put a binder on it the weekend of February first. Some things just weren't meant to be...." The year was 1975, and the affair was over as suddenly as it began.

What Pang's book doesn't say is that it ended when Yoko Ono decided it was time for John to come home - to her. And he went. Like a loyal dog. Imagine that. 
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