May encourages John to reestablish a relationship with his son, Julian, whom John hasn’t seen since he and Yoko moved to the United States. Julian and Kyoko are the same age, and seeing Julian is a painful reminder for Yoko of her missing daughter, so John has limited himself to occasional phone calls.

Very occasional.

“It was thanks to my mum that we started having conversations again,” Julian later says, but it’s never easy closing the gaps that open when too much time passes between communications.

So Cynthia doesn’t know what to expect when she reaches out in early 1974 to inform John that she and Julian are planning to come over on the SS France, a luxury liner launched by Madame Charles de Gaulle in 1960, now making its final crossing from Southampton to New York.

To Cyn’s relief, John not only encourages it but also upgrades their passage and makes sure that he and May are at the dock to meet the ship in New York when it arrives. Upon discovering that Elton John and Tony King will be aboard for the same voyage, John requests that they watch over his son and ex-wife along the way, and they oblige.

When the ship docks, ten-year-old Julian immediately embraces his father, easing the tension for all of them. Though it’s been years since they were last together, Julian’s relieved to find his father as “charming, funny, and warm” as he remembered. John, May recalls, is “shocked to see ‘a little man’ and not the small child he remembered.”

The four of them head back to Los Angeles, where John and Julian spend “a lot of time getting reacquainted as father and son, playing the guitar and making music,” going swimming, and taking repeated trips to Disneyland. When asked by an interviewer around this time if he has any regrets in life, John hesitates, then admits that “if he had his time over, he’d be different to Julian.”

Says friend Elliot Mintz, “He realized he should have been there more for him, but as he once said to me, ‘some of us just can’t handle that.’ And I think when he realized it, a part of himself was able to forgive his own father, who hadn’t been there for him.”

John is a warm host to Julian and, with May’s encouragement, accommodating to Cynthia, for which she remains forever grateful. “May was wonderful, even though she was young and inexperienced in having to deal with such sensitive and emotional issues,” Cyn says. “May was open, caring, and compassionate to me and my son Julian.…She was a good friend when my son and I needed one.”

But while May is a positive influence on John, many things remain beyond her control. She is sorely lacking, for example, the ability to prevent John from doing just about anything.