The late John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono had an unhealthy obsession with body image and were “obsessed with staying thin”, according to a former confidant.
“John kept a diary in which he wrote down each day what his weight was,” said the couple’s friend Elliot Mintz, 79, in excerpts from his upcoming memoir We All Shine On: John Yoko & Me, which will be published on Tuesday.
“Yoko and John had endless questions about this topic,” Mintz wrote in the book, which was reviewed by People. “They thought that everyone in Hollywood was thin and willowy and that there were magic diet pills and they insisted that I get them.”
Mintz, a media consultant, was close to the couple in the decade leading up to Lennon’s shocking murder at the age of 40 on December 8, 1980 in New York City, at the hands of obsessed fan Mark David Chapman.
Mintz initially crossed paths with the famous couple during his time as a Los Angeles-based radio and television host, and once conducted an interview with Ono, 91, about his 1971 album, Fly.
The late John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, photographed in 1980, had an unhealthy obsession with body image and were “obsessed with staying thin”, according to a former confidant.
The couple’s friend Elliot Mintz, 79, opens up about his relationship with the tandem in his upcoming memoir We All Shine On: John Yoko & Me, out Tuesday. Photographed last year in Los Angeles.
Mintz initially crossed paths with the famous couple during his time as a Los Angeles-based radio and television host, and once conducted an interview with Ono, 91, about his 1971 album, Fly.
Mintz, who remains friends with Ono and Sean Lennon, 49, said that on one occasion, Lennon and Ono were disappointed that he couldn’t get them ‘diet pills’ after they called him at 4 a.m. asking him to get them some.
Mintz told People that “her refrigerator was like entering a well of curiosity,” as it wasn’t easy to determine what some of the items it contained were, with a number of healthy foods “unrecognizable.”
He said: “Sometimes there would be these paper containers, which suggested there were leftovers from the night before, and you would open the container and look inside and still couldn’t identify what they were eating.”
Mintz said that while the house was always stocked with “plenty of water,” there was little protein present.
“Before John learned to cook, they were a little thin in the nutrition department,” Mintz said. “And Yoko, with all due respect, didn’t know how to operate the stove.”
In the book, Mintz said the couple had an incredibly organized wardrobe consisting of “hundreds of items of clothing, including dozens and dozens of hats and glasses.”
Lennon and Ono had meticulously organized their wardrobe “like a Manhattan boutique,” Mintz said, as they had their clothes sorted “by waist size and with a large wraparound staircase to reach the highest boxes.”
The late Lennon, photographed in August 1980, “kept a diary where each day he wrote down what his weight was,” Mintz says in the book.
Mintz said that on one occasion, Lennon and Ono were disappointed that he couldn’t get them ‘diet pills’ after they called him at 4 a.m. asking him to get them some.
The book, titled We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me, will be released Tuesday.
“They kept their various jeans and pantsuits, whatever they were, in different waist size categories, from 28 to 32 or so, depending on how they perceived their weight and how tight the pants fit.”
Mintz told People that readers should expect a balanced presentation of their time in the presence of the famous couple.
“This is not a love poem to John and Yoko,” Mintz said. ‘For those who were looking for something lewd, that’s not here either.
“As far as I know, what it is is an honest first-person account of what it was like to spend almost a decade of my life with them, and now, more than 50 years with Yoko.”
We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me is scheduled to be released Tuesday.