When John Lennon and Yoko Ono were at the peak of their fame, it was guaranteed that they would be harassed wherever they went.
But the instantly recognizable former Beatle and his artist wife had devised a wild, almost implausible trick to keep his fans at bay.
In his new book, We all shine: John, Yoko and IElliot Mintz reveals that the pair were convinced they could perform mass hypnotism on people, allowing them to walk through a crowd without being seen.
And he saw them in action during a memorable car trip in 1972.
Mintz, a former radio host turned confidant of Lennon and Ono, was picked up in Ojai, California, by the couple and their driver Peter Bendrey, aka Peter the Dealer, at the end of an epic cross-country road trip. journey.
Mintz joined John and Yoko on their epic road trip from New York to San Francisco.
They traveled to the West Coast in hopes that consultations with a Chinese herbalist would help them conceive a child after several miscarriages.
About three hours from their destination, John got hungry, so Mintz suggested stopping for something to eat at Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey.
“However, the moment I suggested it, I realized it was a terrible idea,” he writes. ‘They were John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They couldn’t show up on a crowded dock without any security. Things could quickly become dangerous. But John ignored my concerns.
As they drove to the dock, he describes how John and Yoko began to “behave strangely.”
‘They started whispering to each other in the back seat. After a while, his whispers became more intense and then turned into a mantra or something like a Hare Krishna chant.’
When they got to the pier, he said there must have been 500 tourists hanging around the pier.
“There was no way John and Yoko could navigate such a large crowd without being harassed,” he writes.
There was no way John and Yoko could navigate such a large crowd without being harassed.
The immediately recognizable former Beatle and his artist wife had devised a wild, almost implausible trick to keep their fans at bay.
When they got to the pier, he said there must have been 500 tourists hanging around the pier.
“However, before I could raise any objections, the two were already outside the door and heading from the parking lot directly toward the crowd.”
Mintz eagerly followed, convinced that the crowd would soon recognize the famous couple in their midst and fearing the chaos that would ensue.
But they confidently made their way through the crowd, unbothered by the hundreds of people surrounding them, almost as if they were invisible.
“The most recognizable couple on the planet had walked into the middle of a horde of hundreds, and not a single soul seemed to know who they were.”
Once settled at a table in a lobster restaurant, John smiled and turned to Mintz to explain what he had just witnessed.
“It seemed that John and Yoko had developed a strange but apparently remarkably effective method of controlling crowds,” he writes.
‘It was a kind of esoteric mind game in which each of them mentally disguised themselves with alternative identities: John became the Reverend Fred Gherkin and Yoko became his wife, Ada.
‘That’s what they had been singing in the back of the car just moments before: “Fred and Ada Gherkin.”
“Somehow, as unlikely as it may seem, John and Yoko assumed these imaginary roles so completely and authentically that they were able to project them to the outside world. Like a kind of collective hypnosis invisibility cloak, it made them almost undetectable.
‘”It always works!” said John.’
However, when the waiter arrived to take their order, it seems the “spell” was broken.
“You could see the veil fall from our waiter’s eyes the moment he heard John’s voice,” Mintz writes.
The Beatles and their wives visited Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India in 1968, when John was married to his first wife, Cynthia.
The ‘spell’ was broken when people heard Lennon’s unmistakable voice
They traveled to the West Coast in hopes that consultations with a Chinese herbalist would help them conceive a child after several miscarriages.
The result was chaos. The murmurs of the dining companions grew louder, and the noise was joined by the scraping of chairs as people surrounded the couple, throwing napkins and pens in their faces, demanding autographs.
Nervously, they backed out of the restaurant without eating and escaped back to the safety of their car: the huge green Chrysler Town & Country station wagon they affectionately nicknamed the ‘Dragon Wagon.’
Once back on the road, Mintz asked what happened.
“It’s my voice,” Lennon said, dejected. ‘That’s what broke the spell. People always knew my voice before they knew what I looked like.’
The book also reveals Lennon and Ono’s unhealthy obsession with body image, saying they were “obsessed with staying thin.”
“John kept a diary in which each day he wrote what his weight was,” Mintz writes.
‘Yoko and John had endless questions about this topic. 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 was with Yoko Ono in the hours and days after Lennon’s murder in New York in 1980.
John and Yoko photographed in November 1980. He was shot and killed a month later.
Mintz (left), a former radio host, became a confidant of Lennon and Ono in the 1970s.
Arriving at the Dakota building at 7.30am to comfort his heartbroken friend, thousands of people were already outside, many of them playing Beatles songs on stereos and laying flowers against the doors.
‘Some had made signs, which they held up almost as if they were attending a protest. One of them rightly said: “WHY?”‘
He was escorted to the Lennons’ seventh-floor apartment and sat quietly with Ono in her bedroom while she watched live footage from the street below on a large-screen television.
“Standing by the bed, dressed in silk pajamas and a kimono, Yoko looked incredibly fragile,” he writes.
‘Yoko had been watching, with the volume off, for who knows how long. Although the windows and shutters were closed, I could hear the music from seven floors below.’
Just as he was getting back into bed, the television lit up with the face of the man suspected of the shooting.
‘Yoko sat and stared at the mugshot of the attacker; she seemed at once hypnotized and repelled (and deeply confused) by the face of the man who, just hours before, had murdered her husband.
“He seemed to be looking for something in the photo… he was looking for the answer to the question on that sign waving outside in the crowd: WHY?”
We All Shine: John, Yoko and I by Elliot Mintz is published by Dutton
