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 where he wrote down what his weight was every day,” said the couple’s friend, Elliot Mintz, 79, in excerpts from his upcoming memoir We All Shine On: John Yoko & Me, out Tuesday to appear.
“Yoko and John had endless questions about this subject,” Mintz wrote in the book, which was reviewed by People. “They thought everyone in Hollywood was thin and slim and that there were magical diet pills, and insisted I buy them for 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 met the famous couple during his time as a radio and TV announcer in Los Angeles, where he once conducted an interview with Ono, 91, about her 1971 record Fly.
The late John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, pictured in 1980, had an unhealthy obsession with body image and were ‘obsessed with staying thin’, according to a former confidante
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. Pictured in LA last year
Mintz initially met the famous couple during his time as a radio and TV announcer in Los Angeles, where he once conducted an interview with Ono, 91, about her 1971 record Fly.
Mintz, who remains a friend of Ono and Sean Lennon, 49, said on one occasion that Lennon and Ono were disappointed that he could not get them “diet pills” after they called him at 4am asking for one buy them a pair.
Mintz told People that “with their refrigerator it was like falling into a well of curiosity” because it wasn’t easy to determine what some of the items were in it – with some “unrecognizable” healthy foods.
He said, “There would sometimes be these paper containers, which indicated there were leftovers from the night before, and you’d open the container and look inside and still couldn’t identify what they ate.”
Mintz said that although the house was always filled 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 her way around 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 their wardrobe intricately sorted “like a Manhattan boutique,” Mintz said, as they had sorted their clothes “by waist size and with a large wrapping ladder so they could reach higher boxes.”
The late Lennon, pictured in August 1980, “kept a diary in which he wrote down his weight every day,” Mintz says in the book.
Mintz said on one occasion that Lennon and Ono were disappointed that he could not get them “diet pills” after they called him at 4 a.m. asking him to buy them some.
The book – titled We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me – is scheduled for release on Tuesday
“They kept their various pairs of jeans and pantsuits, whatever they were, in different categories of waist size, from 28 to 32 or so, depending on how they perceived their weight and how tight the pants were.”
Mintz told People that readers can expect a balanced presentation of his time in the presence of the famous couple.
“This is not a love poem for John and Yoko,” Mintz said. ‘For those who were looking for something lustful: that’s not here either.
“As far as I know, it’s an honest, first-hand account of what it was like to spend almost ten years of my life with them, and now, more than fifty years with Yoko.”
We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me is scheduled for Tuesday.
