The late John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono had an unhealthy obsession with body image and were ‘obsessed with staying skinny,’ according to a one-time confidante.
‘John kept a journal where each day he would write what his weight was,’ the pair’s friend Elliot Mintz, 79, said in excerpts of his upcoming memoir We All Shine On: John Yoko & Me, which is set to be released Tuesday.
‘Yoko and John had endless questions about this subject,’ Mintz wrote in the book, which was reviewed by People. ‘They thought that everybody in Hollywood was slim and trim and that there were magic diet pills and insisted I get that for them.’
Mintz, a media consultant, was close with the couple in the decade leading 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 pair during his time as an announcer for radio and TV based out of Los Angeles, once conducting 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 skinny,’ according to a one-time confidante
The pair’s friend Elliot Mintz, 79, talks about his relationship with the tandem in his upcoming memoir We All Shine On: John Yoko & Me, which is set to be released Tuesday. Pictured last year in LA
Mintz initially crossed paths with the famous pair during his time as an announcer for radio and TV based out of Los Angeles, once conducting 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, Lennon and Ono were disappointed that he could not obtain ‘diet pills’ for them after they called him at 4 a.m. asking him to procure some for them.
Mintz told People that ‘their refrigerator was like going into this pit of curiosity,’ as it was not easy to determine what some of the items inside were – with a number of ‘unrecognizable’ health foods.
He said, ‘There were sometimes these paper containers, suggesting there were leftovers from the night before, and you would open the container and look in and still not be able to identify what they were eating.’
Mintz said that while the house was always stocked with ‘lots 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, did not know her way around the stove.’
In the book, Mintz said that the couple had an incredibly organized wardrobe consisting of ‘hundreds of articles of clothing, including dozens and dozens of hats and glasses.’
Lennon and Ono had intricately sorted out their wardrobe ‘like a Manhattan boutique,’ Mintz said, as they had their garments sorted ‘according to waist size and with a large wraparound ladder so they could get to higher boxes.
The late Lennon, pictured in August of 1980, ‘kept a journal where each day he would write what his weight was,’ Mintz says in the book
Mintz said on one occasion, Lennon and Ono were disappointed that he could not obtain ‘diet pills’ for them after they called him at 4 a.m. asking him to procure some for them
The book – titled We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me – is slated to be released Tuesday
‘They kept their various jeans and pantsuits, whatever it might be, in different categories of waist size, 28 reaching 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 his time in the presence of the famed couple.
‘This is not a love poem to John and Yoko,’ Mintz said. ‘For those who were looking for something salacious, that’s not here either.
‘What it is to the best of my knowledge, 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 slated to be released Tuesday.