The late John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono had an unhealthy obsession with body image and, according to a confidant, were “obsessed with being thin.”
“John kept a diary in which he wrote down what he weighed each day,” said Elliott Mintz, a friend of the couple, 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 it,” Mintz wrote in the book, which was reviewed. People. “Everyone in Hollywood wanted to be slim and trim and insisted that there was a magic diet pill and that I had to get it for them.”
Mintz, a media consultant, remained close to the couple in the decade leading up to Lennon's shocking murder on December 8, 1980, at the age of 40. Mark David Chapman is a die-hard fan in New York City.
During his time as a radio and television host, Mintz initially crossed paths with the famous couple. Los Angeles Once Ono, 91, conducts an interview 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, according to a former confidant, were “obsessed with being thin.”
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. Photograph taken last year in Los Angeles.
Mintz initially crossed paths with the famous couple while conducting an interview with Ono, 91, about his 1971 album Fly, during his time as a Los Angeles-based radio and television host.
Mintz, who is a friend of Ono and Sean Lennon, 49, was disappointed because he once couldn't get 'diet pills' for Lennon and Ono after calling him at 4 a.m. to ask them to buy some for them.
Mintz told People that “her refrigerator was like entering a well of curiosity” because it wasn't easy to determine what some of the ingredients it contained were; many were “unidentifiable” health foods.
He said: 'Sometimes there were paper containers that said 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 there is always “a lot of water” in the house while there is little protein.
“Before John learned to cook, they were a little thin on the nutritional front,” Mintz said. “Yoko, with all due respect, doesn't know how to move around the stove.”
In the book, the Mintz couple had an incredibly organized wardrobe containing “hundreds of dresses, including dozens of hats and glasses.”
Lennon and Ono had their wardrobes meticulously arranged “like a Manhattan boutique,” Mintz says, while arranging their clothes “at waist level and with a large folding ladder to reach the high boxes.”
The late Lennon, photographed in August 1980, “kept a diary every day where he wrote down what he weighed,” Mintz says in the book.
Mintz said that on one occasion, Lennon and Ono were disappointed because they couldn't get them 'diet pills' after calling him at 4 a.m. to buy them some.
The book, titled We All Shine On: John, Yoko and Me, will be released Tuesday.
“They have different jeans and pantsuits, whatever it is, in different waist types, 28 32 or more, depending on how they feel about their weight and how tight the pants fit.”
Mintz told People that readers should expect a balanced presentation of her time opposite the famous couple.
“This is not a John and Yoko love poem,” Mintz said. 'For those looking for something in Salem, it's not here.
“An honest first-person account of what it was like to spend almost a decade with them, and now over 50 years with Yoko, as far as I know.”
We All Shine On: John, Yoko and Me is out Tuesday.
