Of all those sucked into the peculiar, hermetically-sealed world inhabited by post-Beatles John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Elliot Mintz is perhaps the most intriguing.
In September 1971, he interviewed Yoko Ono by telephone for a Los Angeles radio station. Afterwards, she took it upon herself to call him, day after day, hour after hour. “Why, of all the human beings on the planet, she chose to befriend Elliot Mintz?” he ponders in this elegiac memoir. “I have no idea.”
As both a broadcaster and a PR for the likes of Diana Ross, Mintz himself has had a colourful career – but none of this is reflected upon here. Rather, We All Shine On: John, Yoko and Me is very much a book about the relationship he had with one of the world’s most famous couples: a non-sexual triangle that was still going strong when Lennon died in 1980.
For all the intimacy (“I believe that, in a sense, I was married to John and Yoko”) and Mintz’s faintly ludicrous humblebragging (“I never sought out relationships with famous people, they just somehow gravitate towards me”), there are no great Beatles revelations here – he tells us they almost never spoke about the band.
Yet, this book does offer a new layer of Lennon understanding through fragments of the couple’s life and snippets of domestic minutiae: his obsession with his weight, for instance, or his refusal to allow his son Sean to watch television advertisements. Mintz was also the fifth diner when Paul and Linda McCartney visited for Christmas lunch, and remembers how afterwards, John and Paul looked over Central Park in awkward silence, while Yoko and Linda chatted away like the old friends.
Having no input into their music, Mintz was never fully clear what his precise role was, but he flitted between factotum, chauffeur and link to the outside world (“Yoko even paid me a small stipend” he proudly notes). Despite his West Coast career, he was always ready to ready to hop aboard a red-eye to New York at short notice. He had a Lennon hotline installed at home: a red light flashed when the calls came through in the middle of Mintz’s night.
Ever malleable, he neither questioned nor criticised. He kept to himself his disdain for Yoko’s reliance on numerology (she would decide whether someone was suitable to work with by checking the date and time of their birth) and her praetorian guard of “spiritual advisers”.
Nor did he complain at Lennon’s occasional bursts of temper. When Mintz once mildly objected to being ordered to eject one of Lennon’s lovers from a hotel room the response was poisonous: “I’m gonna ask you to do anything I feel like f***ing asking you. Don’t you ever tell me what I can or can’t say to you”. This Lennon emerges as self-indulgent, detached and entitled; an enigmatic manchild, but also a genuine and present father.
After Lennon was assassinated by Mark Chapman in December 1980, Mintz was subsequently tasked with cataloguing roomfuls of Lennon artefacts – from the 26 pairs of spectacles to cardboard cut-outs of flamingos. Lennon certainly could not “imagine no possessions” for himself, Mintz notes wryly.
He also takes us into the dark, near-silent apartment in the hours after the murder. Here, he sits alone with the new widow watching the television news with the sound turned off. When Yoko sees Chapman’s face for the first time, Mintz remembers her being both “mesmerised and repulsed”.
This memoir stops abruptly a few months later and offers no clue as to his current relationship with Yoko. However, the epilogue finds Mintz unearthing a sealed letter addressed to him in John’s handwriting.
“I’m wildly intrigued,” he gushes. As are we. Extraordinarily, he chooses not to open it – and that wailing sound in the background is probably his publishers weeping.
This is a warm book, but it’s melancholic too, notably when Mintz laments that his relationship with the Lennons precluded the possibility of a family life of his own. “I fully expected the three of us would grow old together,” he writes. Some things are just not meant to be.
Published by Bantam on 24th October, £25
