This memoir by a very old friend of the Lennons is definitely worth reading for the arc of his friendship with John. Mintz has many good stories. As a 26-year-old broadcaster in LA in 1971, he played Yoko’s double album Fly and interviewed her on the radio. She struck up a phone routine with him, calling him at home in hippie-blissful Laurel Canyon where he lived alone with his dog, and soon John joined in, for separate calls that lasted hours. Disarmingly, John always called him Ellie. Their triangular friendship lasted through John’s death in 1980 and continued in a more professional form.

Mintz was a fresh-faced young man, living far from his estranged family in Brooklyn, but actually quite well connected to the LA music scene. He was able to tell John, “I met Phil Spector before you did.” Mintz says he has a photographic memory, and the scenes of his chats and in-life meetings with John and Yoko are fun, quirky, and occasionally hair-raising. Tellingly, during John’s Lost Weekend period, he came upon a completely wasted John strapped to a chair in Lou Adler’s home, where he and May Pang were staying. He tried to calm John down, and John spat a homophobic slur at him. This horrified and hurt Mintz—who had clearly never heard of Bob Wooller. (But the man never married, and you have to wonder… he was close friends with the actor Sal Mineo as well, but claims he never knew he was bisexual!)

The mix of open-mindedness and incuriousness about his friends’ (and perhaps his own) sexuality makes for a fun but clean read. Mintz also was not an addict, unlike John and Yoko, whom he says he met in person when they were traveling across the country trying to quit methadone. So his stories generally ring “true.”

The Lennons summoned a nervous Elliot to meet them in the mountain resort town of Ojai in May of ’72. It was fascinating to read Elliot’s first take on them, his jangled nerves at meeting the famous couple very relatable. Even the meeting seems like an odd kind of loyalty test, for Ojai was a long drive and Elliot had to be back to do his show that night.

Our moment had arrived.

I took a deep breath, stepped out of my car, and tentatively walked towards their vehicle. I noticed one of its rear doors opening and caught a glimpse of a slight female figure dressed from head to toe in black. Behind her, lounging in the back seat, was a taller, lankier-looking male with a long beard and tinted wire-framed glasses.

Yoko climbed out of the car, stood by its door, and, for the very first time, looked me up and down. I did the same to her. She was even shorter and thinner than I expected from her photographs, with her long black hair grazing the base of her spine.

“Go on, then,” I heard John say from the back of the station wagon, “give ‘im a hug.”

Yoko, as I’ve mentioned before, was not a physically demonstrative person. But she stepped forward to engage in something sort of like a hug—let’s call it a light tapping on my back. Then John jumped out of the car. He, it turned out, was a hugger. He wrapped his arms around me so tightly, I was a little startled. John was no giant—he was about five feet ten inches—but I was considerably shorter and he towered over me as he hugged me into his chest.

“It’s good to meet you.”

It’s a long-drawn-out episode that concludes with John and Yoko presenting the gobsmacked Elliot with an acetate of their brand-new record, Some Time in New York City… which promptly gets him fired once he plays the radical, strident lyrics on air. Being Elliot, he simply goes on another trip with them, to San Francisco, and then gets a better radio job. But you do get a sense of the fateful nature of the friendship for him—that he stepped out of his lane and into their lane, and could never get back. Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans…

The day/night of John’s murder is harrowing, of course (Mintz jumped on a plane to NY immediately, sensing that something terrible had happened, and was given the news by a distraught flight attendant). My takeaway is that he was very fond of Yoko, but loved John. As many people did. Anyway, this was a refreshing read, and explains why John and Yoko weren’t desperate to make new friends in their last years… they had Ellie. The only thing I didn’t like was that he was disparaging about May Pang‘s importance to John, saying that John never mentioned her name. Pang has always claimed that Yoko sucked John back in by hiring (or pretending to hire) a hypnotist to get him to quit smoking. Mintz proffers a quirky anecdote about this as well, along the lines of “I hired the hypnotist… and he was a diva.” (Sometimes it seems like his agenda for writing the book is to normalize Yoko, and this is one of those times. He certainly does humanize her as much as possible.)

Collages and images of letters from John & Yoko to Elliot round out the period charm of the book. Mintz did go work for Yoko as a publicist after John’s death, so this is something to keep in mind. I’m glad he ended it when he did, for it’s clear that John’s erratic but intense friendship is what he valued most.

Elliot Mintz, We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me, Dutton, 2024, $32