The John and Yoko Whisperer: Legendary PR Man Elliot Mintz Tells All

3 weeks ago 5

You know what Kim Kardashian’s profession was when she met Paris? She installed wardrobe closets for celebrities,” Elliot Mintz — famed publicist and consigliere to stars like Paris Hilton, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono — confides to me over Italian takeout and chardonnay. “She was hired by someone to build a big closet for Paris.”

We’re in the dining room of his house on Mulholland Drive. Built in 1982, it features a tennis court on stilts (Mintz has used it just four times since purchasing the property in 1991) and soaring white walls lined with lithographs by his favorite artist, Tamara de Lempicka. Jack Nicholson lives 12 driveways down the road. “He bought that house with his Easy Rider money in the ’60s,” he tells me.

Mintz, 79, and I have been chatting, gossiping, reminiscing for more than four hours. It’s what he does best — first as an L.A. radio host in the late ’60s, then as entertainment correspondent for KABC in the ’70s, where he interviewed hundreds of notables — everyone from John Wayne to Groucho Marx, Jayne Mansfield to Salvador Dalí.

To millennials, he is probably best known for his later incarnation as Hilton’s publicist — the impish man from The Simple Life who in the early aughts followed the heiress dutifully to Hyde every single night, ensuring she was photographed alongside Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. Mintz was in the back seat when the three bickering party monsters shared an SUV ride together — famously dubbed the “BIMBO SUMMIT” by the New York Post.

“Get them in, get them out with the highest degree of respectability if they were flat-out drunk or high,” Mintz explains of his duties. “Maybe a little smile for the man across the street,” he adds, referring to Harvey Levin, whose TMZ offices were directly across from Hyde at the time.

“Then on to after-hours parties, which we did until 5 in the morning,” he continues. “I would make certain she got home, walk her into the house, made sure that the locks were locked, that the cat was there and that the paps were just outside of the garage, but not inside the garage. I drove her home from the Hollywood precinct when she had been arrested. They were exhausting times.”

Amazingly, this is all just a minor detour from the main topic of conversation, which is Mintz’s new memoir, We All Shine On: John, Yoko, & Me (Dutton).

The book traces the beginnings of Mintz’s reinvention as a media consultant. It all began in 1971, when Yoko Ono, following a radio interview with Mintz she felt went extremely well, began calling him regularly and engaging him in hours-long conversations about whatever was preoccupying her eccentric mind at the time.

Not much later, it was her husband, John Lennon, who called, inquiring about an injectable Mintz had mentioned to Yoko that was said to melt off body fat. This being a half-century before the Ozempic boom, it was hCG that Mintz described — a hormone derived from pregnant women’s urine. Its effectiveness was sketchy at best, but Lennon, who was preoccupied with his weight, didn’t seem to care. The needles, however, scared him off the treatment.

The couple then called Mintz daily — sometimes together, more frequently apart, often in the dead of night — and entangled him in free-associative, at times searching conversations. The phone rang so frequently that Mintz had to install a second dedicated line in his little house in Laurel Canyon; whenever John or Yoko called, a red light would illuminate. It being John Fucking Lennon (and Yoko Ono), Mintz found himself incapable of ever saying no.

They met in person in Ojai in 1972. For the next eight years, Mintz became the couple’s best friend and most trusted confidant. When the marriage got rocky, he served as counselor and go-between. And, when John was murdered outside the Dakota on Dec. 8, 1980, Mintz stepped in to become Yoko’s rock as well as a father figure to the couple’s young son, Sean. Mintz also was enlisted in the days after the slaying to inventory all of John’s possessions, including the former Beatle’s blood-splattered glasses. (He still represents the Lennon estate and remains extremely close with Sean, now 49, who encouraged him to write the book.)

“I fell in love with them,” Mintz explains. “I thought we were married. Not in a sexual way. But we had shared everything with each other.”

After Lennon, Mintz went on to media consult for other towering entertainment figures, including Diana Ross and Dylan — with whom, he says, Lennon always held a minor grudge. “John was simply jealous of Bob,” he explains. “Because of the way Bob was perceived as opposed to the way John was perceived. Bob came out of nowhere and hitchhiked to New York City with a guitar on his back. John got famous singing ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’ They were thought of differently.”

Says Mintz, “I live alone. I never have to tell them, ‘My wife’s waiting.’ ‘No, I can’t be with you for the Sunday Oscars — it’s my child’s soccer tournament, my daughter’s ballet finale.’ Or, ‘No, I can’t be talking to you at 5 o’clock in the morning — I have somebody laying next to me.’ I never said that. I took it all very seriously.”

“It’s almost like you took a religious oath,” I note.

“An oath is exactly what it was,” he says. “It was a pledge. So the question arises: Was it all worth it?” He takes a sip of his chardonnay. “But do I have the answer to that? I don’t.”