May 1, 2024
Having worked in radio and TV before becoming a media consultant, Mintz offers a personal account of his 50-year relationship with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, from when he first interviewed Ono in 1971 to the days after Lennon's murder when Mintz became the official spokesperson for the Lennon estate. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2024 Library Journal
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
October 1, 2024
A radio personality recounts the peculiar friendship he enjoyed with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Mintz begins at a dark moment, when, soon after Lennon was killed, he is charged with inventorying the musician's countless possessions: roomfuls of guitars, the attach� cases with which he was smitten, boxes of cassettes and their works in progress, granny glasses "in a rainbow of tinted colors." He came into this responsibility circuitously. As a Los Angeles disc jockey, he listened to a promo of Ono's 1971 solo albumFly and invited her to be an on-air guest. She agreed. Interestingly, Mintz writes, although he was well aware of her marriage to Lennon, "I was never a Beatles superfan." Instead, he adds, he was more of an Elvis freak, which didn't necessarily serve him well when, after Ono began to call him at all hours, Lennon did, too. "It was a never-ending loop," he writes, an eccentric conversation that often found him wondering why it was he on the other end. There's no brutal dish of the Albert Goldman trash-the-star variety, though Mintz doesn't shy from the dark side: Lennon, he writes, could be a monster when he was drinking, and he harbored odd views: "Even though John had smoked, ingested, or snorted just about every illegal recreational drug he could get his hands on, he was weirdly suspicious of the ones that were properly prescribed and proven efficacious." As for Ono, she's alternately remote and generous, instinctively mistrustful--and for good reason--of anyone who wanted a piece of her husband, as so many did. All in all, he writes, "they were a magical couple," and it's clear that all these years later, he misses them. A charmingly modest tale of a long brush with stardom, with all its pleasures and frustrations.
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Starred review from September 9, 2024
Radio personality Mintz debuts with a vivid account of the decade he spent as John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s confidante, fixer, and friend. “Ellie,” as the couple called him, first interviewed Yoko on his radio show in 1971 and gained her trust, he muses, because he didn’t ask about her famous relationship. With startling speed—Yoko called him for an impromptu, 40-minute chat the next day—Mintz became the couple’s “secret friend,” playing “many parts in the sometimes puzzling, occasionally maddening, always complex dramas they scripted for the three of us.” The roles Mintz played included therapist, unofficial media rep, and de facto babysitter for John during his infamous “Lost Weekend.” In the process, Mintz got an up-close look at John and Yoko’s combustible mix of fame, talent, and fragility (he writes that the “mere mention of Bob Dylan’s name... could uncork a volcano of roiling resentments” in John, who could be “bitter and mean-spirited” when drunk). Only much later did Mintz question why he’d dedicated so much of his life to the pair. Though he closes the account on a melancholy note (“If only I’d had the strength to resist the undefinable magnetic pull both of them had on me”), he admits it was a “conversation that I too wanted to go on forever.” It’s a captivating and intimate window into the complicated lives of one of rock’s most legendary couples.