John Lennon was gunned down outside his New York City apartment building, The Dakota, on Dec. 8, 1980, at age 40. Elliot Mintz wrote a memoir about their friendship.

Elliot Mintz became the long distance confidant of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Then he saw the cruel side of Lennon and picked up the pieces after the former Beatle was fatally shot.

A former broadcaster who was close friends with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the decade before Lennon’s 1980 murder said the lithe couple were “obsessed with staying skinny.” Elliot Mintz, who hosted several radio and television programs in Los Angeles and first met Ono when he interviewed her for her 1971 album Fly,

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were "obsessed" with staying thin, according to "We All Shine On: John, Yoko, & Me" author Elliot Mintz, a close friend of the two.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono's extremely close friend, Elliot Mintz, is gearing up to release a new memoir, We All Shine On: John Yoko & Me, that reveals intimate details about one of the couple's most surprising obsessions.