We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me by Elliot Mintz

Author:Elliot Mintz [Mintz, Elliot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Personal Memoirs, Music
ISBN: 9780593475553
Google: qcfvEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0593475550
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2024-10-21T22:00:00+00:00

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John and I spent a lot of time together over the next several weeks and months. And when we didn’t see each other in person, we kept up our regular phone calls. But he was also expanding his friendship circle in L.A., hanging out with people like Harry Nilsson, the brilliant but notoriously hell-raising singer-songwriter, who was quickly becoming one of John’s best drinking buddies. In fact, a few weeks after our TV interview on the beach, John called to tell me he wanted to fly up to Vegas to party with some of his new pals. Could I take him there?

It was clear he wasn’t inviting me to join them; rather, he needed an escort to make the journey with him and get him to whatever hotel—it might have been the Flamingo, or perhaps Caesars Palace; I don’t remember—had been designated as their meeting spot. But I said yes anyway because…well, because John asked me.

So, the next day, at 10:00 a.m.—an ungodly hour on my timetable—I picked up John at Adler’s house and drove him to LAX, where even in those days there were hourly flights to Vegas. About halfway to the airport, though, on a particularly sketchy stretch of La Cienega Boulevard, John spotted something that made his eyes go big: It was a sorry little strip joint called the Losers.

“We need to stop there, Ellie,” he said. “We need to check out the Losers.”

I glanced over at him and saw that he was serious. Against my better judgment, I pulled the car into the club’s lot, where there were three or four other parked cars. I tried to imagine what sort of people might be compelled to frequent such a seedy establishment at 10:30 in the morning…until I realized we were about to become two of them. Then, as I so often did when wandering in public with John, I began mentally calculating the likelihood of a crowd situation. I remembered the mob John drew the last time he’d put us in a similar situation, when he’d asked me to take him to see Deep Throat at the Pussycat Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. We had to elbow through hundreds of grabby autograph seekers before finally getting through the doors and taking our seats for the 5:45 showing. (John, by the way, didn’t care for the film; we left after twenty minutes. “I had much better,” he noted dryly on the drive home.)

But here’s the thing about fame that I learned that morning during our brief stopover at the Losers: context is everything. The odds of an artist of John Lennon’s stature turning up in a place this sad and dreary were so astronomically remote that when he did show up, nobody could believe it. Even the weary dancer performing on the stage inches away from him—staring straight into his easily recognizable face—couldn’t bring herself to make the connection. She might have thought, Hey, this guy looks a lot like John Lennon, but

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