You recognize what Kim Kardashian’s career was when she met Paris? She put in 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 employed by somebody to construct an enormous closet for Paris.” 

We’re within the eating room of his home on Mulholland Drive. In-built 1982, it encompasses a tennis courtroom on stilts (Mintz has used it simply 4 occasions since buying the property in 1991) and hovering white partitions lined with lithographs by his favourite artist, Tamara de Lempicka. Jack Nicholson lives 12 driveways down the highway. “He purchased that home along with his Simple Rider cash within the ’60s,” he tells me.

Mintz, 79, and I’ve been chatting, gossiping, reminiscing for greater than 4 hours. It’s what he does greatest — first as an L.A. radio host within the late ’60s, then as leisure correspondent for KABC within the ’70s, the place he interviewed a whole bunch of notables — everybody from John Wayne to Groucho Marx, Jayne Mansfield to Salvador Dalí. 

To millennials, he’s most likely greatest recognized for his later incarnation as Hilton’s publicist — the impish man from The Easy Life who within the early aughts adopted the heiress dutifully to Hyde each single night time, making certain she was photographed alongside Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. Mintz was within the again seat when the three bickering celebration monsters shared an SUV experience collectively — famously dubbed the “BIMBO SUMMIT” by the New York Publish.

“Get them in, get them out with the very best diploma of respectability in the event that they had been flat-out drunk or excessive,” Mintz explains of his duties. “Possibly a bit smile for the person throughout the road,” he provides, referring to Harvey Levin, whose TMZ places of work had been instantly throughout from Hyde on the time. 

“Then on to after-hours events, which we did till 5 within the morning,” he continues. “I’d make sure she received residence, stroll her into the home, made certain that the locks had been locked, that the cat was there and that the paps had been simply exterior of the storage, however not contained in the storage. I drove her residence from the Hollywood precinct when she had been arrested. They had been exhausting occasions.”

Amazingly, that is all only a minor detour from the principle subject of dialog, which is Mintz’s new memoir, We All Shine On: John, Yoko, & Me (Dutton). 

The e-book traces the beginnings of Mintz’s reinvention as a media marketing consultant. All of it started in 1971, when Yoko Ono, following a radio interview with Mintz she felt went extraordinarily nicely, started calling him often and fascinating him in hours-long conversations about no matter was preoccupying her eccentric thoughts on the time. 

Not a lot later, it was her husband, John Lennon, who known as, inquiring about an injectable Mintz had talked about to Yoko that was stated to soften off physique fats. This being a half-century earlier than the Ozempic increase, it was hCG that Mintz described — a hormone derived from pregnant ladies’s urine. Its effectiveness was sketchy at greatest, however Lennon, who was preoccupied along with his weight, didn’t appear to care. The needles, nonetheless, scared him off the therapy.

The couple then known as Mintz each day — typically collectively, extra incessantly aside, typically at midnight — and entangled him in free-associative, at occasions looking out conversations. The cellphone rang so incessantly that Mintz needed to set up a second devoted line in his little home in Laurel Canyon; each time John or Yoko known as, a purple mild would illuminate. It being John Fucking Lennon (and Yoko Ono), Mintz discovered himself incapable of ever saying no. 

They met in individual in Ojai in 1972. For the following eight years, Mintz turned the couple’s greatest pal and most trusted confidant. When the wedding received rocky, he served as counselor and go-between. And, when John was murdered exterior the Dakota on Dec. 8, 1980, Mintz stepped in to grow to be Yoko’s rock in addition to a father determine to the couple’s younger son, Sean. Mintz additionally was enlisted within the days after the slaying to stock all of John’s possessions, together with the previous Beatle’s blood-splattered glasses. (He nonetheless represents the Lennon property and stays extraordinarily shut with Sean, now 49, who inspired him to jot down the e-book.) 

“I fell in love with them,” Mintz explains. “I assumed we had been married. Not in a sexual manner. However we had shared every thing with one another.”

After Lennon, Mintz went on to media seek the advice of for different towering leisure figures, together with Diana Ross and Dylan — with whom, he says, Lennon all the time held a minor grudge. “John was merely jealous of Bob,” he explains. “Due to the way in which Bob was perceived versus the way in which John was perceived. Bob got here out of nowhere and hitchhiked to New York Metropolis with a guitar on his again. John received well-known singing ‘I Need to Maintain Your Hand.’ They had been considered in another way.”

Says Mintz, “I dwell alone. I by no means have to inform them, ‘My spouse’s ready.’ ‘No, I can’t be with you for the Sunday Oscars — it’s my youngster’s soccer match, my daughter’s ballet finale.’ Or, ‘No, I can’t be speaking to you at 5 o’clock within the morning — I’ve any person laying subsequent to me.’ I by no means stated that. I took all of it very severely.”

“It’s nearly such as you took a non secular oath,” I notice. 

“An oath is precisely what it was,” he says. “It was a pledge. So the query arises: Was all of it price it?” He takes a sip of his chardonnay. “However do I’ve the reply to that? I don’t.” 

This story appeared within the Oct. 23 problem of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here to subscribe.