When John Lennon and Yoko Ono were at the height of their fame, they were guaranteed to be mobbed wherever they went.

But the instantly recognizable former Beatle and his artist wife had come up with a wild – almost improbable – ploy to keep their fans at bay.

In his new book, We all light up: John, Yoko and mereveals Elliot Mintz that the pair were convinced they could perform mass hypnotism on people, allowing them to walk through a crowd without being detected.

And he witnessed them in action during a memorable road trip in 1972.

Mintz, a former radio host turned confidant of Lennon and Ono, was picked up in Ojai, California, by the couple and their driver Peter Bendrey – aka Peter the Dealer – at the end of an epic off-road drive. trip.

Mintz accompanied John and Yoko on their epic road trip from New York to San Francisco

They traveled to the West Coast in the hope that consultations with a Chinese herbalist there might help them conceive after several miscarriages.

About three hours from their destination, John got hungry—so Mintz suggested we stop for something to eat at Monterey’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

“The second I suggested it, I realized it was a terrible idea,” he writes. “They were John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They couldn’t turn up on a crowded pier without any security. Things can get dangerous quickly. But John waved my worries away.’

As they drove towards the pier, he describes how John and Yoko started ‘behaving strangely.

They started whispering to each other in the back seat. After a while their whispering became more intense and then turned into a mantra or something like a Hare Krishna chant.’

When they reached the pier, he said there must have been 500 tourists milling around the pier.

“There was no way John and Yoko could navigate such a huge crowd without being mobbed,” he writes.

There was no way John and Yoko could navigate such a large crowd without being mobbed

The instantly recognizable former Beatle and his artist wife had come up with a wild – almost improbable – ploy to keep their fans at bay

When they reached the pier, he said there must have been 500 tourists milling around the pier

“But before I could make any objections, the two of them were already out the doors and heading from the parking lot right into the crowd.”

Mintz followed anxiously, convinced that the crowd would soon recognize the famous couple in their midst, and dreading the chaos that would ensue.

But they weaved confidently through the crowd, unfazed by the hundreds of people around them, almost as if they were invisible.

“The most famous couple on the planet had found themselves in the middle of a horde of hundreds, and not a soul seemed to know who they were.”

Once John sat down at a table in a lobster restaurant, he smiled and turned to Mintz to explain what he had just seen.

“It seemed that John and Yoko had developed a bizarre but apparently remarkably effective method of crowd control,” he writes.

“It involved some kind of esoteric mind game where they each mentally disguised themselves with alternate identities: John became Reverend Fred Gherkin and Yoko became his wife, Ada.

“That’s what they’d been chanting in the back of the carriage a few moments before: ‘Fred and Ada Gherkin.’

Somehow, as unlikely as it sounds, John and Yoko took on these imaginary roles so completely and authentically that they were able to project them to the outside world. Like some kind of mass hypnosis invisibility cloak, it made them all but undetectable.

“Works every time!” said John.’

But when the waiter came to take their order, it seems the “spell” was broken.

“You could see the veils fall from our server’s eyes the moment he heard John’s voice,” Mintz writes.

The Beatles and their wives visited Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India in 1968 – when John was married to his first wife, Cynthia

The “spell” was broken when people heard Lennon’s unmistakable voice

They traveled to the West Coast in the hope that consultations with a Chinese herbalist there would help them conceive after several miscarriages

The result was chaos. The murmurs of other diners grew louder, and the sound was joined by the scraping of chairs as people surrounded the couple, shoving napkins and pens in their faces and demanding autographs.

Nervously, they backed out of the restaurant without eating and fled back to the safety of their car – the huge green Chrysler Town & Country station wagon they affectionately called the “Dragon Wagon.”

Once back on the road, Mintz asked what had happened.

“That’s my voice,” Lennon said dejectedly. ‘That’s what broke the spell. People always knew my voice before they knew what I looked like.’

The book also reveals Lennon and Ono’s unhealthy obsession with body image, saying they were “obsessed with staying thin.”

“John kept a journal in which he wrote every day what his weight was,” Mintz writes.

Yoko and John had endless questions on this subject. They thought that everyone in Hollywood was thin and pretty and that there were magic diet pills and insisted that I get it for them.

Mintz was with Yoko Ono in the hours and days after Lennon’s murder in New York in 1980.

John and Yoko photographed in November 1980. He was shot dead a month later

Mintz (left), a former radio host, became a confidant of Lennon and Ono in the 1970s

When he arrived at the Dakota building at 7:30 a.m. to comfort his heartbroken friend, thousands of people were already outside, many of them playing Beatles songs on boom boxes and laying flowers against the gates.

“A few had made signs, which they held up almost as if they were participating in a protest. One of them aptly read “WHY?”

He was taken up to the Lennons’ seventh-floor apartment and sat quietly with Ono in her bedroom as she watched live footage from the street below on a large-screen TV.

“When Yoko stood by the bed, dressed in silk pajamas and a kimono, he looked incredibly frail,” he writes.

Yoko had been watching with the volume off for who knows how long. Even with the windows closed and the shutters closed, I could hear the music from seven floors below.

Just as she crawled back into bed, the TV lit up with the face of the man suspected of the shooting.

Yoko sat up and stared intently at the mug shot of the attacker; she seemed both fascinated and repulsed – and deeply confused – by the face of the man who only hours earlier had murdered her husband.

“She seemed to be looking for something in the picture…she was looking for the answer to the question on that sign waved outside in the crowd: WHY?”

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