JOHN AND YOKO BECAME THE STORY OF MY LIFE

WHILE Mintz found Yoko the easier of the two and the one he was closer to, John was the most fun.

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“He had moments of great humour and naughtiness, although there were times he would be shouting obscenities,” he explains. “Yoko was definitely more gentle and calmer.”

While he insists he was never starstruck and was more of an Elvis than a Beatles fan growing up in New York, Mintz admits he was nervous ahead of his first interview with the singer, which took place on John’s 30th birthday and was arranged by Yoko.

However, despite Lennon’s superstar status, Mintz found him to be “friendly and completely normal”. The musician told him: “I think I’m the happiest I've ever been. I have Yoko, and that’s all that really matters to me.”

But, soon after the interview, the book details how Lennon rang Mintz, desperate to score some drugs - well, diet pills.

“They thought that everybody in Hollywood was slim and trim and that there were magic diet pills and insisted I get that for them,” he writes.

“John had struggled his whole life with his weight. He used to joke that back when they filmed Help! he was in his ‘fat Elvis’ period: he was very self-conscious about that and took it very seriously. He’d tried every fad diet in the world and was clearly open to any other new weight-loss methods that came along.”

Yoko was equally fixated with her weight, according to Mintz, who said the couple arranged their vast closet around their fluctuating sizes.

He last saw Yoko at her 90th birthday two years ago and says she remains “beautiful and coiffed as ever”.

But he doesn’t know if she has read his book or whether she approves of his revelations, despite the book being her son Sean’s idea.

Sean, 49, said: “The reason I wanted Elliot to write a book, first and foremost, is that he’s a good storyteller. The fact that he was there in the lives of John and Yoko (and mine), is really just icing on the cake.”