So This Is Beatlemania[I]
No television show in Great Britain was more popular—or selective—than Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. It was an institution: practically every set in the country was tuned to it each Sunday night as the top English stars and visiting American performers took part in the prestigious but corny variety show that aired live from the Argyll Street theater. Every major celebrity eventually put in an appearance: Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Laurence Olivier, Elizabeth Taylor, Nat King Cole—Cliff Richard. If, to Americans, the pinnacle of success was playing Carnegie Hall, its British equivalent was the Palladium, “home of the stars.” In Ringo’s estimation, “there was nothing bigger in the world than making it to the Palladium.” He’d always dreamed about it as a boy. It was the yardstick for success. “My mum, Annie, always used to tease Ritchie—‘See you on the Palladium’—when he was a boy, just practicing,” recalls Marie Crawford. “You’d always hear a parent say that as a joke, knowing their child had about as good a chance of getting there as winning the football pools.”
Now the Beatles could claim top prize: the toppermost of the poppermost. And even though they were doing only four numbers*—songs they could have played in their sleep—tradition demanded they participate in an all-day rehearsal.
Fans had begun gathering outside just after their arrival at the theater on Sunday, October 13, 1963. By late afternoon, the situation outside the stage door intensified to the point that it attracted Brian’s attention. There were a hundred or so kids milling about there—more than the Beatles could safely deal with. Rehearsal was drawing to an end, and the boys had a three-hour window before they were due back at the theater. Brian consulted with Neil Aspinall and Tony Barrow to coordinate a departure. “We were talking about various decoy routes,” Barrow recalls. “Should they go this way or that way, up over the roof. And we finally decided that with the kids hanging around the stage door, we should just go out the front entrance and get into the car.”
Neil pulled an Austin Princess around to Argyll Street and waited for the Beatles by the curb. It was a few minutes after five o’clock. The street lay in dusky shadows, and from the look of things, they were in good shape to make a clean getaway. There was a clear path to the entrance, no one in sight. “What we hadn’t counted on,” says Barrow, “were the kids who’d been keeping their eyes on the car.” At exactly the moment the Beatles broke through the doors, fans—“hordes of kids”—converged from everywhere, and “it all happened at once.” An incredible roar went up, and not merely any roar but an ear-splitting blast of exultation, mixed with surprise, rapture, awe, and abandon. It was pandemonium on the sidewalk. Pushing and shoving broke out as the crowd moved en masse toward the agile, galloping quartet. The Beatles ran headlong through a gauntlet of grabby hands, diving for cover through the hastily opened car doors, as security guards moved quickly to hold back the crowd.
The scene on the street caught the press napping, but in ten minutes every city desk in London went on alert, cranking up the machinery to cover a story that would take on a life of its own.
The papers knew exactly what to call it. BEATLEMANIA! screamed the front-page banner of the Daily Mirror. Headlines didn’t come any more eye-catching than that. Every paper carried photographs of a dark street scene that resembled a flash siege, with a police cordon struggling to hold off a mob of screaming girls. Tipped off about crowds following the rehearsal, photographers had raced to the scene, hoping to salvage a story after the show. What they encountered, however, was better than anything they could have wished for. Where earlier there had been two hundred girls outside the Palladium, by show’s end there were two thousand strong, all of them overcome with frenetic Beatles rapture. Like the reporters among them, they had heard about the earlier frenzy and used it as a model to express their emotional release, so by nightfall the screaming and sobbing seemed like the accepted way to react. According to eyewitness accounts in the Daily Herald, “screaming girls launched themselves against the police—sending helmets flying and constables reeling.” It was complete bedlam, abandoned only after the Beatles dove down the theater steps and into a car, with most girls giving chase as it sped off along Oxford Street.
“It was exactly the story we’d been waiting for,” says Don Short, who covered “the whole spectrum of show business” for the Mirror. “Up until that time, I’d merely go around to Claridge’s or the Savoy and interview Sammy Davis Jr. one week, Andy Williams the next, but the Beatles had all this drama swirling around them—and they were sexy, a very sexy story.”
Britain’s papers had discovered sex earlier that spring, when they began tracking a colorful rumor that John Profumo, the secretary of state of war, had engaged in a sexual liaison with a young call girl named Christine Keeler. Word had it that he’d met her in 1961 during a weekend social at Cliveden, Lord Astor’s estate, where she was staying with her friend Dr. Stephen Ward. To make matters worse, there were also reports of Keeler’s involvement with a man named Eugene Ivanov, a Russian naval attaché and reported KGB agent, possibly compromising state secrets. At first no paper dared run any part of the story, fearing the harsh slap of England’s libel laws. By June, however, Profumo had admitted to committing an “impropriety,” and the gloves came off. London’s dailies feasted on the scandal, rolling out new installments, morning, noon, and night, as if they were segments of an ongoing soap opera.
Profumo was must reading because it exposed the rank hypocrisy of members of the establishment, but nothing seemed hotter, more sensational, or sleazier than the ongoing case in Edinburgh, detailing the voracious sexual appetite of the Duchess of Argyll, whose husband was suing her for divorce. Cabinet ministers, lords, dukes, duchesses—everyone, it seemed, wanted to get in on the act, and the news media accommodated them. Another cabinet minister was caught—supposedly—having oral sex with a prostitute in Richmond Park. And eight high court judges supposedlyengaged in an orgy, leading Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to exclaim, “One, perhaps, two, conceivably. But eight—I just can’t believe it.”
But the newspapers did. Rather, they believed it sold copies—and they were right. Sex and innuendo had awakened a sleeping readership, and the dailies, particularly the tabloids, marketed them with skill. And Britain was ready for it. Repressive Victorian morality, so long the badge of proper society, was growing rapidly passé. The postwar wave of upper-class promiscuity and “considerable sexual license” had finally swept through the lower orders, who were itching for a piece of the action. Sex was no longer an indulgence only for the rich; it was a pastime as accessible to commoners as a pint at the pub. “The popular morality is now a wasteland,” declared Professor George Carstairs in his Reith Lectures that year. “A new concept is emerging, of sexual relationships as a source of pleasure.” Newspapers certainly saw the future as clearly. “On the island where the subject has long been taboo in polite society,” wrote a Times (London) columnist, “sex has exploded into the national consciousness and national headlines.” Beatlemania was the icing on the cake.
Two days after 15 million viewers got a look at them on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, and only one day after the bold headlines, it was announced that a secret deal had been struck back in August for the Beatles to appear before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret at the annual Royal Variety Performance in November. This was no small development. A command performance was a considerable honor—and a considerable boost. It lifted Beatlemania out of local cinemas and thrust it center stage, giving it the Queen’s blessing. It also legitimized it for the “serious” press. Two days later the so-called prestigious writers, those whose names distinguished general-feature stories and had so far expressed a total lack of interest, came courting: Derek Jewel from the Sunday Times, Vincent Mulchrone from the Daily Mail, Judith Simons from the Daily Express, Peter Woods from the BBC’s Radio Newsreel, the Mail’s Linda Lee-Potter—there were too many to count—all demanding interviews with the Beatles. It had taken Barrow months just to get these journalists on the phone, he says. The next day they began bombarding his office line regularly, begging for leads, thanks largely to the response of their page-one stories. “All over Britain, there have been incredible scenes as stampeding fans have battled for [Beatles] tickets,” wrote Melody Maker, which catalogued the incidents in a column titled “This Week’s Beatlemania.” “Girls have fainted. Police have had to control queue crowds. Fans have been camping out overnight days before tickets [go] on sale.” Crowds in Birmingham jostled with police outside the ABC-TV studios, where the boys were taping a segment of Thank Your Lucky Stars. “At Leicester,” it was reported, “hundreds slept in the streets throughout the night, waiting for box-offices to open” for an upcoming Beatles show. The city of Carlisle experienced a “midnight panic” when six hundred fans crashed police lines outside the ABC Cinema, necessitating emergency first-aid crews. More girls “fainted—and got hurt” buying tickets in Hull. In Portsmouth and Bristol, anxious promoters, alarmed by what they read in the papers and saw on TV, turned to the police for help, calling in “every burly and able-bodied man on the staff to keep order.” And that was only a warm-up. “Thousands of girls battled with police” in Huddlesfield, a town in Yorkshire, when “a stampede broke out,” injuring sixty “screaming teenage fans.” The story broke as front-page news in Sunday People:
When the box office opened a mass of youngsters surged forward, breaking the cordon of forty policemen…. In the rush, many of the fans were crushed against the cinema walls and shop doorways. Ambulance men who had been on duty all night were kept busy pulling them out, carrying out other fans who had fainted, and taking them into the cinema foyer, which served as a casualty station.
There seemed no limit to the wild scenes. The riots during Bill Haley concerts seven years earlier were basically the handiwork of teddy boys, who used the music as a soundtrack for their ongoing punch-ups. But the Beatles had touched off what appeared to be a mass swoon. Girls of all classes were caught up in the screaming, love pledging, sobbing, hair pulling, and fainting that accompanied each show.
Fortunately, from October 24 through the end of the month, the band began a weeklong tour of Sweden, which temporarily removed them from the public eye. But upon their return, on the morning of October 31, hundreds, perhaps even “thousands[,] of screaming fans” thronged the terraced roof of the Queen’s Building at Heathrow Airport, which ignited the hysteria anew.
By coincidence, “the commotion” caught the eye of American TV impresario and gossip journalist Ed Sullivan, who was arriving in London with his wife, Sylvia, at precisely the same time, to scout talent for future shows. Sullivan, intrigued, corralled a few giggling fans and asked if they knew whether a celebrity was arriving. Was it a member of the royal family? he demanded. The girls just laughed and sashayed away. After an airport official told him it was the Beatles, Sullivan dutifully wrote down the name and instructed his son-in-law, producer Bob Precht, to find out what he could about them.
It didn’t take Sullivan long to learn that a phenomenon was streaking through all of England, and he moved to position himself for an American scoop. That meant striking a quick deal with Brian Epstein. Sullivan had some idea of what it would take to land a pop act on the brink of stardom. He’d paid Elvis Presley a staggering $50,000 for three appearances in 1956. What, almost eight years later, could the Beatles possibly command? To Sullivan it was clear that though they were still basically a foreign sensation, it was only a matter of time before their popularity spread to the States. An exclusive would mean offering Epstein enough to keep competitors at bay.
The Beatles had always refused to consider an American visit until they meant something abroad; otherwise, it could prove too humiliating an experience. The boys were all too aware of how American audiences regarded British acts. John was especially sensitive to reports that Cliff Richard, a longtime megastar, had “died”—meaning bombed—on an American tour. “He was fourteenth on the bill with Frankie Avalon,” John huffed, with some exaggeration.
But Brian Epstein had an instinct—a good instinct—for timing. Not only did he feel the moment was right, he knew—he seemed to know instinctively—how to synchronize it.
One stroke of chronology was already in place. While the boys were in Sweden, Brian had concluded negotiations with United Artists for a feature-length movie to star the Beatles. For a few months other film studios had been dangling offers without any concrete idea of what they wanted to make. This frightened the Beatles, who were dead set against being packaged in a kind of standard ensemble jukebox movie, like Rock Around the Clock or The Girl Can’t Help It. John, who was especially cautious about their image, told Melody Maker: “We prefer to wait until we find a film with a good plot that will hold the interest of the teenagers.” (Much later, in blunt terms, he said, “We didn’t want to make a fuckin’ shitty pop movie.”) But UA already had a producer in tow—a jovial American expat named Walter Shenson—who’d cast Peter Sellers in The Mouse That Roared, which had served to establish the comedian outside England. That scored points right off the bat with John. Shenson recalled that during his first meeting with the Beatles, in one of the empty offices at Abbey Road, John, acting as spokesman for the group, confronted him immediately about the type of film he intended to make. “Oh, I don’t know,” Shenson told him, shrugging, “but it should be a comedy.” The Beatles cut knowing glances at one another before John said, “Okay, you can be the producer.” It was as simple as that.
And Shenson was immediately captivated by their vivid personalities and the kind of zany scene that swirled about them. “I really found myself in the middle of a Marx Brothers movie,” he recalls. “And they were awfully sweet.” To Shenson, the Beatles embodied the beguiling blend of natural humor and wholesomeness that the classic movie comedians exhibit. He realized he was “onto something very special, on the level of a Keaton or a Fields.” If he played his cards right, Shenson believed, his little low-budget picture had the potential to be something more—much more.
UA’s guarantee up front of a worldwide release seemed like a princely—even absurd—offer. Shenson himself had asked UA boss Bud Ornstein, “You mean those kids with long hair? What do you want to make a movie with them for?” Without skipping a beat, Ornstein roared: “For the soundtrack album.” Somehow, UA had determined that those rights had been withheld from EMI in the Beatles’ recording contract—withheld, or overlooked—and could be worth a fortune, many times over the film’s £200,000 production budget.
Very quickly, Shenson brought Richard Lester, his director on The Mouse on the Moon,* into the deal. Lester, the irascible scion of a middle-class Philadelphia family, was another expat looking to quit his job grinding out commercials and make his mark in motion pictures. He had worked with the Goons and shared Shenson’s love for their kind of goofy British humor, which seemed to make him a natural choice. “I’ll do it for nothing!” Lester volunteered. This comment amused Shenson, who was grappling at the time with a shoestring budget. “Don’t worry about that, Dick,” he told him, “we’re all going to do it for nothing.”
United Artists was prepared to pay the Beatles a small salary plus 25 percent of the movie’s net. On October 29, they met in Bud Ornstein’s apartment to hammer out a deal. “We laid out the terms,” Shenson says, “which gave us the Beatles’ services for three pictures, along with the soundtracks for each.” That seemed fair all around, nor did anyone object to a £25,000 fee for Brian and the four boys. But then Brian tipped his chin toward Ornstein, put on his most pugnacious game face, and said, “We’re not going to take less than seven and a half percent.”
A deathly silence fell over the room. According to Shenson, “We just couldn’t believe it! It didn’t make any sense.” Only much later did he realize Brian’s mistake. “He was talking percentages of record albums,” Shenson says, “[in] which, if you get a couple of pennies, you make a lot of money.” Just like that, Brian had let the steam out of his trousers. If the man wanted seven and a half points, UA was certainly willing to sign off on a deal—right away. Both parties left that afternoon happy with the agreement.
If only someone had bothered to run it by the Beatles.
It was Paul who first had misgivings, not about money and not about terms. “He wanted to see a script,” recalls Shenson. Actually, his concerns had less to do with substance than with romance. Earlier in the summer Paul had begun seeing a precocious seventeen-year-old actress named Jane Asher, who was wise to the vagaries of show business. She’d been acting since the age of seven, on stage, screen, and television, and urged Paul to approve a script before committing to any deal. “She was absolutely right,” Shenson says today. “Who makes a film without looking at the script?”
Once it was announced that the Beatles were going to make a movie, the producers were inundated with interest from agents and writers who proposed “the most banal nonsense,” in Shenson’s estimation, “just silly stuff, not even close.” No one had the slightest idea how to use the Beatles without treating them trivially, like cartoon characters. Finally, someone—and Shenson believes it was one of the Beatles*—suggested they contact Alun Owen, a Liverpool playwright, to kick around some ideas.
Shenson was appalled. He was familiar with Owen’s work, gritty working-class dramas à la Clifford Odets, John Osborne, and Arnold Wesker, in what was known as the kitchen-sink school of writing. More recently, his plays had been adapted for television, and while Shenson was impressed with them, he was more concerned by their stunning lack of humor and bleakness. Out of curiosity, he screened Owen’s No Trams to Lime Street and considered it “pretty heavy going.” Shenson had only the bare bones of a concept in mind. “I think it should be an exaggerated day-in-the-life of the Beatles,” he told Owen, and suggested the playwright meet the boys in Dublin on October 7, where they were doing two shows at the Adelphi Cinema.
In the meantime, the Beatles prepared for their performance in front of the Queen. “They were nervous,” says Tony Barrow, “fairly overawed by such an important audience.” Although they had basically just a short four-song spot, all of England would be watching, to say nothing of the figure who, next to God, was the most awesome symbol of the empire.* None of which deterred John. “All day long he was practicing a line he planned to deliver that night,” Barrow recalls. When it came time to introduce “Twist and Shout,” John explained, he intended to say, “For our last number, I’d like to ask your help. The people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands, and the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your fucking jewelry.” Brian nearly burst a blood vessel. He begged—ordered—John to behave himself, to think of how much this meant to the Beatles. And their families! Everyone’s reputation, he warned, was riding on it. Still, John gave him no satisfaction. It was evident to those watching Brian throughout the performance, flushed and sweating buckets, sitting in the second row of the front circle, that he was unsure just how far John would actually go. Friends recall Brian gripping the wooden armrests, his knuckles white with fear, as John introduced their rousing showstopper with the rehearsed remark, then relaxing as it played as written—but without the expletive. “You could almost hear him exhale,” says Barrow, who was circling through the Prince of Wales Theatre on a roving ticket.
The next day the press leaped on the line, as it was repeated everywhere with the humility of an outrageous anecdote. It wasn’t disrespectful (although originally intended as such) or scandalous (much to John’s chagrin), but it certainly wasn’t anything one expected to hear out of a loyal British subject. When the papers hit the newsstands, all the focus was on the Beatles instead of the royalty among the audience. The headline across the Daily Express—BEATLES ROCK THE ROYALS—was par for the course. The talk around town was comparable: in London, only John Lennon could upstage the Queen.
[II]
Another stroke on the clock was beginning to tick off.
By the end of the summer of 1963, the Beatles and their manager had grown weary of dragging themselves back and forth between Liverpool and London, sometimes two or three times a week. The grueling trip had convinced Brian that the Beatles needed to be rescued from the road—at least from unnecessary travel—and its impermanence. None of the boys had a place of his own. One might say they still lived with their parents, but even that was inexact. The two or three nights a month they touched down in Liverpool gave them no more sense of a nest than a layover at another guesthouse. Interaction with families and friends was becoming awkward. And with the constant invasion of fans, as Ringo noted, “it was impossible to go home.” Even John, whose wife and son remained Merseyside, lived more or less out of a suitcase, in a low-priced bedsit in Hoylake.
As a remedy, Brian rented the Beatles an unfurnished flat in London, to use as a base when they were in the city on business or playing nearby. The little place, on Green Street, was frightfully sparse—no furniture to speak of, just three bedrooms with nothing more than single beds and lamps. A tortured hi-fi in one corner played a never-ending selection of loud music. “Overflowing ashtrays and record jackets [were] strewn over the floor.” It was everything they could do to make it seem habitable, congregating in George and Ringo’s room, endlessly smoking cigarettes and talking into the night. But if there was a bleakness about it, Ringo and George didn’t seem to mind. As George recalled, “It was such a buzz because we’d been brought up in little two-up two-down houses in Liverpool, and now to have a posh flat in Mayfair, and with a bathroom each, it was great.” To suggest that it resembled anything close to home, however, was way off track. “There was no homeliness [sic] about it at all,” according to Paul, who got stuck with the closet-size room in the back. “There was nobody’s touch. I hated it.” Despite its austerity, the Beatles made no effort to improve the lonely space—they never so much as bought a kettle for afternoon tea.
On those rare days when they weren’t jammed up with interviews and gigs, the Beatles used their spare time to explore the city streets. It was not yet the Happening it would become, not yet even swinging London; that was still a year off. But the momentum was clearly building. The “obligatory period of post-war austerity” gave rise to radical social changes and a generation waiting to break loose—and to experiment. London was where the action was, and it was in the throes of a youthful renaissance that sought to take the starch out of the Union Jack.
In fact, the transformation was already under way. The postwar generation—those specifically of the Beatles’ age, just becoming adults—was coming into its own, and slowly but surely taking over the city. There was already a young presence visible on the streets. London, being the Continent’s port o’ call for American culture, had it all: record labels, bookshops, art galleries, clubs, cafés—a whole smorgasbord of attractions operating outside the bounds of traditional society. Disenchantment with the mainstream reverberated through these ranks; a new wave of political and philosophical thinking began to take hold. Traffic pulsed through the gaudy boutiques that had sprung up on Carnaby Street, where mods kitted up in dazzling hues launched a provocative new clothes consciousness. Artists, writers, musicians, poets, painters, activists: dreamers. “So many factors commingled to produce the cultural earthquakes,” writes Jonathon Green in his introduction to Days in the Life. And now the Beatles lived on the fault line.
But they couldn’t live in London as the Beatles: one for all and all for one. London wasn’t Hamburg, where nothing mattered and no one seemed to care. A crash pad was all right for George and Ringo, but John, for one, had a family to think about. Eventually he moved with Cynthia and Julian into a tiny fifth-floor maisonette at 13 Emperor’s Gate, Kensington, directly above the one occupied by Bob Freeman, who had photographed the Beatles for their album covers.
Paul laid claim to John’s empty room, but shortly thereafter he, too, decided to split away from the group’s flat. Aside from disliking the place, he’d become increasingly involved with Jane Asher and her personal life. More and more often, after a hectic day conducting Beatles business, Paul would make a beeline for her family’s town house on Wimpole Street. From there, he and Jane disappeared into the glare of brightly lit streets, where they reaped the benefits of London’s nightlife. Throughout the fall of 1963, they spun madly from the West End to Covent Gardens to the National Theatre to the Royal Albert Hall to the Establishment Club, to anywhere there was something of cultural interest going on. Plays, exhibitions, concerts, parties, one after another—there was never a dull moment. Late at night, when the crowds thinned out, they would idle down Cork Street, browsing in the windows of the high-end galleries where Hoppers, Giacomettis, and Man Rays were displayed like the crown jewels, sharing their firsthand judgments and educating their eyes. They were also frequent guests of artistic royalty: Maggie Smith, Harold Pinter, Jill Bennett, Arnold Wesker, John Mortimer, Kenneth Tynan. Jane, it seemed, knew just about everybody, and just about everybody was fascinated by the Beatle on her arm.
This was quite an education for a working-class boy from Liverpool. Paul may have felt occasional twinges of insecurity concerning his lowbrow northern identity, but it did nothing to curtail his eagerness to participate in the scene. “It seemed great to me,” he told his biographer, Barry Miles. “I was very young and energetic and eager to experience all these great thrills that London had to offer.” In the midst of so many prominent wits and garrulous conversationalists, Paul attempted to hold his own, reining in the lazy Scouse accent in favor of the more refined diction his mother had drilled into him. Although by no means an intellectual—he called his smarts “an intuitive brightness”—Paul had an acute sense of people, a knack for engaging an audience, and a musician’s ear for timing. He always had a good story about some aspect of Beatlemania. His was a world completely alien to the tweedy London social set, almost as alien, in fact, as the world of Liverpool and the North. This was the kind of information that only recently had begun to fascinate Londoners, not only for the richness of the settings but also because these worlds were converging in a way that had become relevant to popular culture. Besides, when Paul found himself in over his head, he simply turned on the charm, which never failed to dazzle.
Paul wasted no time anguishing about his circumstances. “Coming in from the provinces to the center—isn’t that what cities are all about?” he argued. “Aren’t cities made up of ants, the outside ants attracted to the Queen’s lair? It seems to me that’s what it is.” It mattered little that he knew practically nothing of London when he arrived. After several trips around the fashionable arts circuit, his creative instincts had been aroused. This recherché existence was an extension of everything that had brought him this far, all that contributed to his nature as a Beatle. Few men of his background ever got the opportunity to be part of this—and even fewer got an entrée to it from a more alluring benefactress than Jane Asher.
Friends describe Jane Asher as “your typical girl next door,” but that holds true only if you live next door to the Muses. She was all of seventeen when Paul first met her and already a fixture in the London acting community. Most young girls who debuted onscreen at the age of five would have gladly settled for the life of an ingenue, but Jane Asher was thwarted by beauty and sophistication. “Every man who ever met Jane fancied her,” Alistair Taylor recalls. She was slim-waisted and sylphlike (barely topping Paul’s shoulders), enormously striking, with delicate features and a pale, creamy complexion framed—to Paul’s surprise when introduced backstage at the Royal Albert Hall concert—by a mane of brilliant scarlet hair. “We’d thought she was blonde,” Paul recalled, “because we had only ever seen her on black-and-white telly doing Juke Box Jury, but she turned out to be a redhead.”*
Bearing as well as beauty impressed. After an adolescence of auditions and finishing school, Jane developed enormous poise accentuated by a lithe theatricality that made her gestalt seem somehow too perfect, as though it were a facade. When she spoke, her resonant, stage-trained voice, refined without a trace of pretentiousness, commanded the kind of attention that stopped conversations cold. And yet she was not at all self-absorbed, but rather of innate dignity. Like Paul, Jane had the aura. “She was smart and sexy,” recalls Peter Brown, “one of the most charming young women I ever met.”
The middle one of three gifted children, Jane was an unconventional mix of gentility and eccentricity. Her father, Richard, a psychiatrist and incorrigible kook, nervously cranked a coffee grinder while his patients poured out their hearts during analysis; her mother, Margaret, a tall, auburn-haired—“dominant”—woman of noble Cornish heritage, operated a music conservatory out of their eighteenth-century home—she had taught the oboe to no less a prodigy than George Martin—and groomed her children for stardom. It was in this latter pursuit that the family shone. Over and above Jane’s accomplishments, her brother, Peter, a rather serious jazz musician, amassed credits in a number of secondary film and radio roles, while her younger sister, Claire, appeared regularly as an actress on the radio soap opera Mrs. Dale’s Diary. For Jane, being courted by a Beatle made perfect sense. It gave her another strong foothold in the creative community but was also offbeat enough to remain consistent with the family personality.
At once, Paul and Jane were desirable. “There was something about seeing them together that was magical,” says Tony Barrow. “With those two gorgeous faces and all that incredible charisma, they looked like a couple of Greek gods.” Everywhere the couple went, people gravitated to them. They attracted a circle of friends from among London’s grooviest and most free-spirited. “Both of them came with plenty of their own flash,” says John Dunbar, who lived around the corner from the Ashers and was one of London’s leading young scenemakers.
And they were inseparable. Friends began saying that you were as likely to see Paul with Jane as with John. They spent every night “out and about” on the town and then, afterward, talking or necking in the Ashers’ downy parlor. If it got too late, Paul would simply sack out in the little music room on the top floor of the town house, next to Peter’s bedroom, where a guest bunk was always made up. Even without the personal touches, it sure beat the dormitory-like Green Street, which was becoming more objectionable to him with each passing day.
Nothing could have satisfied Paul’s fantasies of a family more fittingly than the Ashers. They were so well educated and widely traveled, so sophisticated in their tastes, be it the books they voraciously consumed or the exquisitely prepared food served at mealtimes. From their intense, if fitful, table conversations, Paul realized he didn’t know as much about the arts as he thought. (Or much else, for that matter.) Their facility with words was extraordinary; it fascinated and humbled him. Everything they had bespoke elegance and fine choice. “It was really like culture shock,” he recalled.
It was even more unforeseen when in November Jane suggested that he move permanently into the Ashers’ magnificent town house; if he liked, the attic room was available, along with auxiliary membership in the family. The magnanimity of it must have shocked Paul, who had been living out of a suitcase—or in a filthy van—for so long that it was hard for him to remember the last time he had had his own room. To say nothing of a girlfriend living only one floor below. It was not an invitation that required much deliberation. “For a young guy who likes his home comforts,” he noted, it was a dream come true.
But it was only a part of the dream. By November, America arrived. Brian had spent months laying plans to take the Colonies back for his boys. Armed with an arsenal of star-making weapons—including the movie contract, merchandising offers, a potential booking on Ed Sullivan’s show, an extraordinary new single, a most impressive packet of press clippings, and a good deal of outrage—he arranged several meetings in New York, between November 5 and 13, that were necessary for an eventual launch. The trip was also timed to introduce Billy J. Kramer to executives at Liberty Records, which had taken a U.S. option on the young NEMS star.
Still, nothing illustrated the challenge as sharply as the cocktail party thrown in Brian’s honor upon his arrival in New York. The party was part of the strategy hatched by Walter Hofer, a homespun but canny music lawyer who exercised his talents on NEMS’ behalf in the United States.* Hofer figured that people who met Brian face-to-face would be impressed by the same elegance and determination that he’d noticed when Dick James had introduced them in 1962. So he telephoned every VIP in his Rolodex, inviting them to his home in the Beresford, one of New York’s most swank addresses, at Central Park West and Eighty-first Street. “I invited the whole industry,” Hofer recalled, all the label bigwigs, important promoters, independent promo guys, the trade press, every major deejay. Some of music’s “most prominent names,” the heavy hitters, adorned the guest list. And nobody came.
Canvassing a sampling of record stores along Broadway was as discouraging to Brian as the reception at Hofer’s. Not a glimmer about the Beatles surfaced anywhere. It was as if they didn’t exist. And it wasn’t just the absence of the Beatles that amazed him. Aside from Anthony Newley—and you had to really search to find Anthony Newley—there wasn’t a single record by Billy Fury, Johnny Kidd, or Cliff and the Shadows. When he called Capitol Records to confirm his appointment to discuss the Beatles, a secretary asked him: “Are they affiliated with a label?”
Despite the chill, Brian attended to his appointments, many of which had been hurriedly set up during the week of the Royal Variety Performance. The most pressing one, at the outset, was the ongoing negotiation with Ed Sullivan. A notoriously prickly veteran of the New York show-business scene, Sullivan knew little about talent itself. He was impressed by a performer’s ability as far as any stage act went, but his experience as a gossip columnist lent itself more to recognizing tips and hot stories than substance. So when it came to the Beatles, Sullivan was more enthused, he later said, that they were “a good TV attraction, and also a great news story.” On a hunch, he offered Brian what was then a fairly extravagant deal for the Beatles: three appearances on his show, at a fee of $4,500 each, “plus five round-trip airline tickets and all their expenses for room and board while in America.”
Brian seized a rare opportunity to capitalize on this generosity and, thus, went for broke, offering the impresario a chance to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, with Gerry and the Pacemakers. There was an unwritten rule that you didn’t hustle Ed Sullivan. But Brian was “so charming, and so convincing” that Sullivan booked the Pacemakers for a guest spot on his March 15 show, which was certainly a coup.
The next play was at Capitol Records, where Brian was determined to storm the enemy gates. None of the American A&R staff wanted to be told how to conduct their business, especially by Brits, with their posh accents and stiff-necked etiquette. Nothing significant had ever broken out of the U.K., and if any of them dared admit their true feelings, nothing ever would.
Brian’s contact at Capitol was a man by the curious name of Brown Meggs, who ran the label’s East Coast pop department. Under normal circumstances, Meggs probably would have made himself unavailable to a manager without portfolio, but unbeknownst to Brian, L. G. Wood had paved the way. Earlier that fall, he had sent Roland Rennie to “visit” Meggs, along with a letter of introduction from Sir Joseph Lockwood, EMI’s formidable chairman whose phone extension happened to be 4-6-3, or GOD. Rennie insists it was nothing more than a friendly chat “to get over this hurdlewith the Beatles.” But he also acknowledges that subtle “pressures were put on” Capitol to get on the stick. Incredibly, it made not a lick of difference: Dave Dexter used the occasion to issue another pass.
As a result, Len Wood himself flew to the States, a visit comparable in frequency to that of the pope. Wood had already summoned Alan Livingston to a meeting in New York. Livingston, a permanently tanned, smooth-talking, Hollywood-style protégé of Frank Sinatra, was the president of Capitol Records and on the board of EMI. More attuned to image than music, he operated Capitol in the manner of an old-style movie studio mogul, surrounding himself with talented A&R men whose decisions he either rubber-stamped or rejected. The prerogative—backed by Capitol’s considerable muscle—gave Livingston substantial clout in the music business. So strong was his autonomy, in fact, that it was unthinkable that anyone would, or even could, make demands on him. “But L.G. wasn’t asking anymore,” says Paul Marshall, referring to the Beatles’ forthcoming single. “He told Alan, ‘You must take it.’ ”
Must: Livingston was surprised by the ultimatum. Capitol and EMI had never before operated on those terms. Each was supposed to have “the right of first refusal” on the other’s product, nothing more. And he was surprised by Wood’s demeanor, by the vehemence in the voice of this otherwise imperturbable Englishman. L.G. was, in fact, so agitated that he refused to leave it alone until Livingston agreed to put the record out.
Years later Livingston would tell a significantly different story. According to a 1997 interview with the BBC, he insisted that Capitol’s decision to release the Beatles was his idea. After a surprise visit from Brian Epstein, he recalled: “I… took the record home to my wife… and said, ‘You know, I think that this group, they’ll change the whole music business if it happens.’ ” It was a ridiculous claim, considering the paper trail of rejections from his office as well as other substantiated accounts. Capitol had done everything possible to avoid the Beatles. But shoved against the wall by its British masters, it no longer had a choice.
Fortunately, in this case, Capitol was handed a lulu of a record that launched the new group—and the label—into the stratosphere.
The record Brian delivered to Brown Meggs was “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Beatles’ most inspired production yet, the apotheosis of the bust-out “Merseybeat” sound that took all its most harmonious elements, the guitar-oriented riffs and vocal harmonies, and condensed them into a two-and-a-half-minute rave-up that fairly jumped off the grooves. From the unsparing two-chord intro, there was no letting up. “Oh yeah, I’ll tell you something…” The energy was impossible to let go of. Part easygoing pop, part joyous rocker, part roller-coaster ride, it came at the listener from every angle, with rhythmic jerks and handclaps and inadvertent detours from the standard four-chord structure. As if the overheated arrangement wasn’t tantalizing enough, the Beatles’ performance was extraordinary, from John and Paul’s slashing harmonies to Paul’s sudden full-octave leap into falsetto, capped off by stirring confessions—“I can’t hide, I can’t hide”—that seem to gain in fervor each time they are sung. If the suits at Capitol were duly affected by the record, they never let on. But no doubt about it: “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was like no record they’d ever heard.
If Capitol was required to release the Beatles in America, then at least this was a record it could get behind. But according to Livingston, they wouldn’t press more than an initial run of 5,000 copies, standard for any new artist. Shortsightedly, Capitol had neglected to keep an eye on the numbers in Great Britain, where EMI had received an unheard-of advance order for 700,000 copies of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” only three days after dealers there were notified of it. Even at Capitol, an artist with a strong track record could count on an advance of only 25,000 copies, 50,000 at the most. There was also an advance order for 265,000 copies of the Beatles’ second album, With the Beatles, a figure that would have staggered any American label. But for the time being, Capitol ignored these numbers, preferring to eye with disdain the millstone that had been looped around its neck.
Sid Bernstein made up in spades for Capitol’s stunning lack of enthusiasm. He was the original Charlie Hustle, and he was convinced of the Beatles’ greatness before he ever heard them sing a note. The son of a Harlem tailor, Bernstein stumbled into the music business while still a journalism student at Columbia University, managing a neighborhood ballroom in Brooklyn that showcased the great Latin bands. In those days mambo was the province of not only Puerto Ricans but also Jews, both of whom shared the dance floor, and Bernstein acquired a passion for it through such leading lights as Ralph Font, Tito Rodríguez, Marcelino Guera, Tito Puente, and Esy Morales, the latter of whom Bernstein left the ballroom to manage.
Bernstein traveled the turbulent mambo circuit for two years, until the thirty-five-year-old Morales’s untimely death. He came to the agency business booking Latin, jazz, and R&B acts in the 1950s before gravitating into the teen stars department at General Artists Corporation on the strength of his relationship with Judy Garland and Tony Bennett. Bobby Darin, Bobby Rydell, Dion, and Chubby Checker were a far cry from those mellifluent heights, but that never diminished Bernstein’s drive, and he flogged the agency’s pop roster like a team of prized stallions.
In his spare time, he began attending evening courses at the New School, in Greenwich Village, one of which was a lecture on Western civilization given by the noted analyst Max Lerner. Lerner required that each student read a British newspaper once a week to gain insight into the English form of government. “After a while,” Bernstein recalled, “I started to see in the slim entertainment pages the name ‘Beatles’ popping up,” first in small print, then in headlines. “And then the word ‘Beatlemania’ appeared.”
Instinct convinced Bernstein that he should jump on this before someone else in America caught wind of it, so he attempted to interest GAC’s agents in taking on this new group. Nothing doing. “They thought the name was crazy and gave me every excuse for not letting me go over to see them.” Instead, he made private inquiries about the Beatles, eventually tracking them to Brian Epstein. It must have been child’s play to tantalize Brian with lavish name-dropping and hype. “I hit him with my experience,” Bernstein recalled. “Tony Bennett at Carnegie Hall, Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall.” The names and that place were all the pitch he needed for Bernstein to “sell him on [the Beatles] doing Carnegie Hall” in early 1964. “So we made a deal on the phone for sixty-five hundred bucks for two shows.”
From various angles, the deal was either brilliant or utterly foolish. This wasn’t agency money or part of a promoter’s discretionary fund. Bernstein had reached into his own pocket to book no less a venue than Carnegie Hall for a group that had no hit record and no following in America. Who would come to see them? How would he create any interest?
At their first meeting in New York, Brian brought the answers with him. Capitol, he revealed, had agreed to release “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in January. Since Bernstein had booked Carnegie Hall for Wednesday, February 12—weekends were reserved for the symphony—it gave them a good month to build word of mouth. Then Brian dropped the clincher: two appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. When Bernstein heard that, he said, “I knew I was home because, in those days, when you appeared twice on Sullivan you were a star.”
And then, out of nowhere, Capitol announced that it intended to put an astounding $40,000 into promoting the Beatles’ new record. The sudden reversal in outlook would never be explained, but to Bernstein, it was the telltale sign that a new star had been discovered.
[III]
Even without Brian at the controls, the Beatles remained constantly on the go. Appearing in a package of endless one-nighters—five weeks of sold-out one-night stands—they racked up miles, difficult miles, hopscotching between towns and cities where fresh outbreaks of Beatlemania were reported like the flu. But as Beatlemania grew more intense, life on the road became ever more precarious, and once-precious downtime left them preoccupied with the planning of safety and escape routes.
“Girls are fainting in the streets,” reported Melody Maker just prior to the tour. “Scores are injured in the crushes.” Many locales attempted to head off such mayhem by having convoys of police cars liaise with the Beatles on the outskirts of town for an escort to the theater. Outside Birmingham, news of “rampaging fans” forced the Beatles to exchange clothes with the police in order to disguise themselves so they could enter. “Getting them inside,” according to the music magazine, “was like a military operation.”
Sometimes getting them out was an even hairier proposition. In Sunderland the Beatles were led like escaping refugees through a narrow, pitch-dark backstage corridor that deposited them into an adjoining firehouse. One by one, they slid down the pole, then waited while a decoy engine lured waiting fans into a wild-goose chase through the deserted town. Of course, there was another side to all of this. Before one show, in East Ham, George Martin arrived backstage quite jauntily to announce that “ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ had cleared a million [advance orders] before release.” It was incredible news, a first for the British music industry, and the Beatles were suitably thrilled.
During the show, as was now always the case, an exit strategy began to unfold. All plans focused on the getaway car, a gleaming black Austin Princess idling by the stage door. The Princess was considered sort of a down-market limo. “I assumed they’d have either a Daimler, a Bentley, or a Rolls-Royce,” Alistair Taylor recalls. Mal Evans, a big, bearlike but scatterbrained ex-Cavern bouncer who had been hired in August to assist Neil Aspinall and act as a bodyguard for the boys, detected Alistair’s disapproval and explained. They’d tested all the available limos, he said, and found that the Princess had doors that opened wider to accommodate diving in.
While half a dozen questions flashed through Taylor’s head, he was pushed bodily into the car, which was already rolling forward. Up ahead, “a cordon of law enforcement officers held back a sea of screaming heads.” A police car fell in alongside, with its blue light flashing.
Suddenly the car jerked forward, then skidded to a stop in front of two innocuous-looking doors behind the theater. They were flung open and four blurs burst from its dark mouth: Paul first, John right behind him, followed by George and Ringo. Each Beatle dove headfirst into the backseat of the Princess—except for Ringo, who fell on his face, with his feet in the gutter.
“Rich, Rich, come on, man!”
“I’ve got me fooking foot stuck,” Ringo wailed.
Before anyone responded, the three Beatles wriggled out of the car, picked up Ringo as if he were luggage, and threw him into the back. Reaching behind him, Alistair slammed the door shut and Mal sped away.
“So, this is Beatlemania,” Alistair mused. He couldn’t believe the rush as the police line broke a split second after the car squeaked through and kids, hundreds of kids, swarmed through. “We screamed into central London with the blue lights flashing, running every traffic light,” he recalls. “It was just like the Queen coming—only it was four Liverpool musicians. If that didn’t beat all.”
On the morning of November 22, expectation surged through Merseyside about the group’s second album, With the Beatles, due to arrive in local stores later that afternoon. Information had been leaked about the selection of fourteen songs, but there was an air of intense heat surrounding the project that refused to let up until it was actually in people’s hands. All the clubs were full of talk about it, and the music papers had already issued encomiums. Melody Maker, in a forum with three top disc jockeys, touted it as “a great album… that puts the Beatles unmistakably at the top of the beat tree,” while Alan Smith, writing in NME, called it “a knockout,” predicting it would top the charts for a record-setting eight weeks. “Most of the material on With the Beatles is wild and up-tempo,” Smith revealed, while citing “All My Loving” as the album’s true “highlight.”
“The second album was slightly better than the first,” George said, “inasmuch as we spent more time on it, and there were more original songs.” Seven Lennon-McCartney numbers—half the songs—were featured among the lineup. Following the same effective balance as on their first album, mixing originals with American covers, the Beatles ripped through a stingy thirty-three and a half minutes of music that put the excitement back into Top 40 pop. There was nothing timid or bottled up about the performances on this album, from the blazing attention-grabber “It Won’t Be Long” to the very last beat of “Money.”
In between, “All I’ve Got to Do” cha-cha’ed in and out of a brooding but affectionate melody that took its cues from the kind of primitive urban R&B sound that was popular in New York. It was influenced, John recalled, by his attempt to write a Smokey Robinson–type song, but it is closer in style to the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You” and early Drifters records. If “All I’ve Got to Do” comes off as restlessly dark and moody, the album’s spirit jerks back and forth along a fragile emotional line. The fans couldn’t have asked for a more exuberant teenybop anthem than “All My Loving,” which became somewhat of an instant Beatles classic. To them, its sunny simplicity, with those chirpy vocals, galloping guitar triplets, and irresistible hooks, perfectly exemplified the developing “Beatles sound.” And the cover of “Please Mr. Postman” is whipped with such slap-bang ferocity that the interpretation goes a long way toward overtaking the Marvelettes’ version.
“We were all very interested in American music, much more so than in British,” Paul later admitted. That deep-felt debt to classic rock ’n roll brought them back once more to “Roll Over Beethoven.” From the band’s earliest efforts, Chuck Berry songs had been a staple of their repertoire. John always considered Berry “one of the all-time great poets, a rock poet” as much as anybody (including Bob Dylan), and addressed his admiration directly when he said, “I’ve loved everything he’s done, ever.” George’s vocal and guitar solos pay tribute to Berry’s handiwork. He didn’t try to embellish or outstrip the original—he turbocharged it with an undercurrent of handclaps accenting the beat.
If anything stuck out as being awkward or out of place, it was Paul’s delivery of “Till There Was You,” an overly pretty ballad from The Music Man, which was performed in such a precious way that, according to George, Paul “sounded like a woman.” Songs like this one, along with “A Taste of Honey” and “Besame Mucho,” can easily be seen as the Beatles’ response to George Martin’s and Brian Epstein’s request that they broaden their image and appeal with a selection of pop standards. Such material had always been part of the Beatles’ standard sets, even in Hamburg and at the Cavern, where audiences could either slow dance, light up cigarettes, or, if they grew too bored, visit the loo. But on an album of rock ’n roll songs, it proved too conspicuous. Such indulgence didn’t harm their credibility, but it did nothing to further the Beatles along the path they had marked out for themselves.
Besides, there was too much other territory for them to explore. Paul, who wrote “Hold Me Tight” at Forthlin Road while he and John were still teenagers, refers to it as “a failed attempt at a single which then became an acceptable album filler,” but since their Cavern days it had been shaped and reshaped, most recently with a quirky middle eight, that eliminated its flatness and cranked up fresh interest. Even “I Wanna Be Your Man,” given a surly, suggestive reading by the Rolling Stones, sounds more intimate under Ringo’s chummy vocal. And “Money,” a barn burner left over from Hamburg, put the torch to all the assembly-line Liverpool covers, the repetitious rave-ups blaring out of every club within ten miles of Clayton Square, and transformed the song into something else entirely. This version pulled the song off the stage and thrust it into the garage, where the Beatles roughed it up and gave it a new potency that had eluded it before.
Among the elements that lifted this album above its predecessor are the innovative double-tracking—a process that allowed the Beatles to layer vocals and rhythm tracks rather than recording everything live, in one take—and its unique cover, an ethereal, grim-faced, black-and-white portrait that conjures up a striking, if disturbing, image of the boys. Nervous that EMI might pressure them into using the same kind of uninspired group shot as on Please Please Me, they enlisted Robert Freeman to come up with something “artistic,” something bold. “We showed him the pictures Astrid and Jurgen [sic] had taken in Hamburg and said, ‘Can’t you do it like this?’ ” George recalled. Freeman posed the Beatles against the velvet curtains of a hotel dining room in Bournemouth, using mostly natural light that seeped in through an enormous window along one side of the wall. It was a stunning departure from the usual upbeat, glossy sleeves on which labels exclusively relied. Given the circumstances, EMI’s reaction was inevitable. They hated the concept, calling it “shockingly humorless,” and threatened to pull the cover for something more “happy” and less “grim.” Brian, too, was less than enthusiastic. “He was convinced it would damage their image,” Tony Barrow recalls, “but the boys put their feet down.”
When the album finally appeared, it was clear that the cover was every bit as alluring as they had hoped. Stores were besieged with jacked-up Beatles fans throughout the afternoon of November 22. Peter Brown, who was managing the NEMS record department in Brian’s absence, recalls being unprepared for the runaway demand. “I’d never seen anything like it,” he says. “No record in my experience had ever caused this kind of frenzy. There were hundreds of kids trying to get into the store; a crowd had gathered on the street. Police showed up to keep things under control. Our cashiers were so overwhelmed that everyone, myself included, worked the counter until the store closed.”
This scene wasn’t restricted to Liverpool. All over Great Britain, teenagers mobbed the local record stores to get their hands on copies of With the Beatles. If a cult of personality had surrounded the group, there was now also a retail phenomenon to go with it. On that first day alone, an impressive 530,000 copies of the album were sold, along with another 200,000 more singles of “She Loves You,” which had pushed beyond the vaunted million mark. No album had ever aroused this much interest. It was generally acknowledged by record companies that teenagers bought singles and, occasionally, the rare album; right up to the release of With the Beatles, EMI was still unsure if a market for it would materialize. Now all that had changed.
EMI couldn’t afford to let a slipup burst the bubble, but neither did it want to interfere with the fantastic flow of sales. Please Please Me was still selling like hotcakes, too, and by the end of sales on November 22, it was keeping pace alongside With the Beatles. Two albums by the same artist on the British charts was rare indeed; the last time it had happened was in 1960, with Elvis Presley. But by that evening, NME decided that the sales situation was so unique that it launched the new album into the Top Thirty at the number fifteen position.*
These facts and figures dominated the conversation on a DC-3 overrun with Beatles fans as it took off from Speke Airport en route to Hamburg that same afternoon. The Cavern sponsored the chartered excursion to coincide with the release of the new Beatles album and about thirty teenagers signed on, along with Allan Williams, Bob Wooler, Bill Harry, and other supporting cast members associated with the Beatles’ rise in Liverpool. Everyone spent the flight time singing the songs on With the Beatles—songs they knew by heart from the gigs—and swooning over the dramatic events of the past few months. At the moment, everything else seemed unimportant. The boys had come not only so far but so fast: from the side streets of Liverpool to the royal roads of London, where the Queen herself had crossed their path. Only a year before, they had alternated between a basement club and the back of a creaky van, with nothing more than a substandard demo tape and the fierce, unquenchable dream to make records, to be rock ’n roll stars. Now they were poised again to build upon that dream, and the entire country’s attention had swung toward Liverpool. It was a fairy tale come true, and the fans aboard the flight—those who had been there all along, who had known from the beginning—were so giddy that at even 25,000 feet up in the air they seemed only a stone’s throw from the stars.
When the plane touched down in Hamburg, not only was there no carpet, there was no move initiated to help them disembark. “We stood on that tarmac for what seemed like an eternity, waiting for a coach to take us to the Star-Club,” Wooler remembers. The usual busyness that hastens an airport seemed eerily stalled; aside from a few planes landing in the distance, it was as quiet as a car parking lot outside church services. The passengers began to grow edgy, then irritable. Finally, an official pulled up in a car and bumbled around them in a fluster. “Oh, terrible, terrible news about JFK,” he said, all aquiver. The American president had been shot—he was dead; the world was in mourning. “You’ll find most of the Reeperbahn closed, as I’m sure you’ve closed your Cavern tonight.”
But from the Grosse Freiheit, the American tragedy and its reverberations seemed as far away as the banks of the Mersey. The seedier bars—those where even cataclysmic events took a backseat to debauchery—ran at full tilt, dispensing fantastic quantities of alcohol to the teenagers and chaperones alike, all of whom held on to the Beatles like a life raft against such terrible tides. For three days and nights, they drank themselves silly, putting the real world and its problems out of their mind. Although history may have turned a wicked corner, there were glimmers of “hope and consolation” to be found in the Beatles’ music. Of course, it was only the beginning of a generation’s dependency on rock ’n roll as an escape from the harsh changes that rocked the world at large. For the next six years—and beyond—music and other intoxicants would be liberating forces, the kind of distractions that helped kids avoid the wicked corners. On the way back to Liverpool, Wooler says, “we were so diminished by our indulgences that when the pilot delivered the news about the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, many of us, sitting there like zombies, were unable to open our eyes.”
By the last week in November, “She Loves You” returned to the top spot on the Record Retailer chart, along with word that the band’s next single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” had more than a million advance orders. The next week “She Loves You” held its position, while “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was number three, Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas’ version of “I’ll Keep You Satisfied,” written by John and Paul, hovered at number six, and “I Wanna Be Your Man” by the Rolling Stones entered at number thirty. NME’s album chart was even more rewarding, listing With the Beatles and Please Please Me as vying for the very top, with three EPs—Twist and Shout, The Beatles Hits, and Beatles No. 1—padding close behind. The dominance was unprecedented. In a single outburst, the Beatles had hijacked the charts.
Finally America took notice. In mid-November all three U.S. networks sent film crews to the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth in an attempt to report on the Beatles phenomenon. The clips they sent back received only scattered coverage, but one viewer’s impression touched off a storm of unexpected interest. A teenager named Marsha Albert was so intrigued by the music that she wrote a letter to her local deejay, at WWDC in Washington, D.C., asking to hear something by the Beatles. That station in particular was a curious place to handle such a request; it played “a real mixed bag” of pop standards, catering to a devoted Frank Sinatra–Nat King Cole audience, with only the occasional rock ’n roll song slipping onto the playlist. But the disc jockey, a genial straight arrow named Carroll James, hunted down an import copy of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and invited Marsha Albert to introduce it on the air.
On December 17, 1963, she read a few lines of copy that James had scrawled on the back of a traffic report, then launched the Beatles into the American airwaves for the first time ever. When it was over, James invited the audience to pass on their opinion of the record. As he recalled it, “the switchboard just went totally wild.” Every line lit up. Completely unprepared for such a reaction, James “played it again in the next hour, which is something I’d never ever done before.” He continued programming “I Want to Hold Your Hand” every night that week, fading in the middle of the song and interjecting, “A WDDC exclusive!” in order to prevent WPGC, the area’s main teen station, from taping it.
The circumstances at WDDC sounded an alarm at Capitol Records, which was planning to release the single in late January. Eventually, after days of memos flying back and forth, Capitol decided to move up the American release of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to December 27. It would not arrive in time for Christmas, but the Beatles didn’t care. It was the best gift they could have asked for that holiday season, and at long last it was under the tree.
After “I Want to Hold Your Hand” struck gold, Beatles Fan Club membership was no longer just an indulgence of former Cavern groupies. Applications poured in from all over the country, more than even a sophisticated mail-order company could handle. “There came a time when we had a backlog of many thousands of unopened mailbags, each one containing hundreds of applications, accompanied by money orders for membership,” recalls Barrow, who’d been awakened to the danger of their negligence. “Goodness knows how many mailbags were stolen from the rickety staircase leading to the office above the dirty bookstore.”
Complaints followed, and it wasn’t long before the media, especially the tabloids, picked up the story. What happened, reporters wondered, to all the money sent to the Beatles? How did they intend to placate thousands of unhappy teenagers?
Faced with a public relations catastrophe, Epstein directed Tony Barrow to run damage control and propose a solution. Barrow decided to get everyone immediately onto a mailing list and appease those who were slighted by giving them something special for Christmas. But what? All the standard options—key chains, bracelets, T-shirts—took too much of a bite out of the NEMS budget. It had to be something, Brian insisted, “that only cost a few pence to produce.” Finally, when it looked all but hopeless, Barrow struck gold. Paging through Reader’s Digest, he came across something called a flexi-disk—a plastic record the size of a seven-inch forty-five but played at the speed of a thirty-three. The magazine used it quite cleverly, to preview selections from its record club. “My idea was to get out a humorous message from the Beatles to their fans, giving them something that was totally exclusive—and free. I ran it by the lads, who loved the idea and were eager to do their share.”
Portions of the record were leaked to the press, which called it “the craziest Xmas greeting of all [time].” Following a loosely scripted sketch that skipped around for roughly five minutes, it delivered more of the “likable, crazy” Scouse-inspired zaniness fans had come to expect from the Beatles. Each musician delivered a personal greeting (in which more than a few of the band’s devotees detected John’s handprint) loaded with puns and loony wordplay. There were parodies of Christmas carols. Everyone sang a few bars of his favorite, the most bizarre rendition, perhaps, being Ringo’s “Buddy Greco-style version” of “Good King Wenceslas,” after which George deadpans: “Thank you, Ringo—we’ll phone you.”
At times the band responded to fans directly. “Somebody asked us if we still like jelly babies,” Paul mentioned, referring to a comment John had made during an interview earlier that year in which he expressed fondness for the candies. Back then, John had joked that George had eaten his supply. “The next day,” John recalled, “I started getting jelly babies with a note saying, ‘Don’t give George any.’ And George got some saying, ‘Here’s some for you, George; you don’t need John’s.’ And then it went mad.” From that day on, whenever the Beatles took to the stage, a hailstorm of jelly babies pelted them from the seats—whole bags and occasionally even boxes were lobbed—with fans often winging them sidearm from overhanging balconies. Eventually it resembled a combat zone, with candy projectiles ricocheting off guitars and cymbals, once even cutting John above the eye. For the first time, Ringo said, “it felt dangerous” onstage. “Anyway, we’ve gone right off jelly babies!” Paul avowed on the flexi-disk, hoping that put an end to the gesture.
To preserve the edge of lunacy that was interrupted with words of sincere thanks, the Beatles signed off with another parody, “Ricky the Red Nosed Ringo,” which collapsed into uncontrollable laughter before regrouping for a final inspirational message.
The result was a resounding success. Long-neglected fan-club members, delighted by the record, were content with what all fans ultimately want—to have something that nobody else can get their hands on, something personal that was in short supply. With the exception of a few disgruntled parents, no one registered so much as a complaint over the way in which membership was handled. And if some head case wanted to make trouble, Barrow had the power to launch the ultimate defensive weapon: a personal phone call from one of the boys. “In that respect, we never had to worry,” he says, “because we knew the effect something like that had.”
None of the Beatles liked how success had reshaped their appearance. The way Paul saw it, they were way off their stride, still “on the cusp of showbiz.” And John, who made no bones about regretting their phony clean-cut image, bristled when a fan described the Beatles’ music as “genuine.” Sentiments like that were already becoming a liability to the boys, who felt the edge they’d honed in Liverpool and Hamburg eroding even further.
The latest bit of puffery was the Beatles Christmas Show, which, since its announcement in September, had taken on a life of its own. Conceived primarily as “a resident show”—that is, a show where the Beatles would remain situated at one location over a period of weeks—it relied on the old-fashioned British tradition of incorporating comedy, music, and pantomime toned down to attract a family audience.
Theatrical production in London was a closed shop: a small, inbred clique of sharp, cunning, and ruthless deal-brokers governed by impresario Lew Grade and his brother Bernie Delfont. Details of every major production in the city eventually crossed their desks. Most legitimate theaters fell under the Grades’ grudging jurisdiction, as did actors and agencies, with an industry’s fortunes tied to their discretionary nod. Outsiders were looked upon as cockroaches.
The Grades were interested only in what they could control, and, in fact, they’d already approached Brian with an offer to absorb NEMS into their kingdom. Delfont suggested he accept the princely sum of £150,000 in exchange for half equity in the company. Brian was tempted. He had taken on a good deal more than he was rightfully equipped to handle, and the strain was beginning to “drive him crackers.” But when he sounded out the Beatles, they disapproved in four-part harmony. “They said they would rather break up than leave me,” Brian reported, somewhat self-servingly, to a friend. Then, in a more forthright account, he added: “John told me to ‘fuck off,’ which was very moving.”
Whatever the case, it was clear that moving NEMS to London was long overdue. With Brian away so much of the time, the Liverpool office had fallen into a long decline, its day-to-day operation, according to Alistair Taylor, “a shambles, just chaos.” There was no one with authority to call the shots. And the office manager, Barry Leonard, proved incapable of picking up the slack. In the meantime, Brian toured office buildings in London, finding affordable space on the fifth floor of Sutherland House, at 4–5 Argyll Street. For the most part it was unfinished, a loftlike open-floor plan that was considered “quite revolutionary” for the time, with two enclosed offices and the rest partitioned off in a maze of impersonal cubicles. “They weren’t terribly good offices,” says Taylor, but the location was ideal, right next door to the Palladium. According to Tony Barrow, “[Brian] loved the idea that on the other side of those walls, Judy Garland might be rehearsing.”
In any event, Brian dreaded returning to Liverpool. As far as talent went, the cupboard was bare; the best local bands were already on the NEMS roster. And there was a strange, lingering local resentment. Part of it had to do with the perception that Brian had drained the city of its best bands without any regard for their fans. John had felt it even before the Merseyside musical explosion. “When I left Liverpool with the group,” he recalled, “a lot of Liverpool people dropped us and said, ‘Now you’ve let us down.’ ” It was an understandable reaction.
Brian, always an outsider but not one with a gift of assimilation, didn’t help. The last time Brian returned to NEMS from London he “showed up at the office in a brand-new Jaguar XK-E,” recalls Frieda Kelly, who watched him pull up from the window. It was a sight to behold, especially in Liverpool, whose factories mass-produced budget-priced Fords and Z-cars. In a way, the Jaguar only confirmed what everyone suspected: that NEMS was rolling in money, growing beyond all expectations. But it also embarrassed the Scousers, who considered such extravagance vulgar.
An hour later Billy Hatton, the Fourmost’s bass player, showed up bearing gifts. His mother operated a kiosk in Moorfields, from which he’d lifted a box of ice pops for the NEMS’ staff. “Have you seen Eppy’s car?” he asked, with a snickering grin. “Who threw acid all over it?” Kelly, who was talking to a friend at the time, remembers laughing at Billy’s sick sense of humor. “Then we realized he wasn’t kidding,” she says. “Everyone rushed outside, and sure enough, it was true. What a mess. All the paint had bubbled and began peeling back. It was destroyed.”
The next morning Brian announced the firm was moving to London.
The Beatles Christmas Show was the first item launched from NEMS’ new London office. Brian was determined to pull out all the stops and had enlisted help from an old-line variety agent, Joe Collins, whose daughters, Joan and Jackie, happened to be Beatles fans. Collins hooked him up with Peter Yolland, who specialized in producing Christmas pantomimes in major provincial cities across Great Britain.
“My idea was to make the Beatles do things they had never done before,” says Yolland. As far as the music went, he’d leave that up to the individual acts, but during the course of the evening he intended to present them in sketches designed around the age-old pantomime form, with the dramatization of a fairy tale followed by broad comedy and a script full of topical references that encouraged audience participation. As stories went, it was predictably hokey: at the top, the heroine, Ermyntrude, gets thrown out of the house because she’s had a baby; abandoned and alone, she falls into the clutches of a mustachioed villain, Sir John Jasper (played rather villainously by John Lennon, in a top hat and brandishing a whip), who ties her to the railroad tracks, only to be rescued in the nick of time by Valiant Paul the Signalman. There was never a question that the “leggy lovely” in white headscarf and fishnet thighs would be played en travestie by anyone other than George; as the youngest Beatle, the time-honored role of panto boy fell naturally to him. That left a hole for Ringo. After some deliberation, he was cast as Fairy Snow, a derelict elf in head-to-toe black, who leaped around the stage, sprinkling white confetti over the other Beatles.
Today, it would be hard to imagine any men of comparable age, much less rock ’n roll stars, submitting to such drivel. But the Beatles did—“quite willingly and without resentment,” says Yolland, who rehearsed the boys under the most congenial of circumstances. No one complained or balked at a procedure, not even George, in perpetual embarrassment over the woman’s getup he was forced to wear.
The Beatles’ spot—a nine-song mini-set—came near the end of the top-heavy two-hour show. Up first were the rest of the NEMS artists, performing medleys of their hits intermingled with Christmas songs, in a footloose, music-hall-style revue. Most of those who attended couldn’t have cared less about its technical flourishes. All the work that went into the staging meant nothing to the mostly female fans, whose only aim was to gaze upon their heartthrobs—gaze with tear-rimmed, tormented eyes, hands clutched arthritically at the sides of their faces, mouths twisted in anguished, blood-curdling screams that fluctuated in waves, as if induced by jolts from electric-shock paddles. Ex–Quarry Man Nigel Walley, now the golf pro at Wrotham Heath in Kent, also fought his way inside the Astoria to catch a glimpse of his old mates. For weeks afterward, Walley says, he was haunted by those scenes. “I used to wake up in the middle of the night, thinking I must have dreamed it all.”
Backstage, the police had their own nightmares to contend with. Getaways had been blueprinted and rehearsed with split-second precision. The size and layout of the Astoria, with its twenty-seven exits, left myriad options. (The police telephoned the producers ten minutes before the end of every show with the details for that night’s route.) Perhaps the greatest safeguard was the mandatory playing of “God Save the Queen” at the evening’s conclusion. During those two and a half minutes, the audience remained standing at attention, virtual captives, while the Beatles, escorted by an usher wielding a flashlight, fled through one of the cobwebbed underpassages.
“They’re not listening to anything,” John complained bitterly about the Beatles’ ecstatic audiences. “All they’re doing is going mad.” The futility of it gnawed at him. Somewhere along the way, the music had taken a backseat to the act, the act of being the Beatles. The success it brought, however, didn’t diminish John’s discontent, and he hated himself for encouraging it. Pete Shotton saw that the annoyance was taking its toll. John was feeling trapped in his new celebrity, playing a role that he didn’t relish; week by week, feeling more like a fraud, more like a phony. Says Shotton: “He very quickly realized that… he was getting cut off from the world—and that it was [only] going to get worse. He realized very early on that this was the penalty.”
But there were the perks as well.