Tomorrow Never Knows[I]
The Beatles were dressed exactly as they had been two weeks earlier, although now the same dark suits were rumpled slightly from an eight-hour flight. As they came through the airliner’s forward door, they stood on the same platform, offering the same wandlike wave to the same monster crowd, except that in place of the 4,000 screaming, well-behaved teenagers, there were now “8,000 to 12,000” who, at the sight of their heroes, went on a rampage through Heathrow Airport, bending steel crash barriers and demolishing car roofs as if they were made of tinfoil. Forty girls fainted, bouquets of flowers were trampled, bins overturned, and the banners—WELCOME HOME BEATLES—shredded in the mad scramble to reach the boys.
The Beatles were back in the land of jelly babies.
If the fans’ behavior distressed the Beatles, they refused to let it show as they were herded into the crowded Kingsford-Smith Suite at the terminal to face the homeland press. More than one reporter remarked at the civil disorder on the tarmac in terms that encouraged the Beatles to distance themselves from the hooligans, but the boys knew better than to buy into that business. Instead, they saluted the crowd as “healthy and British and lads and mates and friends.”
The Beatles defused any potential controversy with their now-expected witty one-liners, stumbling only when it came to the news that while they were overseas, the prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, named the Beatles as his “secret weapon” in diplomatic relations with the Americans. It actually “flattered” the boys that the PM knew their names. “The thing is, I don’t get the bit where [he] said, ‘Earning all these dollars for Britain,’ ” George said with a shrug, paraphrasing the item. He would learn the hard way—and before long write a song about it he called “Taxman.”
As it turned out, it was impossible to put a real dollar value on their worth to Great Britain. No one knew about the $253,000 check from Capitol Records in Brian’s pocket—the Beatles’ share of royalties so far—but it was hot news that the Barclays Bank Review had declared them an “invisible export,” estimating their overseas record sales at something over $7 million. But there was no clear picture of what the Beatles actually brought in. Aside from records and performances, merchandising remained a vast gray area. The Seltaeb compact was practically minting money—published reports put it somewhere around $50 million—but who knew how much of that would ever find its way back to the source. Income from the enormous number of bootleg products was impossible to peg.
Their cultural impact, however, was easier to calculate. If the Beatles had left London as explorers to the New World, they returned as conquering heroes. No other British pop star had ever scored so strongly in America. Now, practically overnight, the whole scene cracked wide open. The pop music pipeline that until their appearance had flowed one way—from America to Great Britain—suddenly reversed direction. The U.S. market was flooded with singles by topflight British acts, from the Dave Clark Five to Dusty Springfield to the Yardbirds to the Searchers, none of whom imitated American rock so much as adapted it in ways that brought new energy to the form. For the first time in the history of the English charts, British records occupied the top fourteen places. The days of second billing and second-class citizenship for British rock ’n roll seemed over. “With this transition,” wrote pop music historian Greg Shaw, “British rock became real.”
The day after their return, the Beatles headed straight back to work, taping a segment of the TV variety series Big Night Out, in which they performed three comedy sketches as well as five songs, then huddling with Walter Shenson to iron out a few details for their upcoming film. Ringo, feeling dispensable, managed to disappear for a day, flying home to Liverpool to visit his folks and keep a date with Maureen Cox, a Liverpool girlfriend to whom he was engaged.
The next morning, Tuesday, February 25—George’s twenty-first birthday—the boys checked into the Abbey Road studio to work on songs for a new album. They could hardly wait to get started. Since the beginning of the year, they had barely played a note that wasn’t drowned out by screams and, as musicians, they had become clearly frustrated by the emptiness of it.
This time—for the first time—the scale of the work had changed. Instead of balancing six or eight original songs with a smattering of well-known American covers, practically all the selections were to be Lennon-McCartney compositions. Most of the numbers were slated for the movie soundtrack, requiring immediate attention so they could be synced to some specific action on the screen, or vice versa; the rest, for the tie-in album, weren’t as urgent.
John and Paul had written steadily over the past few months, so material wasn’t going to be a problem. They had a ton of songs to choose from and, said Paul, “we knew they were good.” A version of “Can’t Buy Me Love” was already in the can, but a lyric change was needed and the Beatles redid the vocals. They sketched out three songs the first day, one of which—“You Can’t Do That”—was pretty much completed before lunch. John had written most of the hard-nosed rocker, with Paul contributing the tart B7 chord that electrifies the bridge. The vocal, however, gives the song its most cutting edge. John delivers a stinging emotional attack in the form of a reprimand, practically spitting out the warning “because I told you before,” while Ringo reinforces it by punching out the beat.
If there was one highlight, it was Paul’s reading of “And I Love Her,” a lushly melodic ballad that he’d written on the piano at Jane Asher’s house. Paul’s gift for immediacy had never been sharper. The plaintive lyric is simple and direct, the feeling achingly poignant. From the opening notes, his voice expresses an honesty that wrings the heart out of every word. “It was the first ballad I impressed myself with,” Paul recalled, pointing to the “nice chords” and the “imagery” as its irresistible assets. There is real power in the song, but after two takes the Beatles couldn’t find the right way to harness it. Dick James, who was visiting the studio, felt the song was “just too repetitive” and during a tape change he mentioned as much to George Martin. Apparently Martin agreed because he called for a short recess and left the control room briefly to discuss it with the band.
James claims that Martin suggested they write a middle eight to break up the repetitious verses. “I think it was John who shouted, ‘OK, let’s have a tea break,’ and John and Paul went to the piano and, while Mal Evans was getting tea and some sandwiches, the boys worked at the piano,” he said. “Within half an hour they wrote… a very constructive middle to a very commercial song.” Paul, on the other hand, maintained that John “probably helped” on some minor adjustments, but otherwise, “the middle eight is mine…. I wrote this on my own.” No matter which account is accurate, the arrangement still lacked the right touch, and they abandoned the song for another day.
The same fate befell “I Should Have Known Better,” which was temporarily scrapped after three wasted takes. The Beatles were frazzled, wiped out from jet lag and the endless work, and after seven hours of recording, they succumbed to a case of terminal giggles. It was all they could do to get through one complete take. No one even felt like celebrating George’s birthday, least of all George, who was “tired and depressed” from the brutal grind. Grudgingly, he’d devoted an hour that morning to posing for pictures as a favor to the press. (The Daily Express made George’s birthday front-page news.) There were over fifteen thousand cards waiting for him, along with four postal hampers stuffed with presents from fans, none of which he had the energy to open. Dick James had given him a pair of gold cuff links, and from Brian, a gorgeous Rolex that George wore throughout his life. But what he prized more than anything was sleep, precious sleep.
Two days later another productive session yielded two more songs: “Tell Me Why” and “If I Fell.” Just before the lunch break, they ran right through “Tell Me Why,” a spirited, up-tempo number that John later described as mimicking “a black New York girl-group song,” nailing it in eight takes. “If I Fell” proved more elusive. It was John’s first attempt at a ballad, wrapped in a snug, intertwining harmony that is easily one of the most beautiful and appealing duets the Beatles ever performed. John and Paul opted to record it together, on a single microphone, which only served to intensify their delivery. The symmetry of their voices is perfect; they come to the center with such precision that it is often hard to tell who is singing which part. It sounds easy—but isn’t. The way John structured it demanded chord changes on almost every note of the verse—“dripping with chords,” as Paul explained to a reporter—and it took them fifteen takes to get it right.
The album was beginning to take shape. A Sunday session was highly unusual, but since the Beatles were to begin work on their film the next day, Martin suggested they grab a few hours in the studio to keep up the flow. The Beatles worked only the morning session, until breaking for lunch. Still, they managed to lay down three tracks in three hours: a retooling of “I Call Your Name,” written originally for Billy J. Kramer as a B-side to “Bad to Me”; a tear-ass version of “Long Tall Sally” that was captured in one live take; and “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You,” a “bit of a formula song” that Paul and John had cobbled together for George.
“The Beatles didn’t get totally immersed in record production until later on, when they stopped touring,” recalled George Martin. But they were no longer intimidated by the recording process, getting it right in the first few takes—or else. Most rock ’n roll groups were still expected to complete an entire album in a day, but for the Beatles that pressure had been eliminated thanks to their huge success. As a result, they could work at their own pace. “We don’t stop until we’re confident there is no possibility of further improvement,” Martin explained. With time to spare—and the advancement of the four-track system—they had the luxury of recording the rhythm tracks and the vocals separately, instead of all at once. Another factor was George Martin’s extraordinary confidence in their ability. It was impossible for Martin to ignore the Beatles’ instincts, and he gave them considerable leeway to explore new techniques. In songs like “You Can’t Do That” and “I Should Have Known Better,” George had begun to experiment with a twelve-string Rickenbacker 360 he’d bought in New York, an instrument so new that there were only two in existence. Offbeat percussion flourishes were introduced in the form of cowbells and bongos. The Beatles were quickly fascinated with the mysteries of overdubbing and double-tracking. Contrary to what they originally feared, the studio didn’t restrict their songs; it opened up a world of options that gave the songs freedom and new color.
The world of film, however, was alien and precarious.
The Beatles began production on their as-yet-untitled movie on Monday, March 2, in London. Early that morning, a good-size crowd had gathered along Platform Five at Paddington Station, from where the cast and crew were scheduled to depart for six days of shooting aboard a slow-moving British Rail car that would shuttle between various locations in the West Country.
Awkward introductions were made in haste. The Beatles met several of their costars, including Wilfrid Brambell, John Junkin, and Norman Rossington, then joined Actors’ Equity at the behest of a union official who painstakingly wrote out four membership cards amid the pushing and shoving on the platform. Director Richard Lester, who stood on the periphery, held his breath as he watched the scene unfold. The first day of a movie was always a bit ticklish, but this one was riddled with uncertainty. The Beatles seemed perfectly comfortable performing onstage, but as Lester realized, film was an altogether different medium, requiring a different set of skills. He had no idea if they could deliver lines without appearing and sounding foolish. Those Scouse accents were nothing to sneeze at. Should they consider a dialogue coach? Or subtitles? Damned if he knew. The plan was to keep everything simple—no tricky monologues, no long-winded speeches. The way the script was constructed, “they spoke in sentences of five or six words each,” recalled Alun Owen, who scaled down his original talky screenplay to a collage of manageable sound bites. “The director knew we couldn’t act, and we knew,” John admitted. “So he had to try almost to catch us off guard.” It was a gamble from the start. But, as Walter Shenson notes, “the Beatles fell right into it, they were naturals. And the script was so good, it sounded like they were making it up as they went along.”
Owen had done his homework. As promised, he kept the story achingly simple. The Beatles would play the Beatles and do what Beatles normally did—minus the smoking, drinking, swearing, and sex. Geoffrey Stokes, in the essential history Rock of Ages, summarizes the movie as a “high-speed pseudodocumentary posing the sole question: will the lads make it through a typical day of press conferences, fan pursuit, encounters with disapproving elders, manic playfulness and occasional self-doubt in time to play a concert for their adoring fans?” From spending only two days with them in Dublin, Owen had managed to pin down the nature of the Beatles’ camaraderie, all the nuances and the special give-and-take that insiders found so “disarming and refreshing.” It was all there, Paul recalled, the “little jokes, the sarcasm, the humor, John’s wit, Ringo’s laconic manner; each of our different ways. The film manages to capture our characters quite well.” But the goal was not accuracy. “We were like that,” John explained—when it was advantageous to be cute and lovable. But overall, he saw it as “a comic-strip version of what was going on” in their lives. The few scenes that dramatize the constant scrutiny they were under are but a shadow of the real thing; according to John, “the pressure was far heavier than that.”
The work itself was more demanding than they’d expected. For one thing, they had to report for costume and makeup at six o’clock in the morning, which meant getting up at five—an ungodly hour for most people but especially for a Beatle. Moreover, they were seriously out of their element. Learning lines was an uphill battle on top of everything else that was going on in their lives. Victor Spinetti, another of their costars, observed how “the lads never touched the script.” In fact, they “frantically” gave it a once-over in the car each morning on their way to the studio, then simply winged it. “You never knew what they were going to say or do.” “We’d make things up because of our being so comfortable with each other,” recalled Ringo. Some real gems came out of their mouths, the same kind of spontaneous witty stuff that dazzled at their press conferences, but for a seasoned film crew it was a hair-raising way to work. To counteract the Beatles’ lack of preparation, Dick Lester kept five cameras running, even after a scene technically ended. “Dick just went on shooting,” Spinetti recalled, “shooting everything…. [H]e just pointed the cameras at them and let them go…. And I just used to keep going…. [W]hen he caught them actually talking amongst themselves, it was just magical.”
The magic was everywhere, it seemed. Yet the Beatles were still skeptical, still unsure of how long it would last. They remained convinced, to a man, that it might all end suddenly tomorrow, so despite the grind of making a movie, to say nothing of its potential upside, they turned up the heat, working simultaneously on a slew of other projects, pushing harder, persevering, to keep the fantasy alive.
[II]
The most dependable resource, the one that offered the most immediate response, was music. During the last week in February, Columbia Records released “A World Without Love,” by Peter and Gordon, most of which Paul had written when he was sixteen and recently salvaged for a Billy J. Kramer session. True to form, Billy J. rejected it as being “too soft.” A few weeks later Paul made a few minor changes to the lyric and gave the song instead to Peter Asher, Jane’s brother, as a favor to help launch his singing career. “A World Without Love” was soft, a delicate harmonic soufflé in the style of “I’ll Follow the Sun,” lacking the more wiry sophistication of the Beatles’ recent releases. It would have never made the cut for their current session, but Peter and his boarding-school mate, Gordon Waller, sang it with a pleasant laid-back yearning that transformed the song into a perfectly acceptable pop hit.
At the Ashers’, Paul and Peter had grown accustomed to hanging out when the Beatles were in town. Though entirely different in nature—unlike Paul, Peter was serious and self-involved, with rust-red hair, black horn-rimmed glasses, and an imperiously arched eyebrow that made him look slightly peevish—they established a comfortable, unforced rapport, the perfect antidote to the Beatles’ incestuous relationship. “I could talk to him about anything,” Paul recalled, pointing to the merits of their unique living arrangement. The boys had an almost comic claim on the house’s attic floor: it was an obstacle course littered with guitars, records, books, tape recorders, phonographs, suitcases, and other “bric-a-brac in a jumble” that resembled a typical college dorm. “Their bedrooms were next door to each other,” John Dunbar recalls, “so it was kind of a boy’s scene upstairs. They would sit there for hours, discussing art and music, endlessly playing the latest records. It was where the rest of us went to hear new music—and to groove.”
The place always seemed filled with inherently restless young men who fancied themselves amateur intellectuals, smoking, discussing poetry and politics, paging through magazines, and trading harsh criticism of the establishment. Often Paul would just listen, amazed by the ideas flying around that room. The cool, intellectual agility, while raw and shapeless, was still formidable, providing a glimpse of the future. Many students who congregated at the Ashers’ house were refugees from universities and art schools, “the laboratories” for the emerging sixties culture, where being hip and aggressively clever were as crucial to success as pure artistry. And many, though in denial, were patently upper-class. But if Paul felt the wide gap in their background and education, he was never made to feel inadequate. “Somehow it wasn’t to do with which area you were from,” Paul realized, “it was more just a level of thinking.” To that extent, Paul was learning to hold his own. Besides, he was a Beatle, and they envied his enormous success, to say nothing of his talent, along with the freedom it brought him.
While Peter and Gordon promoted “A World Without Love,” the Beatles prepared to release their own new single, which had already attracted an inordinate amount of buzz. EMI had wasted no time—or expense—beating the drums for “Can’t Buy Me Love,” which the label fully expected to break all existing sales records. In the United States, Capitol already had advance orders for 1.7 million copies, allowing it to be issued as a gold record, an unprecedented feat. The British trades were giddy with excitement. “Well, here it is!” Derek Johnson panted in his windy NME review. “A pounding, vibrating, fast-medium twister in the r-and-b mould, with a fascinating trembling effect in the middle eight”—he’s referring to the instrumental break, actually, in which George’s double-tracked guitar solo produces a riveting echo—“it’s not so strong melodically as their last two discs—but there’s rather more accent on beat.”
Though the review made no strides in the advancement of rock criticism, it gave the record a commendable launch. It also helped distract from the pack of would-be marauders who were pecking at the kingdom walls. Competitors were flooding the market with anything that might capitalize on the Beatles’ success. All along, there had been scores of singles that made no pretensions as to their agenda: “My Boyfriend Got a Beatle Haircut,” “Yes, You Can Hold My Hand,” “Beatle Fever,” “The Beatle Dance,” “The Boy with the Beatle Hair,” “Beatle Mania in the U.S.A.” (by the Liverpools, no less), “We Love You Beatles”—there were too many to keep track of. A start-up label, Top Six, announced that its debut album would provide a full menu of Beatles covers, coincidentally entitled Beatlemania. Another new label, Dial, was banking on a group called the Grasshoppers. Even Decca, at the behest of onetime Beatles producer Mike Smith, recognized the value of ancestry by signing a band called the All-Stars to be led by Pete Best. To their credit, the Beatles wasted not so much as a glance on any of these coattail surfers, their evil eyes trained on more unbenign targets that threatened to cut into their royalties.
Vee-Jay Records had become an irksome problem. The bankrupt Chicago label had revived itself on the back of its two monster Beatles smashes. As far as the boys cared, that was fair and square. Vee-Jay had licensed “Please Please Me” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret” in good faith and were entitled to the windfall they eventually produced. But the label had gotten greedy. The original demo tape submitted two years earlier had other material on it, and despite repeated requests by Roland Rennie for its return, Vee-Jay, under new leadership, claimed that it was nowhere to be found. But Vee-Jay promptly issued the extraneous songs on an album titled Introducing the Beatles that sprinted up the charts at a remarkable pace.* Brian pleaded with EMI to protect the Beatles’ position, and in February a New York federal court awarded Capitol a temporary injunction against Vee-Jay to halt distribution of the album. But that only succeeded in sidetracking the renegade label.
The sessions in Hamburg also continued to haunt them. Polydor Records had licensed the masters for “My Bonnie” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” to MGM in the States. Now, attempting to parlay that success, the labels were releasing “Cry for a Shadow,” the instrumental George had patched together in 1961, to coincide with the release of “Can’t Buy Me Love.” And Sheridan, who had since joined Bobby Patrick’s Big Six, announced that they intended to record a song called “Tell Me If You Can” that he’d cowritten with Paul in Germany.
“Brian didn’t get very good deals on anything,” George argued later, with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time the abundance and grandeur of the deals themselves kept the Beatles from articulating their fears. Anyone who wanted a pound of their flesh, John joked, should get in line; with four of them in the picture, there was plenty to go around. Even if John could bring himself to laugh about it, there was a growing suspicion among them that Brian “wasn’t astute enough” to handle the heavy traffic. The EMI record royalty, the Dick James publishing deal, the Seltaeb merchandising agreement, the UA movie contract, even their road shows with promoter Arthur Howes—Paul took to calling them “long-term slave contracts”—were grotesquely inadequate.
No sooner had Brian returned to London than his New York agent, GAC, cabled with news that offers—“spectacular offers”—were pouring in from American promoters, requiring an immediate answer from the Beatles. “We had fifty times as many offers as we could handle,” Norman Weiss, their U.S. agent, revealed, and he urged Brian to immediately set aside dates for a major U.S. tour. And the money was staggering for a pop group: a minimum guarantee of $20,000 up front against as much as 80 percent of the gate. Absolutely no one received that much for a single performance, not even Frank Sinatra. The handful of entertainers who could even get close to that amount had been icons for fifteen or twenty years—Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Judy Garland.
This was completely new territory. The string of eligible arenas in America, those with seating capacities of 7,000 to 20,000, had never presented rock ’n roll shows before. They were primarily sports facilities or convention halls, deviating from the schedule once a year when the circus came to town. Among the cast of possible promoters, few had experience staging any type of show. Five years later a network of rock impresarios would establish itself, with a dominant promoter in almost every major city, but in 1964 none existed. Presenting the Beatles required that a local promoter handle tickets, publicity, staging, security (“no fewer than one hundred uniformed police officers”), sound (including “a hi-fidelity sound system… and a first-class sound engineer”), and hospitality (“clean and adequate dressing room facilities… [and] two seven-passenger Cadillac limousines, air-conditioned if possible”). Who knew how to pull that all together?
There were already ominous signs. It was inevitable that competition would eventually loosen their vise grip on the charts, and, sure enough, groups such as the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals, and Freddy and the Dreamers edged above them periodically in swings that were treated as certain downfall. When the Beatles toppled out of the number one spot, however briefly, it was front-page news. The dailies suggested that their popularity had peaked. “Are the Beatles finished?” a tabloid wondered. Rumors circulated that John was leaving the band, and even though he dismissed it as “foolish gossip,” the speculation persisted. Harder to dismiss was the cold reception given to the closed-circuit film of the Beatles’ Washington, D.C., concert. Not only was the turnout conspicuously flat, but the deal structure was such a mess that determining what royalties were owed the Beatles became next to impossible.
In late March John’s book, In His Own Write, was published by Jonathan Cape and sold forty thousand copies on the first day of its release. It wasn’t creative writing in the literary sense: the text was woefully slight, a mere seventy-eight pages, the format haphazard, the syntax clumsy and fragmented—all quirks that normally earned terse rejection slips from publishers. It looked nothing like a regular book with its crude, “scrappy” line drawings and chicken-scratch marginalia. “There’s nothing deep in it,” John insisted, “it’s just meant to be funny.” If anything, it was a descendant of “The Daily Howl” that he had passed around at Quarry Bank and was later serialized in Mersey Beat, studded with the puns and nonsensical wordplay he called “gobbledegook,” along with a generous dose of sick humor. But it possessed an undeniable power. It had a rude, freewheeling irreverence that thumbed its nose at literary pretension, all of which appealed to the emerging “alternative” culture. It seemed to confirm what commentators had been saying about the rumblings of a “cultural earthquake” and a new, anything-goes permissiveness. And if John lacked the craftsmanship of a traditional author, there were pillars of the establishment ready to explain and defend his book. The BBC called it “a laugh a minute,” and no less an institution than the Times Literary Supplement extolled it as being “worth the attention of anyone who fears for the impoverishment of the English language and the English imagination.”
In fact, the Beatles were now welcome at several doors where, until only recently, they were scorned as riffraff. The Variety Club, that snooty, old-line showbiz establishment, named them “Show Business Personalities of 1963” in an awards ceremony at the Dorchester Hotel presided over by prime minister hopeful Harold Wilson. Then, on March 23 they received the prestigious Carl-Alan award from Prince Philip in a ceremony at London’s Empire Ballroom, before accepting five Ivor Novello Awards for “outstanding contributions to British music.”
Awards. Awards. Awards. Everything was finally breaking their way. Record sales were astronomical; at one point in April the Beatles had fourteen singles on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, a feat not so much unparalleled as obscene. A world tour had been set, beginning June 4 in Scandinavia, continuing through Hong Kong and Australia, and culminating in a late-summer tour of North America. And the film was moving forward at a fairly painless clip. There were just a few more weeks of shooting before the Beatles scattered for vacation.
No one had any forewarning when, in April, Freddie Lennon finally turned up. The Beatles were in the midst of shooting a difficult scene at the Scala Theatre, a gorgeous old vaudeville house in Soho, which had been spruced up by Dick Lester’s set designers for the movie’s live concert performance. Everyone at NEMS was posted there, because of the swarm of fans blocking the streets and trying to get inside, so no one stopped the grizzled old man who hobbled into the Argyll Street office. “I’m John Lennon’s father,” he told the receptionist, who reacted as one might to the reappearance of Anastasia.
John had told people he was an orphan. Shaken, the receptionist passed the news to a secretary, who immediately located Brian Epstein. “Brian went into a panic,” according to Brian Sommerville. He sent a car for John without any explanation.
It seems doubtful that John recognized his father on first sight. He had seen Freddie Lennon only twice in his entire life, and not since 1945, just after his fifth birthday, at a seaside retreat in Brighton. Now Freddie was sitting across the desk in Brian’s private office, a stooped-over, toothless sea dog with smoke-gray hair slicked back in the style of a faded sharpie.
“I stuck out my hand to shake his,” Freddie remembered, “but John just growled at me and said suspiciously, ‘What do you want?’ ” Brian felt the hostility immediately and endeavored to subdue John, instructing him: “You can’t turn your back on your family, no matter what they’ve done.”
It helped defuse the situation temporarily. Still, John wasn’t particularly sympathetic toward the broken-down man and the timing of his visit. “He turned up after I was famous,” complained John, who remained “furious” at Freddie for abandoning him as a child. “He knew where I was all my life—I’d lived in the same house in the same place for most of my childhood, and he knew where.”
It may have crushed John to grow up without a father, but it took no effort for him to cut short Freddie’s visit and ultimately order him from Brian’s office. Whatever reasons had rendered his father no longer incommunicado, it was more convenient for John that Freddie remain at large.
Because the set was basically closed to the media, there was an intensified hunger for stories about the boys. Usually during these crunch periods, the Beatles were made available to do some small, meaningless interview specifically aimed at keeping the newshounds at bay, but with the lockdown on the set, it seemed that they’d dropped out of sight. Some reporters, like the Mirror’s Don Short, simply decided to take things into their own hands. Up until that time, there was an unwritten policy between the press and NEMS that designated the Beatles’ private lives as being off-limits. “It was casting a sprat to catch a mackerel,” Short says of the unique accommodation. “We gave up the small, personal stories to land the big one. If something dicey came up, we just put a wrap on it. It was easy, considering the tremendous access we were given, and it also gave the Beatles a built-in sense of security.” With the boys suddenly absent from the scene, however, all bets were off. There was too much pressure, Short says, to keep their name in the paper and for rival journalists to “stay ahead of the pack.”
He finally got the break he’d been waiting for. A few days before Easter, Short was passing through a nightclub when a breathless source tipped him off that two of the Beatles were about to fly north on a weekend holiday, one of them with a new girlfriend in tow. That was all he needed to hear. Bolting from the club, Short made a beeline for the Mirror’s offices and spent a few hours on the phone, calling every aviation contact he knew who might have information on the Beatles’ whereabouts. It didn’t take long for him to pick up their scent. “They’d gone by private plane from one of the airports [outside London],” he discovered—John with Cynthia, and George with Pattie Boyd, a beautiful young model who had a bit part in the movie. Now that was a scoop! According to Short’s source, there was a reservation in their names at Dromoland Castle, in a remote corner of western Ireland, which is where he wound up, flying puddle jumpers, late that same night.
“They had checked in under assumed names,” Short recalls, “so the hotel denied they were there. So I actually climbed up the outside of the hotel, with a bottle of scotch in my pocket.” Oblivious to the danger or, by this time, merely irrational, he leapfrogged from balcony to balcony, peering into open windows in search of his prey. Finally, after half an hour, he struck gold. “There was John and George, with the two girls, having dinner on the floor, on a huge rug, and I burst in through the window.” They couldn’t believe their eyes. The Beatles were so astounded by Short’s appearance, to say nothing of his nerve, that they welcomed him in, ordered extra food, drank his scotch (as well as a few bottles held in reserve), and gave him an exclusive story.
Don Short wasted no time in breaking the news. Pattie Boyd was a very slim, angelic-looking young woman, pleasant and unpretentious, with a style that was as natural as it was alluring. In a genuinely matter-of-fact way, she seemed to be a reference point for all the bold new fashion that was percolating in London—what Mary Quant called “the total look”: chic and funky clothes, shaggy haircut, sexy miniskirt, pale “dollybird” makeup, antique jewelry. “Whenever fashions changed Patti [sic] was in there first with all the right gear looking beautiful as ever,” Cynthia wrote in one of her memoirs. Much later, Twiggy admitted that she based her look on Pattie, who never begrudged anyone her personal beauty tips. “Pattie always managed to look fabulous with very little effort,” Peter Brown remembers. “George wrote ‘Something in the Way You Move [sic]’ about her; Eric [Clapton] wrote ‘Darling, You Look Wonderful [sic] Tonight’ about her. That’s Pattie—she is that person.”
As a favor, Richard Lester had cast her as an extra in the movie, along with her younger sister, Jenny, knowing they would dress up the scenery around the Beatles.* According to several friends, Pattie not only had an eye on George, she been following his career from a distance from the start. He picked up the signals on the very first day of production, during a scene in which she appeared as an immodest schoolgirl. “When we started filming, I could feel George looking at me,” she recalled, “and I was a bit embarrassed.” It might have been less awkward had she not been “semi-engaged” to a boyfriend, Eric Swayne, with whom she’d been living for two years. At the time, Swayne said he felt “confident about [his] relationship with her,” but within a week Pattie and George were making their own plans.
Don Short wanted a photo to go with his story, which, “in those days,” he says, “was taboo. You never published a picture of a Beatle with his spouse or girlfriend. But suddenly none of us cared anymore.” Short had flown in a photographer expressly to get the prize shot, but by the next morning the hotel was crawling with other press. Word had leaked out about George’s new romance, which put a premature end to the vacation. Reporters, determined to identify the young woman, had all the exits covered. It got so bad, the couples became prisoners of their room. Eventually John and George went downstairs to check out, acting as decoys so the girls could sneak away unnoticed. “In the end, Cyn and I had to dress as [chamber]maids,” Pattie told Hunter Davies. “They took us out a back way, put us in a laundry basket, and we were driven to the airport in a laundry van.”
The women were, in fact, only one small cloudburst in the mammoth typhoon of press that surged through the spring of 1964. Everyone followed the Beatles like a favorite soap opera. Not a day went by that didn’t offer ample stories about their exploits, even if they were only vague speculation. Papers reported on where they were last seen and with whom, how they were dressed, what they had for dinner, when they went home (and with whom). The gloves had come off; all angles were now fair game.
[III]
To Ringo, the movies were magic and the experience of making one even more marvelous, indescribable. Years later he could still say: “It was all so romantic, with the lights and coming to work in the limo.” And UA, which never even saw a synopsis of the script, had been viewing each day’s rushes with mounting excitement. What had begun as a quickie, low-budget exploitation feature riding on the Beatles’ fleeting fame now looked more and more like a quirky little gem. The Beatles were funny. They were naturals in front of the camera and “made it seem as if the picture was ad-libbed or improvised.” What’s more, its style was so distinctive: shot in black and white, using mostly handheld cameras to capture the energy of a documentary film, and chock-full of sequences that were as outrageous as they were innovative.
For convenience, on the set, everyone had been calling it The Beatles Movie until something more suitable came along. There are several “official” versions of how the title was finally arrived at. What they all agree on is that it occurred during a lunch break at Twickenham Studios, where either Paul remarked to Bud Ornstein—or John to Walter Shenson—“There was something Ringo said the other day…,” at which point, the two Beatles recounted their drummer’s penchant for “abusing the English language.” “Ringo would always say grammatically incorrect phrases and we’d all laugh,” George recalled. One that sprang easily to mind had popped out at the Heathrow press conference, when Ringo described having his hair cut at the British embassy soiree. “I was just talking, having an interview… and then ‘snip’… Well, what can you say? Tomorrow never knows.” Tomorrow never knows! The Beatles cut wicked glances at one another when that gem fell out. And John promptly wrote it down, to use in one of his stories and, later, songs. There was another malapropism—or “Ringosim,” as John called them—that had already appeared in John’s book, In His Own Write: “He’d had a hard day’s night that day.” One of the boys entertained the lunch gathering with details of its origin, following a grueling late-night gig, but they were already one step ahead of him. “We’ve just got our title!” one of the producers exclaimed.
But only half the battle had been won. What Shenson knew, and what the studio had pointedly reminded him, was that a musical with a new title needed a title song. He despaired about burdening John and Paul with it. They’d already been pushed to the wall, filming all day while looping at night to replace lines that were lost to extraneous noise. Sometimes he knew they’d finish work well after ten o’clock, rush off to attend a cocktail party or do a late press interview over dinner, then head out to various clubs until nearly dawn before being dragged from their beds an hour or two later for makeup. It was a brutal, seven-day routine that more than qualified the film’s new title, so it took some temerity to ask for any more of them.
It was at a looping session, as Shenson remembers it, that he finally made his plea. He pulled John aside during a coffee break and broached it without beating around the bush. “I’m afraid we’re going to need a song called ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ something up-tempo that can be played over the main titles.” They had already shot the opening scene at Marylebone Station, in which a throng of half-crazed girls chase the Beatles onto a train. If the song was as impetuous as the on-screen action, it would establish the perfect mood. Driving back into London from the studio, he recalls, John brooded, chain-smoking sullenly, no doubt in response to the annoying request.
The next morning on the set, the assistant producer paged Shenson and told him: “John Lennon wants to see you in his dressing room.” The producer went through every imaginable scenario, wondering how he’d respond to the young man’s irritation. “He and Paul were standing there, with their guitars slung over their shoulders,” Shenson recalls. “John fiddled with a matchbook cover on which were scrawled the lyrics to a song—‘A Hard Day’s Night’—which they played and sang to perfection. This was ten hours after I’d asked for a song.” When they’d finished, John glanced at the producer and said, “Okay, that’s it, right?” It was all Shenson could do to feebly mutter, “Right.” “Good,” John said, “now don’t bother us about songs anymore.”
“A Hard Day’s Night” was recorded the next day, on April 16, and from the extraordinary opening chord, it was evident that once again the Beatles had raised the bar for all of pop songwriting. The “strident” chord is a powerful attention-grabber—a G7, with an added ninth and a suspended fourth, so unique that it is considered neither major nor minor—that hangs in the air with disturbing inevitability. How George came up with it remains a mystery to this day; he never discussed it, even though the chord has become as identifiable as the song that follows. As it uncoils, there is nothing left to chance. The energy it delivers is explosive, full of fireworks—“It’s been a haaaard daaaays night…”—and musically as daring, with a vocal track that gathers so much steam that the middle eight (sung by Paul, John explained, “because I couldn’t reach the notes”) comes as almost a relief.
While the Beatles wrapped up work on A Hard Day’s Night, as the movie was now readily being called, Brian left for the Devon coast, where he planned to begin work on an autobiography that had been commissioned by a small London publisher. Derek Taylor, the trusted Daily Expressreporter who’d been handpicked to ghostwrite the book, joined him in a sumptuous suite at the Imperial Hotel, in Torquay, for a weekend of protracted interviews that would hopefully serve as the foundation for the work. Like Brian, Taylor was from an affluent Liverpool suburb, the eldest son of a gregarious Welsh ex-officer and a sickly housewife who, at some point, relinquished all hope that Derek would pursue a respectable career “in the world of commerce.” Taylor was everything a banker wasn’t: effusive, generous, entertaining, impractical, and wonderfully glib. “There are only a few journalists like Derek, who are a joy to listen to in the pub,” recalls Tony Barrow, who, though often at loggerheads with his “inscrutable” colleague, found him equally mesmerizing. “He had such an amazing way with words. He wrote and spoke beautiful prose. And he made rapport an art form I’ve never seen duplicated.” Taylor could also be, like Brian, cynical and obstinate. Having recently moved from covering comedians to pop music, he concluded that the Beatles “painted a new rainbow right across the world, with crocks of gold at each end, and then some,” which ultimately beckoned him to their doorstep. His several meetings with the boys cultivated a remarkable rapport. Of all the journalists they encountered, and perhaps ever would encounter, Taylor’s dervish intellect brought him closest to being a trusted confidant. “He’s one of those people that clicks as soon as you meet him,” John remarked that same month. There was no doubt: he was on their wavelength.
Trust. Brian needed to confide in his cowriter. Two days into their amiable “fact-gathering expedition,” Brian poured large gin and tonics to facilitate a tricky exchange. He wondered aloud (although not too loud) if Taylor had heard rumors that he, Brian, “was queer.” Derek may not have known about this dark secret in early 1964, but he no doubt sensed the underlying torment and vulnerability. The always eloquent Taylor became tongue-tied, stammering as Brian admitted: “I am homosexual and have known it all my adult life and there’s nothing I can do about it.” This was a startling confession, not so much for the context in which it was conveyed as for the information it carried. In Britain, laws still regarded homosexuality as a punishable offense, thereby casting its current pop icons in a web of deceit. Its disclosure was fraught with danger. Brian was mortified that it would bring harm to the Beatles, but he found it just as offensive to fabricate a personal—and absurd—romantic past.
Fortunately, Taylor was a sympathetic figure, completely at ease in a world from which most straight men felt alienated. The secret, he assured Brian, was safe with him. Besides, Taylor knew how to handle it with discretion so there would be no awkward references to women in the book. Not only was Brian relieved, he felt unthreatened, even secure in Derek’s degree of understanding. Several soul-searching conversations with Taylor were Brian’s first opportunity to explore territory that had previously been forbidden with a straight colleague. At breakfast the next day, he felt comfortable enough to share the details of a drunken late-night date that had culminated in rough sex. This was all so fantastic to Taylor, who managed to maintain a straight face throughout. Brian’s entire life, it seemed, was suffused with the contingencies of indulgence and risk. Soon after he and Taylor went out together for some serious drinking and gambling, Brian arrived at a decision. “I would like you to become my personal assistant,” he proposed, “and come to work at NEMS in London, in the office next to mine.”
It was an inspired idea. Taylor had great antennae, which made him sensitive to Brian’s volatile moods. No one was more compatible or eager to please; he mixed as easily with the Beatles as he did with the press, and he made friends easily. “The entire office took to him thirty seconds after he walked in,” says Tony Bramwell. Everyone at NEMS already knew him as a northerner, their own kind. There was never any question he’d function as Brian’s eyes and ears.
A rough draft of the autobiography was finished in slightly under two weeks, a thin, abstracted affair that Taylor facetiously referred to as “a potboiler.” He considered it “ridiculous” to write the autobiography of someone who was not yet thirty years old, and felt constrained by the material, much of which was an acknowledged whitewash. When it came time to title the book, Derek drew a blank. Instead, Brian sounded out his friends, hoping to come up with something catchy. “Why don’t you call it Queer Jew?” John suggested, within earshot of the other Beatles and some guests. To appease John, Brian made a show of chuckling at the needling abuse. Some part of him probably even liked being humiliated by John—after all, it was part of his dark nature. But after the book was submitted as A Cellarful of Noise, he was visibly wounded each time John referred to it as A Cellarful of Boys.
“My early days at NEMS resembled nothing so much as a crazy bazaar,” Taylor recalled. “There were dozens, hundreds of visitors, all with pressing needs…. Epstein demanded all my time and all my energy.” Brian put him through one wringer after the next, threatening to sack Derek at the first sign of a slip. “The heat was immediately on.” But as it happened, it was only an appetizer.