The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  It was too much for John. Drunk and indignant, everything about the “star turn” reeked of stagy pathos. Several times during her rendition, he cupped his hands around his mouth and let out a string of obscenities. “Aw, fuck off, Sophie!” he hollered, thrashing about in his chair and waving her toward the wings. Finally, mercifully, the song and an encore ended, and the other stars, “very edgy and nervous,” massed around Garland, ostensibly to congratulate her but no doubt to keep the Beatles away.

  For Brian, it was ghastly, a nightmare, not only because of the boys’ disturbing behavior but also for the humiliation it had caused him. In his book, Garland “was the epitome of great talent,” everything he’d always loved about theater and the musical stage. It put him in a precarious position, now that the Beatles’ hostility betrayed their anti-establishment sentiments, especially since he’d invited Garland to a party at his flat in their honor.

  The party was supposed to be “a send-off for the boys,” and as Brian envisioned it, “nothing less than spectacular.” Two hundred invitations had been sent out to London’s most eligible young scenemakers, among them Russ Conway, Dusty Springfield, Mary Quant, Lionel Bart, Alma Cogan, Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Stones, the Searchers, George Martin, most of EMI’s top brass, the city’s most important disc jockeys, and, as a concession to the public, a handful of Beatles-friendly press. Everything had to be on a grand scale; no expense was to be spared. He hired Ken Partridge, a fancy interior decorator, to stage a setting lavish enough to rival the coronation; John Edgington and his craftsmen to install a breathtaking tented rooftop retreat with an inlaid dance floor and French windows overlooking all of Hyde Park; and Mr. Copple of Covent Gardens, the exclusive society caterer, whose menus were legendary for their sumptuousness.

  But as the plans knitted together, an indistinct cloud drifted ominously over the preparations. It hadn’t taken Partridge long to determine that Brian was no ordinary client. After a string of casual evenings in the manager’s company, he concluded that much about the party was a placebo to mask the desolation and torment that churned inside the Beatles’ manager. The demons that weighed on him in Liverpool had turned inward again. “He tried hard to conceal the pain, but it had marked him like a beacon,” recalls Partridge.

  That summer the two men ate dinner together almost every night, table-hopping among the city’s smartest restaurants. In gilded seclusion at the Coup de France, La Caprice, or the Connaught, caught up in the flow of alcohol and anxiety, Brian revealed “how empty his life had become and how increasingly lost he felt.” There was nothing to enjoy from all the money and opportunity. With his leprechaun charm, Partridge tried to shift the small talk onto a less-burdensome track, but Brian was inconsolable. He never discussed the Beatles or any of his other successes; it was as if they didn’t exist. Instead, he sulked, chafed, brooded, drank to excess, and wandered out looking, for all his sophistication, like an uneasy guest in an unaccommodating city.

  “When we finished dinner, around eight-thirty, he’d always leave the Rolls [-Royce] in St. Ann’s Church car park, in the middle of Soho,” recalls Partridge. Across the road was the Golden Lion pub, a famous pickup place for “tuffy numbers”—guardsmen and rent boys—available at the crook of an eyebrow. “He was very well known in that pub,” says Partridge, who would watch as Brian, angry and excited, disappeared hurriedly inside. “Otherwise, if he didn’t find anything in the Lion, he would drive up and down the Mall—the great road up from Buckingham Palace, where all the state occasions took place. You could find a boy on just about every bench there. He’d pick them up and take them back to his flat. And the next day he’d tell me these lurid stories. There were terrifying beatings—and robberies.”

  Even before the summer, friends noticed Brian slipping into depressions marked by episodes of irrational and self-destructive behavior. He had always been excitable, with volatile mood swings that terrified his employees, but had never given anyone cause to think it was anything more serious. Now, it seemed, these swings grew fiercer and more erratic. Charming and sensitive when in control, he turned cold and nasty at the least excuse of pique. Simple conversations often exploded into unprovoked violence. Emotional rages erupted with unprecedented ferocity, followed by silent, subversive bouts of self-loathing that could stretch on for hours in the privacy of his locked bedroom.

  Peter Brown and Brian had spent part of May together, following the feria in Seville among a crowd of aficións that included Ken Tynan and Orson Welles. There, Brown noticed Brian’s growing dependence on pills, amphetamines, that he buffered with excessive quantities of alcohol in an attempt to offset the highs with lows. “It had a disastrous effect on him. It accelerated the mood swings. He was really the sweetest, most sensitive man, but he became belligerent in the blink of an eye. And the worst part was that nobody understood where it came from.”

  “He was always putting pills into his mouth, thinking we wouldn’t notice,” Billy J. Kramer recalls, demonstrating how Brian would cover his mouth with a hand and pretend to cough while slipping his other hand stealthily between his fingers and lips. It seemed like acceptable behavior for a rock ’n roll idol. But realizing his manager “got fucked up,” Kramer says, “was pretty alarming.”

  A quick trip to Roehampton, a posh sanitarium, in early August did little to relieve the stress. The same for an “all-boys party” in Montpelier Square with footmen in full costume and powdered wigs who attended to the guests’ every kinky whim. “Brian was far too uptight to enjoy himself,” recalls one of the attendees. Everything seemed to convey the same fretful sensation. Then, only hours before the rooftop party, his mother, Queenie, showed up unannounced and insisted that all the red wallpaper and carnations be removed immediately as a hedge against some macabre superstition.

  Later, as the party flowed along, everyone seemed to agree that “Brian was the picture of self-assurance.” Dressed in an exquisite pin-striped suit and a pale blue shirt with stiff white collar and cuffs—“like a French diplomat”—he stood apart from the crowd, “beaming” in a daze, his chin tilted up at an angle like a Greco-Roman statue throughout the affair. When anyone tried to engage him in conversation, he stared past them, over their shoulders, gazing adoringly at John and Cynthia, Paul and Jane, George and Pattie, or Ringo and Maureen as they jostled their way through the crowd. Even Garland’s unexpected arrival in the middle of dinner didn’t seem to ruffle the facade. Anytime there was the least bit of excitement, Brian relied on the unfailing tactic. It was a simple enough solution, solving every immediate problem, but guests must have wondered how long he had had that cough.

  [II]

  The lure of America had once involved a fear of the unknown, but when the Beatles returned on August 18, there were no longer surprises. Their records were, according to a midwestern newspaper, “on jukeboxes in a hundred thousand joints and drugstores” (Capitol had flooded the market with an unprecedented 2 million copies of their brand-new album), airplay was nonstop to the point of punishment, A Hard Day’s Night flickered across a mind-boggling five hundred screens, newspapers boosted circulation on their mop-haired images. Everywhere the boys went—or were rumored to be—crowds amassed in staggering numbers: three thousand, eight thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, more. If the Beatles themselves were still oblivious to the extent of America’s infatuation with them, Neil Aspinall’s perspective was somewhat more informed. “America was now very aware of the Beatles,” he said, “and things were crazy.”

  Crazy: it was a word occurring with disturbing frequency in descriptions of the shifting American scene. There was a feeling in the States that the blissful self-contained provincialism of the Eisenhower era was in rocky disarray, with forces working to destabilize it on myriad fronts. Young people were struggling—often chaotically—to find a means of self-expression. The seething civil rights movement, galvanized by a minister named Martin Luther King Jr., had strafed the status quo, as northern college students pou
red into the South, committed to actively dismantling segregation. The threat of thermonuclear war and talk of a widening “missile gap” aroused interest in pacifism, while the escalation of America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia heightened opposition to the draft and touched off demonstrations as well as a crusade against violence in particular and authority in general. And changing attitudes toward sexuality jump-started a raucous debate concerning public values and private moral choices.

  Everything seemed connected to a growing disenchantment with the establishment and was set, coincidentally, to a soundtrack by the Beatles. As journalist Salley Rayl has concluded, with their music and appearance, the boys served as hip role models for a restless generation of Americans grappling with questions of individual freedom and rebellion. Their hair, especially, pissed off adults, she writes, “and now it was perceived to be threatening the very fabric of American society. It was a sign of degeneration. And it was intolerable. Furthermore the Beatles had an irreverent attitude, part wit and part cheeky disrespect, that questioned rigid, uptight American values.”

  Crazy, indeed. In all the blind spots surrounding these issues, the Beatles were a visible target. Parents quickly put them in their crosshairs for contributing to teenage delinquency; right-wing evangelists accused them as being conspirators in a “Communist… pact”; psychologists couldn’t resist analyzing them as perpetrators of “mass hypnosis [and] contagious hysteria,” all in a rabbity effort to explain away the upheaval.

  There was no precedent for the kind of mayhem the Beatles provoked. In Los Angeles, where the boys had cleared Customs, the terminal’s rotunda had to be cleared when the LAPD quickly lost control of the situation. “It scares you,” a lieutenant on duty admitted to Jack Smith, covering the arrival for the Los Angeles Times. “It’s just beyond me. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  In San Francisco, too, the festivities turned grim and dangerous. All traffic leading to and from the airport ground to a standstill. Fans dangled over the freeway overpasses as the limousine crawled past, waving banners and throwing things at the car. “I saw two girls fall to their knees at the roadside,” recalled NME’s feature columnist, Chris Hutchins, “biting their hands to stem the ecstasy of seeing the foursome.” At another intersection he watched, horrified, as “two motorcyclists collided in the commotion.” At the new Hilton, where the Beatles were booked into the fifteenth-floor penthouse, crowds throttled all entrances and disabled the elevators. Management had assured Brian’s henchmen that there was no access from the roof, but according to Walter Hofer: “No sooner had the Beatles moved into their suite than people [were] coming down from the roof on sheets.” One person who witnessed the scene described it as “total madness.” Even the cavernous Cow Palace, whose security forces had sparkled two weeks earlier during Barry Goldwater’s nomination as the Republican candidate for president, was a shambles. “Security was just awful,” recalls Larry Kane, Philadelphia’s longtime TV news anchor who covered the tour as a twenty-one-year-old greenhorn. “They never anticipated this kind of a problem. Certainly, the cops had never experienced anything like it. There wasn’t enough manpower, very makeshift security.” NEMS actually had the foresight to hire members of the Stanford football team as reinforcements around the stage, but even they were no match for the fans. The usual number of girls fainted. Kids who flung themselves at the Beatles were turned back with unflinching firmness. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. “But at one point,” Kane remembers, “a Beatles button came flying out of the crowd and hit Lennon—and cut him. And he was scared.” After the show Brian rushed the Beatles backstage to a trailer behind the arena, where a doctor was summoned to examine John. Kane, who watched from a corner of the room, remembers thinking: “It wasn’t a wound—but it was a wake-up call.”

  The scene was the same everywhere. In Las Vegas “exasperated sheriff’s deputies” brought in police dogs to quell the “shrieking mob.” Mounted police first circled, then stormed the crowd in Vancouver. In Seattle the Beatles were “pinned in their dressing room for 59 minutes” before being rescued by a cordon of “Navy sailors who bent but didn’t break.” Jelly beans sailed at the stage from every conceivable angle. Nothing and no one, it seemed, was off-limits to attack. Journalist Art Schreiber recalls how, in Chicago, “somebody let go with a frozen T-bone [steak] from the balcony and it damn near took McCartney’s head off, landing with a big thud on the stage.”

  The shows were patched together with no real concern for a cohesive structure. A package of four warm-up acts was the result of a shotgun marriage of rootless GAC artists. Bill Black’s Combo, a “dull-sounding big beat rock ensemble,” opened the bill and provided backing for the others, including the Exciters, still riding the crest of their 1962 Top 40 hit, “Tell Him”; the husky-voiced Jackie DeShannon, who wrote “Needles and Pins” for the Beatles’ Liverpool mates the Searchers; and the Righteous Brothers, a few years shy of real blue-eyed-soul fame but already something of a legend on the California club circuit.

  As for the shows themselves, lasting a scant thirty-one minutes, they were like sitting inside a funnel cloud. The four Beatles would rush onstage unannounced, clutching their instruments like body armor while flashbulbs exploded around them in a hail of blinding white light. Most of the kids unleashed another burst of “screaming, weeping ecstasy,” keeping it up relentlessly throughout the entire performance. A solid wall of decibel-shattering sound shook the seats and floorboards, rumbling through the darkness, wave after wave of it, in a convulsion of rocking, rolling thunder. “It felt like an earthquake,” recalls an astonished eyewitness who would remember the experience for the rest of his life. “It would start at one end [of the arena] and continue to the other. It was incredible to do nothing but stand there, letting it wash right over you.”

  Bill Medley, a member of the Righteous Brothers, recalls “feeling terrible” for the Beatles. “They were real players and singers, doing songs they’d written themselves” he says, “and yet they weren’t being heard beyond the first or second row. I remember standing by the stage and thinking: ‘this can’t be any fun for them.’ ”* But, in fact, it was fun, John insisted, explaining, “we don’t want [the fans] quiet.” Like most rock musicians, he fed off the screams and could tease them from the audience at will. So when things got dull, as they invariably did from night to night, John merely had to shake his head or grin at the crowd to set off another explosion. Let them raise a little hell, he decided. Scream, cry, bring down the house. John meant it when he said: “I like a riot.”

  In many cities, the entourage went straight to the airport and headed to the next stop on the tour as a way of avoiding the crazy crowd scenes. For convenience and safety, GAC had chartered a plane for the duration, a twin-engine turboprop Electra owned by an outfit out of Fort Worth, Texas, called American Flyers Airlines, which “vibrated like crazy and made such a helluva lot of noise,” recalls a passenger on the tour, “that you couldn’t hear yourself think.”* Still, it made road life easier for the Beatles, not having to be pestered by fans and autograph seekers every time they were in transit. The cabin crew was great, the boys could move about undisturbed to their heart’s content, and there was room enough aboard to carry everyone connected with the tour.

  There was a tiny lounge in the back of the plane where, whenever they got bored, the boys would congregate with several reporters always milling about, usually drinking and comparing notes. It was an uneasy standoff at first, with both groups eyeing each other like the opposition, but after a while, the ice began to thaw. “After a few days of circling, you could finally sit down with them,” recalls a journalist. “They had to see you for a while to get to know you.” Eventually Paul and Ringo conducted an ongoing poker game with a revolving cast of hard-core news guys, while John and George hustled Art Schreiber in many a “cutthroat game” of Monopoly. “Lennon was a fiend, and extremely competitive,” Schreiber remembers. “He got so keyed up over the damn game, he
had to stand up to roll the dice.” And he stayed at it, racking up properties and plastic hotels until he was satisfied that he’d prevail. “I’d be falling asleep, and John would be tugging at me, saying, ‘Art, Art, hey, man, it’s your turn.’ ‘God, John, let me go to bed—please.’ Then we’d get to the next city and I’d no sooner get into my room [than] the phone would ring. ‘Come on up,’ John would insist. ‘We’ve got to play!’ And we’d literally quit the games when the sun was coming up.”

  Through Schreiber, an older Cleveland-based radio news director who doubled as a national correspondent for Westinghouse stations, John got an unfiltered education in everything from the U.S. presidency to the upturn of violence in the streets. “We talked a lot about American politics and the racial divide,” recalls Schreiber, who had marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King Jr. and across Mississippi with James Meredith, as well as traveled closely with the candidates on the Kennedy campaign. “Lennon couldn’t get enough of it; he was fascinated. I tried to familiarize him with the segregation in the South, about how blacks moved north to avoid discrimination and go where jobs were available, but that there was as much segregation in the North, only in a different way.”

  Prior to the start of the tour, Brian had forbade them to comment on topical issues. It wasn’t appropriate, he felt, for pop stars to air particular opinions inasmuch as it might alienate—or as George put it, “rattle”—a segment of their audience, especially over a hot potato like Vietnam. “We were being asked about it all the time and it was silly,” said John. “We had to pretend to be like in the old days when artists weren’t meant to say anything about anything.” But the Beatles weren’t about to be silenced—especially George and John, both of whom in a relatively short amount of time became consumed by social and political issues. “We couldn’t help ourselves…. We spoke our minds after that: ‘We don’t like it, we don’t agree with it, we think it is wrong.’ ”