At Washington’s Union Station, three thousand teenagers flung themselves against the 20-foot-high wrought-iron platform gates. Seven thousand more filled the Coliseum, an arena with the stage in the center, like a boxing ring. While the Beatles performed Brian Sommerville had to keep running out to turn them in a different direction. The Washington fans, having read George Harrison’s joke about liking jelly babies, resolutely pelted the stage with America’s version, the jelly bean—often not troubling to remove them from the packet—as well as buttons, hair rollers, and spent flashbulbs. A policeman near the stage philosophically screwed a .38-caliber bullet into each of his ears. And Brian Epstein, once again, was noticed standing and weeping.
The British embassy visit had been arranged by Brian Sommerville, an old shipmate of the naval attaché there. The Beatles agreed to go only because Brian thought it would be good for the image. Upon arriving, they were greeted by the ambassador, Sir David Ormsby-Gore, pleasantly enough. What followed was extremely unpleasant, though not atypical of foreign office social life. Men in stiff collars and their gin and tonic wives pushed and struggled for autographs, at the same time exclaiming in patrician amusement, “Can they actually write?” One cawing female produced nail scissors and cut off a piece of Ringo’s hair. The purpose of this visit, they discovered, was to announce the prizes in an embassy raffle. When John Lennon demurred, a group of young F.O. types formed threateningly around him. Ringo, touching his shoulder, said pacifically, “Come on—let’s get it over with.”
The story, when reported in the British press, caused a major parliamentary incident. A Conservative MP, Joan Quennell, called on the foreign secretary, R. A. Butler, to confirm or deny that the Beatles had been manhandled by embassy personnel. Mr. Butler replied that, on the contrary, the Beatles’ manager had written to Lady Ormsby-Gore “thanking her for a delightful evening.”
At the White House, meanwhile, Sir Alec Douglas Home had arrived for his talks with President Lyndon Johnson. The Beatles in fact largely helped break the ice between a big, folksy Texan and a tweedy, skeletal Scottish earl who otherwise might have found small talk difficult. “I like your advance guard,” Johnson quipped. “But don’t you think they need haircuts?”
And in New York, the promoter Sid Bernstein sat on the staircase at Carnegie Hall, listening to an uproar that made even the framed portraits of Schubert and Ravel jiggle slightly on the corridor wall. His phenomenon, mistaken by that Polish lady for a string quartet, had in one night recouped for Sid Bernstein the losses suffered in promoting the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival. Celebrities like David Niven and Shirley MacLaine had unsuccessfully begged him for tickets to the Beatles’ Carnegie Hall concerts. Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller, with her two daughters, had waited half an hour just for a peep into the dressing room.
“After the second concert,” Bernstein says, “I walked with Brian across to Madison Square Garden. We looked inside the old Garden arena. Seventeen thousand seats. I knew the Garden wanted the Beatles; they could have had tickets printed in twenty-four hours. I offered Brian twenty-five thousand dollars and a five-thousand-dollar donation to the British Cancer Fund. I knew he was tempted. But he gave me that little smile he had. ‘Sid,’ he said, ‘let’s save it for next time.’
Next morning, the police barricades were removed from the front of the Plaza Hotel; its elegant lobby grew quiet but for the headlines on the newsstand counter. “Britain’s Boy Beatles Buzz By, Bomb Bobbysoxers.” “Audience Shrieks, Bays and Ululates.” A large sum of money, which CBS had paid into the hotel for the use of the Beatles party, was found to be untouched. Nobody even knew it was there.
The Beatles were aboard a National Airlines jet bound for Miami and their second Ed Sullivan Show, their course to the southwest plotted by a flight engineer in a Beatles wig. On landing, they were greeted by a crowd of seven thousand who smashed twenty-three windows and glass doors inside the terminal building.
At the hotel, each Beatle was decanted into his own lofty, luxurious, three-room prison cell. For the Deauville, like the New York Plaza, was in a state of screaming siege. Two enterprising girls had themselves wrapped in two parcels addressed to the Beatles, but were apprehended before they could be delivered.
George Martin, who happened to be in America on a business trip, came to see them in Miami, bringing his wife-to-be, Judy Lockhart-Smith. Martin watched the Beatles rehearse in bathing trunks in the hotel ballroom, and later repay Ed Sullivan’s $3,500 with a performance destined to break every record in audience ratings for televised entertainment. So far as such things can ever be computed, 75 million Americans watched the Ed Sullivan Show that night. During the broadcast, from the hotel’s Mau Mau Club, a girl next to George Martin broke off sobbing and bouncing to stare at him in surprise. “Do you like them, too, sir?” she asked.
Another widely oversubscribed photo opportunity took place at the 5th Street Gymnasium where Cassius Clay—still some years from renaming himself Muhammed Ali and embracing Islam—was in training for his impending World Heavyweight title fight against Sonny Liston. Even John could not compete with the loose-limbed young giant whose every word defied America’s unwritten rule that even famous black people must conduct themselves with slavish self-effacement. The Beatles pretended to spar with Clay for the camera and smiled complicitly when he gave his so-quotable verdict that they might be “the greatest” but he was still “the prettiest.” Long-suffering Ringo even found himself picked up and flourished aloft by the soon-to-be champ.
Their only escape from the crowds and press was a day spent at the beach-side mansion of a Capitol Records executive. Sergeant Buddy Bresner, a Miami cop who had befriended them, arranged for them to escape from the Deauville in the back of a butcher’s truck while other policemen brought decoy guitar cases out through the front lobby.
George Martin and Judy joined them for that first real respite since they had sunbathed on the seafront at Margate. Brian was there, too, with his temporary assistant, Wendy Hanson. The householder, though absent, had left an armed bodyguard to look after them. Their protector barbecued steaks for them with a cigarette in his mouth, his shoulder holster clearly visible. “Brian was complaining about all the bootleg records that were coming out,” George Martin remembers. “Suddenly, this tough-looking guy who was barbecuing our steaks leaned forward and said: ‘You want we should take care of them for you, Mr. Epstein?’ It was a very sinister moment.”
PART THREE
HAVING
THIRTEEN
“ONE MORE STAGE, ONE MORE LIMO, ONE MORE RUN FOR YOUR LIFE”
The scene is an oak-paneled room deep in the hallowed precincts of an ancient and illustrious Oxford college. Before the open fire stands the principal, an elderly gentleman both scholar and diplomat, conversing in mellifluous undertone with his junior dons and one or two of his most favored students. A cold buffet supper, garnished by the rarest wines from the college cellars, is attended by white-jacketed servants. From a distance, through the historic courtyards and cloisters, a clock may be heard, civilly striking the hour.
The fifteenth-century oak door opens—to admit the Beatles. They are wearing, as always, dark suits, deep-collared shirts, and boots with elasticated sides. Their manner, as they meet the college principal, the tutors and undergraduates, is deferential yet impudent. A servant offers Paul McCartney champagne in a silver goblet: Paul says he would rather have milk. George Harrison surveys the spread of smoked salmon and beef filet buffet, then beckons to a retainer. “Have you got any jam butties?” he asks. “I’ll trade you an autograph for a jam butty.”
The scene comes not from A Hard Day’s Night but from life. It happened at Brasenose College in March 1964 arranged by a still unknown self-publicist named Jeffrey Archer. It is recorded in the Daily Mail, in a vast picture spread and a story running to three columns. Nothing evokes more powerfully Britain’s mood in early 1964 than the Mail ’s hyperbolic triumph at this coup; its writer’s mixture of jocular indulgence and his
tory-witnessing earnestness.
The Beatles were no longer a teenage fad: They had become a national obsession. Far from self-destructing in the way everyone had predicted, their fame somehow fed on its own freakishness, passing more and still more previous limits of celebrity.
Anyone, in however unrelated and elevated a sphere, could command instant attention simply by mentioning their name. The usually rarified New Statesman published an editorial headed “The Menace of Beatledom.” The literary peer Lord Willis denounced them as “a cheap candy-floss culture-substitute”—as if his own television creations such as Dixon of Dock Green had not been precisely that. In his regular Sunday soapbox orations at Hyde Park Corner, the Methodist cleric-peer Lord Soper asked, “In what aspect of the full life of the Kingdom of God can we find a place for the Beatles?” Even royalty was beginning to recognize them as a national asset on a par with—well, royalty. The Duke of Edinburgh, in an address to a youth conference, called them “good blokes.” Buckingham Palace even let it be known that an American fan had written to the Queen, congratulating her on having John, Paul, George, and Ringo among her subjects. A lady-in-waiting had written back, regretting “that it is impossible for the Queen to tell you how to get in touch with them.”
The Variety Club of Great Britain named them, collectively, Show Business Personality of the Year. Wax effigies of them in their round-collar shirts were put on show among world leaders and film stars at Madame Tussaud’s. They became an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was all like a game, played with the roguish connivance of ancient institutions, to see in what unlikely surroundings the Beatles would turn up next, unawed by any grandeur, disarming the pomp of ages with a request for a jam butty.
In April, a literary luncheon, more heavily subscribed than any that Foyle’s bookshop had run since the age of Shaw and H. G. Wells, commemorated John Lennon’s entry into authorship. The little drawings and verses he used to doodle under his Quarry Bank desk—and still did at odd moments backstage—appeared as a slim volume entitled John Lennon In His Own Write. It was, said the Times Literary Supplement, “worth the study of anyone who fears for the impoverishment of the English language.” Other critics saw, in the book’s myopically mispronounced, punning fragments, the influence of Edward Lear and James Joyce. “Do you,” a radio interviewer asked John, “make conscious use of onomatopoeia?” “Automatic pier?” John echoed. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
It was thought shocking, but forgivably so, when the Foyle’s luncheon received no speech from the guest of honor. John, who arrived with Cynthia, deeply hungover after a night at the Ad Lib, had not realized he was supposed to say anything. Urged to his feet, he could only mumble, “Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.” An obliging press translated this into the more Beatlelike: “You’ve got a lucky face.”
The Mersey Sound pumped out by George Martin from Abbey Road studios represented a mere fraction of the teen music from far-flung British locations that now filled the charts, sometimes under names that made “Beatles” look positively conventional. There was also a “Manchester Sound,” spearheaded by the Hollies, whose spiraling harmonies were analyzed by musicologists with almost the same earnestness as the Beatles’ own. There was a Tyneside Sound, spearheaded by the Animals and their epic-length version of an old bordello-blues number, “The House of the Rising Sun.” There was a Birmingham Sound, spearheaded by the Applejacks, a Scottish Sound, spearheaded by Lulu and the Luvvers and the Poets, an Irish Sound, spearheaded by Them, featuring the young (but never youthful-looking) Van Morrison.
London and the south, meanwhile, fought back to regain their old cultural ascendancy with a Shepherds Bush Mod group called the High Numbers, soon to be transmogrified into The Who; with Soho blues stars like Georgie Fame; and with a thousand and one eager young R&B bands from which would eventually emerge Eric Clapton, Elton John, and Rod Stewart.
Ironically, the group destined to become the Beatles’ greatest rivals owed their start to the Liverpudlians’ native friendliness and generosity. On the day of their Variety Club awards back in 1963 John and Paul had been riding through Soho in a taxi when they spotted Brian’s erstwhile teenage publicist, Andrew Loog Oldham, walking along with a preoccupied frown on his face. Oldham had gone on to manage his Richmond discoveries, the Rolling Stones, after Brian passed on them. But, to his disappointment, they had so far failed to make themselves—and him—rich by writing their own songs à la Beatles.
Their first release, a cover version of Chuck Berry’s “Come On,” had barely registered in the charts. At this very moment Oldham had just left them at a club in Great Newport Street, vainly arguing about what to record as a follow-up. Overcome with frustration and annoyance, their young manager had gone out for a breath of fresh air—and the first people he happened to meet were John Lennon and Paul McCartney. “The conversation really did go like this,” Oldham recalls. “‘’ello, Andy. You’re looking unhappy. What’s the matter?’ ‘Oh, I’m fed up. The Stones can’t find a song to record.’ ‘Oh—we’ve got a song we’ve almost written. The Stones can have that to record if yer like.’”
The song was “I Wanna Be Your Man,” a tongue-in-cheek blast of R&B destined to be sung by Ringo on the With the Beatles album. With an obligingness Oldham still marvels at to this day, John and Paul turned their taxi around, accompanied him back to the Stones’ rehearsal room, and finished off the song so that the Stones could record it with minimum delay. One can read it as kindliness or as hard-hearted opportunism, since John and Paul at this point both saw their ultimate destiny as songwriters rather than performers. Like so many early Lennon-McCartney songs, “I Wanna Be Your Man” proved wonderfully adaptable to non-Beatles treatment, in this case providing a perfect frame for Mick Jagger’s sneery punk voice and Brian Jones’s palpitant slide guitar. By December 1963, it was headed for the U.K. Top Ten and the Stones were off the launchpad at last.
This huge glut of pop had long ago proved too much for the British Broadcasting Corporation, whose music radio output remained limited to a few strictly controlled slots on what it still rather condescendingly called the Light Programme. Now, that hitherto impregnable bastion of the Establishment was also to be challenged. The challenger was a young Irish entrepreneur named Ronan O’Rahilly, a colorful figure around the London scene well known to Brian Epstein and the Beatles. On Easter Day 1964, O’Rahilly’s pirate station, Radio Caroline, began transmitting continuous pop, with slick American-style disk jockeys and jingles, from a small ship anchored outside Britain’s territorial limits, beyond the jurisdiction of the Wireless Telegraphy Act that enshrined the BBC’s radio monopoly. The public’s response to getting what it, rather than the Light Programme, wanted was instantaneous. Radio Caroline won a huge listenership and gave the signal for a whole armada of rival pirate stations to begin operation from various offshore moorings as far north as the mouth of the River Clyde.
On pirate wavelengths, as everywhere, the Beatles were preeminent. Their new single, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” had become the first record ever to go to number one simultaneously in Britain and America, and that before a note of it had been heard. Advance orders from America alone exceeded three million copies.
Their first film had been shot during the six weeks between their return from America and their departure on a tour of Europe and the Far East. Rather than confecting an artificial plot, their scriptwriter Alun Owen had sensibly opted to show them just as they were, four astonished lads perpetually on the run, with seasoned British comedy actors in supporting roles like Norman Rossington as Norm, their manager, and Wilfred Brambell, from television’s top sitcom Steptoe and Son, as Paul’s grandfather. Owen’s script largely reproduced the four’s own private badinage, with an unacknowledged steal from W. S. Gilbert in the running joke about Brambell being “a clean old gentleman.” Location filming took place in north London, in installments rarely lasting longer than about ten minutes. “Wherever we set up, the wor
d would instantly get out that the Beatles were there,” director Richard Lester remembers. “After about three takes, we’d all have to run for our lives.”
Within this simple formula Lester managed to give the film both the gritty honesty of working-class dramas like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and the surreal artiness of something French or Italian. In its most memorable sequence, aboard an old-fashioned British Railways corridor train, the Beatles played “I Should Have Known Better” inside the guard’s van’s metal cage—first to an audience of glamorous gym-slipped schoolgirls, then as a soundtrack to their own private card game. Lester’s history with the Goons’ Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film also came to the fore in a speeded-up comedy sequence recalling Mack Sennett’s silent-movie Keystone Kops. Escaping their pent-up life, the Beatles gamboled onto an open sports field and began to hold imaginary running and sack races. Not even Cliff Richard had presented so pure an image of pop-star innocence.
The film was supposed to have been called Beatlemania. Then, at the last minute, a far better and more Beatle-like title offered itself in a favorite phrase of Ringo Starr’s. Whenever a round of performing, recording, partying, and fleeing from fans had been particularly crazy, Ringo, in an unconscious paraphrase of Eugene O’Neill, would say it had been “a hard day’s night.” The eponymous album that came with the film was the first to consist entirely of Lennon-McCartney compositions, including “If I Fell,” “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You,” “I Should Have Known Better” (with “yeah yeah yeah” mutating into “hey hey hey”) and the title track with its gloriously long and irrelevant guitar coda. The material had mostly been written months earlier, between crêpes flambées at the George V. Yet the album evoked the film, just as the film caught Beatlemania at its maddest and happiest.
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