Besides, we were only millimeters away from hitting the Toppermost of the Poppermost, and I wasn’t about to let anybody or anything stop us.
CHAPTER FOUR
1965
The Beatles’ debut flick, A Hard Day’s Night, was a smash with fans and critics alike, so the canny Liverpudlians, not wanting to mess with a successful formula, brought director Dick Lester back into the fold for the film’s follow-up, Help! They had a bigger budget this time around, which meant they were able to film not only in the UK but also in Austria and the Bahamas. Different and better locales meant different and better herbal jazz cigarettes; thus, according to Lester, it was lights, camera, duct tape, marijuana, action … and mayhem.
RICHARD LESTER: They wanted to put a ski scene in the movie, and who was I to turn them down? Picture this: you’ve got three blitzed-out, blissed-out zombies on skis, wrapped completely in duct tape—completely, that is, except for the tiny holes over their mouths and noses that enabled them to breathe and, of course, to toke up—tottering around the side of a mountain. Man, I wish they had DVDs back then, because I would’ve put together one hell of a gag reel.
Eppy’d told me about how weed—and its aftereffects—had become a normal part of their lives, and my thinking was, As long as they do their jobs, they can smoke and fart all they want.
Which is exactly what they did.
They were sneaky about it; I didn’t even know they’d gone to get high until, well, they’d gotten high. One minute, I see them calmly trying to figure out how to strap into the skis, and the next, I see them tearing off all their duct tape and engaging in an epic snowball fight. Now, that might not seem like that big of a deal—six-year-olds engage in epic snowball fights all the time, and they survive—but the snowballs got bigger and bigger, and the fighting became angrier and angrier, and it got ugly. It wasn’t like they were mad at one another; I think it was more about the competition. They all wanted to be King Turd of Snow Mountain.
George was the first to take it up a notch, when he removed his leg and used it to whack a snowball at John. (Now, I’d never seen anybody use his leg as a cricket bat before, but this was the Beatles, so you have to expect the unexpected.) John followed suit by yanking off his right arm and hurling it at Harrison’s noggin. He scored a direct hit, but the throw wasn’t strong enough to knock off George’s melon, which was fortunate, because had he been on target, we would’ve lost at least a day of shooting looking for a surgeon who could properly reattach the skull.
Paul, who, up until that moment, for reasons unknown, was throwing snowballs at himself, noticed the commotion. In two or three seconds, he’d put together an orb of snow as big as a boulder, and yelled, “Oi, if you cunts don’t cut that out, you’ll both be eating this for lunch, y’know!”
Using only his teeth, John removed his own left arm, spit the arm onto the ground, then kicked it toward Paul. Paul ducked, then kicked the massive snowball toward John. John avoided the snowball, and then, with blinding speed, retrieved and reattached both of his arms. Then he conked Paulie on his butt. And he hit him hard, so hard that Paul landed face-first in the snow, about seventy-five yards away. Even though the fight was messing up my shooting schedule, I was impressed. It takes a lot to bring down Paul McCartney.
George, who apparently had gotten his bearings back, took off one of his skis and whipped it at John, who dodged it neatly. Then George took off the other and chucked it at the prone Mr. McCartney. The sharp end of the ski lodged itself into Paul’s back, theoretically pinning him to the ground. But as anybody who’s been attacked by any of the Fab Four knows, it’s hard to keep a Beatle incapacitated for long. So, without even removing the ski from his rib cage, Paul stood up; the ski remained lodged in his back, but only briefly, as he pulled it out without even a blink. Where his heart was supposed to be was a gaping hole, odd for a man who was known for writing such romance-filled ditties.
George tried to escape up the mountain, but Paul caught him easily. He grabbed George by the ankle, whirled him over his head like he was an Arsenal banner—a clever move he later told me he learned from John—then tossed poor Georgie up the mountain. Harrison ended up what had to be six football fields’ length away; the pile of snow that was kicked up when he landed looked like a mushroom cloud. Now I don’t know if they got tired or bored or if the weed wore off, but right then, the melee stopped as quickly as it started.
They had a couple of more fights before we wrapped, the most notable being in the Bahamas, when George launched Paul into the ocean and he landed a solid half mile away. He made it back to shore but took a good long while. For the record, Liverpool zombies are slow, clumsy swimmers.
I got so wrapped up in watching these battles that it never dawned on me to roll camera, and I didn’t get a single zombie-on-zombie clash on film. Frankly, ninety minutes of that sort of undead madness would’ve made for a better movie, that’s for damn sure.
GEORGE HARRISON: After we finished filming Help!, we suffered from a bit of, I dunno, I guess you could call it malaise. All that Mania can get to a bloke.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: We were exhausted, y’know, but I didn’t think we should stop.
NEIL ASPINALL: The boys needed a break, but Brian wouldn’t let that happen. They were knackered, and John was suffering the worst.
JOHN LENNON: I dunno if it was the grass or what, but I was hungry all the fookin’ time, and human food wasn’t cutting it. I could eat three steaks, four baked potatoes, six tins of beans, and eighteen boxes of Corn Flakes in one sitting, and I’d still be starved. The only way to placate my stomach was with the classic zombie meal of human brains with a side of bone marrow.
LYMAN COSGROVE: Lennon’s 1965 murder spree was one for the record books. It rivaled the eating rampages of Earl J. Eaves in 1956—Mr. Eaves ate some thirty-two brains in seventeen days—and Martine Jefferson’s 1961 onslaught, a three-day-long bloodbath that ended in twelve deaths and ten new Liverpool Processers. John held his own, downing twenty-eight brains in a two-week period. That was impressive, and one can’t help admiring his single-mindedness.
What Eaves, Jefferson, and Lennon had in common was a notable weight gain. You see, Liverpool zombies rarely become ravenously hungry, and generally only need a handful of brains a year to survive. But when something triggers that eating mechanism, and they ingest brain after brain after brain, their gastrointestinal system goes off the rails. The fact that Lennon was inhaling an inordinate amount of cannabis didn’t help matters.
JOHN LENNON: So I added one or two pounds. I don’t think anybody noticed.
NEIL ASPINALL: John went through a tubby phase, no question.
RINGO STARR: His face got a bit fuller, his tummy got a bit wider, and his complexion got a big grayer. It wasn’t attractive.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: He certainly filled up his suits, John did, y’know.
GEORGE HARRISON: He was the fattest zombie I ever personally saw. And it slowed him down. He was still able to move well—he could chase down a mortal without too much trouble, so he was able to keep on eating—but if he’d needed to defend himself against, say, a Ninja, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.
If there was a time for Ringo or me to take over the band, that would’ve been it.
RINGO STARR: One afternoon, Georgie invited me out to lunch, and he spent the entire meal telling me, “John’s a fatso, Rings. He’s slowed down, and you can take him out. Think about it: it’s always Lennon and McCartney this, Lennon and McCartney that. Isn’t it time people start talking about Harrison and Starr? You can be the guy. We can be the guys! The best part is, if Johnny’s gone, you can sing more than one song an album.”
I told him I was perfectly content with the way things were, and if he wanted to start an uprising, he was on his own. He looked pissed off, and you don’t want to be around George Harrison when he gets pissed off, so I became virtually invisible and scooted home. Aside from berating me for leaving him with the check, George never mentioned that lunch
again.
JOHN LENNON: Eating brains isn’t like eating food. There are hundreds of thousands of different human meals to choose from, but brains are all the same. The brain of a seventy-two-year-old Spanish gent tastes just like the brain of an eleven-year-old French girl. That being the case, in order to keep all these deaths quiet, I confined my meals to the Addenbrooke’s Hospital geriatric ward.
If you were on your last legs, you were my breakfast. If you had one foot in the grave, you were lunch. If they were getting ready to pull the plug, you were dinner. I don’t think you’d enjoy hearing about my in-between-meals snacks.
Brian thought I was being self-indulgent. It seemed like once an hour, he’d tell me, “You don’t need all this food, John.” I didn’t think it was all that big of a deal. These people were close to the end anyhow; if they died a day or two earlier than scheduled, so fookin’ what? They’d lived good lives, plus they’d get to tell everybody in the afterworld that they got eaten by a Beatle. I know for a fact that at one point in time, that earned you some serious cool points with the dead.
But yeah, no real weight gain for Johnny Lennon. Not much at all. Okay, I maybe gained a few pounds. Maybe three or four.
PAUL MCCARTNEY: We put him on a hotel scale one night in Paris: sixteen stone. Two-hundred-plus pounds. That’s a lot of excess brains, y’know. A lot of bloody excess brains.
BRIAN EPSTEIN: Image isn’t everything, but it still matters, so I asked him to drop three stone. He pulled off his leg, wrapped it around my neck like it was a scarf, and said, “There’s five stone right there, mate. Does that work for you?”
Up until that point, I never realized just how bad rotting zombie limbs smelled; I almost passed out from the stench. I shrugged and the leg fell to the ground. Then I nudged it away with my foot and said, “Johnny, lad, you’d best get it together immediately, because New York is waiting. That’s a big gig, our biggest one yet, and you need your strength back, mentally and physically.”
As I’m sure you know, John listened. Soon he was mentally and physically strong. Very, very strong.
In June 1965, a mere week after graduating second in her class from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Jessica Brandice landed a job at The New York Times. It’s been said that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger took a personal liking to Ms. Brandice—little surprise, considering how she simultaneously oozes intelligence and sexuality, even undead—which is why he ignored the unwritten reporter code and assigned her to the crime beat before she’d even written a single word for the venerable newspaper.
Luckily for Sulzberger, it turned out that Jessica was far more than a brainiac and a pretty face; the girl was a terrific investigative reporter, as witnessed by her brilliant coverage of The Beatles’ August 15 concert at Shea Stadium, coverage that ultimately led to the book The Shea Stadium Riot: How the Beatles Almost Destroyed New York City, arguably the finest examination of how, if a few things had shaken out differently, the British zombie invasion could have taken the United States off the map.
Each August 15, Jessica honors the memory of the riots with a lecture at the New York Public Library. I sat down with her at length after her 2005 discussion; it was the fortieth anniversary of the Shea Stadium show, but Jessica remembers that horrifying evening like it was yesterday. Little wonder: once you get a look at the scars that run up and down her pretty gray face, you know that’s a day she’ll never forget, until the end of time.
(Note: Brian Epstein, Neil Aspinall, and three-fourths of the Beatles refused to discuss Shea either on or off the record. Lennon talked. Sort of.)
JOHN LENNON: The one thing I’ll say about Shea is, you can blame it on my zombie nature.
JESSICA BRANDICE: It was one of the first rock concerts held at a major outdoor stadium, and the fact that a zombie band was performing had the city government on edge. As there was no precedent, putting together a security plan for Shea Stadium—not to mention New York City as a whole—was complete guesswork. Neither New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., nor his staff had a clue how to deal with … well, the fact of the matter is, they didn’t know what they’d have to deal with. It could have turned out to be a completely peaceful crowd. It could have turned out to be hundreds of thousands of screaming Beatlemaniacs and disturbed zombie fanatics ready and eager to trash Queens. It could have turned out to be something in between those two extremes. They had no clue.
My editor didn’t assign me to cover the concert; the only reason I was there was because my boyfriend, Dave Errol, was the Times rock writer, and I was his plus one. I certainly wouldn’t have attended of my own accord. I liked the Beatles as much as the next girl, but there’s no way I would’ve gone to Shea, only to be surrounded by screaming teenage girls.
Now, the only time I’d seen the Beatles perform previously was their second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, the one where they blew up those poor cameramen. They’d looked perfectly poised on the television screen, right up to the moment when the screen went black. But that night at Shea, as they walked to the stage from the third-base dugout, I thought they looked twitchy.
They’d stuck me and Dave in the first-base dugout, which was about ten feet away from stage left. The dais was raised, and the dugout was below ground level, so the only Beatle we were able to see clearly was the Beatle who always stood stage left, John Lennon. I recently read an interview where Paul said that John “went crazy” during the concert, but it seemed to me he was acting a little crazy before they even played a note.
Dave said that the band was too energetic, and pointed out that Paul was counting off the songs too quickly, and they were racing through their two-and-a-half-minute tunes in about a minute forty-five. He also noted that it was weird they had an electric keyboard onstage for John, because as far as he knew, Lennon was, at best, an amateur pianist.
They had their amplifiers turned all the way up, and since we were so close to the stage, by the third number, our ears were ringing. So I took a tissue from my purse, ripped off two little pieces, wadded them up, and voila, makeshift earplugs. I did the same for Dave, and it was a damn good thing we did.
Seemingly only a few minutes later, the band went into the last song of their set, “I’m Down.” Lennon started playing the keyboard with his elbow … actually, he wasn’t playing it but, rather, bashing it, sliding back and forth, and back and forth, creating a weird, dissonant mess of noise. When the song ended, Lennon hit the keyboard with his forehead, and then the stadium went silent. The screaming stopped. Fifty-five-thousand-plus people shut down, just like that.
And then Lennon grabbed a microphone, jumped on top of the keyboard, and whispered one word: “Poppermost.”
And then the place went up for grabs.
In virtual unison, everybody in the crowd ripped their seats from the concrete and threw them onto the field. A good number of the hard, green wooden chairs hit the Beatles, but they seemed unaffected; for that matter, Harrison even threw a bunch of them back.
And then, the adults in the crowd froze in place, and the teenagers stormed the field. Watching the police detail try to stem the tide of boys and girls was laughable. The cops were standing a good ten feet apart, and the teens—who were all literally foaming at the mouth—plowed over, around, and through New York’s Finest. To their credit, the police did their best, but they had no chance.
After the teens tore up and ate every blade of grass in Shea Stadium, the entire crowd—they were a mob at this point, really—stampeded to the exits; they moved quickly and violently, but almost politely, as if to make certain that none of their allies were injured. Aside from all the teens vomiting up half-digested grass, it looked to me like they were heading off to the train station.
At that point, the Shea Stadium concert went from being a music story to a crime story, so I told Dave to haul ass back to his apartment, because I had to follow this through to the end, and I couldn’t have him tagging along. He berated me for risking my life for a
newspaper that paid me fifteen thou a year, and I told him to fuck off, this was a big deal, and money wasn’t the issue. Then he asked me how the hell I expected either of us to get into Manhattan when the subways were going to be filled with hypnotized Beatlemaniacs who might be out for blood. I told him he had a point, but I had to follow the story. If he thought he could keep up with me, great; if not, I was going to have to go without him.
I’d been a sprinter at Columbia and was a considerably faster runner than Dave was, so I gave him a kiss, then zipped out of the stadium to the subway station. The next time I saw Dave, he was in the postsurgical recovery room at the Queens Medical Center. He was back to work eight weeks later, with a sixteen-inch zigzag scar running from his chest to his pelvis.
The mob took over the subway and that weird aura of politeness went out the window. From across the street, I could see they weren’t just jumping the turnstiles—they were ripping them clean off and climbing over one another as if they were tigers on the hunt: grabbing, clawing, biting, spitting, roaring, not caring what or who they were hurting. There was no way I was getting on that train, so I hopped a cab.
My gut told me they’d ride from Shea to Grand Central Station, and I was right. According to reports, one-third of the crowd exited at Grand Central, while the other two-thirds transferred to other lines. Within an hour, the fifty-five thousand people who John Lennon had hypnotized were strategically dispersed throughout the city. I don’t know if Lennon planned it that way, or if these poor people were acting on instinct.
If your readers want specifics on the riots—for instance, the Times Square bonfire, the complete destruction of the Bronx sewer system, or those brutal lynchings in Prospect Park—that’s all in my book. What’s not in my book is my own personal journey, and the only reason I’m able to discuss it with you now is because I’ve gone through a shitload of therapy.
Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion Page 15
