America was the place to go. From boyhood John had wondered about it, marvelled at its seeming zest and creativity and loved its music – not just rock and roll, but some of the Broadway show tunes, too. But as Pan Am 101 lowered its undercarriage to touch down on the runway of the newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport, he was feeling nervous. He and Cynthia had sat together on the flight, during a journey when the tension had gradually been rising for the Beatles – and all their party. They might be top of the US charts, but what if that was a one-off fluke? What if America didn’t like the look of them? Bill Haley had been a big star in England, until he’d appeared there, after which his career had gone into terminal decline. Had that been an omen? ‘We can always turn around and go home again if no one likes us, and say we’d only come to buy some LPs,’ he’d joked during the flight. But then, as the plane taxied to a halt, laughs of relief broke out around the first-class compartment. Capitol Records had done their job well. Down there at the foot of the steps to the plane was a small army of photographers and newsreel cameras.
What none of them had known while they’d been travelling was that music radio stations all over New York had been priming the pump of expectation, playing Beatles records one after the other. WINS had even been giving the time as ‘8.30 a.m. Beatle-time’, and the weather report as ‘fine, sunny, 32 Beatle-degrees’.
The Beatles got off the plane first. Leaving Cynthia still sitting in her seat, as Brian had insisted, John pulled on the jaunty leather cap he had decided to wear and joined the others as they stepped out of the door and smiled hello to America for the first time – the country that would one day become his home.
From that moment, Americans took the Beatles to their hearts and kept them there. It had taken nine months for the Beatles to conquer Britain, but America’s devotion was instantaneous. Perhaps there’s some truth in the theory that it was, in some part, a mass reaction after the national trauma of the assassination of President Kennedy that had occurred less than three months earlier. America, the thinking goes, needed something feel-good to help it recover, and the fun of the Beatles was a means of catharsis. With their songs, and jokes, and what looked like silly hair, they brought a kind of wholesome joy to a recovering nation. Of course, the hysteria would become bigger and noisier in America, but then everything was bigger and noisier in America.
The press conference that followed the group’s arrival has since become a part of rock folklore, with the four Beatles at their irreverent best, wisecracking answers to dumb questions. It was easy for them. They’d done it hundreds of times before – never taking any of it seriously. ‘Will you sing something for us?’ asked a reporter.
‘No. We need money first,’ came back John. Everyone laughed.
‘What about the movement in Detroit to stamp out the Beatles?’
‘We have a campaign of our own to stamp out Detroit.’
‘Do you hope to take anything home with you?’
‘The Rockefeller Center.’
And so it went on. Everyone present wanted to be amused, and, when necessary, the Beatles could be an effective comic turn, as they tried to make each other laugh, too. As George would say: ‘Everyone in Liverpool thinks they’re a comedian . . . We’ve had that born and bred into us.’
After meeting the press, the four Beatles were then driven into Manhattan in four separate Cadillacs, with their records coming at them from whichever radio station their car radio was tuned to. This hugely impressed John. Before arriving in America he’d been thinking, ‘If we could just get a grip, we would wipe them out.’ They already had that grip.
A year earlier, their beds for the night had often been cheap hotels in small English towns as they toured up and down the country, and they’d survived on a diet of egg and chips in transport cafés. Now they were staying in the Plaza, New York’s smartest and most traditional hotel, in four separate suites that opened out on to a large central room, from where they could stare out at the thousands of fans in Central Park below. It was a kind of celebrity prison, but it was thrilling, too, as a documentary film crew tried to capture the moment.
For the next two days, when the Beatles weren’t doing interviews, they tried to enjoy New York, sneaking out of the Plaza Hotel one night to visit the Peppermint Lounge, where Ringo doffed his usual lugubrious demeanour and manically danced the twist. Then there was a drive around the periphery of Central Park, which, if he’d known, would have given John his first sight of the Dakota building. But their real purpose in New York was to announce their arrival and sell records, so on the Sunday afternoon they were driven to the CBS TV Studio 50 on West 53rd Street for The Ed Sullivan Show.
And, just as the Queen Mother had given the Beatles her blessing in Britain, now Ed Sullivan did the honours for the United States. Aided by a telegram from Elvis and the Colonel, the TV host welcomed the group before 73 million Americans – at least some of whom might have been otherwise engaged robbing houses or cars, a dip in crime statistics for the hour of the show would later suggest. Reckoned at the time to be the biggest audience for any TV show in history, ‘The Beatles on Ed Sullivan’ became a life-punctuating moment for many, and life-changing for others.
Like their television appearances in the UK, their performance was pretty standard stuff. Dressed in dark little suits, ties and Chelsea boots and their hair just shampooed and pageboy floppy, Paul opened with ‘All My Loving’, while John, who sounded as though he hadn’t been plugged in, looked happily around as though he didn’t really care. In truth, he couldn’t see very far.
Altogether, his attitude throughout that first weekend in New York was one of bemusement. ‘Never in a million years did we think anything like this,’ he would say over and over in amazement at the pandemonium going on around him. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life . . . We’re just walking through it like watching a film . . . as though it’s happening to somebody else.’
Meanwhile, Cynthia was trying not to be photographed, and diverting her eyes from where, across the room, her husband was being flirted with by the Ronettes, and any other girl who could wangle her way into the inner circle – as pretty girls often did.
The Beatles had expected some snide comments from the press about their debut, and they duly got them the following morning. ‘Seventy-five per cent publicity, twenty per cent haircut, five per cent lilting talent,’ came the Herald-Tribune; ‘a sedate anti-climax’, read the New York Times; and ‘laughable lunacy’, reckoned the Daily News. John liked that line. It was ‘lunacy’. But the obsession with their hair was becoming wearyingly boring.
The following day the entire party took the train through a snowstorm down to Washington DC. So far the Beatles had been playing up the cuddly, zany image that Brian had been cultivating for them. But that wasn’t who they were, and John could only be pushed so far. The cliff edge was reached when, after a performance with the Chiffons, Tommy Roe and a then little-known group called the Beach Boys at the Washington Coliseum, they were invited to a charity ball at the British Embassy by the ambassador, Sir David Ormsby-Gore. He was a charming, trendy aristocrat, but some of his young staff at the embassy were about to forget their manners. Having joined the party with Lady Ormsby-Gore on his arm, John had just waded through the crowd to get a drink when a pushy embassy official said: ‘Come on now, do your stuff.’
‘I’m not going back through that crowd,’ John replied. ‘I want to finish my drink.’
‘Oh, yes you are,’ replied the official firmly, to be immediately joined by a smart young lady in a ball gown, who tried to chivvy John along.
The Beatles hadn’t found themselves being patronised or pushed around by a bunch of toffs before, and they didn’t like it. To John, the British class divide was still ‘as snobby as it ever was . . . people like us can break through a little . . . but only a little’. He decided to leave. Just then, however, a British debutante walked up to Ringo, produced a pair of nail scissors from her handbag and snipped off a lock of his hair – his Beatle hair!!
John blew up. Brian Epstein might have been signing contracts the whole weekend to get images of the Beatles stuck on to all kinds of memorabilia from lunch boxes to T-shirts, shoes, chewing gum, candy bars, toy guitars and cuddly toys, but the Beatles themselves weren’t cuddly toys. ‘People were touching us as we walked past . . .’ John would remember. ‘Then some bloody animal cut Ringo’s hair. I walked out . . . swearing at all of them.’
Lady Ormsby-Gore apologised as they left. But it wasn’t her fault. Everyone was over-excited. But, as the ball had been filled with journalists following in the Beatles’ wake, the row inevitably made the newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic the following day. Some pundits accused John of having been rude to the ambassador. But, overwhelmingly, sympathy lay with him and the Beatles.
It was the Sixties. Times had changed.