Many American teenagers watch the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show against a noisy backdrop of snorts and harrumphs. In New York, twelve-year-old Sigrid Nunez has to contend with her mean uncle mocking their looks, their voices, their every movement. Some parents call them faggots. Others take the ultimate stand and switch their televisions off. ‘You call that music?’ Sigrid’s friend’s father shouts. ‘And when do you think was the last time those creeps had a bath?’
But not every member of the older generation is against them. Billy Graham watches The Ed Sullivan Show in order to, as he puts it, ‘gain a better understanding of the youth of today’. For the first time, America’s most celebrated evangelist breaks his own rule to avoid television on the Sabbath. After all, he has to know what is going on. He concludes, not unfairly, that ‘The Beatles are a product of our time. They represent the restlessness and the longing of young people today for something off-beat, something different.’ Later, in Omaha, he advises a packed audience: ‘Watch the kids’ reaction to the Beatles and you’ll know that man is an emotional creature.’
In New York, Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein, aged from twelve to two, keep an eye on their forty-five-year-old father Leonard. Barely three months ago, on the day after the assassination of President Kennedy, he conducted the New York Philharmonic playing Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony for a televised memorial. For Leonard, as, in a different way, for Billy Graham, the Beatles represent a vision of the future: ‘I fell in love with the Beatles’ music (and simultaneously, of course, with their four faces-cum-personae) along with my children, two girls and a boy, in whom I discovered the frabjous falsetto shriek-cum-croon, the ineluctable beat, the flawless intonation, the utterly fresh lyrics, the Schubert-like flow of musical invention and the Fuck-You coolness of these Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse … Together we saw it, the Vision, and heard the same Dawn-Bird, Elephant-Trump, Fanfare of the Future.’
The following morning, over breakfast in their suite at the Plaza Hotel, the Beatles sift through their reviews. Conservative commentators compete with one another to voice the most vehement disdain. The New York Times carries two reviews, neither appreciative. ‘The Beatles’ vocal quality can be described as hoarsely incoherent, with the minimal enunciation necessary to communicate the schematic texts,’ writes the music critic Theodore Strongin. The TV critic, Jack Gould, calls their performance both ‘a sedate anti-climax’ and ‘a fine mass placebo’.
Under a front-page headline, ‘Beatles Bomb on TV’, the Herald-Tribune says: ‘The Beatles apparently could not carry a tune across the Atlantic but were saved by the belles in the audience.’ Their reviewer condemns them as ‘75 per cent publicity, 20 per cent haircut, and 5 per cent lilting lament’, and ‘a magic act that owed less to Britain than to Barnum’.
The New York Daily News offers a mixed response: admiration, stupefaction, incomprehension. ‘Not even Elvis Presley ever incited such laughable lunacy among the screaming generation. The Presleyan gyrations and caterwauling, in fact, were but luke-warm dandelion tea compared to the 100-proof elixir served by the Beatles.’
‘Just thinking about the Beatles seems to induce mental disturbance,’ notes George Dixon in the Washington Post a week later. Like many other commentators, he can’t stop going on about how they aren’t worth going on about. ‘They have a commonplace, rather dull act that hardly seems to merit mentioning,’ he writes, ‘yet people hereabouts have mentioned scarcely anything else for a couple of days.’
The viewing figures offer no comfort to the critics. Seventy-three million Americans tuned in, the second-largest viewing figure in the history of commercial television. The first came eleven weeks earlier, following the chilling words ‘News just in of shots fired in Dallas.’
In many people’s minds, the two events will always be linked: the assassination of JFK was winter; the Beatles are spring. Years later, Joe Queenan Jr, now a successful writer, is convinced the link is valid: ‘I have always believed that the Beatles’ stupendous success in America was directly related to JFK’s death. I remember reading this theory years and years after the fact and thinking, “Yes. Here is one theory about pop culture that is not stupid or obvious.” The Beatles helped heal America … Some musicians heal ethnic groups. Some musicians heal nations. The Beatles healed an entire planet.’