The Jungle Drums The Jungle DrumsFor the Beatles, everything changed with their leap to the top of the charts. They were no longer just a local act, not even a northern act. Once their record hit number one, they were lofted into a larger orbit that identified them as “Parlophone Recording Stars” or, perhaps somewhat prematurely, “Britain’s top vocal-instrumental group.” “Please Please Me” had extended their popularity far beyond the Cavern walls and far beyond the Mersey banks, establishing them as something of a national phenomenon. By the second half of the Helen Shapiro tour, everywhere the Beatles played, ear-splitting screams broke out at the mere mention of their names. The minute the lights went down, the crowd went crazy. And after each act finished its set, the theaters shook with kids hollering, “We want the Beatles! We want the Beatles!”
The Beatles got a charge out of it, playing off the energy with increasing confidence, but it wreaked havoc with the tour. The show had been constructed so that each act was assured of its own twenty-minute set, giving Helen half an hour to close the performance. That had worked for a while, but as each day passed, as audiences grew more familiar with “Please Please Me,” as word of the Beatles spread from town to town, “all the people coming to the show were just waiting for the Beatles” and it often took several minutes to restore order between sets.
During those first few months in the spotlight, the Beatles regarded the mayhem as a novelty—and a boost to their spirits. Most of the days were interminably long and insufferably boring, with hours spent cooped up on the bus followed by ridiculous hours of downtime. In the northern towns, they’d “have a walk through the streets and visit a greasy spoon for some lunch.” Afterward, if there was time, they would go shopping. Then, about four o’clock, before the first show, says Kenny Lynch, “we’d have a bacon sarnie and a mug of tea in the closest café to the theater.”
The tea came in handy. John, for one, couldn’t function without it. His voice had never fully recovered from the bashing he’d given it recording “Twist and Shout,” and as a result, the live shows did a number on his vocal chords. On long bus trips, he’d sweet-talk the driver into stopping whenever possible so he could tank up on something warm. And “in the dressing-rooms,” observed Ray Coleman, who covered the Beatles for Melody Maker, “Lennon was addicted to tea.” His hand was constantly wrapped around a steam-capped paper cup, convenient to sip from or to warm his fingers. The conditions in most theaters were impoverished, the backstage comforts less than meager, the heat often nonexistent. If the Beatles had envisioned a world of glamour and luxury as rock ’n roll stars, this tour brought them back to earth with a thud.
As dreary as the theaters were, their accommodations were often worse—the guesthouses they stayed in run-down, staffed with local help who regarded them as nothing more than riffraff. All-night service stations were the restaurant of choice for most package-tour units, with a heaping portion of starchy beans on toast and chips a safe enough bet to see them through until the next opportunity arose to eat something.
Touring was hard work—and worse. “It was always a bore,” Ringo recalled. At least when they were on the bus, there were plenty of diversions. A card game was usually in progress among facing rows of seats. There were invariably conversations about the previous night’s show and its aftermath, with bloated conquests bandied about like fish stories. Each day, the boys plowed through newspapers, searching for their names. Once, in a Yorkshire town, they found an article hailing them as “a band in the American Negro blues tradition,” in which they reveled and quoted from ad nauseam. For a change of scenery, John read avant-garde poetry, along with a volume of Spike Milligan’s verse to lighten the mood. Everyone wrote home, with dreamy postcards sent to their girls.
In the highs and lows of those journeys, however, John and Paul always made time to work on some music. “They wrote every day on the coach, like clockwork,” says Kenny Lynch. At some point John or Paul would catch the other’s eye, then they would get up nonchalantly, work their way to the back of the bus, take out their guitars, and get down to business. “It was always the same routine: one would play, and the other would be writing down lyrics and chord changes.” They were in their own private world back there, absorbed by the instant gratification of the work and adept at blocking out distractions. Every so often Kenny would lean over the seat in front of them and attempt to offer a line or critique the work. “Fuck off! Turn around!” they replied—and they meant it.
On the bus, they began to explore new ground. The steadying success of the collaboration encouraged them to experiment with different chord combinations, concentrating more on the choruses—or what they called “the middle eight”—to give the songs a fuller, more accomplished sound.
The effects of this creative experimentation began to show up immediately. A real breakthrough came on February 28, as the bus rolled south along roads from York to Shrewsbury. To fulfill an urgent request from George Martin for a follow-up single to “Please Please Me,” John and Paul spread out across the backseat and worked on several ideas. One, finished a few days earlier, was “Thank You Little Girl.”* The song still needed tinkering, but as they played around with it, other themes emerged and they went off on a tangent, leaving the song behind. In an interview with columnist Alan Smith, John recalled how after a while they were just “fooling around” on the guitar. “Then we began to get a good melody line, and we really started to work on it.”
The new tune came quickly. Working in the key of C, they sketched out a verse using a standard four-chord progression. But when it came time to construct the middle eight, Paul accidentally hit a G-minor and felt something shift. “It went to a surprising place,” he explained.
Once they had the melody, the words just tumbled out. It was John who came up with the basic premise. As he recalled it: “Paul and I had been talking about one of the letters in [NME’s] ‘From You to Us’ column.” Up to that point, all their songs exploited pronouns in the title as a way of making them “very direct and personal.” That way, Paul thought, “people can identify… with it.” This time around, they’d finally hit the mother lode: me and you, together, in the same phrase.
“From Me to You” was finished before they even crossed the Shrewsbury town line. As soon as the ink was dry on the last “to you,” the Beatles knew they had another smash.
The Beatles cut their new single five days later, sandwiched between a show in St. Helens and a radio appearance in Manchester. The session, which ran from 2:30 until 10:00 P.M. at Abbey Road, went as smoothly as the last. As uncertain as he still was about rock ’n roll, George Martin was amazed by the quality of the song—and that John and Paul kept writing obvious winners. He’d never experienced anything like it before, and the prospect that they were real, as opposed to one-shot wonders, gave him chills.
They rehearsed the number once or twice while Norman Smith worked in the booth to get a balance on the mikes. George’s guitar intro’ed the song with a lick that mimicked the opening line. But something about it didn’t work for the producer. Martin pulled up a stool and listened to them play it again. There, right at the top: it was unexciting, slack. Why not sing the intro? he suggested. Just as George played it: “Da da da da da dum dum da…”
Sing it? What an odd approach. No rock ’n roll artist in their memory had ever sung an opening lick, but it never occurred to the Beatles—nor would they have dared—to argue with Martin. Martin was known for creating an atmosphere in which recording artists felt comfortable to express their feelings. But there was a clear, almost palpable distinction between them, based largely on roles of authority. To working-class Liverpool lads, inadequate by nature in London, in the Smoke, Martin’s refined social graces and perfect diction drew a line. It put him in a position of command, of authority, and while their relationship was harmonious, it was an uneasy alliance. If he wanted them to sing it, they’d give it a try. Besides, after an initial pass at it, they heard the difference: it was dynamic, it drove them into the song. “In a way, this made them aware of George’s enormous musical sense,” says Ron Richards, who listened to the result sometime later that week and “wasn’t at all surprised” by how well it turned out. “The Beatles had marvelous ears when it came to writing and arranging their material, but George had real taste—and an innate sense of what worked.”
From the moment they were signed, the Beatles regarded the States as the Promised Land. That isn’t to say they weren’t pleased with recent developments. In fact, they were thrilled by the opportunity to make the kind of records they were making and tickled by the possibility of getting airplay in London. But it was America—home of Chuck, Buddy, Elvis, Gene, Richard, and Phil and Don—on which they ultimately set their sights. America had the aura; it would legitimize them in a way that no one from England had yet experienced.
Brian shared their dream and persisted in his belief that an American tour should happen without delay. He had first brought it to EMI’s attention after “Love Me Do” cracked the charts, but the brass couldn’t promise anything other than that they would try to find a suitable outlet. Now, with “Please Please Me” at number one and the third single in the can, he stepped up his efforts, pestering George Martin to get something done.
The stumbling block seemed to be Capitol Records, which, according to its president, Alan Livingston, had the right of first refusal on EMI products in the States. EMI had bought Capitol in the late 1950s, cashing in almost immediately in Europe with Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mercer, and Nat King Cole. “The idea was that [Capitol] would also be useful for launching EMI’s roster in the USA,” says Roland Rennie, who had come up through the ranks of the British organization and functioned as its chief traffic coordinator, fighting to get product released overseas, and vice versa. “But the Capitol Tower in Hollywood was very much its own master. They called all the shots—and they frankly refused to put out any of our records.” Every two weeks EMI sent packages to Capitol, stuffed with their latest releases, and within days always got back the same terse response: Not suitable for the U.S. market. “They turned everything down.”
Most parent companies would simply demand that their subsidiaries follow orders, but EMI took a very hands-off position with Capitol. Its lawyers had warned that such interference might summon up antitrust litigation, which, Rennie says, “put the fear of God in the British.” EMI never said so much as peep to Capitol about its A&R responsibilities. “Think of that,” he muses, “not a word—they only owned it.”
In America, Alan Livingston claims he “didn’t even hear the first Beatles record”—it was just one more bloodless import that Capitol chucked on the overflowing slush pile. Earlier, he had appointed a producer named David Dexter to screen every EMI artist that was sent to Capitol for consideration. And according to Dexter, the Beatles were “nothing.” According to his Capitol colleagues, Dexter was “a jazz man… who couldn’t see [sic] pop records.” Out of “courtesy,” Alan Livingston says, they would occasionally put out an English artist to satisfy the parent company, but it was merely a gesture, never bearing any fruit.
That left matters in the hands of Leonard G. Wood, known to everyone as L.G., who was EMI’s managing director and “very sympathetic” toward the company’s growing “American problem.” Rennie had first brought the Beatles to Wood’s attention in late 1962, after George Martin had turned up the heat. “He was polite but noncommittal, warning me again about this antitrust business,” Rennie remembers. But there was another course of action that Wood recommended he explore. A year earlier, frustrated by Capitol’s rigid resistance toward EMI releases, he commandeered a Capitol employee named Joe Zerger and set up a company in America—the absurdly important-sounding Transglobal Music—which was to lease EMI’s repertoire throughout the States once Capitol had turned it down.
Zerger, whose heart wasn’t in it, “didn’t do anything much,” says Rennie. But his partner was a young man named Paul Marshall, a dapper, dynamic, raspy-voiced lawyer with a passion for music and a finely tuned ear for quality. Behind a perfectly coiffed head of cotton-white hair and a blinding smile lurked an impetuous deal maker. Marshall had placed dozens of foreign masters with independent labels and undertook EMI’s offer as a personal challenge.
Having listened to a few dozen EMI releases, Marshall was determined to push the record business in a radically new direction. He chose a handful of those records he considered American in spirit, and in early January 1963, with Roland Rennie replacing Joe Zerger, Marshall set out to find British artists a home for their music in the New World. Coincidentally, the first record he put his hands on was by a group called the Beatles.
Marshall could not, he felt, make hay at Capitol Records. “I wasn’t going to call [Dave] Dexter back,” he recalls. “He’d already said no to Len Wood.” So, without any hesitation, Marshall scratched Capitol off the list of prospective labels. Instead, he sent copies of “Love Me Do” and “Please Please Me” to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Atlantic was enjoying a blistering hot streak, churning out hit after hit by Ray Charles, the Coasters, Ben E. King, the Drifters, Solomon Burke, and Bobby Darin. The label was the most successful independent of its kind—and it abounded in cachet. But after a week—and then two—without return calls from Wexler, Marshall began to grow impatient. He called Noreen Woods, who was Wexler’s and Ahmet Ertegun’s joint secretary, for Jerry’s response and got an evasive reply. Which meant that Wexler “was probably too distracted” and hadn’t gotten around to listening to it yet. The next time Marshall called for an answer, Woods informed him: “I haven’t got one. Jerry says, ‘If you can’t wait—then go ahead.’ ” And Marshall couldn’t wait.
Cursing his luck, Marshall decided to go for broke and hastened to send the Beatles’ material out en masse—to Columbia, RCA, London, Mercury, United Artists, all the major New York labels. That way, it eliminated the weeks of waiting between submissions. By the middle of January, however, he had come up empty-handed. No one expressed interest in the Beatles, even at a bargain-basement royalty rate. Perhaps this was related in some way to the cold winds blowing from the north: Capitol’s Canadian affiliate label had put out both singles on the heels of their British releases and, according to its Canadian A&R rep, they “fell right to the bottom.” With the majors impassive, Marshall merely turned his sights to the independents. The most attractive outlet was Vee-Jay Records, a reservoir of fresh waters from which Marshall had drunk long and greedily in the past. Its owners were a married couple named Vivian and James Bracken, who owned bars on the South Side of Chicago and had scored over the years with a roster of classy R&B artists such as Jimmy Reed and the Dells. In the past two years alone, they’d put together an incredible string of crossover hits that included “Raindrops,” by Dee Clark, “Duke of Earl,” by Gene Chandler, and a million-seller by Jerry Butler called “He Will Break Your Heart.” They also feasted on a string of hits by another of Marshall’s clients, Frankie Valli and the 4 Seasons, with “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and “Walk Like a Man” winning the trifecta for Vee-Jay in 1962 and early 1963.
On January 25, 1963, NME broke the story that Vee-Jay had signed the Beatles, in a deal that had been brokered in London the previous Monday. The band might still be considered a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies from the provinces, but in the world of rock ’n roll, where merely being British doomed an artist to provincialism, an American release gave them admittance to a select circle.
According to Roland Rennie and others, EMI sent the Beatles’ tapes to Chicago, where they were to be pressed for a timely Vee-Jay release. Shortly before their arrival, the record company’s president, Ewart Abner (who would one day head Motown), went to Las Vegas with a Scandinavian distributor to celebrate Abner’s fortieth birthday. During the second weekend of festivities, the distributor uncharacteristically placed a call to Paul Marshall at his home. Marshall immediately heard the alarm in the man’s voice. He said, “I carried [Ewart] away from the tables an hour ago. But he’s back at the tables. Watch out, Paul.” By the time Marshall could leap into action, however, it was too late. Not only had he gambled away the money earmarked to pay for the hotel rooms, but with it went a sizable chunk of Vee-Jay’s operating expenses. “[The company] was blown by Abner in Vegas,” Marshall recalls. “Two weekends—done.”
For the Beatles and Brian Epstein, the next few months were a blur of intense activity, so much so that they were blissfully ignorant of the problems at Vee-Jay. The Helen Shapiro tour had alerted promoter Arthur Howes to the Beatles’ soaring popularity, and without wasting a beat, he negotiated a deal for them to segue into another tour—opening for teen idols Tommy Roe and Chris Montez—beginning on March 9, a few days after the Shapiro gig ended. Then, in the February 8 issue of NME, an article appeared under the banner BEATLES HEAD PACKAGE SHOW, announcing plans for the band to headline “a nationwide package tour” in May, with “a U.S. artist” who was “being sought to share top billing with them.” Booking another tour—their third in a row—looked like a bad move on Brian’s part; between all the recording sessions, the songwriting, and endless months of performing, the Beatles appeared to be driven to the point of exhaustion. But a small follow-up in Melody Maker, which revealed their costar to be none other than Roy Orbison, made an apparent miscue seem like a perfectly calculated move.* Orbison already had a mystique about him. An early crony of Buddy Holly’s in Texas, he’d recorded his own songs, among which “Only the Lonely,” “Running Scared,” “Crying,” and “Dream Baby” became instant classics. He’d written “Claudette” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream” for the Everly Brothers, and fans were awestruck by his incredible vocal range, clocked somewhere around E above high C—territory frequented by Enrico Caruso. The Beatles loved him and he had another hit—the intensely soulful “In Dreams”—currently clawing its way up the British charts. Three weeks on the road with him would be a treat for the Beatles. Besides, their stamina was hardly in question, not after Hamburg, not after all those marathon jams. If problems arose, there was always speed to fall back on, to which, according to his biographer, Orbison was also “devoted.”
To accommodate his growing roster, which included Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas, and the Big Three—and to mollify his growing-angrier-by-the-day father—Brian leased office space in a stately old building on Moorfields Avenue. A stone staircase swept up to the second floor, where letters painted on a glass door announced the new headquarters of NEMS ENTERPRISES. Brian’s private office was the focal point. “Eppy’s Epitorium,” as it was called—although never within his earshot—was a bright, airy room, with an enormous teak desk, a tufted black-leather chair, and a “posh,” hand-knotted Abyssinian carpet that looked large enough to land a plane on. Waterford crystal tumblers were arranged on a silver tray atop a credenza, and above that, the room’s only other decoration: a huge picture of the Beatles with Little Richard taken at the 1962 Tower Ballroom show. The most memorable effect, however, was a traffic signal positioned just outside the door. Frieda Kelly recalls how everyone who worked at NEMS kept one eye peeled on those lights, which Brian controlled like the Great Oz. They all lived in dread of having to cross Brian’s threshold, even on green. He was too unpredictable, too quick to “jump down [their] throats.” With green, at least, the odds edged slightly in your favor. “No way you’d enter on red,” Frieda says. “Amber was touch and go—you’d take a chance if you were brave enough.” Only the Beatles, who were impetuous drivers in their own right, barreled straight through that signal, no matter what color was lit.
But the Beatles were seldom in town anymore. They came home as often as humanly possible, for a day at the most, then they were off again, to play a gig or to plug their latest record on one of the myriad radio shows that Brian managed to line up on an appallingly regular basis. Through the spring of 1963 the Beatles phenomenon steadily built momentum. With their records leading the way and the music press dewy-eyed with fascination—their sharp, cheeky banter made good copy—the Beatles single-handedly spurred interest in the Merseyside rock ’n roll scene. When John claimed that “there are three groups in Liverpool for every top Yank act,” even his fans rolled their eyes. But the comment also raised eyebrows. Chris Roberts, writing in Melody Maker, explained how a hastily arranged trip to Liverpool—a place so alien to him, it might as well have been Zanzibar—made a believer out of him. Breathlessly, he described a music “scene that could only find its counterpart in the USA” and concluded that the “Beat City,” a nickname appropriate in every respect, qualified as “Britain’s Nashville.” The sheer number of clubs, dances, and groups made his head spin. “You say London’s got it all?” he speculated, but the question was gratuitous—readers already knew the score. Truly, there was something incredible going on up in Liverpool, and across Britain, kids beat the jungle drums.
Throughout the end of February and most of March, the Beatles still managed to get home, although more and more on an irregular basis. All of them needed to reconnect with their families—and vice versa. If to the fans, the Beatles were the young heartthrobs taking the country by storm, there were four loving families left behind, a collection of common, unpretentious Scousers, not all of whom understood what all the fuss was about and whose sons—not one of them yet twenty-two years old—were especially missed.
For Elsie Graves, the Beatles’ success was a particularly difficult burden. The way she doted on Ritchie, her only child, touched friends, who felt as though she “idolized him.” Theirs wasn’t just a conventional mother-son relationship. They were friends as well, having been through so much together. Now, with the Beatles, everything had changed. “Elsie felt they were taking him away from her,” says Marie Crawford, “and that terrified her.” Even the unexpected perks, like money and popularity, failed to appease her. “Of all the parents, she found it quite difficult to cope,” remembers Frieda Kelly, who visited Elsie every Wednesday on her half day off from NEMS. “She could have done without any of the success. Elsie would have preferred Ritchie to be ordinary, to live down the road with four children she could visit every day.”
It was easier for Paul and George. Both the Harrisons and Jim McCartney “were thrilled” by what was happening to the Beatles. Friends close to Louise Harrison recall how much pleasure she got from George’s new success. “She followed the Beatles as avidly as any of their fans,” says Arthur Kelly, who received regular updates from the Harrisons. It was the same at Forthlin Road, where fans who turned up at the door were treated to tea and biscuits. “Jim was probably the Beatles’ biggest fan,” recalls Bill Harry, who frequently ran into Paul’s father on his rounds through the city. “He was so proud of what was happening,” remembers Shelagh Johnson, a local girl and, later, director of the Beatles Museum. “Outwardly, all his attention occasionally embarrassed Paul, but I think secretly Paul loved it and enjoyed coming home.”
Only John was anxious about being away. Cynthia’s pregnancy, nearing term, had encountered some unforeseen bumps. Scarcely two months along, she began “showing blood,” at which point, as a precautionary measure, the doctor confined her to bed. This only served to alarm the naturally timid Cynthia, who was on her own and scared. With John on tour and her mother in Canada, she was happy when Paul’s old girlfriend, Dot Rhone, moved into the “dank, awful basement” flat just below them on Falkner Street. “Once I arrived, Cynthia seemed to be fine,” Dot recalls. “It upset her that John wasn’t around, but she got used to it after a while.”
Even when John managed to get home, the atmosphere bristled with tension. Flush with excitement from another triumph with the Beatles, he’d bound in unannounced to find Cynthia—languorously pregnant—like an anchor, a jolt of reality. For John, the situation was too emotionally charged—and confusing. “There were a lot of fights,” says Dot. “He would drink an awful lot—just get drunk and mean. And then he’d say such awful things to Cyn. He was so moody. One moment he could be so funny and wonderful, and the next—so damn cruel.” Having grown up around an alcoholic father, Rhone recognized the symptoms that ignited his rage. “John told me that there had never been a day in his life when he didn’t feel he needed some kind of drug,” Dot recalls.
The prospect of fatherhood made John increasingly resentful and merely turned up the heat in an already smoldering domestic cauldron. Falling into black moods, he’d storm out of the flat, claiming to need cigarettes, and just disappear. Instead of blowing off steam and returning, he’d spend late evenings at the Jacaranda or drinking at the Blue Angel. Paddy Delaney, the Cavern’s bouncer, remembered encountering him there sometime in late February, grafted to the bar, where they “drank whiskey after whiskey” until well after four in the morning.
That spring friends often saw John wandering from club to club in the company of Ida “Stevie” Holly, a tall, “spunky” seventeen-year-old with jet-black hair to the middle of her back. According to reports, they’d been hanging out together, on and off, for a period of several months. “We presumed he’d broken up with Cynthia and had got a new girlfriend,” says Bill Harry, who, like most of the old crowd, was unaware that Cynthia was pregnant, let alone that she and John were married. Harry and his girlfriend, Virginia, who would eventually become his wife, remembers barging into the Blue Angel one night in March and finding John and Stevie at the bar “all over each other, like a couple of wildcats.” Tactfully, the Harrys avoided them, scooting downstairs before they were seen. Virginia was already in enough trouble with John, who had lent her a pile of notebooks filled with the poems he’d written. During Mersey Beat’s move from their tiny attic office to larger space on a lower floor, she’d absentmindedly “thrown them in the bin.” A few weeks earlier they’d run into John—again at the Blue Angel—and Bill insisted that Virginia confess. “I crept over and admitted what I’d done with his poems,” she recalls, “and he just started sobbing.”
Stevie Holly had been with him that night, too. And there were other nights at the Cavern. And afternoons, strolling lazily through the Walker Art Gallery. Even with the Beatles. “He had no shame,” Bill Harry says in a voice flattened by scorn. “He acted as if he were still a bachelor—even after the baby came.”
In the first hours of April 8, Cynthia, who had been staying at Aunt Mimi’s house with her friend Phyllis McKenzie, was rushed by ambulance to Sefton General Hospital, where just after 6 A.M.* she gave birth to a six-pound, eight-ounce boy. Had it been a girl, she was to be called Julia, after John’s mother. For the birth certificate, however, Cynthia confidently recorded his name as John Charles Julian Lennon.
John, out of town with the Beatles, phoned the next day, “triumphant at the news that it was a boy,” but, ironically it was Mimi who saw Julian first. No one had expected Mimi to rush to the hospital. Relations between the women had always been frosty, and a month of living together had left them straining for ways to remain courteous, then civil. Why Mimi urged Cynthia to move into Mendips was anyone’s guess. Far from comforting Cynthia, whose condition had admittedly made her “over-sensitive,” Mimi was her old supercilious self, “moody and sharp-tongued” toward her rabbity niece-in-law. Even though they attempted to steer clear of each other, there was always some explosive, petty incident that set Mimi off, with her carping about Cynthia’s “willfulness” or the way she left the kitchen a mess. Some people felt as though Mimi got “a perverse pleasure” from the situation, as though it were retribution for the shotgun marriage and the “terrible scenes” that preceded it. Their relationship had deteriorated to the point where, according to a published report, Mimi “didn’t even emerge from upstairs” when Cynthia, doubled over with labor pains, was loaded into the ambulance.
John turned up two days later, on April 10, fresh from taping an appearance on one of the popular new BBC rave-ups, The 625 Show, followed by a party in a London suburb at the home of the Shadows’ guitarist, Bruce Welch, where the Beatles first met Cliff Richard. Conveniently, the Beatles were slated to play three dates in and around Liverpool that week. Julian and Cynthia were still in the hospital so that the doctors could keep an eye on the baby, who was born weak and jaundiced as a result of the umbilical cord being wrapped around his neck.
According to various accounts Cynthia gave over the years, John behaved like any other new father. No one was more elated—or proud—than the demonstrative Beatle. He bounced Julian around like a football, gloating at his son’s wan, wrinkled face. “Who’s going to be a famous little rocker like his Dad then?” she quoted him as crowing. The baby was either “bloody marvelous” or “a miracle” in his eyes. In every retelling, Cynthia polished the story to portray John as a devoted dad. But no matter what kind of shine she put on it, Cynthia must have known—or, at least, had a sinking sense of—the truth.
Like Cynthia, the baby tightened the chains around John. Especially now, with the long struggle to stardom finally within reach. The tiny margin separating the Beatles from their ultimate goal required his undivided attention; the Big Party lay just over the next rise—John was sure of it. There was nothing left in the tank to give a wife and child.
It had been hard enough keeping Cynthia hidden in the shadows. Brian had insisted that John keep the marriage a secret to avoid diminishing his popularity with the fans. “It was a calculated judgment on [Brian’s] part that pop stars oughtn’t to have partners,” remembers Tony Barrow.* That was the rationale, at least, and apparently John was content to abide by it. And the exuberant success was all about freedom—freedom to pick and choose among the flock of available birds and his choice of crazy scenes, the freedom to experiment, to live it up. With no wife to his credit—at least, not in any published account—John could behave as most rock ’n roll stars did on the road.
Cynthia may have suppressed this latest slight in order to give herself hope, but she had turned a blind eye toward John’s indiscretions too many times not to know what was going on. The stories that drifted back from Hamburg had upset her until she learned to block them out. And those times at the Cavern, when John disappeared for a few hours—she’d seen the way those girls had looked at him onstage and knew the score. Even in the hospital, she recognized the familiar signs: John “was beginning to feel trapped.”
Bill Harry, like Cynthia, had been awakened to John’s freewheeling behavior. He spent several late nights at the Blue Angel, drinking with the Beatles, while they were back in Liverpool. It was especially gratifying for Harry to reconnect with his old art school mate and to hear the latest fabulous adventures involving the Beatles and John’s life. “But he never talked about Julian or being a proud father,” says Harry. “Julian was never mentioned. As far as John was concerned, it was as if Cynthia or Julian didn’t exist.”
What did exist for John was the new world taking shape around him—a world that increasingly involved success. “Once the Beatles hit the pop charts, we all envied what they had—and wanted it for ourselves,” says Johnny Byrne. “Guys like Gerry [Marsden] and Billy J. [Kramer] rode the Beatles’ coattails for a while. But for the rest of us, who never made it out of the clubs, a kind of resentment took hold.” The Big Three, who were more exciting, couldn’t write their own material; Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes stayed too long in Hamburg, playing bars and getting shitfaced; Rory Storm and the Hurricanes lacked the ambition—and the talent. But after the Beatles, returning from the Tommy Roe–Chris Montez tour, caught the national ear in a big way, the resentment directed toward them at home diminished as a result of the enormous groundswell that was created and the power it conferred.
If there was one spark responsible, it was the release of “From Me to You,” on April 11. Initially, the record got mixed reviews from the music papers. The NME critic noted that it had “plenty of sparkle” but got in his licks, concluding: “I don’t rate the tune as being anything like as good as on the last two discs from the group.” And Ray Coleman, writing in Melody Maker, expressed his disappointment in the “so-so melody” and questioned whether “if this average song was done by a less prominent group,” it would have the same impact.
Nevertheless, the impact was stunning. Instead of building steady, solid momentum, as was usual with a potential hit record, “From Me to You” “came crashing” into the charts at the number six position—a first for a British pop group. “From Me to You” flew out of the stores. In the first week alone, sales hit 200,000 copies, outselling the entire issue of “Please Please Me.” A keen witness on the scene observed: “By now, the Beatle legend was beginning to grow…. It was becoming clear that they were something rather special.” Actually, that was putting it mildly. All of London, it seemed, had their name on its lips. The Beatles! What was it with this funny-sounding—funny-looking—group? And where was this great music coming from?
With few exceptions, the critics caught the drift. “The Beatles could take it to the Americans,” argued a writer from Melody Maker after watching them snatch the stage out from under Chris Montez and Tommy Roe in East Ham. That, in itself, was a remarkable observation, if very un-British. And it was picked up in NME, which led its story with a note on the trend. “Latest visitors from America… were given scream-filled receptions,” wrote columnist Andy Gray. “But the Beatles stole top honours for entertainment and audience reaction.”
The Beatles could take it to the Americans.
Amazing! Even though Beatlemania was still a good year off, the tremors were already being felt. There was something quintessentially British about these uncompromising musicians, these charismatic, cheeky, shaggy-haired Scousers from the uncultured North, taking the larger cities by storm but still living in Liverpool, mostly with their parents, where they worked overtime to hone the emerging “Liverpool sound.” Suddenly their beleaguered northern city had become exotic, chic. Suddenly the real Brits weren’t sophisticated Londoners but those with caustic accents who worked in the trenches. Suddenly teenagers across the kingdom made a pilgrimage to the Cavern. Suddenly the North was known as “home of the Beatles.” Suddenly Liverpool was on the map. It was “Music City,” “the Nashville of the North,” even “Nashpool.” And if anyone needed further evidence, they had only to glance at the charts, where suddenly Gerry and the Pacemakers had themselves trudged their way to number one with “How Do You Do It.” A single group from Liverpool was uncommon enough, but two groups—it was revolutionary! And to make sense of it all, you only had to point to the Beatles.
Unfazed by the outbreak of attention, they plowed through critical appearances on national television, promoting “From Me to You” without pause, including, of all things, the BBC Jazz ’n’ Pop Festival in the venerable Royal Albert Hall. (The show was broadcast simultaneously as part of the BBC’s Light Programme.) They acted so loose and behaved so playfully during rehearsal, impervious to tradition or other stars on the bill, that the show’s producer, Terry Henebery, bristled. “A couple of records in the charts,” he fumed, “and they think they can do exactly what they like.”
He wasn’t the only one discomfited by the Beatles’ outsize personalities. Right off the bat, the show’s promoters were forced to deal with the feverish wave of anticipation the Beatles inspired. The dense crowd that had packed the stalls arrived in a bubble of highly charged expectation. A diaphanous buzz punctuated by whistles filled the upper reaches of the cavernous space. This wasn’t the usual contingent that bought tickets to the frequent package shows and sat politely through each performance. These were pumped-up teenagers—most of them girls—in every manner of emotional thrall, behaving rather curiously, as if they all knew one another. “They acted that way because they had one thing in common,” says Tony Barrow, who wasn’t in the theater that night. “They were Beatles fans.”
Writer and scenemaker George Melly later admitted that even he wasn’t prepared for the reception that crowd gave the Beatles. “It was my chore to announce them,” he recalled, “and the moment I went on I was met by a solid wall of screams. In the end I just gestured into the stairwell, mouthed ‘the Beatles’ and walked off. The screams lasted right through their act.” And through Del Shannon’s as well. Cries of “We want the Beatles! We want the Beatles!” repeatedly interrupted his set, forcing an awkward, abruptly shortened performance.*
Success at the Albert Hall was no mean feat for any new band on the scene, but the sensation the Beatles caused, marked by the screams and rampant hysteria, heightened its subsequent impact. Their new single rather rudely evicted Gerry Marsden from his perch atop the charts, and their just-released album, Please Please Me, shot to the number two position, breathing down the neck of current top dog, Cliff Richard. After years of working on the entertainment fringe, and only months after being rejected by all major labels, the band was besieged with offers pouring into the NEMS office. The Beatles were wanted on the NME poll winners’ concert at Wembley’s Empire Pool, the self-styled “highlight of the pop music year.” There was an invitation for them to appear on an all-Liverpool version of Thank Your Lucky Stars, which was accepted. A top-of-the-bill appearance on Saturday Club caught their fancy. And from Paris came an offer for them to headline an eleven-day run at the Olympia Theater. Within a relatively short time, the Beatles had moved from the fringes to ground zero of the increasingly fertile British rock ’n roll community.
The attention left the Beatles in such a state of euphoria that they refused another lucrative offer to join yet a fourth package tour that would leave from London at the end of April. They were exhausted from the months of touring, let alone the spinning of their four heads. Records… tours… television interviews… screams… money… fame… It was too much to absorb at once. They had worked so hard for this—and for so long. And yet, they were running too hard, worn out. There was an urgent need for some breathing room. Fast.
Earlier in the year Brian had set aside a block of time at the end of April, specifically for a vacation, and recommended the Beatles get away, too: visit a place where they could unload all the incremental tension that had accumulated during the past year—and where nobody knew who they were. At the same time, Brian mentioned to John that he was going to Spain during the hiatus and invited him to go along.
It is not known what prompted Brian to make such a bold—and potentially dangerous—offer. So far, all his experiences with the Beatles had been strictly professional, and to a large extent protective, leading observers to view their relationship “more like that of a father and his sons” than manager and artist. Only once had Brian stepped over a line, and even then it was more a matter of appearances than of any intent.
It had occurred on an afternoon almost a year earlier, in Liverpool, after a lunch session at the Cavern. Headed toward his car, Brian offered George Harrison a lift home and somehow they wound up driving through the leafy environs of Childwall. This, in and of itself, wasn’t unusual. Childwall, where Brian grew up, was en route to Speke, and George thought nothing more of it when his manager stopped to show him around the lovely house at Queen’s Drive. According to an account that George later gave Bob Wooler, it was an entirely innocent gesture. Proud of the estate and aware of the impression it was making on this council-house lad, Brian glided rather imperiously through the lavishly appointed rooms, annotating as though a curator at Versailles. It was only when his brother, Clive, showed up unexpectedly that anything untoward was insinuated. “Clive took one look at the scene and exploded,” says Wooler. “The family anguished over Brian’s vulnerability, and here he was, alone in an empty house, with this quite adorable boy.” With George standing there, smoking a cigarette, befuddled by the commotion, screaming broke out as the brothers, their faces white with fury, disappeared behind closed doors to hurl and deny accusations.
Afterward, in the car, Brian was visibly “flustered.” The remainder of the drive to Speke was uncomfortable, silent. It still wasn’t clear to George what had occurred. The whole baffling incident seemed to have come out of—and to—nothing, and George, who had never seen Brian so debased, couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, he broke the awkward silence. “Clive’s younger than you, isn’t he?” George wondered. Brian, seized with self-loathing, could only nod. “Well, he shouldn’t talk to you like that.”
George’s naïveté served to shade the undertones and rescue Brian from complete humiliation. But with John, it was another matter altogether. Lennon was catnip; no young man could have filled Brian’s sexual fantasies more perfectly. Like other encounters Epstein had responded to, John was young, studly, foul-mouthed, dangerous, alternately caring and cruel—and off-limits. For two years Brian had pushed all lascivious thoughts of John as far out of his mind as humanly possible. But it was difficult. He was always around, spotlighted onstage, standing splay-legged with the guitar, or lounging in dressing rooms. (Or sulking, which proved to be another turn-on.) That John sensed this and teased, perhaps even tormented, Brian is undeniable. His attentions, according to Paul, may have been intended to flatter Brian and assert his power, but it had a pitiable effect. It was a constant temptation—all those longings and forbidden looks, the persistent infatuation—but through it all Brian remained creditably aloof.
It was only a matter of time, however, before the desperate fantasy that had first drawn Brian to the Beatles proved too overwhelming. There is no record of what emboldened him to act on it—whether it was that he’d become successful in his own right, that he was feeling more confident, or that he was just reckless. Certainly, his relationship with John had changed. But since the beginning of the year, he’d begun to construct in his imagination the plans for an inevitable liaison. He just had to bide his time.
Finally, after the Beatles announced they’d be spending the break at a beach house belonging to Klaus Voormann’s parents, in the Canary Islands, Brian made his move. It must have taken all of his courage to pop the question. The recruiting phase, in fact, lasted several weeks. In between shows, he would entertain John on end with amiable stories about several enchanting visits to Spain: witnessing his first bullfight at a time when few gringos ventured into the arena; eating paella at midnight from a paellera the size of a Ford, hopping from café to café and from nightclub to nightclub where the energy seemed to run on a different—furious—current. As nonchalantly as possible, he described his romance with the mysterious country and wondered if John might want to consider coming along. Whether there was any discussion up front about accommodations is unknown. Certainly John recognized Brian’s attraction to him. “He was in love with me,” John later admitted, with characteristic bluntness.
How John responded to this brazen offer is not recorded, except that he said yes. Doubly surprising, perhaps, is that he didn’t cancel the trip, following, as it did, so closely on the heels of Julian’s birth. According to an account that Cynthia later gave, while she was still recovering in the hospital John told her about the planned trip and “wanted to know if [she] objected” to his going. The news, she recalled, hit her “like a bolt out of the blue,” which must be a terrific understatement in light of the circumstances. After all, John had been gone throughout her pregnancy and was absent for Julian’s birth. She’d half expected him to pitch in and help out now that he was back. If the Beatles had obligations, that was one thing. But a vacation wasn’t anything she’d contemplated—or understood. Cynthia tried to maintain her composure in the face of such gall. She was “hurt,” to say nothing of envious. And even John knew “what a bastard [he] was,” while acknowledging he “wasn’t going to break the holiday for a baby.”
On April 28, George, Paul, and Ringo shuttled to the striking black-sand beaches of Tenerife, which provided some welcome relaxation but little comfort. The Voormanns’ tiny cottage, like most of those that dotted the hillside, was an amusing, rustic affair, without electricity, that overlooked the festive coast, where the last ripples of tidewater spilled into the Atlantic Ocean. From each window was a Matisse-like view of paradise. The land sweeping down to the sea radiated a dizzying canvas of color: patches of blue and yellow foxglove bloomed in the chalky brush, pale pink finches and red admiral butterflies rustled among natural tones of saffron and berries and olives and flax. Orange groves lined the ridges above the town. The light on the land was so strong, the colors so intense, that the scenery often resembled a montage of overexposed snapshots.
Embracing the torrid island stillness, though without much forethought, the trio of Beatles “stayed in the sun too long and got incredibly sunburnt.” With Klaus, they tooled around the briny port in his Austin Healy Sprite and drove up the jagged mountain slopes to Teide Peak, an idle volcano, where they explored the craterlike rim that George likened to “the surface of the moon.” Local teenagers had no idea who they were—or knew their records. It came as no small relief that they could blend in with other vacationers. Every day after lunch, when the sun was at its highest, the Beatles would change into their suits and join the resident sunbirds at the beach for a swim. Occasionally Paul would drift off by himself, notebook in hand, to find a quiet place in which to work on an unfinished lyric. He’d spend hours nesting in the sand, gazing intently at a slightly crumpled page while all around him bathers screamed and splashed in the rugged surf. Despite bouts of sunstroke and a swimming mishap in which Paul nearly drowned in the swift current, the boys considered the getaway “a real good holiday”; nevertheless, they were eager to get back to the music—and to John.
If only they suspected what he was up to.
The friends who knew John best—who knew how single-minded he was, how “nothing would stand in his way of stardom, not friendship, not love, absolutely nothing”—had felt upon hearing of his vacation with Brian, as Paul had, that John was “a smart cookie… [who] saw his opportunity to impress upon Mr. Epstein who was the boss of his group.” In 1963 very few straight men in their twenties would have gone away with a homosexual, no matter how much influence he might wield. None of that fazed John. An hour after the other Beatles left for Tenerife, he and Brian boarded a plane for Barcelona, “the Paris of Spain,” where they checked into a suite at the Manila Hotel. Brian had been there before. In November 1960 he kicked off his lifelong love affair with Spain from a room in this “superb” hotel with its view of the eastern hills. “Where else may I have a gin and guests in my room at 4:00 A.M.?” he wrote in his journal the next day. There is evidence to indicate that Brian entertained a series of men in his room, although in typical fashion, he “behaved foolishly and irresponsibly,” and things eventually turned rough. “Last night I suffered, for I was robbed and it was not pleasant. In many ways fortunate [sic], for in England I would not have been left so lightly.”
With John in tow, everything was straightforward and aboveboard. The two spent several days shopping and sightseeing along the historic cobblestone promenades that twined through the city center. John was particularly delighted by the ornate Gaudi architecture, those inventive distortions incorporated into the medieval skyline, which no doubt appealed to his wacky aesthetic. In the late afternoons they dug in at a café in the Ramblas, Barcelona’s most famous promenade, where they could watch the smartly dressed Catalans nose around the stalls and kiosks heaped with books, flowers, and even pets. Then, after a few drinks, they took dinner at one of the stylish local restaurants that Brian knew or toured the nightclubs in search of entertainment.
A few days later, on the recommendation of a friend, Brian rented a car and drove south along the coastal roads that led to Torremolinos and Sitges, on the Costa Brava. Between the heat, the beach, and the familiarity that had been developing since they left Liverpool, souls were bared. Sitting around the outdoor seaside cafés, wandering along the spit of sandy coastline—walking and talking without any inhibitions—Brian and John shared intimate information about themselves, much of it long-suppressed and often traumatic memories of their past, their fears, their frustrations. One can only imagine the loose range of subjects they covered: John’s fractured boyhood, his absent father, Julia’s tragic death, his sudden marriage and fatherhood, perhaps his rivalry with Paul, money, the allure—and pitfalls—of fame.
Sexuality. John was almost as unsparing about gays as he was about cripples and the retarded. “My God, how he ranted about ‘fucking queers’ and ‘fucking fags!’ ” says Bob Wooler, who was privy to many of John’s backstage outbursts. “He was very outspoken, indifferent to anyone’s feelings. He didn’t give a shite about anyone, really—but he was especially intolerant of gays.” But there is every reason to believe that as they became more relaxed, John was drawn further and further into Brian’s guarded confidence. Gradually, Brian unburdened himself of the decisive role homosexuality played in his life, its captive grip and stigma. Certainly he explained its permissive appeal. It must have surprised both men how easy it was to talk so openly about this thorny emotional issue, how therapeutic, in light of their often complicated relationship. No doubt John encouraged the direction of the conversation, but Brian did most of the talking, regaling John with details about the life, sometimes with rapturous descriptions of encounters and taboos. In the provocative Spanish sun, Brian became bold enough to behave with John as he might naturally around other gay men, pointing out “all the boys” he found attractive, even daring to act on his desires. “I watched Brian picking up boys,” John recalled, “and I liked playing it a bit faggy—it’s enjoyable.”
In all the months that they had worked together, through all the conferences and interaction, there was never an instance in which John felt either uncomfortable or threatened by Brian’s attention. There was plenty of talk about it; plenty of jokes flew among friends. But for all of the clear signals, no line was ever crossed.
Until Spain. Something happened while Brian and John were in Sitges. In the privacy of their room, after an evening of drinking and sporting about, Brian initiated something that led to physical contact. The extent of their intimacy was never discussed, and all secret details died with the two men. Only John ever spoke of it, and then only cryptically, in an attempt to explain away the incident. “It was almost a love affair,” he conceded, “but not quite. It was not consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship.”
Love affair… pretty intense… relationship… These phrases provide enough clues to paint a pretty persuasive picture. And yet if John participated in some sort of a homosexual act, it follows that he played a passive role, allowing Brian an opportunity to probe his fantasies. A lot has been written about their impromptu seaside getaway, most of it imagined by a battery of creative historians. Several insist that Brian and John cruised the bars for unattached young men, even engaging rather impetuously in experimental sex. Albert Goldman is most emphatic: “[John] and Brian had sex,” he declares in The Lives of John Lennon. Pete Shotton, in his footloose memoir, claims that John told him: “I let [Brian] toss me off.” And in The Love You Make, Peter Brown and his coauthor, Steven Gaines, go so far as to construct an intimate bedroom scene, complete with cartoonish, overheated dialogue, in which “John lay there, tentative and still, and Brian fulfilled the fantasies he was so sure would bring him contentment….” As far as it is known, the issue of homosexuality never surfaced again in John’s life. Curiosity may well have gotten the better of him in Spain. He may have been experimenting, nothing more—or just in an extremely vulnerable state. It had been less than a month since Julian’s birth; John not only felt trapped in marriage but did not want to deal with being a father. It stands to reason that his dalliance with Brian was impulsive, more of a reaction to his situation than from any emotional attraction. Away from home, in a beautiful resort with a man—certainly a father figure—who was devoted to taking care of him, John was relaxed and open enough to let it happen unconditionally.
Still, it set a dangerous precedent. Brian came away from the vacation brimming with exhilaration, overjoyed that John had opened up to him and poised for something more. He told friends that their time together had been “something to build on” in the months ahead. The other Beatles were aware that something consensual had gone on between John and Brian. In retrospect, Paul referred to it as “the homosexual thing” and suggested that it was John’s way of exercising power over their manager. But if power was part of John’s strategy, he was also exercising it over Paul. More influence with Brian also meant more control of Paul—and ultimately of the Beatles. It was a currency he would collect for the rest of his life.