In the Eye of a Hurricane In the Eye of a HurricaneThe usual shock wave shuddered through Copenhagen Airport as the Beatles’ plane approached from the north. More than two thousand kids had been waiting since dawn for the boys to arrive, and as the plane broke through the clouds there was the kind of chain reaction that had at one time put a smile on Dr. Teller’s face. There was a deafening roar; bodies collided. Then all hell broke loose on the ground as the cabin door popped open and out bounded the Beatles: John, Paul, George, and Jimmy.
Say what?
There had been no time to warn the crowd that Ringo wasn’t aboard. Only a day earlier, on the morning of June 3, he’d collapsed during a particularly stressful photo session for the Saturday Evening Post. Despite a blissful three-week vacation with Paul in the Virgin Islands, he’d been experiencing spells of fatigue, which were blamed on the drastic change in climates. His throat was especially sore, owing, Ringo was certain, to his excessive smoking habit. Although stricken by waves of dizziness, he’d soldiered through a June 1 and 2 recording session, as well as several telephone interviews with British teen magazines. But during the photo session he suddenly sank to his knees, and Neil, who “didn’t like it one bit,” rushed him to University College Hospital, where it was diagnosed he’d scored a double whammy of laryngitis and pharyngitis.
Back at Abbey Road studios, Brian, Derek, George Martin, and the rest of the Beatles debated how to handle the situation. It seemed pointless to continue without their drummer, the boys argued. “Imagine, the Beatles without Ringo!” George scoffed. The tour, as he saw it, should be postponed immediately. “Brian argued with us for more than an hour to change our minds about abandoning the tour,” Paul recalled, “pleading that thousands of Dutch and Australian fans had already bought tickets, and that it would be cruel to disappoint them.”
According to George, they were “bullied by Brian Epstein and George Martin into accepting the situation that [they] had to go.” But how? Who would supply the right beat? Pete Best? Not a chance, according to John, who explained to a reporter: “It might have looked as if we were taking him back. Not good for him.” Martin ran through his Rolodex of drummers, pulling the names of those he deemed adequate, with emphasis on a chap named Jimmy Nicol. In Martin’s estimation, not only did Nicol have great hands, but it so happened that he looked the part as well. Nicol was twenty-four, from the East End of London, with the kind of round, cherubic face that would have suited any Scouser. He’d put in time drumming with Georgie Fame and, aside from a decent amount of session work, fronted a band called Jimmy Nicol and the Shub Dubs that had a minor hit single with “Humpity-Dumpity.”
There are various versions as to what happened next, and over the years Nicol has related them in any number of ways, but his assertion that “I nearly shit in me pants” seems utterly reliable.
After three months paired off with the girlfriends and wife, the Beatles hit the road like prisoners on furlough. The moment they touched down in Denmark the scene was swarming with girls: young and older girls, blondes and raven-haired beauties, full-breasted and elfin girls, hookers and virgins. The most beautiful creatures in the world paraded through the Beatles’ set of suites seemingly without end and without restriction. The rate of turnover was breathtaking, as was the boys’ endurance. It was party time, day and night, and as the newcomer, Jimmy Nicol viewed it with incredulity. He had never witnessed such an extravagance of “mischief and carrying-on. I thought I could drink and lay women with the best of them until I met up with these guys,” he admitted.
“Wherever we went, there was always a whole scene,” John recollected, calling it “Satyricon” as a frame of reference, “with four musicians going through it…. When we hit a town, we hit it—we were not pissing about…. We were the Caesars.”
In Copenhagen, where they broke the ice, John especially uncoiled, drinking so much, according to an observer, that “his head was a balloon”; he was nearly unrecognizable onstage, sweating and bloated. Then in Amsterdam the next day, he struck out for the city’s notorious red-light district, trolling through brothels at an impressive breakneck clip, enlisting the services of a police escort to avert possible scandal. There seemed to be no limit to John’s binges of alcohol and sex—nor reason that adequately explained them. His marriage to Cynthia, after all, provided a source of security as well as comfort. They’d enjoyed “the most relaxing and happy holiday” in Tahiti with George and Pattie, mulling over plans to find the house of their dreams upon his return. It seemed almost irrational that he threw himself into these scenes with such self-destructive determination. Friends close to the Lennons at the time insist that their relationship was mutually gratifying and harmonious. Cynthia herself refers to that period as “happy families time for all concerned.” Perhaps the debauchery was just general therapy for John’s troubled soul, a form of emotional decompression. Maybe it was a way of asserting his independence—or merely blowing off steam. God knows, Beatlemania was a pressure cooker—“like being in the eye of a hurricane,” as John put it. Whatever the reason, he and the other Beatles plunged ahead on an excursion of drinking and screwing that rivaled the frenzy at their concerts.
Somehow, Jimmy Nicol took it all in stride. “He played well,” Paul admitted with customary graciousness. There were no slipups, barring the odd, tricky count that only Ringo would have anticipated; there were no star trips or ugly scenes. George had been right to object that it wasn’t the Beatles without “the Four Fabs,” as he called them, but not even the fans seemed to mind the last-minute replacement. Wherever they went, the Beatles were welcomed like conquering heroes. Their arrival in Amsterdam was greeted by an elaborate motorcycle escort that wound through the city, flanked by auxiliary units of police and the civil guard. The next morning a glass-topped boat collected the Beatles from a ledge outside their hotel for a ten-mile trip through the Amstel Canal. “We passed at least 100,000 cheering people who lined the streets on each side of the water to wave, and sometimes almost touch, the Beatles as they passed,” Andy Gray wrote with breathless exaggeration in an edition of the NME. “Six police boats accompanied us on the water and they were kept busy, picking up dozens of boys who swam to the boat, some climbing on to shake the Beatles’ hands.” Fans leaped from canal bridges as the boat passed underneath.
But sometimes the vibe turned rude and unpredictable. For example, that same night before the concert, the mayor of Blokker, the Dutch suburb where the old arena was located, approached George in the dressing room with a key to the city. “Fuck off, yer bald owd crip!” George snapped, oversaturated by the parade of grinning well-wishers.
Every city, every situation, brought out people who wanted to, in some way, touch them—and wanted to be touched back. Insisted on it: promoters demanded that the Beatles meet their families and friends; security men demanded autographs; the hotel manager, driver, waiter, chambermaid, reporter, nurse, newspaper vendor, flight attendant, everyone they came into contact with at every hour of the day, demanded a piece of the boys. And the fans—everywhere they went, fans expected, demanded, some sort of personal response: sign this, wave, say hello, touch me, heal me, call me, kiss me, fuck me. And they stopped at nothing: invading the Beatles’ suites, throwing themselves in front of their cars, jumping from balconies, stalking wives, girlfriends, family members, pets! In Copenhagen a reporter from the Express admonished Paul for his seemingly callous disregard of a telegram that read: CHILD DYING IN THIS FAMILY, TWO DAYS TO LIVE. PLEASE CALL. CHILD IS MARY SUE.” Paul was convinced that it was a hoax, and if not, then a tragedy that was beyond his mortal powers. The world was filled with such tragedies, he argued. Were the Beatles expected to alleviate each one? To prove his point, he instructed Derek Taylor to place a call to the sputtering Mary Sue, who, as it so happened, was in tip-top health and not at all embarrassed.
There were other obligations, too—press conferences, civic receptions, charity balls, processions, literary luncheons, awards ceremonies, record-shop appearances, social engagements… it was unrelenting. On the Beatles’ sixteen-hour flight from London to Hong Kong, there were “welcomes” planned at every refueling stop—in Zurich, Beirut, Karachi, Calcutta, and Bangkok. Far from being honored, the Beatles felt abused. Over Derek Taylor’s objections, they refused to get off the plane anywhere other than Bangkok, fueling their dark mood with a steady diet of stimulants. “We’d been sitting on the floor, drinking and taking Preludins for about thirty hours [sic],” George recalled. Then, arriving in Kowloon, exhausted and grimy, they were expected to judge the finals of the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant.
In Australia five thousand fans staged a vigil in a torrential rainstorm when the Beatles’ 707 descended into Sydney. Fierce crosswinds tugged perilously at the plane, raindrops heavy as hail slashed at the cockpit windows and drummed on the roof, making the landing on the puddled tarmac a nail-biter—none of which deterred local officials, who put the boys “on the back of a flat-bed truck so the crowd could see them.” Their skeletal umbrellas were useless, and the dye in the new capes they had had made in Hong Kong ran, turning their skin a cadaverous blue.
Two days later, on June 12, in Adelaide, the numbers got crazy. In gorgeous weather, the Beatles were loaded into a Ford convertible and paraded along a nine-mile stretch of the Anzac Highway lined by 250,000 people, almost half the city’s population. Over a policeman’s objections, the Beatles crawled up to perch on the car’s trunk in what George later referred to as “the J. F. Kennedy position.” It was an incredible sight from that viewpoint, sending a “shock,” especially to John, who admitted that it dawned on him “you might get shot.” An additional thirty thousand more fans crammed into the square outside the gates of Town Hall for the official greeting by Adelaide’s Lord Mayor, several stories above the gathering. “It was like a heroes’ welcome,” said Paul, who leaned way out on the balcony and flashed the crowd the old reliable thumbs-up, not realizing Australians regarded it like being given the finger.
The scene, sans the thumbs, was repeated in Melbourne, where, despite “a bitterly cold day, some 250,000 people lined the route from the airport to the [Beatles’] hotel.” According to the New York Times, it was “nearly twice as many as turned out to see Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip” the previous year. Ringo had arrived earlier that morning with Brian Epstein on a “horrendous” thirty-hour flight from London through Los Angeles, made tolerable by a running poker game with Vivien Leigh and Horst Buchholz. Ringo assured an attentive press corps waiting at Essendon Airport that he felt refreshed and recharged, although doctors warned that his tonsils would eventually have to come out. Otherwise, he expressed relief to be out of the hospital, the scene of so many childhood setbacks, relief to be in Australia, relief to be back in the mix—and ready to rock ’n roll.
In fact, the rocking started even before his reunion with the Beatles, when Ringo’s car was surrounded outside the Southern Cross Hotel by an estimated three thousand fans. A moment of real panic ensued while officials decided how to deal with the boisterous crowd. Everywhere Ringo looked, kids were pressed up against the windows, screaming and pounding on the doors, clambering over the hood. It was “a madness we had not seen in Adelaide,” observed Derek Taylor, who watched “the melée” develop from an overhanging balcony. Usually there was a contingency plan to avoid such an encounter, but for some unknown reason, it had been abandoned en route. Impractical as it might seem, they decided to go in through the front entrance. A police inspector built like a bulldozer slung Ringo over his shoulder and, charging, made a beeline for the hotel. A hotel official leading the charge stumbled in the fray—which sent an errant body block into the police inspector. In a flash, everyone went down like tenpins. Ringo was knocked to the ground and engulfed by the crowd. By the time he was rescued from the throng, he was scuffed and badly shaken.
Later, when the other Beatles arrived, the crowd in the street had swelled to an estimated twenty thousand, some of whom were whipped up in a terrific heat. Others, many of them young girls who had been waiting since dawn, suffered from hunger and exhaustion. The police force, which had been monitoring the situation nervously, called in the army and navy to help maintain order, but it was short-lived. By late afternoon, with chants of “We want the Beatles!” ringing through the square, the shaken troops, now four hundred strong, felt control slipping from their grasp. They didn’t know where to look first: at the barricades being crushed, the girls fainting out of sight, the hooligans stomping in the roofs of cars or pushing through their lines. A fourteen-year-old “screamed so hard she burst a blood-vessel in her throat.” It was “frightening, chaotic, and rather inhuman,” according to a trooper on horseback. Their most pressing concern was the hotel’s plate-glass windows bowing perilously against the violent crush of bodies. They threatened to explode in a cluster of razor-sharp shards at any moment. Ambulances screamed in the distance, preparing for the worst; a detachment of mounted infantry swung into position.
Just when it all seemed hopeless, at the point when one more thrashing body would undoubtedly deliver the coup de grâce, a roar went up that seemed to suck all the kids away from the hotel. Look! Up in the air—it’s a bird, it’s a plane…Suddenly, all five Beatles appeared on the first-floor balcony in hopes of defusing the situation. Another roar went up, this one even more deafening than the first, as John put a finger across his upper lip, threw the Nazi salute, and goose-stepped jauntily across the platform, screaming, “Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”
If this is how Australia was, what would America be like? There, Beatles fever was running at an all-time scalding high. Public demand seemed insatiable. In Chicago eighteen thousand tickets were sold before a single ad appeared; two thousand fans stormed Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, scooping up every available seat; the entire block of twelve thousand tickets for Philadelphia’s Convention Hall was gone in “70 hectic minutes”; for all twenty-seven concert dates—the same thing. American deejays kept cranking up the heat.
Before that, however, there was unfinished business back home. The buzz was particularly loud concerning a swarm of notable challengers, such as the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Manfred Mann, the Yardbirds, Them, the Dave Clark Five, and the Zombies. The Beatles were especially concerned by news that they’d been knocked from the chart’s top spot by a single called “House of the Rising Sun.” What was this cheeky record? they wanted to know. And who were these predators calling themselves Animals? It was time to find out.
The Beatles arrived back in London, determined to attack it all at once—but first they had a date at the movies.
The premiere of A Hard Day’s Night wasn’t expected to be normal, even by movie-gala standards. By 7:30, an hour before curtain, the streets around Piccadilly Circus were jammed by a crowd of twelve thousand fans jockeying to get a glimpse of the stars. Inside the London Pavilion, the Beatles, dressed in stiffly pressed tuxedos and glossy patent-leather shoes, stood in the midst of their families and the posh crowd. Joining them were Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowden. Earlier that day the band had watched a run-through of the film at a private screening, with Brian, Derek, and Walter Shenson, who insists they “behaved like delighted little kids” watching themselves romp across the screen. Slouched down in the stalls, with their feet up on the backs of the seats in front of them, they wolfed down popcorn and howled like hyenas or groaned with embarrassment, depending upon the scene. Shenson, hunkered in the balcony, was confident that they had a monster hit on their hands.
With few exceptions, the critics agreed that A Hard Day’s Night was a winner. The Times called it “off-beat” and an “exercise in anarchy” with a spontaneity exceptional in British films. In the Daily Express, critic Leonard Mosley struck the same euphoric tone, calling it “delightfully loony” and adding “there hasn’t been anything like it since the Marx Brothers in the ’30s.” Later, Bosley Crowther, whose opinion in the New York Times was read like scripture, praised it as “a whale of a comedy” that “had so much good humor going for it that it is awfully hard to resist… with such a dazzling use of the camera that it tickles the intellect and electrifies the nerves.”
The Beatles preened unflinchingly in the afterglow. “I dug A Hard Day’s Night,” John said initially. “We knew it was better than other rock movies,” though “not as good as James Bond,” he relented. Later, in a puff of vengefulness, he backpedaled, saying, “By the end of the film we didn’t know what had happened and we hated it.” But by then it didn’t matter. On July 8 the movie opened to critical success and amazing business. The next morning there were lines around the block. United Artists blanketed Britain “with a record 160 prints of the picture” and was bragging to reporters that it “would gross at least a million pounds in Britain alone,” which wasn’t bad, considering the film cost less than a quarter of a million pounds to make. Publicly, the Beatles acted indifferent to the success. Still, at every opportunity, they cruised past the Pavilion to check on the length of the queues. Chris Hutchins, who accompanied them on just such a junket, remembered their delight at the lines snaking around the theater. “That’s the stuff!” he recalled John shouting from the backseat of a car a few days after the premiere. “A couple of hundred more for the sevens-and-sixes* and we’ll all be rich!”
That smugness was nowhere to be seen two days later for the northern premiere of the film. On July 10 the Beatles arrived in Liverpool aboard a capacity-filled Britannia turboprop, but they might as well have flown in on their own buoyancy for all the butterflies in their stomachs. “It was extraordinary to see how very nervous the Beatles were,” recalled BBC deejay David Jacobs, a member of the London entourage that accompanied the boys north. “They were absolutely terrified [of going back].” Ringo acknowledged: “[Friends] kept coming down to London, saying, ‘You’re finished in Liverpool.’ ”
Outwardly, Paul scoffed at the “one or two little rumors,” as well as the hyperbole from routine “detractors,” but whatever tension he may have experienced was complicated by another development. A few months earlier Paul had settled a paternity claim with a young Liverpool woman, paying her $14,000 in exchange for her silence and the repudiation of all claims against him. Everyone assumed that the problem had gone away, but on the morning of the Beatles’ triumphant homecoming it seemed to have ghosted in from the cold. The night before, the girl’s disgruntled uncle papered Liverpool with thirty thousand leaflets baring the gory details of the alleged paternity. He had been thorough, too, hitting every public telephone kiosk in the center of Liverpool as well as the Press Club in Bold Street, where he was sure reporters would feast on the incriminating facts. Brian’s attempts to head it off proved too little, too late. Unable to face the inevitable tempest, he dispatched Derek Taylor in his place to warn Paul, who, to Taylor’s disbelief, seemed callously unconcerned by the news, shrugging “with astonishing nonchalance” and mumbling, “OK.” How Paul kept his composure was beyond all explanation. Was he that insensitive to the predicament? Did hubris blind him to the possible backlash? It’s impossible to know. Whatever his intention, astonishingly the approach paid off, without a word of the accusation finding its way into print.
“Being local heroes made us nervous,” John admitted. The prospect of facing family, friends, and fans—and not just any fans but the fans, their “own people,” as Paul called them—was nerve-racking. No one knew what to expect. It didn’t help matters that as the airplane descended, the once-familiar landscape appeared strange and forbidding. “Miles away from Speke Airport… we saw them,” David Jacobs remembered, “thousands upon thousands of what looked like black currants packing the route to Liverpool.” The entire city had turned out to greet them! They hadn’t been forgotten—or worse, written off—after all. A wave of relief swept through the cabin, followed by childlike glee: “Look! Over there! By the Ford factory… by the freight yard… by the bus depot…” They were incredibly moved by the sight. People—Scousers—everywhere. And as they disembarked, a massive crowd surged forward—cheering deliriously, shouting their names. Two hundred thousand people crowded the square outside Town Hall. From the balcony high above the city, the Beatles could make out all the familiar old haunts: the movie theaters and chip joints, the institute and the art college, Gambier Terrace and Ye Old Cracke, Hessey’s, the original NEMS storefront, the Kardomah and the Jacaranda and the Cavern, and, across the docks, the river Mersey, dark and brooding in the enveloping dusk. “Did you ever imagine that this day was coming?” a reporter asked Paul, who for once was caught without a slick, ready-made comeback. “Never like this,” he answered haltingly. “We never imagined, you know, we’d come back to this.”
For his part, John could not resist the knife. “You want to get some teeth for these people who are cheering us,” John advised the Lord Mayor, who seemed befuddled by the outrageous remark. (Little did he realize the extent of the Beatles’ worldly exposure, having witnessed firsthand the superiority of other cultures’ hygiene. The contrast, glaring in front of them now, with rows of “gap-toothed grins,” was shocking.) King for a day—and fortified by pills—John wasn’t about to let it rest. “What’s the matter,” John persisted, “can’t you spare the money?” Then, without any forewarning, he strode to the front of the balcony, put a finger across his upper lip, and threw the Nazi salute to the unsuspecting crowd.
That evening more than six thousand congregated outside the Odeon Cinema, the scene of countless teenage trysts, for the invitation-only screening of A Hard Day’s Night, and more than fifteen hundred formed a queue around the block for its official public premiere, at 10:30 the next morning. No longer enchanted with their “awkward” acting turns, the Beatles waved under the marquee but refused to sit through another performance. As soon as the houselights dimmed, they ducked out a side door, went straight to the airport, and caught a 1:30 A.M. flight back to London.
The Beatles had been in London only intermittently since returning from Australia, and there wasn’t much time left—a couple of weeks, at most—before the start of their American tour. As the next departure loomed, personal obligations requiring their attention piled up.
John, in particular, needed to rescue his family from their impossible housing situation. The tiny flat in Emperor’s Gate was under constant siege by fans who were staked out at the entrance for what seemed like twenty-four hours a day. Though security now accompanied John at all times, Cynthia was repeatedly confronted by “really weird characters… hovering around the flat, sitting on the stairs directly outside the door.” It was like a human obstacle course just trying to get in and out of the place, all the more threatening when Cynthia had Julian in tow. There were times, she said, when anyone could accost them. “We had no protection from nutcases when John was away,” she bemoaned.
There wasn’t a moment of privacy to be had in that place. A friend who visited for a weekend recalled: “People were ringing the phone all the time. John would answer… and disguise his voice. ‘I’m sorry, John’s not here.’ ‘But we seen him come in.’ ‘Well, he must have gone out the back door.’ ‘There is no back door!’ It was amusing at first, but it just went on and on; it never ended.”
Finally, it became too much of a nuisance and John put his foot down: they were moving, he announced, instructing Cynthia to begin house-hunting at once. One of the Beatles’ corporate accountants, who happened to live in nearby Weybridge, invited them to tea in between house inspections—and the rest was kismet. The neighborhood seemed perfectly suited to John and Cynthia’s needs: it was tranquil and undisturbed without being secluded, with a whiff of exclusivity—Cynthia called the area “select”—that befitted a young celebrity. It took them about twenty minutes to locate a comparable house for sale: a twenty-seven-room timbered mock-Tudor mansion at the top of a leafy rise in the ultraposh enclave of St. George’s Hill Estate. The sprawling three-acre property, about twenty miles southwest of London, was called Kenwood and belonged to an American woman who was asking £40,000. John bought it on the spot, despite its needing a good deal of work.
With the Beatles set to tour in three weeks, the task of preparing the house fell entirely in Cynthia’s lap. John, inundated by obligations, couldn’t be distracted; though his thoughts inevitably drifted to his family, the band’s dance card was booked solid by back-to-back TV appearances and one-nighters in an effort to strengthen the franchise before leaving the country. At the BBC’s Paris Studio, they taped another episode of From Us to You, their fourth in the hokey music series, then swept out to Blackpool, scene of so many riotous Beatles shows, for an ABC-TV special and a concert at the Opera House. On what should have been a rare day off, John and Paul crashed a Cilla Black recording session, where their old Cavern mate was cutting “It’s for You,” a single they’d written especially for her. There was a fund-raiser at the Grosvenor House for the British Olympic team, a visit to Madam Tussaud’s to check out their likenesses, and a breathless two-day excursion to Stockholm, all interspersed with a dozen or more interviews with local flacks to promote the release of the A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack. “They were the hardest-working entertainers I ever met,” recalls a fellow musician.
Between it all, Brian had coaxed the Beatles into attending a revue at the London Palladium to benefit the Theatrical Charities Appeals Council. The postmidnight show, on July 23, indicated just how far they’d risen in the London entertainment caste system. Billed as “The Night of 100 Stars,” it was a red-hot who’s who of establishment showbiz celebrities led by Laurence Olivier, Buddy Greco, Shirley Bassey, Harry Secombe, and Marlene Dietrich and fanned by rumors that Frank Sinatra, in town to promote Robin and the Seven Hoods, would most likely attend.
The Beatles endeavored to put their best faces on the event, but as the night wore on, as one old hoofer after another plodded across the Palladium stage, lines of boredom and outright scorn began to show through the facade. The revue was unending. To relieve the boredom, the Beatles began downing flutes of champagne, a drink for which they were particularly unsuited. Sitting around small, dimly lit cocktail tables at the back of the stage, they smoked to neutralize their discomfort while the resentment and disdain slowly bubbled toward the surface. The set of their mouths was impossibly lipless, grim, giving their faces the same anesthetized cast as their wax effigies in Madam Tusaaud’s. Ever resourceful, Mal Evans found an old wooden oar backstage and began using it to shuttle whiskey and Cokes to the boys onstage. That immediately did the trick. “By the time we were getting drunk, we’d become fed up with all that bullshit showbiz nonsense anyway!” George recalled.
The final outrage came when a disturbance ruffled from the wings, and the frail, insectlike figure of Judy Garland wandered into the spotlight. It seemed impossible, like a mirage. Only two weeks earlier she’d suffered a nervous collapse in Hong Kong, and a few days after that she checked into a London hospital with mysterious “cuts” on her arms. The mere sight of her alone—alive—brought down the house. The audience leaped to its feet, cheering and whistling, shouting, “Sing, Judy, sing!” “Do ‘Over the Rainbow!’ ” Shaking her head, she waved humbly and began to back away from the footlights, but when the orchestra broke into the inimitable introduction, Garland regaled them with the song.
It was too much for John. Drunk and indignant, everything about the “star turn” reeked of stagy pathos. Several times during her rendition, he cupped his hands around his mouth and let out a string of obscenities. “Aw, fuck off, Sophie!” he hollered, thrashing about in his chair and waving her toward the wings. Finally, mercifully, the song and an encore ended, and the other stars, “very edgy and nervous,” massed around Garland, ostensibly to congratulate her but no doubt to keep the Beatles away.
For Brian, it was ghastly, a nightmare, not only because of the boys’ disturbing behavior but also for the humiliation it had caused him. In his book, Garland “was the epitome of great talent,” everything he’d always loved about theater and the musical stage. It put him in a precarious position, now that the Beatles’ hostility betrayed their anti-establishment sentiments, especially since he’d invited Garland to a party at his flat in their honor.
The party was supposed to be “a send-off for the boys,” and as Brian envisioned it, “nothing less than spectacular.” Two hundred invitations had been sent out to London’s most eligible young scenemakers, among them Russ Conway, Dusty Springfield, Mary Quant, Lionel Bart, Alma Cogan, Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Stones, the Searchers, George Martin, most of EMI’s top brass, the city’s most important disc jockeys, and, as a concession to the public, a handful of Beatles-friendly press. Everything had to be on a grand scale; no expense was to be spared. He hired Ken Partridge, a fancy interior decorator, to stage a setting lavish enough to rival the coronation; John Edgington and his craftsmen to install a breathtaking tented rooftop retreat with an inlaid dance floor and French windows overlooking all of Hyde Park; and Mr. Copple of Covent Gardens, the exclusive society caterer, whose menus were legendary for their sumptuousness.
But as the plans knitted together, an indistinct cloud drifted ominously over the preparations. It hadn’t taken Partridge long to determine that Brian was no ordinary client. After a string of casual evenings in the manager’s company, he concluded that much about the party was a placebo to mask the desolation and torment that churned inside the Beatles’ manager. The demons that weighed on him in Liverpool had turned inward again. “He tried hard to conceal the pain, but it had marked him like a beacon,” recalls Partridge.
That summer the two men ate dinner together almost every night, table-hopping among the city’s smartest restaurants. In gilded seclusion at the Coup de France, La Caprice, or the Connaught, caught up in the flow of alcohol and anxiety, Brian revealed “how empty his life had become and how increasingly lost he felt.” There was nothing to enjoy from all the money and opportunity. With his leprechaun charm, Partridge tried to shift the small talk onto a less-burdensome track, but Brian was inconsolable. He never discussed the Beatles or any of his other successes; it was as if they didn’t exist. Instead, he sulked, chafed, brooded, drank to excess, and wandered out looking, for all his sophistication, like an uneasy guest in an unaccommodating city.
“When we finished dinner, around eight-thirty, he’d always leave the Rolls [-Royce] in St. Ann’s Church car park, in the middle of Soho,” recalls Partridge. Across the road was the Golden Lion pub, a famous pickup place for “tuffy numbers”—guardsmen and rent boys—available at the crook of an eyebrow. “He was very well known in that pub,” says Partridge, who would watch as Brian, angry and excited, disappeared hurriedly inside. “Otherwise, if he didn’t find anything in the Lion, he would drive up and down the Mall—the great road up from Buckingham Palace, where all the state occasions took place. You could find a boy on just about every bench there. He’d pick them up and take them back to his flat. And the next day he’d tell me these lurid stories. There were terrifying beatings—and robberies.”
Even before the summer, friends noticed Brian slipping into depressions marked by episodes of irrational and self-destructive behavior. He had always been excitable, with volatile mood swings that terrified his employees, but had never given anyone cause to think it was anything more serious. Now, it seemed, these swings grew fiercer and more erratic. Charming and sensitive when in control, he turned cold and nasty at the least excuse of pique. Simple conversations often exploded into unprovoked violence. Emotional rages erupted with unprecedented ferocity, followed by silent, subversive bouts of self-loathing that could stretch on for hours in the privacy of his locked bedroom.
Peter Brown and Brian had spent part of May together, following the feria in Seville among a crowd of aficións that included Ken Tynan and Orson Welles. There, Brown noticed Brian’s growing dependence on pills, amphetamines, that he buffered with excessive quantities of alcohol in an attempt to offset the highs with lows. “It had a disastrous effect on him. It accelerated the mood swings. He was really the sweetest, most sensitive man, but he became belligerent in the blink of an eye. And the worst part was that nobody understood where it came from.”
“He was always putting pills into his mouth, thinking we wouldn’t notice,” Billy J. Kramer recalls, demonstrating how Brian would cover his mouth with a hand and pretend to cough while slipping his other hand stealthily between his fingers and lips. It seemed like acceptable behavior for a rock ’n roll idol. But realizing his manager “got fucked up,” Kramer says, “was pretty alarming.”
A quick trip to Roehampton, a posh sanitarium, in early August did little to relieve the stress. The same for an “all-boys party” in Montpelier Square with footmen in full costume and powdered wigs who attended to the guests’ every kinky whim. “Brian was far too uptight to enjoy himself,” recalls one of the attendees. Everything seemed to convey the same fretful sensation. Then, only hours before the rooftop party, his mother, Queenie, showed up unannounced and insisted that all the red wallpaper and carnations be removed immediately as a hedge against some macabre superstition.
Later, as the party flowed along, everyone seemed to agree that “Brian was the picture of self-assurance.” Dressed in an exquisite pin-striped suit and a pale blue shirt with stiff white collar and cuffs—“like a French diplomat”—he stood apart from the crowd, “beaming” in a daze, his chin tilted up at an angle like a Greco-Roman statue throughout the affair. When anyone tried to engage him in conversation, he stared past them, over their shoulders, gazing adoringly at John and Cynthia, Paul and Jane, George and Pattie, or Ringo and Maureen as they jostled their way through the crowd. Even Garland’s unexpected arrival in the middle of dinner didn’t seem to ruffle the facade. Anytime there was the least bit of excitement, Brian relied on the unfailing tactic. It was a simple enough solution, solving every immediate problem, but guests must have wondered how long he had had that cough.
The lure of America had once involved a fear of the unknown, but when the Beatles returned on August 18, there were no longer surprises. Their records were, according to a midwestern newspaper, “on jukeboxes in a hundred thousand joints and drugstores” (Capitol had flooded the market with an unprecedented 2 million copies of their brand-new album), airplay was nonstop to the point of punishment, A Hard Day’s Night flickered across a mind-boggling five hundred screens, newspapers boosted circulation on their mop-haired images. Everywhere the boys went—or were rumored to be—crowds amassed in staggering numbers: three thousand, eight thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, more. If the Beatles themselves were still oblivious to the extent of America’s infatuation with them, Neil Aspinall’s perspective was somewhat more informed. “America was now very aware of the Beatles,” he said, “and things were crazy.”
Crazy: it was a word occurring with disturbing frequency in descriptions of the shifting American scene. There was a feeling in the States that the blissful self-contained provincialism of the Eisenhower era was in rocky disarray, with forces working to destabilize it on myriad fronts. Young people were struggling—often chaotically—to find a means of self-expression. The seething civil rights movement, galvanized by a minister named Martin Luther King Jr., had strafed the status quo, as northern college students poured into the South, committed to actively dismantling segregation. The threat of thermonuclear war and talk of a widening “missile gap” aroused interest in pacifism, while the escalation of America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia heightened opposition to the draft and touched off demonstrations as well as a crusade against violence in particular and authority in general. And changing attitudes toward sexuality jump-started a raucous debate concerning public values and private moral choices.
Everything seemed connected to a growing disenchantment with the establishment and was set, coincidentally, to a soundtrack by the Beatles. As journalist Salley Rayl has concluded, with their music and appearance, the boys served as hip role models for a restless generation of Americans grappling with questions of individual freedom and rebellion. Their hair, especially, pissed off adults, she writes, “and now it was perceived to be threatening the very fabric of American society. It was a sign of degeneration. And it was intolerable. Furthermore the Beatles had an irreverent attitude, part wit and part cheeky disrespect, that questioned rigid, uptight American values.”
Crazy, indeed. In all the blind spots surrounding these issues, the Beatles were a visible target. Parents quickly put them in their crosshairs for contributing to teenage delinquency; right-wing evangelists accused them as being conspirators in a “Communist… pact”; psychologists couldn’t resist analyzing them as perpetrators of “mass hypnosis [and] contagious hysteria,” all in a rabbity effort to explain away the upheaval.
There was no precedent for the kind of mayhem the Beatles provoked. In Los Angeles, where the boys had cleared Customs, the terminal’s rotunda had to be cleared when the LAPD quickly lost control of the situation. “It scares you,” a lieutenant on duty admitted to Jack Smith, covering the arrival for the Los Angeles Times. “It’s just beyond me. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
In San Francisco, too, the festivities turned grim and dangerous. All traffic leading to and from the airport ground to a standstill. Fans dangled over the freeway overpasses as the limousine crawled past, waving banners and throwing things at the car. “I saw two girls fall to their knees at the roadside,” recalled NME’s feature columnist, Chris Hutchins, “biting their hands to stem the ecstasy of seeing the foursome.” At another intersection he watched, horrified, as “two motorcyclists collided in the commotion.” At the new Hilton, where the Beatles were booked into the fifteenth-floor penthouse, crowds throttled all entrances and disabled the elevators. Management had assured Brian’s henchmen that there was no access from the roof, but according to Walter Hofer: “No sooner had the Beatles moved into their suite than people [were] coming down from the roof on sheets.” One person who witnessed the scene described it as “total madness.” Even the cavernous Cow Palace, whose security forces had sparkled two weeks earlier during Barry Goldwater’s nomination as the Republican candidate for president, was a shambles. “Security was just awful,” recalls Larry Kane, Philadelphia’s longtime TV news anchor who covered the tour as a twenty-one-year-old greenhorn. “They never anticipated this kind of a problem. Certainly, the cops had never experienced anything like it. There wasn’t enough manpower, very makeshift security.” NEMS actually had the foresight to hire members of the Stanford football team as reinforcements around the stage, but even they were no match for the fans. The usual number of girls fainted. Kids who flung themselves at the Beatles were turned back with unflinching firmness. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. “But at one point,” Kane remembers, “a Beatles button came flying out of the crowd and hit Lennon—and cut him. And he was scared.” After the show Brian rushed the Beatles backstage to a trailer behind the arena, where a doctor was summoned to examine John. Kane, who watched from a corner of the room, remembers thinking: “It wasn’t a wound—but it was a wake-up call.”
The scene was the same everywhere. In Las Vegas “exasperated sheriff’s deputies” brought in police dogs to quell the “shrieking mob.” Mounted police first circled, then stormed the crowd in Vancouver. In Seattle the Beatles were “pinned in their dressing room for 59 minutes” before being rescued by a cordon of “Navy sailors who bent but didn’t break.” Jelly beans sailed at the stage from every conceivable angle. Nothing and no one, it seemed, was off-limits to attack. Journalist Art Schreiber recalls how, in Chicago, “somebody let go with a frozen T-bone [steak] from the balcony and it damn near took McCartney’s head off, landing with a big thud on the stage.”
The shows were patched together with no real concern for a cohesive structure. A package of four warm-up acts was the result of a shotgun marriage of rootless GAC artists. Bill Black’s Combo, a “dull-sounding big beat rock ensemble,” opened the bill and provided backing for the others, including the Exciters, still riding the crest of their 1962 Top 40 hit, “Tell Him”; the husky-voiced Jackie DeShannon, who wrote “Needles and Pins” for the Beatles’ Liverpool mates the Searchers; and the Righteous Brothers, a few years shy of real blue-eyed-soul fame but already something of a legend on the California club circuit.
As for the shows themselves, lasting a scant thirty-one minutes, they were like sitting inside a funnel cloud. The four Beatles would rush onstage unannounced, clutching their instruments like body armor while flashbulbs exploded around them in a hail of blinding white light. Most of the kids unleashed another burst of “screaming, weeping ecstasy,” keeping it up relentlessly throughout the entire performance. A solid wall of decibel-shattering sound shook the seats and floorboards, rumbling through the darkness, wave after wave of it, in a convulsion of rocking, rolling thunder. “It felt like an earthquake,” recalls an astonished eyewitness who would remember the experience for the rest of his life. “It would start at one end [of the arena] and continue to the other. It was incredible to do nothing but stand there, letting it wash right over you.”
Bill Medley, a member of the Righteous Brothers, recalls “feeling terrible” for the Beatles. “They were real players and singers, doing songs they’d written themselves” he says, “and yet they weren’t being heard beyond the first or second row. I remember standing by the stage and thinking: ‘this can’t be any fun for them.’ ”* But, in fact, it was fun, John insisted, explaining, “we don’t want [the fans] quiet.” Like most rock musicians, he fed off the screams and could tease them from the audience at will. So when things got dull, as they invariably did from night to night, John merely had to shake his head or grin at the crowd to set off another explosion. Let them raise a little hell, he decided. Scream, cry, bring down the house. John meant it when he said: “I like a riot.”
In many cities, the entourage went straight to the airport and headed to the next stop on the tour as a way of avoiding the crazy crowd scenes. For convenience and safety, GAC had chartered a plane for the duration, a twin-engine turboprop Electra owned by an outfit out of Fort Worth, Texas, called American Flyers Airlines, which “vibrated like crazy and made such a helluva lot of noise,” recalls a passenger on the tour, “that you couldn’t hear yourself think.”* Still, it made road life easier for the Beatles, not having to be pestered by fans and autograph seekers every time they were in transit. The cabin crew was great, the boys could move about undisturbed to their heart’s content, and there was room enough aboard to carry everyone connected with the tour.
There was a tiny lounge in the back of the plane where, whenever they got bored, the boys would congregate with several reporters always milling about, usually drinking and comparing notes. It was an uneasy standoff at first, with both groups eyeing each other like the opposition, but after a while, the ice began to thaw. “After a few days of circling, you could finally sit down with them,” recalls a journalist. “They had to see you for a while to get to know you.” Eventually Paul and Ringo conducted an ongoing poker game with a revolving cast of hard-core news guys, while John and George hustled Art Schreiber in many a “cutthroat game” of Monopoly. “Lennon was a fiend, and extremely competitive,” Schreiber remembers. “He got so keyed up over the damn game, he had to stand up to roll the dice.” And he stayed at it, racking up properties and plastic hotels until he was satisfied that he’d prevail. “I’d be falling asleep, and John would be tugging at me, saying, ‘Art, Art, hey, man, it’s your turn.’ ‘God, John, let me go to bed—please.’ Then we’d get to the next city and I’d no sooner get into my room [than] the phone would ring. ‘Come on up,’ John would insist. ‘We’ve got to play!’ And we’d literally quit the games when the sun was coming up.”
Through Schreiber, an older Cleveland-based radio news director who doubled as a national correspondent for Westinghouse stations, John got an unfiltered education in everything from the U.S. presidency to the upturn of violence in the streets. “We talked a lot about American politics and the racial divide,” recalls Schreiber, who had marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King Jr. and across Mississippi with James Meredith, as well as traveled closely with the candidates on the Kennedy campaign. “Lennon couldn’t get enough of it; he was fascinated. I tried to familiarize him with the segregation in the South, about how blacks moved north to avoid discrimination and go where jobs were available, but that there was as much segregation in the North, only in a different way.”
Prior to the start of the tour, Brian had forbade them to comment on topical issues. It wasn’t appropriate, he felt, for pop stars to air particular opinions inasmuch as it might alienate—or as George put it, “rattle”—a segment of their audience, especially over a hot potato like Vietnam. “We were being asked about it all the time and it was silly,” said John. “We had to pretend to be like in the old days when artists weren’t meant to say anything about anything.” But the Beatles weren’t about to be silenced—especially George and John, both of whom in a relatively short amount of time became consumed by social and political issues. “We couldn’t help ourselves…. We spoke our minds after that: ‘We don’t like it, we don’t agree with it, we think it is wrong.’ ”
Still, even an insignificant incident could put a torch to their careers. John got a taste of it in Las Vegas, after two thrilling shows at the Convention Center. Two young twin girls—perhaps no more than fourteen years old—managed to talk their way into the Beatles’ suite at the Sahara and fell asleep in his room at an extremely indelicate hour. As Derek Taylor maintained, “It was all perfectly respectable,” but, of course, he was being paid to call it respectable. No matter what, it didn’t look good. John was a married man after all. And it looked even worse when the girls’ mother showed up in the lobby, concerned that her daughters were still somewhere upstairs with the Beatles.
“Mal knocked on my door about two-thirty in the morning,” remembers Larry Kane, “and he told me there was a problem. ‘Put on a jacket and tie,’ he said. ‘We need a clean-cut-looking suit with an authoritative voice.’ ” Kane, having joined the tour only two days earlier, did as he was asked and followed the roadie back to the Beatles’ suite, where he understood John’s dilemma at a glance. Kane was dispatched to the lobby, where he found the girls’ mother waiting, and charmed her into believing that “Mr. Lennon [had] been spending some time with [her] young ladies, signing autographs.” John and Derek were so “badly shaken” by the experience that they had consulted a lawyer by the time they reached Los Angeles.
Perhaps in response, the Beatles steered clear of rabid female fans in Seattle, secluding themselves instead in a suite at the Edgewater Hotel on Elliott Bay, where they dropped fishing lines from their window and idled away the downtime. Officials had taken extraordinary precautions to ensure they wouldn’t be disturbed. A makeshift barricade constructed out of plywood and razor wire had been positioned around the hotel to discourage fans from storming the entrance, in conjunction with a Coast Guard detail patrolling the immediate bay area, but despite these extreme measures, a number of stowaways still managed to breach security. Girls were eventually discovered hiding in a restroom, another in a closet, and several under beds. Later the Beatles learned about a plan by the hotel’s housekeeping staff to sell the sheets and shag carpeting from their rooms to a local promotional firm, which offended their sensibilities enough to sabotage the scheme by urinating on everything in sight.
In Vancouver, at Empire Stadium, police security was unprepared for the “explosive situation” that erupted on the field, as five thousand kids rushed the stage “to jam up against… four crush barriers” separating them from the Beatles. In the process, kids got trampled and had to be rescued from the melee. Even the Beatles had to intervene. “If you don’t stop, we’re going to have to leave,” Paul warned the audience halfway through the show, but it had little effect on the situation. “These people have lost all ability to think,” complained a greatly agitated police inspector as he surveyed the scene, trying to redirect his men. Variety reported that “some 160 females, mainly in the 10 to 16 year age brackets, required medical attention.” Others were treated backstage or at a nearby hospital for broken ribs and legs, heat prostration, hysteria and “overexcitement,” along with an assortment of cuts and bruises.
“It was pretty scary just about everywhere we went,” recalls Chris Hutchins, who never strayed far from the Beatles’ long shadows. “Even those of us who had experienced Beatlemania in the U.K. were amazed at the disorder lurching around those shows in ’sixty-four.” Hutchens himself got a taste of the danger in Denver when the car he was riding in was mistaken for the Beatles’ and wound up being “badly damaged” by fans outside the Brown Palace Hotel. In New York the situation grew more serious during a security lapse at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. “Dozens of fans stormed [the] stage,” he reported in NME, “and at one point Ringo was knocked off his stool by [an] overenthusiastic girl who had leaped over steel-helmeted police kneeling in front of the stage.”
But that was only the tip of the iceberg. In Boston on September 12, a series of ferocious fistfights erupted on the sidewalk outside the Garden, followed by a wave of pushing and shoving during which two glass doors to the building were smashed and several gates overturned. Cops immediately converged from all sides, with a mounted police team stampeding through the mob and knocking young fans indiscriminately to the ground. “The police were truly awful,” recalled Derek Taylor in his memoir of the tour.
Boston was only a warm-up for Cleveland. A force of five hundred uniformed police circulated through Public Hall, clamoring roughly for order by knocking their nightsticks on chairs. They kept a lid on things while the opening acts were on, but as soon as the Beatles hit the stage, all civility broke down. Jelly beans, toys, and much heavier objects were launched at the band’s heads. Then, in the middle of “All My Loving,” the audience rose as one and stood on their seats as a swarm of teenage girls “surged toward the stage in a spontaneous banzai charge,” as one reporter called it. A cordon of forty cops tried to hold back the girls but eventually collapsed against the attack, “as did a brass railing… bolted to the floor which was ripped out” in the ensuing scuffle.
Instead of regrouping to restore order, the officer in charge, Deputy Inspector Carl Bare, charged onto the stage and attempted to stop the music. At first the Beatles ignored him, continuing to play. Undaunted, Bare elbowed Paul aside and commandeered the mike. “Sit down, sit down—this show is over!” he bellowed. When the Beatles refused to respond, the battle line was drawn. Bare advanced on John, who squibbed away, mocking the policeman with a little dance and making a face. A “hurricane of boos” flooded the arena. Another policeman, Inspector Michael Blackwell, joined Bare onstage and waved the Beatles into the wings. Predictably, the boys refused to yield, but Blackwell, known locally as Iron Mike, grabbed George by the elbow and steered him forcefully off the stage, at which point the rest of the Beatles reluctantly followed.
Art Schreiber, who was standing in the wings, grew terrified by the crowd’s response. “It touched off a kind of screaming I’d never heard before,” he recalls, “a violent, angry, bone-chilling roar that somehow demanded a comparable reaction.” He could see packs of kids roaming aimlessly, menacingly, around the dark hall, pursued by wary policemen. Several windows were shattered as disgruntled fans tried to reach the backstage area through an adjoining building.
Calm prevailed thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Derek Taylor. Sensing a disaster in the making, he volunteered to go onstage and plead with the audience for order in return for twenty minutes of additional showtime. The police were reluctant to accept at first, as were the Beatles, who had already changed out of their stage clothes and were relishing an early escape. Much like a cagy U.N. negotiator, Taylor swung between both camps in an attempt to broker an agreement, and in the end, the show went on.
In Los Angeles on August 23, the Beatles played to a worshipful crowd of almost nineteen thousand at the Hollywood Bowl, the gilded open-air amphitheater at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. Behind them, reaching into the spectacular starlit sky, another ten or fifteen thousand gate-crashers were massed in the sparsely populated woodlands. John swung his head around reflexively, like a child discovering new scenery, taking in the unexpected guests. “Welcome to you in the trees!” he shouted, as the other Beatles plugged in. It was “a gorgeous California night, just magnificent” and moistly warm, with incomparable hibiscus-scented breezes. A lot of importance had been placed on this gig, what with the celebrity-studded crowd and Capitol Records headquartered a few miles away, and the band fed on it to get wired.
George Martin had arranged with Capitol Records to record the evening’s concert in the hope that it would serve as an interim release, and so the clamshell stage was cluttered with booms and cables. Live albums were still something of an anomaly in the rock ’n roll business, but Martin, who’d struck gold with the Beyond the Fringe soundtrack, felt that Beatles fans would support such an effort if it captured the excitement the boys put out onstage. “They were great as a live band,” he observed, having seen them dozens of times. But from the moment the tape rolled, there was no containing the screaming. Martin worked frantically with Capitol’s crew, struggling to filter out the noise, but the VU meters were hopelessly redlined throughout the Beatles’ set. “It was like putting a microphone at the tail of a 747 jet,” he said. “It was one continual screaming sound, and it was very difficult to get a good recording.”
Still, while the Los Angeles Times critic claimed that “not much of the mop-haired quartet’s singing could be heard” over the shrieking, the crowd was comparatively low-key for a Beatles concert. “It was almost too well behaved,” John told KRLA’s Jim Steck over lunch the next afternoon. For a change, he said, the Beatles could actually hear what they were playing, which, coupled with the lush surroundings, made the show the highlight of the tour.
Afterward, the boys were feted until nearly dawn by about thirty of the city’s “best-looking” starlets, including the Mod Squad’s Peggy Lipton and Joan Baez, who were shipped up to the gated mansion the Beatles were renting on St. Pierre Road in a neighborhood known as Hidden Hills. In an unprecedented move, the traveling press corps was also invited, as were wives and girlfriends and a few local deejays. Ray Hildebrand and Jill Jackson, who performed as Paul and Paula, showed up as someone’s guests, along with Billy Preston, whom the Beatles had first met in Liverpool and later at the Star-Club during his tenure in Little Richard’s band. It was a cozy little crowd, “very casual,” recalls a guest. The boys, lounging in the living room, introduced the newcomers to their friends on the tour, and as the evening stretched on and the Beatles dropped their guard, the party developed into a predictably wild scene. Guests enjoyed the general run of the house, including the pool and the bedrooms, where the action was in full swing.
Brian, who had been looking forward to enjoying L.A. nightlife, had actually turned in early and was asleep in his sprawling pink and green suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel in anticipation of two important events scheduled for the next day. He’d arranged to have lunch in the Polo Lounge at noon on August 24 with Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s wily old mentor, so they could check each other out and compare notes on managing their two rock phenomena. Then, later, with the Beatles in tow, he would head to a charity garden party in Brentwood to benefit the Hemophilia Foundation hosted by Capitol Records’ president Alan Livingston, whose wife, actress Nancy Olson, was on the foundation’s board.
At the party Livingston went to great lengths to accommodate the Beatles, who, after being cold-shouldered by the label, had rocketed Capitol’s profits into the stratosphere. No expense had been spared to stage a Hollywood-style spectacular. A festive striped tent had been set up in the spacious backyard, where vendors dispensed soft ice cream and lemonade to a litter of gorgeously groomed children. There were pony rides and games. Security was unparalleled, befitting a presidential visit, with a fully armed riot squad stashed in the garage, just in case. The guest list was a who’s who of local dignitaries, complete with a selection of handpicked celebrities, each of whom was required by the hosts to bring a child: Edward G. Robinson had in tow his granddaughter, Francesa; Lloyd Bridges, his son Jeff; Rita Hayworth, her daughter, Princess Yasmin Khan; Donald O’Connor, his son, Freddy, and daughter, Alicia; Jack Palance, his daughter, Holly; Eva Marie Saint, her son, Darrell, and daughter, Laurie; Barbara Rush, her son, Christopher; Jeanne Martin brought five of Dean’s children a few feet in front of Jerry Lewis, who bolted as soon as he saw them, leaving his son, Gary, behind rather than risk an encounter with his estranged partner.
If the Beatles were at all starstruck, they didn’t show it. Longtime movie fans, they always enjoyed meeting their screen heroes, but the turnout at the party seemed on the slim side, rather far from the hip. “We saw a couple of film stars,” John relented, but added: “We were expecting to see more.” Then an invitation arrived that absolved the anemic turnout.
Burt Lancaster was screening the new Peter Sellers movie, A Shot in the Dark, at his Bel-Air estate and thought the Beatles might get a kick out of joining him. Was that the Burt Lancaster, they asked Derek—the man with all the teeth? Ringo was absolutely beside himself. A stone cowboy freak, he’d seen Lancaster in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Apache, The Kentuckian, and Vera Cruz the moment they were released and had the actor’s persona, with the leer and cobra smile, down pat. Burt Lancaster! Sure, they’d watch a movie with him. They’d shop for groceries with him, if that was the offer.
Lancaster’s pad, in George’s opinion, “was a very expensive, impressive Hollywood home,” with a sunken Olympic-size pool buried in a grotto of lighted waterfalls and lagoons with a tributary that fed directly into a bedroom—you could just swim right in—and a panoramic view of West Los Angeles that seemed lifted from a movie backdrop. But it wasn’t nearly as impressive as Lancaster himself, a bronzed god “about eight feet tall” whose aura probably set off car alarms up and down the hills. Ringo, who came dressed in western-style gear, with a holster and toy guns strapped around his waist, drew on their host as he lumbered through the door. “Hold ’em up there now, Burt—this town ain’t big enough for the two of us,” he drawled. It was the equivalent of some goofball meeting the Beatles and bleating, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But Lancaster played along, flashing his dazzling grin and going for an imaginary weapon. “What have you got there?” he frowned at Ringo’s plastic gun. “Kids’ stuff.” The Beatles were in heaven.
The next day, during a fatiguing heat wave, more stars—and more guns—continued to show up, beginning right after lunch when Colonel Parker arrived in a station wagon loaded with presents for the Beatles. A huge box carried to the patio spilled over with rhinestone-studded leather belts and holsters with each of the boys’ names engraved on the back and “From Elvis and the Colonel” burned inside. The Beatles expressed their thanks, but that was as far as they were willing to go. There was something slightly off base, something condescending about the spirit of the gift-giving that registered on the boys’ shit detectors. “Bang, bang,” Paul deadpanned, aiming his gun at the Colonel, who was sitting across the table from him. Ominously, John pointed a gun at his own head and mimicked Paul—“bang!”—as George grumbled: “I wish we had real guns.” It cast an awkward hush over the table, broken finally by the Colonel’s twangy appeal to “have fun, fellas,” before hightailing it out of their compound.
Soon afterward, Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee stopped by to pay their respects, followed by Jayne Mansfield, a tough little number who had “harangued and hassled” Derek Taylor for days in an attempt to have her picture taken with the Beatles. Brian had laid down the law about using the Beatles in photo ops: it was out of the question, especially with cheesy celebrities, but Derek occasionally made exceptions. Mansfield wasn’t to be one of them. Having gotten the tactful Lancashire brush-off, she finally showed up at the house, “adamant about meeting them.” She refused to take no for an answer. It set up an awkward situation, awkward for its exchange in front of the boys and awkward because of its inexcusably harsh pitch, but in the clamorous give-and-take, Mansfield’s suggestion that everyone meet at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go seemed like a solution they could live with—anything, as long as it removed her from their doorstep.
Truth be told, the Beatles were itching to get out, tired of being cooped up and handled, eager to sample L.A. nightlife without being on a leash. John, Neil, and Derek had actually gone clothes shopping at Beau Gentry earlier in the day and were encouraged by the fact that no one had accosted them. Maybe, Derek concluded, they could survive an outing to the Whiskey. Brian wouldn’t approve, but he had disappeared again, leaving Derek in charge.
Calls were made to the club, whose press agent guaranteed the Beatles “absolute privacy.” Johnny Rivers was playing, and George and Ringo set out at 10:30 in a white Cadillac convertible, while John followed in a police car with Mansfield and a few guys from the press corps, leaving Paul curled up in a hammock. “It was bad from the get-go,” recalls Larry Kane, who had squeezed into the backseat before Derek could give him the boot. “Before anyone knew what was happening, John grabbed Mansfield and they started making out like mad. It was almost obscene the way they went at it like that, right there in front of us.”
It was evident from the moment they pulled into the Whiskey’s parking lot on Sunset Boulevard that “Beatlemania [was] in full frenzy, the owners having broadcast [the] visit all over town.” Somehow, John elbowed his way inside the jam-packed club, where a banquette had been reserved, but George and Ringo had to be literally lifted and passed over the crowd to keep them from being trampled. Instantly “the whole of Hollywood paparazzi descended,” George remembered. Photographers zeroed right in on the money shot: busty Jayne Mansfield sandwiched between three-quarters of the Beatles. Wordlessly, the boys let them do their bit, withstanding an explosion of flashbulbs. It was over soon enough—except that Robert Flora, a stringer for UPI, refused to cut the Beatles any slack. “He just kept snapping pictures of them with one of those old-fashioned box cameras that flashed real big,” says Larry Kane, “and they wanted to be left alone.” After a suitable grace period, George warned Flora “to get lost,” which worked for about a minute. Soon he drifted back, peppering the table with flashes. “Will you just move him?” John asked a bouncer diplomatically, waving Flora aside. “Tell him to drop his camera, come over and join the table. Anything, but stop flashing.”
But as the bouncer turned around, Flora reached over his biceps and boldly fired off another shot at the table. “Get the fuck out of here!” George roared to a stunned entourage. Jumping halfway to his feet, he snatched up his glass—a half-drained scotch and Coke—and hurled its contents at the camera. The drink missed its mark and hit actress Mamie Van Doren instead, who was making her way over to the table.
The next day, predictably, the incident was splashed across the front page of the Herald Examiner, along with “photos by Bob Flora” of the entire drink-throwing fiasco. One of the pictures shows George clearly in action, establishing a new public image to contradict that of the so-called quiet Beatle. (In Baltimore, two weeks later, he would reinforce this side of him by booting a local photographer in the ass.) “That was horrendous,” admitted George, who regarded the skirmish as a lapse in judgment. The Beatles had always worked so hard to keep from losing control like that in public, from embarrassing themselves in front of fans. But it also underscored how much things had altered since they’d hit the road back in June. In fact, the whole gestalt of Beatlemania had radically changed. The fans were becoming more aggressive, the situations more dire, the press more unforgiving, the future more uncertain. From now on, the way the Beatles interacted with anyone had to be carefully refocused. One thing was for sure: venturing out in public was no longer a smart or safe bet. As Derek Taylor recalled: “When in future days someone would say—and someone often did say it—‘You guys never go out anywhere. Don’t you ever feel shut in?’ we would recall the time we went night-clubbing [sic] with Jayne Mansfield and sigh.”
The American tour dragged on through most of September, with little variation in its madcap routine. The cities sped by in a blur: Denver, Cincinnati, New York, Atlantic City, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit… Everywhere they went, there were greater displays of mayhem, the fans ever more determined to cross the Beatles’ path. Their schemes got more inventive—and more preposterous, too—as the tour progressed and gathered steam. In Indianapolis a college student posed as a room-service waiter at the Speedway Motor Inn in order to collect their autographs. That stunt was clever enough to amuse the boys. But at the old Muhlbach Hotel in Kansas City, a mother got stuck crawling through the air-conditioning ducts trying to locate the Beatles’ suite.
Mothers! They put their daughters to shame when it came to the nightly groupie scene. There was always an abundance of gorgeous young women willing to do anything—and to anyone—in order to meet one of the Beatles. But the mothers were even more determined to score one of the boys. “Older women would come up to us all the time and say, ‘I want to meet the Beatles,’ ” recalls a journalist who traveled with the entourage. “I’d say, ‘I can’t do that.’ And they’d say, ‘No, you don’t understand. I want to make them happy.’ ”
The variety of women that paraded through the Beatles’ rooms was extraordinary for its range and magnitude. “After most shows, you couldn’t get into their suite without wading through the crush of available girls,” Wendy Hanson recalled. “It resembled the waiting room of a busy doctor’s office. Derek or Neil would poke his head through the door and say, ‘Next,’ until, one by one, they’d work their way through the entire group.” Invariably, when Neil confronted a promoter about arrangements following a show, he’d be waved off in mid-sentence—“Don’t worry, that’s all been taken care of”—which usually meant that hookers were waiting in their dressing room. “The Beatles hated that,” says Tony Barrow, who encountered it on subsequent tours. “The promoters used to think they were being terribly helpful, but those girls were gotten rid of as fast as the Beatles could get rid of them.”
Most of the time. But in Atlantic City, at a motel party following the concert at Convention Hall, the girls on call were too spectacular to resist. John, especially, couldn’t take his eyes off a slim and flashy young blonde who “reminded him of Brigitte Bardot.” And again, in Dallas, when bunnies from a private club showed up, the boys yielded to temptation. This time it was Paul who fancied a tall blond cowgirl standing somewhat behind the others. Art Schreiber, who happened to be passing through the suite, was startled when Paul motioned with his chin and whispered, “I like that one. Can you get her for me?” Answered Schreiber: “Listen, pal, I’m no fucking pimp. I’m a reporter.”
The Beatles were in dire need of a substitute distraction when the tour mercifully rolled into New York. “This is it! This is what it’s all about!” Paul gushed, as their car emerged from the Midtown Tunnel slightly before four on the morning of August 28. They had been flying since midnight, having taken off directly after the last show in Cincinnati, where the temperature onstage peaked at a torturous 115 degrees. Exhausted though they might have been, the city hit them like a handful of amphetamines. New York, New York: it was a sight for sore eyes—and a jolt to weary senses.
John immediately ordered their driver to scan the local radio stations and, sure enough, it was just the same as the last time they’d arrived. Their songs reverberated right across the AM dial. A thrill like that never wore off!
“This is it!” Paul said again to no particular response, though everyone nodded in unison.
The Plaza Hotel now knew what to expect and refused to have the Beatles back, so at Ed Sullivan’s suggestion, they’d shifted headquarters to the Delmonico Hotel, a dowdy high-rise on the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Park Avenue, where Sullivan lived year-round and could vouch for their welfare. But when their limo pulled up to the entrance canopy and they got out, about eighty teenage girls broke through police barricades. The boys knew how to slip unscathed through these type of crowds, but a plucky fifteen-year-old named Angie McGowan, who lived just a few blocks south, pounced on a startled Ringo, ripping the St. Christopher’s medal from a chain around his neck. In the havoc she also shredded his shirt, according to an account in the New York World-Telegram, “then retired triumphantly into the crowd.”
New York, New York: double trouble, but alluring as ever. Two sold-out shows at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium drew nearly thirty thousand teenagers to what Robert Shelton, the New York Times pop music critic, labeled “a screaming success.” Shelton, partial to Greenwich Village folksingers, warned: “[The Beatles] have created a monster in their audience. If they have concern for anything but the money they are earning, they had better concern themselves with controlling their audiences before this contrived hysteria reaches uncontrollable proportions.” It was a ridiculous admonition. No one was going to control Beatlemania, much less tame the defiant monster. The Beatles, more than anyone, had transformed the rock show from a conventional performance into a bash to blow off some steam. The audience was asserting itself without even realizing what it was doing. The feeling generated at the Beatles shows bordered on spiritual anarchy, and being nothing short of exhilarating, nothing was going to stop it. In under a year, the Beatles had redefined the experience in terms of sheer numbers, money, and energy. No one, not even Elvis, had that great of an impact all at once. A whole new chapter of musical prophecy was being written.
It was inevitable that Dylan would show up. While the Beatles had linked themselves musically to Elvis, it was Dylan with whom they would reshape their generation.
Paul had discovered him first, buying the Freewheelin’ album before they’d left for Paris at the beginning of the year. That record hit the turntable the moment the Beatles settled into their suite at the George V. “And for the rest of our three weeks in Paris we didn’t stop playing it,” John recalled. In fact, George considered the experience “one of the most memorable things of the trip,” alleviating the irritation of being cooped up in their rooms.
One can only imagine the impact that Dylan’s music had on the boys. The album itself was the first of many watersheds in his long career. That sure command of language might have drifted by unnoticed were it the work of an older, more experienced interpreter, but from a twenty-two-year-old folksinger, this articulation of self-expression had major resonance. There was plenty to chew on, from the sentimental arguments made in “Blowin’ in the Wind” to the lovesick bitterness of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” to the barbed topicality of “Masters of War” and especially the verbal whiplashing given to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” “I’m sure this kind of thing found its way into our music, and into our lyrics, and influenced whom we were interested in,” Paul explained many years afterward. “Vocally and poetically Dylan was a huge influence.” Certainly, in addition to the obvious effect it had on his language and style, Dylan’s lyrics served to turn John inward as a songwriter. From that point on, he said, “I’d started thinking about my own emotions…. Instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself.”
The revelation was not merely a self-conscious one. In ten years, no other artist, not even one as inventive as the Beatles, had been able to cultivate rock’s literary essence. Paul Simon, one of the more articulate young songwriters to tap into that reservoir, understood just how liberating Dylan’s contributions actually were. “He made us feel at a certain time that it was good to be smart, to be observant, that it was good to have a social conscience.”
There is no way of knowing how, or even if, this posed a threat to the Beatles. But John responded to the challenge much as Simon described it, probably because he was better equipped. The older John got, the more experience he acquired and discoveries he made, the less songs about holding hands and sharing secrets kept him engaged. As a songwriter, his perspective had expanded, and he was trying to break out of the mold. In Dylan, John had finally found what was, for him, a new direction. It is no coincidence that John began writing “I’m a Loser” while still in Paris. The song is clearly his attempt at constructing an early self-portrait, with its revealing soft focus on relationships and fame. “I think it was Dylan who helped me realize that,” John concluded, “not by any discussion or anything, but by hearing his work.” John reveled in the new possibilities of substance and character that might free his imagination from the mush he worked on with Paul.
Dylan caught up with the Beatles in their suite at the Delmonico about an hour after their first Forest Hills concert. It was a particularly maddening night. They were in the midst of having dinner with Brian, Neil, and Mal when he arrived with his road manager, Victor Maimudes, and New York Post columnist Al Aronowitz, who had coordinated the get-together as a favor to the boys. Of their initial introduction, John commented: “When I met Dylan I was quite dumbfounded,” but within minutes he managed to get over any initial shock. Dylan was eccentric and intense but cool, very cool, in a way that only another pop phenom could appreciate. There was the usual checking-out process, followed by awkward stabs at conversation, until ultimately everyone discovered that they spoke the same language.
It didn’t take long before someone retrieved the communal pillbox from John’s leather bag and Drinamyls and Preludins were offered like after-dinner mints to the edgy guests. The Beatles downed a handful on most nights of the tour as a way of staying up—and up—when their bodies ached for sleep. But Dylan took one look at the assortment of gaily colored pills and shook his head. “How about something a little more organic?” he suggested. “Something green… marijuana.”
The Beatles recoiled. They were scotch and Coke men, chain-smokers. Granted, there were the pills, but they served a purpose other than getting stoned.
“We’ve never really smoked marijuana before,” Brian interjected, sensing the boys’ immediate discomfort. This, unbeknownst to him, wasn’t entirely true. “We first got marijuana from an older drummer with another group in Liverpool,” George recalled. Besides, an acquaintance had shared a joint with the Beatles at the Star-Club in Hamburg, but it was what Neil called “just the sticks,” which probably meant a deposit of stems mixed with dried oregano or some such filler.
“But what about your song—the one about getting high?” Dylan wondered. In his inimitable rasp, he sang: “ ‘And when I touch you, I get high, I get high…’ ”
“Those aren’t the words,” John said stone-faced. “It’s ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide.’ ”
No matter. Rolling “a skinny American joint,” Dylan handed it to John, who gave it a dubious look and passed it on to Ringo, dubbing him “my official taster.” Ringo was no blushing maiden. Without a word, he retreated to a back room sealed with rolled towels—there was a battalion of New York City policemen on a security detail in the hall—and smoked it down to his fingertips. A few minutes later he emerged with a twisted grin plastered on his face. As Paul recounted the experience, “We said, ‘How is it?’ He said, ‘The ceiling’s coming down on me.’ And we went, Wow! Leaped up, ‘God, got to do this!’ So we ran into the back room—first John, then me and George, then Brian.”
The effect it had on the boys was spectacular. “We were just legless, aching from laughter,” George told Derek Taylor, who joined them later on in the suite. Paul greeted Taylor by gathering him up in an immense bear hug and revealing “he’d been up there,” pointing to the ceiling, and Brian pressed his P.A. to smoke some weed, which he politely declined. The pot had loosened up Brian to a degree that was truly emancipating. He became entranced by his reflection in the mirror. After a moment or two he stood back, then pointed to himself, and blurted out: “Jew!” to everyone’s hilarity. Paul noted how that was the first time Brian had ever referred to himself as a Jew. “It may not seem the least bit significant to anyone else,” he admitted, “but in our circle, it was very liberating.” And a sign to those not red-eyed of Brian’s deep self-loathing.
Meanwhile, Paul entertained his own moments of mind-blowing significance. For a period of time he frantically crisscrossed the suite in search of pencil and paper to capture the profundities that were leapfrogging around his brain. “Get it down, Mal, get it down!” he implored his faithful roadie, appointing the also significantly stoned Evans his trusty Boswell. Exasperated, Paul scratched out his own cogent musings on a slip of paper, which Mal obediently stashed away for safekeeping, or at least until the next morning, when Paul read its contents aloud to the other Beatles. It said: “There are seven levels,” nothing more, which amused everyone to no end.
An unusually gregarious Dylan was delighted by the Beatles’ curiosity and readiness to experiment. They got right into the groove, which relaxed the recalcitrant bard, who lit joint after joint, fanning the fateful flame. “He kept answering our phone, saying, ‘This is Beatlemania here,’ ” John recalled. But it was something much more than that, something as close to a cultural milestone as could be determined by academics and savants. “We were smoking dope, drinking wine and generally being rock ’n rollers, and having a laugh, you know, and surrealism. It was party time.”
That it was: party time. And nothing would ever be the same again.