The original plan when the Beatles played Shea Stadium, New York, on 15 August 1965 was that they should arrive by helicopter and descend as if from heaven into the very midst of the 55,000 waiting fans. That, Brian felt, would be the kind of theatricality that only the Beatles deserved as they became the first group ever to play a stadium of such vast proportions. And although, in the event, that wasn’t allowed to happen, as, before reaching the stadium, they had to be transferred to a Wells Fargo security van, the day would go down in rock history as the peak of their touring days.
They’d just finished a two-week European tour when, in what looked like natty little toy soldier uniforms, they made their way to the stage at the centre of the ground and looked around in astonishment at the multitude. Before the show they’d all been nervous, but, out there on a little island stage of musical technology, the realisation of how far they were from the audience had the effect of drawing them closer together. In moments like this, when nerves could get to them, it would always be John, the comic, who would lead. He was never much of a keyboard player and didn’t play piano on their records, but now he found himself attacking the organ with antic disposition as Paul sang ‘I’m Down’. It made no difference that John only knew a handful of chords, or that he attacked the keys with his elbow. Fifty yards away, the fans couldn’t hear or see that. John’s job was to be the leader of the band, and the best way to lead was to amuse the other members at what they could all see had become the absurdity of Beatles concerts. ‘Once you plug in and the noise starts, you’re just a group who could be playing anywhere . . . You forget that you’re the Beatles,’ he said about an afternoon he’d loved.
Some fans – Linda Eastman, who was yet to meet Paul, her future husband, among them – were upset that they couldn’t hear the music. But on this day the Beatles didn’t care. The fans had come to see them, not to hear them, which would be the case everywhere as they began their latest traverse of North America. ‘We could send out four waxwork dummies of ourselves and that would satisfy the crowds,’ was John’s opinion. ‘Beatles concerts are nothing to do with music any more.’
What they were to do with was more difficult to define. In the delirium that their appearances provoked, parallels would be drawn with religious frenzy and mass political communion. That such mob excitement was being sparked by four young men who sang popular songs mainly about the emotional vagaries of adolescents had no precursor on this scale. It was the by-product of twentieth-century communications. When girl fans had screamed in smaller numbers, although with equal intensity, for Elvis, it could be pointed out that he would purposely be sexually provocative when on stage. But the Beatles had always made a point of not being sexy in their performances. John could be funny, Ringo was lovable, and George and Paul looked romantic.
But no one ever called the Beatles’ performances sexy. If sex was involved, it didn’t emanate from them, so much as it was inevitably everywhere in their hormonally charged, excited teenage audiences. The Beatles on stage were the trigger, as one scream led to ten thousand or fifty thousand more, and in this way the audience became part of the show, an audience primed to react by radio and television, like no other audience in history. The Beatles, and Beatlemania, and their audiences, were all products of their time.
There’s an unwritten rule in entertainment that says you should never meet your idols – because nine times out of ten they will disappoint you. For John, Elvis Presley had already disappointed by appearing in vapid beach-boy movies since he’d left the US Army in 1960, and by making some mediocre records. All the same, although Hollywood stars had flocked to the Beatles when they’d first arrived in America, Elvis was, as John said, ‘the only person in the United States we really wanted to meet . . . though, I’m not sure that he wanted to meet us’.
So when, during a break in Los Angeles halfway through the tour, a young English journalist called Chris Hutchins engineered a summit between the Beatles and their one-time hero at Elvis’s home in Bel Air, the mood was tentative. Elvis had only agreed to it because the Colonel pushed him into it, believing that it would be good publicity. Now, however, he was no longer the twenty-one-year-old rule-breaking and ground-breaking rebel who had inspired them almost a decade earlier.
No photographers were permitted to record the meeting, but if a picture had been taken it would show Elvis in a red shirt and black jerkin, his hair dyed black and lacquered like a helmet, being stared at by the four silent, shampooed, shaggy-haired English usurpers of his throne, John and Paul on either side of him on a horseshoe-shaped settee. Across his large sitting room were Priscilla Presley and some of her girlfriends, all overdressed for the occasion in party attire, who, in turn, gazed at the Beatles. Elvis was then thirty and John approaching his twenty-fifth birthday. But in the way the two men looked, and in their attitudes, there could have been a two-decade difference in age.
Uncomfortable with the awed silence, Elvis finally joked, ‘Well, if you guys are just going to stare at me, I’m going to bed.’
The ice was partly broken. But while Paul tried to get a conversation going about the bass guitar, as Elvis was nervously playing a Fender along to Charlie Rich’s ‘Mohair Sam’ that was on his jukebox, John began to speak in a mock Peter Sellers-type German accent. He was trying to be funny, but such was the awkwardness of the situation it’s unlikely that Elvis realised. George, meanwhile, had been stoned before he got there, and took little part in any conversation, while Ringo went off to play pool with some of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia entourage. For Paul the most memorable part of the evening was that Elvis had the first TV remote he’d ever seen.
It wasn’t an unpleasant evening, and John would later say he enjoyed it, but the immediate rapport that had occurred at his meeting with Bob Dylan the previous year was not repeated. Things got better when guitars were passed around and plugged in so that some ensemble versions of rock and roll riffs were played, without much singing. After which Paul ventured to tell Elvis how much they’d all liked his early rock records. To which Elvis replied that he was thinking of recording some more songs in similar vein. Had they not been overawed by the occasion, John and Paul should at that point have offered to write a song for their host. They had the magic touch of the moment and were regularly handing out songs to their friends, some of which became very big hits. But no suggestion was made and the moment passed with John’s slightly brusque retort: ‘Oh, good. We’ll buy them when you do,’ which sounded ruder than intended. Years later, Elvis would include ‘Get Back’ and ‘Yesterday’ in his stage act, but 1965 was when he really needed a little Lennon and McCartney magic.
As the Beatles left that night, inviting Elvis to visit their rented home in Beverly Glen for a party the following evening – an invitation that was not taken up – John, now quite drunk, returned to his German accent and said: ‘Sanks for ze muzik, Elvis. Long live ze King!’ It probably sounded as though he was being sarcastic, but he meant it. As he would tell some of Elvis’s pals who did attend the Beatles’ party the next night: ‘Without Elvis I would have been nothing.’ He meant that, too.
‘It was a nice meeting,’ he would say later. ‘But he wasn’t articulate, that’s all . . . He did some good stuff after the army, but it was never quite the same. It was like something happened to him psychologically.’ On a crueller day, though, looking for a laugh, he would say that meeting Elvis had been ‘just like meeting Engelbert Humperdinck’. His habit of changing his mind was a constant in his life.
The rest of the US tour was the same screaming bedlam the Beatles had come to expect and by the time they returned to England in September the euphoria they’d felt at Shea Stadium was quickly dissolving. But it wasn’t so much the fans who bothered them: ‘They’ve paid for a good show and they can go potty if they like,’ he said.
What irritated them was having to talk to people they didn’t want to meet. Today, rock stars are surrounded by small armies of security men to barricade them against outside demands. But the Beatles travelled with the same little unit they’d always had, with Brian managing, Neil and Mal acting as road managers and security and Tony Barrow looking after the demands of the press. All of which meant that local officials, promoters and police could easily get to them.
The most difficult moments would be when invalids in wheelchairs would be lined up for them as though the Beatles were faith healers. The suspicion was that some of the nurses and carers only brought the patients because they saw it as a way that they could get to meet the Beatles themselves.
It had been at John’s insistence that Mimi leave Liverpool and move closer to him in the south of England. She still worried about him, but he worried about her, too, aware of and feeling slightly guilty about the constant disruption to her life from the fans who made pilgrimages to Mendips. So, one day while she’d been staying at Kenwood, he decided to take her by Rolls-Royce on a tour of houses on the south coast where she thought she might like to live. Estate agents had already provided details of four possibilities, but Mimi had grumpily dismissed the first three. Then she’d seen a white bungalow by the beach at Sandbanks at Poole in Dorset, and John had made up her mind for her. ‘If you don’t have it, Mimi,’ he said, ‘I will.’
‘There were still people living in it,’ Mimi would recall, ‘so I didn’t want to go in, but John did.’ She was embarrassed because he was wearing his old jeans and what she described as ‘a silly cap’. But he was ‘as bold as brass’. It cost him £25,000 – which was the amount he’d paid for his own home, Kenwood. But it was by the sea and had a beautiful view in the richest corner of England outside London.
Mimi had hoped that living less than a hundred miles away would mean that she would see more of Julian, but Cynthia would only remember one visit to Sandbanks, on a sunny summer’s day. Putting a picnic together they paddled and sunbathed, with John hiding under a large hat so that no one would recognise him. They didn’t.
‘It was heaven,’ Cynthia would tell me. ‘Beautiful. The one moment when we sat as a little family and made sand castles with Julian’s buckets and spades. We planned to do it again. But we never did.’
The autumn of 1965 was mainly spent recording at Abbey Road, but there was a break in the sessions when in October all four Beatles were driven through the gates of Buckingham Palace to be awarded with their medals as Members of the British Empire, an honour promoted by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and bestowed on them by the Queen. Traditionally the Queen’s biannual honours had usually gone to establishment figures, such as long-serving civil servants, Members of Parliament, heads of major businesses and charities, and former members of the armed forces. So when the honour for the Beatles had been announced in the summer there had been much amusement in the press, and some outrage, that a mere pop group should be worthy of such decoration. Some retired generals were said to have even threatened to send their own honours back if standards were to be lowered so far. It seems unlikely that any did.
Harold Wilson had been clever. The honour wasn’t for the Beatles’ contribution to music, it was for their part in boosting the nation’s exports. At first there had been some disagreement among the group as to whether they should accept the award. Though Ringo liked the idea, John, a vague republican, wasn’t so sure. But he was flattered, too, and putting aside his argument that they would be selling out even further, he got up early (‘I couldn’t believe that such a time existed’) and went off to meet the Queen.
He would later boast that before the investiture, the Beatles smoked pot in the Palace toilets, but that was just John fibbing for the fun of it. They were, the others agreed, too nervous to have done that. As rituals go it was all straightforward enough, with the Beatles waiting in a line for their names to be called, then having to walk forward, bow, and then step further forward. John was first, as usual.
‘It’s a pleasure giving this to you. Have you been working hard recently?’ the Queen asked as she hooked the MBE medal on to his lapel.
Mimi hadn’t brought John up to make small talk with the Queen, and John’s mind went blank. He had been working very hard recording, but for some reason he said, ‘No, we’ve been having a holiday.’
Then, stepping back he bowed again, and, turning, walked away, leaving the Queen to honour his friends. Usually recipients were proud to have been honoured by the Queen, but John quickly sent his medal to Mimi, who put it on her mantelpiece in her new home. At least she was proud of it.