Beatles (39 page)

But all the doubts were swept away the minute they saw Kennedy Airport, when they landed at 1.35 in the afternoon. Over 10,000 screaming teenagers were choking the airport. They were all singing ‘We Love You Beatles, Oh Yes We Do’, a song, or at least a doggerel, peculiar to American Beatle fans.

Capitol was still pursuing its crash publicity, and handed each person who got off the aeroplane a ‘Beatle Kit’, complete with wig, autographed photo and a button saying ‘I Like the Beatles’.

They fought their way eventually to the airport press lounge and faced the biggest press conference they’d ever had. John shouted at them all to shurrup. Everyone applauded him.

‘Will you sing something for us?’

‘We need money first,’ said John.

‘How do you account for your success?’

‘We have a press agent.’

‘What is your ambition?’

‘To come to America.’

‘Do you hope to get haircuts?’

‘We had one yesterday.’

‘Do you hope to take anything home with you?’

‘The Rockefeller Centre.’

‘Are you part of a social rebellion against the older generation?’

‘It’s a dirty lie.’

‘What about the movement in Detroit to stamp out Beatles?’

‘We have a campaign to stamp out Detroit.’

‘What do you think of Beethoven?’

‘I love him,’ said Ringo. ‘Especially his poems.’

It was chaos at the Plaza Hotel, a hotel that prides itself on its discreet exclusiveness and hadn’t checked the professions of the five English businessmen who’d booked some months ago. When a Plaza executive saw his hotel besieged by thousands of
screaming teenagers he went on radio and offered the Beatles to any New York hotel who wanted them.

Not that the Beatles were grateful. ‘What made you pick the Plaza?’ a reporter asked George. ‘I didn’t. Our manager did. All I can tell you is, I don’t like the food.’

George was by this time ill in bed and looked like missing the Ed Sullivan Show. Neil stood in for the rehearsal, but George managed the show, filled up with dope. The screams echoed across America. The show had a record audience of 73 million.

In New York, during the show, not one hubcap from a car was stolen. Throughout America, so it was reported, not one major crime was committed by a teenager.

Elvis Presley sent them a congratulatory telegram. Next morning the
Herald Tribune
said they were ‘75 per cent publicity, 20 per cent haircut and 5 per cent lilting lament’. The
Daily News
said: ‘The Presleyan gyrations and caterwauling were but lukewarm dandelion tea compared to the 100-proof elixir served up by the Beatles.’

Every paper gave them huge coverage. The analyses were long and complicated. There was another huge press conference. ‘Do you have a leading lady for your film yet?’ ‘We’re trying for the Queen,’ said George. ‘She sells.’

Billy Graham said he’d broken his strict rule and watched TV on the Sabbath, just to see them. ‘They’re a passing phase,’ he said. ‘All are symptoms of the uncertainty of the times and the confusion about us.’ Then they set off by train for Washington.

‘What happened in the States was just like Britain,’ says Ringo, ‘only ten times bigger. So I suppose it wasn’t like Britain at all. That first Washington crowd was 20,000. We’d only been used to 2,000 at home.’

The Coliseum, where the Washington concert was held, their first one on American soil, is normally used as a boxing ring or baseball field. The Beatles were put on a revolving stage, so the whole audience could see. It meant they were hit from all angles by jelly babies.

‘It was terrible,’ says George. ‘They hurt. They don’t have soft jelly babies in America, but hard jelly beans like bullets. Some newspaper had dug out the old joke, which we’d forgotten about, when John once said I’d eaten all his jelly babies. Everywhere we went I got them thrown at me.’

Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the British prime minister, was due to arrive in Washington the same day. He put his arrival back to the day after, to avoid the Beatle chaos.

That evening they accepted their first, and last, embassy invitation. They’d already turned down dinner with Lady Dixon, wife of the British ambassador in Paris.

‘We always tried to get out of those crap things,’ said George. ‘But that time we got caught. They were always full of snobby people who really loathe our type, but want to see us because we’re rich and famous. It’s all hypocrisy. They were just trying to get publicity for the embassy.’

Reports of what exactly happened at the Washington embassy party vary in detail, but Michael Braun, in his paperback book on the Beatles’ early tours (
Love Me Do
, Penguin, 1964), says that it started off amicably enough.

‘Hello John,’ said Sir David Ormsby-Gore (now Lord Harlech) when they arrived.

‘I’m not John,’ said John. ‘I’m Charlie. That’s John.’

‘Hello John,’ said the ambassador to George.

‘I’m not John,’ said George. ‘I’m Frank. That’s John.’

‘Oh dear,’ said the ambassador.

Several elderly ladies, with glasses of drink in their hands, accosted the Beatles and demanded autographs. Officious junior officials started pushing them around, insisting they spoke to people and gave autographs. ‘Sign this,’ one said to John, who refused. ‘You’ll sign this and like it.’ A young lady guest walked up to Ringo, removed a pair of nail scissors from her purse and started snipping off locks of his hair. John left early, but the others stayed on and saw it out. The ambassador and his wife said how sorry they were.

Even Brian’s charm hadn’t managed to calm things down.
‘Both the ambassador and his wife were extremely nice,’ he said later. ‘But the Beatles loathed that reception. Since then they have refused every invitation of that type.’

Sir Alec Douglas-Home at last arrived to meet President Johnson. ‘I liked your advance party,’ said the President. ‘But don’t you feel they need haircuts?’

The Beatles started back for New York and their Carnegie Hall concert, under the usual barrage of press, TV and fans. The American wheeler-dealers were now out in strength, trying to get contracts for Beatles products, at any price. It was estimated that in 1964, 50 million dollars’ worth of Beatle goods were sold in the States. Several unauthorized tape-recorded interviews, which no one realized had been done, were brought out as LP records, billed heavily under the Beatles name, much to Brian’s annoyance.

Over 6,000 were in the audience for each of the two Carnegie Hall concerts. Sid Bernstein had to turn down David Niven and Shirley MacLaine. Hysterical screams greeted and accompanied the Beatles’ two appearances, each only 25 minutes long, so the papers reported next day.

Sandi Stewart, the 15-year-old fan from New Hampshire, made it, but she didn’t think the screams were all that great. ‘That first concert wasn’t all that wild, I mean there wasn’t much screaming, nothing like later concerts which were completely wild. I remember being very annoyed with George that first time, perhaps that was why I didn’t like him. He seemed to be standing in the way of Ringo and we couldn’t see him. We all shouted at him to get out of the way and let us see Ringo.

‘You really do believe they can see you, just you alone, when they’re up on the stage. That’s why you scream, so they’ll notice you. I always felt John could see me. It was like a dream. Just me and John together and no one else.

‘Even when you’re screaming, you can still hear. All the reporters in the papers always said you couldn’t hear anything with all the noise, but you could, even when you were screaming. Their sexy movements made you scream even louder.

‘They were being sexy with you personally. It was an outlet. But I don’t think many girls got sexually excited, not at concerts anyway. I didn’t myself.’

The Beatles then went by plane from New York down to Miami for the second Ed Sullivan Show. The pilot wore a Beatle wig. They met Cassius Clay, who said he was the greatest, but they were the most beautiful.

It was getting close to 25 February, George’s 21st birthday. Even though Sandi Stewart didn’t like George so much, she still decided to send him a present. ‘We found out he was staying at the Deauville Hotel in Miami. We sent a registered parcel, figuring that was very clever, as he’d have to sign for it and we’d get his autograph. But we didn’t.

‘It didn’t really matter. John was the one I was in love with. I gave him three whole years of my life from then on.’

Back in Liverpool, the Beatles’ old schools were getting some strange requests. Teenagers from all over the world were writing for any old desks belonging to the Beatles, or old caps or old exercise books. There were soon scores of signed exercise books in circulation, far more than they could ever possibly have had.

‘We were getting these very funny letters from girls, mainly in America,’ said Mr Pobjoy of Quarry Bank. ‘Asking if our boys would write to them. I thought they were howlingly funny. For the boys’ amusement as well as mine, I used to read them out in the hall after morning prayers.

‘The boys enjoyed them so much they were convinced for a long time that I was making them all up, but I gather that quite a few boys in the end did write to the wretched girls.’

The Beatles’ parents were also being contacted by a lot of American fans, some of them turning up on their doorstep, having forced their parents to stop off on their European grand tours to fit in the Dingle and Woolton.

‘I’d usually ask the ones who’d come a long way if they’d like some tea,’ says Jim McCartney. ‘When they said yes, I’d say, there’s the kitchen. They’d go in and start screaming and shouting
because they’d recognize the kitchen from photographs. They knew more about me than I did myself. Fans would make very good detectives.’

On George’s 21st birthday, Mrs Harrison was unable to find room in her house for all the cards and presents. They came in mail vans by special deliveries.

Elsie and Harry, Ringo’s parents, like the others, began to find themselves surrounded and barricaded in their own home, while fans camped outside and stole bits of the door or chalked on the walls.

‘The first time I really noticed how well they were known,’ says Elsie, ‘was when we woke up one morning to find a busload of fans knocking at the front door. It was seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. They’d travelled overnight from London. Well, what could I do? I fetched them all in and gave them tea and biscuits. I thought it was marvellous. All that way, just for Ritchie. They never ate anything. They wrapped them up to take back as souvenirs.

‘They used to climb over the backyard wall, or sleep in the street for days. They were physical wrecks, most of them, but they were just too excited to rest or eat. They’d ask, which is his chair? I’d say, sit on them all love, he has. They always wanted to go up and see his bed as well. They’d lie on it, moaning.’

Cyn and Julian had by this time moved out of Mimi’s house and into a place of their own. She was still avoiding the press as much as possible. ‘A gang of reporters trailed me round for days, when they found out who I was. They cornered me one day when I was visiting my mother in Hoylake. This reporter chased me all over the place and besieged me in a shop. I managed to dart out the back and into a fruit shop next door, where I hid for half an hour till he’d gone.’

The Beatles came back from America to the usual hysterical scenes. The prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, called them ‘our best exports’ and ‘a useful contribution to the balance of payments’. Mr Wilson, leader of the Labour Party and a Liverpool MP, didn’t like the inference that a 14th Earl should be
trying to cash in on the Liverpool Beatles. ‘The Tories are trying to make the Beatles their secret weapon,’ he said.

They were invited to dinner by the master and dons of Brasenose College, Oxford, where they asked for jam butties. A Roman Catholic bishop called them a ‘menace’, but Prince Philip met them and thought them good chaps. He had a chat with John about books. They met Mr Wilson at last, at a Variety Club presentation, and called him Mr Dobson.

John’s first book came out in March. It was called
In His Own Write
, a title suggested by Paul. They discarded another idea,
In His Own Write and Draw
, as the pun (right-hand drawer) was too complicated. Most literary experts and most publishers said it was a stunt that would fail – how could a beat-group player write anything that was any good? It went to the top of the best-seller list, beating James Bond. The
Times Literary Supplement
said: ‘It is worth the attention of anyone who fears for the impoverishment of the English language and the British imagination.’ John was invited to be guest of honour at a Foyles literary lunch. He didn’t speak, except to mutter ‘Thank you, you’ve got a lucky face,’ and got a few boos for not doing so. But Brian Epstein made a very nice speech.

On 24 March, their sixth single, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, came out. It went straight to number one. It also went immediately to number one in America. In Britain and America, before it had come out, the advance sales were three million, a world record. Not long after, they had the top six records on the United States hit parade.

Ringo was elected a Vice-President of Leeds University in preference to a former Lord Chief Justice. Madame Tussauds put wax effigies of all four Beatles on show. Paul Johnson, in the
New Statesman
, did an article headed ‘The Menace of Beatlism’. A writer in the
Sunday Telegraph
said that the group would break up, because eventually they would all get married and ‘the chance of four random women liking one another or even being able to get on with one another will be small indeed.’

In March they started shooting their first film. The title,
A
Hard Day’s Night
, wasn’t decided until it was almost finished and Ringo came out with the phrase, though John had used it earlier in a poem.

Paul was by this time going out with Jane Asher, daughter of a Wimpole Street doctor. On the first day of the film, George met Pattie Boyd. Like Jane Asher, she has a a south of England background, completely different from the background of the girls in the other two Beatles’ lives.