Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (20 page)

JOHN LENNON:
Those birds had it all planned out, man. They dropped the limo right by the front door of what they called the Lair of Love and Death or some shite, then opened the car doors and pulled us in like we weighed nothing. They somehow blocked our zombie powers, so we couldn’t fight back. Which, as it turned out, wasn’t such a terrible thing.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
Right after they stripped us naked and bolted us to the operating tables, they stripped
themselves
naked, y’know. John turned to me while one of the zombie girls gently whipped him with her bra, and said, “I bet Ringo would’ve loved this.”

RINGO STARR:
Hell yeah, I would’ve loved it!

JOHN LENNON:
One of the birds looked closely at my bollocks and said, “Looks like you’ve had some recent damage down there, Mr. Lennon. Adrenaline problems?” Those zombie ladies knew the score.

GEORGE HARRISON:
I don’t quite know what they were trying to prove. They kidnapped us, they tied us down, they showed off their bodies, and then they untied us and bounced us from water bed to water bed. What was the point?

JULIE PROUST:
Our whole point was to show these boys that we girls weren’t playthings, that we had feelings and shouldn’t be taken for granted. Thing is, they were pretty cute and
very
charismatic, and some of us got distracted, so, as the politicos say, we went off-message. How off-message? Let’s say that by the time we put them back in the limo, the Lair of Love and Death was a dustmen repository.

BRIAN EPSTEIN:
After John and George loaded me and Ringo back into the limo, they told me what happened, and I had no choice but to believe it. How else could you explain a car that was there one second, then gone the next, then back the next after that? How else could you explain me losing a full ninety minutes of my life?

At the end of the day, the lads were happy and safe, and that’s all that mattered. Well, that’s not exactly
all
that mattered: I needed them to be ready for Sullivan.

E
ver since talk show host David Letterman and his crew began broadcasting their late-night gabfest from New York’s Ed Sullivan Theater in 1993, many on Letterman’s staff believe that Mr. Sullivan’s ghost still haunts the venue that was home to his beloved variety show for more than three decades.

Guess what? They’re right.

The theories as to why Ed is all ghosted-up are myriad: maybe he was bitten by Anna the Juggling Bear after her less-than-successful 1959 appearance on Ed’s show, maybe he inhaled too much Brylcreem, maybe he ate a bad hot dog in the green room. However it went down, Ed is conflicted about his ghostly status: on one hand, his pre-ghost life was pretty good, but on the other, if he’s going to be stuck somewhere for all eternity, where better than a place that holds so many rrrrrreally big memories … memories that the specter is always ready to share.

As Ed’s ghost told me in January 2002, one of his favorite moments as host of arguably the most revered variety show in television history was the night that the Beatles conquered the United States … almost.

ED SULLIVAN:
No matter what anybody tells you, deep down, John, Paul, George, and Ringo were nice boys. I always felt that all the talk
about
total
world domination was for show. Think about it: if three artistically creative zombies and a talented Ninja don’t make a token effort to rule all the heavens and the Earth, they have no credibility. At the end of the day, I think they would’ve been happy to rule the charts, as well as a handful of key metropolises in the UK and the USA.

You might not have appreciated their music, and you might not have liked the length of their hair, and you might not have cared for their predilection for murder and mayhem, but you can’t deny that the Beatles were professionals. Music was both their life and their job, and they took it very seriously. They came to my studio with a plan, and they executed it to perfection. If the plan had worked, the world as we know it would’ve been quite a different place.

They called me into the dressing room after the afternoon dress rehearsal. John told me, “Listen, Ed, we’re not gonna be your normal guests.”

I said, “Oh, I know that. America’s going to remember this one.”

George quietly said, “Not if we have something to say about it.”

I asked, “What do you mean by that.”

Paul stood up, put his arm around me, and said, “Listen, mate, we like you. But most important, we respect you, and we don’t want any harm to come to you, y’know. So here’s a bit of advice: when we start singing ‘All My Loving,’ cover your ears.”

I said, “Why in God’s name would I do that? That’s a wonderful song, just wonderful.”

John said, “Thanks, Ed. We appreciate that. But trust us: You. Don’t. Want. To. Listen. To. That. Song.”

JOHN LENNON:
I
thought
we’d be able to make it come to fruition, but I wasn’t sure. See, it’s not the kind of thing you can practice, so we
wouldn’t know until we knew. Or didn’t know. Whichever came first.

GEORGE HARRISON:
If you were to point the finger—and I’m not pointing, mind you—but if you were to point, you’d have to point at Paul. After all, John and I had the background harmonies down.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
It wasn’t anybody’s fault. We tried, and it didn’t work. Sod it. Lesson learned. Move on.

RINGO STARR:
Whenever John, Paul, and George did something a bit off, they always blamed it on their zombie nature. Like, “Oh, we couldn’t help killing everybody at the Cavern Club; it was our zombie nature.” Or, “Oh, we didn’t mean to destroy EMI Studios; it was our zombie nature.” They had plenty of free will; they just didn’t use it all the time. So when they try and play off the Sullivan thing like it was their zombie nature, well, that’s utterly ridiculous.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
The plan was simple. When we got to the bridge, John and George’s descending “Ooh’s” would meld with my lead vocal and create a frequency that would allow us to control the minds of each and every listener. And, erm, it worked. For exactly thirteen seconds.

ED SULLIVAN:
When they stopped singing, I uncovered my ears and yelled, “Boys, what’s going on? Keep playing, keep playing!” Then I noticed that everybody in the room was staring at the four of them with a glazed look on their face, not moving a muscle.

John called over, “Oi, Eddie, keep it down. We’ve got some work to do!” Then he said into the microphone, “Concentrate on my voice. Heed my command. You have three tasks, and you will
follow them to completion. Task one, buy our latest record. Task two …”

And before he could continue, everybody snapped out of it and started screaming.

RINGO STARR:
When the studio audience awoke, they were scared like you wouldn’t believe. Just check out the pictures. The look of horror on their faces was chilling.

JOHN LENNON:
I was having a laugh with that first task. I always said I wouldn’t sell records by hypnosis, and I meant it. I thought the boys would get a kick out of it. They didn’t.

I’m not gonna tell you what the other two tasks were. See, I might pull them out at some point down the line, and like Ringo says, “The element of surprise is your friend.” But trust me, they’re good ones. Really, really good ones.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
That was the last time we tried to control the minds of a telly-viewing audience. Electronic hypnosis accomplished very little and, frankly, was a pain in the arse, y’know.

JOHN LENNON:
We tried to take over the United States that night, and all we ended up with was another number one single.

BRIAN EPSTEIN:
They played Sullivan’s show again the following week; this time it originated from Miami Beach, rather than New York. All they talked about in the two days leading up to it was mind control, mind control, mind control, and I wasn’t thrilled. I begged them to forget hypnosis and just play their tunes, but they were insistent. John said, “America could forget all about us next
week. Think about it: coming over here didn’t help the other Brit acts, so we have to do
what
we can,
when
we can.”

I asked him, “Why do you have to do it?”

John said, “It’s our zombie nature.”

GEORGE HARRISON:
We scaled it down considerably, intending to own the minds and bend the wills of just the people attending the concert at the Deauville Beach Resort. Since hypnosis hadn’t worked when Paul was singing lead, we opted to use “This Boy” as our launching point. Most of the song was sung in three-part harmony, but there was a moment right before the bridge where John did a “Whoa, whoa, whoa” bit, and that was the spot.

RINGO STARR:
Man, that was a disaster. If I were undead, I’d have been embarrassed for all zombiekind. As it was, I was embarrassed to be a Beatle.

JOHN LENNON:
Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I always say.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
We got to the bridge of the song, and we did our hypnotize-with-harmony thing, and
nothing
. Nobody froze, and nobody yelled their heads off in horror. The whole crowd just sat there and watched while the lenses of all four television cameras shattered. The cameramen were dead before we even had a chance to reanimate them.

Yeah, we sold a whole bunch of records, and yeah, we earned a whole bunch of loyal fans, but to us, our first trip to the States was a failure. We didn’t kill a single person, except for those cameramen, but they don’t count, because we didn’t
really
kill them, an’ that. They just died on our watch.

Nobody said much of anything on the plane ride home. Right before we landed at Heathrow, I leaned over to Johnny and said, “Listen, we did the best we could, and that’s all we could do. We’ll get ’em next time.”

He said, “If there
is
a next time.”

W
hen film director Richard Lester—Dick to his friends—was hired to helm the Beatles’ film debut, A Hard Day’s Night, he’d had only limited experience working with otherwordly beings: the assistant director on his 1963 outing The Mouse on the Moon was a reformed mole man, and his regular collaborator the Brit comic legend Spike Milligan was rumored to have modest telekinetic abilities. So, as Lester told me over too many bottles of wine in March 2005, he was a bit on edge when filming started in the spring of 1964.

RICHARD LESTER:
Three questions gnawed at me from the beginning: How do you
film
zombies? How do you
direct
zombies? And are zombies even
directable
? I had no clue. I had nobody to ask. So I dived in. Brian Epstein swore to me up and down that nobody in the band would harm me, so what was the worst that could happen? I’d lose a few shillings for the studio. It wouldn’t be the end of the world.