The Beatles (78 page)

Now the Beatles could claim top prize: the toppermost of the poppermost. And even though they were doing only four numbers
^*
—songs they could have played in their sleep—tradition demanded they participate in an all-day rehearsal.

Fans had begun gathering outside just after their arrival at the theater on Sunday, October 13, 1963. By late afternoon, the situation outside the stage door intensified to the point that it attracted Brian’s attention. There were a hundred or so kids milling about there—more than the Beatles
could safely deal with. Rehearsal was drawing to an end, and the boys had a three-hour window before they were due back at the theater. Brian consulted with Neil Aspinall and Tony Barrow to coordinate a departure. “We were talking about
various decoy routes
,” Barrow recalls. “Should they go this way or that way, up over the roof. And we finally decided that with the kids hanging around the stage door, we should just go out the front entrance and get into the car.”

Neil pulled an Austin Princess around to Argyll Street and waited for the Beatles by the curb. It was a few minutes after five o’clock. The street lay in dusky shadows, and from the look of things, they were in good shape to make a clean getaway. There was a clear path to the entrance, no one in sight. “What we hadn’t counted on,” says Barrow, “were the kids who’d been keeping their eyes on the car.” At exactly the moment the Beatles broke through the doors, fans—“hordes of kids”—converged from everywhere, and “it all happened at once.” An incredible roar went up, and not merely any roar but an ear-splitting blast of exultation, mixed with surprise, rapture, awe, and abandon. It was pandemonium on the sidewalk. Pushing and shoving broke out as the crowd moved en masse toward the agile, galloping quartet. The Beatles ran headlong through a gauntlet of grabby hands, diving for cover through the hastily opened car doors, as security guards moved quickly to hold back the crowd.

The scene on the street caught the press napping, but in ten minutes every city desk in London went on alert, cranking up the machinery to cover a story that would take on a life of its own.

The papers knew exactly what to call it.
BEATLEMANIA
!
screamed the front-page banner of the
Daily Mirror.
Headlines didn’t come any more eye-catching than that. Every paper carried photographs of a dark street scene that resembled a flash siege, with a police cordon struggling to hold off a mob of screaming girls. Tipped off about crowds following the rehearsal, photographers had raced to the scene, hoping to salvage a story after the show. What they encountered, however, was better than anything they could have wished for. Where earlier there had been two hundred girls outside the Palladium, by show’s end there were two thousand strong, all of them overcome with frenetic Beatles rapture. Like the reporters among them, they had heard about the earlier frenzy and used it as a model to express their emotional release, so by nightfall the screaming and sobbing seemed like the accepted way to react. According to eyewitness
accounts in the
Daily Herald,
“
screaming girls launched themselves
against the police—sending helmets flying and constables reeling.” It was complete bedlam, abandoned only after the Beatles dove down the theater steps and into a car, with most girls giving chase as it sped off along Oxford Street.

“
It was
exactly
the story
we’d been waiting for,” says Don Short, who covered “the whole spectrum of show business” for the
Mirror.
“Up until that time, I’d merely go around to Claridge’s or the Savoy and interview Sammy Davis Jr. one week, Andy Williams the next, but the Beatles had all this drama swirling around them—and they were sexy, a very sexy story.”

Britain’s papers had discovered sex earlier that spring, when they began tracking a colorful rumor that John Profumo, the secretary of state of war, had engaged in a sexual liaison with a young call girl named Christine Keeler. Word had it that he’d met her in 1961 during a weekend social at Cliveden, Lord Astor’s estate, where she was staying with her friend Dr. Stephen Ward. To make matters worse, there were also reports of Keeler’s involvement with a man named Eugene Ivanov, a Russian naval attaché and reported KGB agent, possibly compromising state secrets. At first no paper dared run any part of the story, fearing the harsh slap of England’s libel laws. By June, however, Profumo had admitted to committing an “
impropriety
,” and the gloves came off. London’s dailies feasted on the scandal, rolling out new installments, morning, noon, and night, as if they were segments of an ongoing soap opera.

Profumo was must reading because it exposed the rank hypocrisy of members of the establishment, but nothing seemed hotter, more sensational, or sleazier than the ongoing case in Edinburgh, detailing the voracious sexual appetite of the Duchess of Argyll, whose husband was suing her for divorce. Cabinet ministers, lords, dukes, duchesses—everyone, it seemed, wanted to get in on the act, and the news media accommodated them. Another cabinet minister was caught—
supposedly—
having oral sex with a prostitute in Richmond Park. And eight high court judges
supposedly
engaged in an orgy, leading Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to exclaim, “One, perhaps, two, conceivably. But eight—I just can’t believe it.”

But the newspapers did. Rather, they believed it sold copies—and they were right. Sex and innuendo had awakened a sleeping readership, and the dailies, particularly the tabloids, marketed them with skill. And Britain was ready for it. Repressive Victorian morality, so long the badge of proper society, was growing rapidly passé. The postwar wave of upper-class promiscuity
and “
considerable sexual license
” had finally swept through the lower orders, who were itching for a piece of the action. Sex was no longer an indulgence only for the rich; it was a pastime as accessible to commoners as a pint at the pub. “The popular morality is now a wasteland,” declared Professor George Carstairs in his Reith Lectures that year. “A new concept is emerging, of sexual relationships as a source of pleasure.” Newspapers certainly saw the future as clearly. “On the island where the subject has long been taboo in polite society,” wrote a
Times
(London) columnist, “sex has exploded into the national consciousness and national headlines.” Beatlemania was the icing on the cake.

Two days after 15 million viewers got a look at them on
Sunday Night at the London Palladium,
and only one day after the bold headlines, it was announced that a secret deal had been struck back in August for the Beatles to appear before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret at the annual Royal Variety Performance in November. This was no small development. A command performance was a considerable honor—and a considerable boost. It lifted Beatlemania out of local cinemas and thrust it center stage, giving it the Queen’s blessing. It also legitimized it for the “serious” press. Two days later the so-called prestigious writers, those whose names distinguished general-feature stories and had so far expressed a total lack of interest, came courting: Derek Jewel from the
Sunday Times,
Vincent Mulchrone from the
Daily Mail,
Judith Simons from the
Daily Express,
Peter Woods from the BBC’s
Radio Newsreel,
the
Mail
’s Linda Lee-Potter—there were too many to count—all demanding interviews with the Beatles. It had taken Barrow months just to get these journalists on the phone, he says. The next day they began bombarding his office line regularly, begging for leads, thanks largely to the response of their page-one stories. “
All over Britain, there have been incredible scenes
as stampeding fans have battled for [Beatles] tickets,” wrote
Melody Maker,
which catalogued the incidents in a column titled “This Week’s Beatlemania.” “Girls have fainted. Police have had to control queue crowds. Fans have been camping out overnight days before tickets [go] on sale.” Crowds in Birmingham jostled with police outside the ABC-TV studios, where the boys were taping a segment of
Thank Your Lucky Stars.
“At Leicester,” it was reported, “
hundreds slept in the streets
throughout the night, waiting for box-offices to open” for an upcoming Beatles show. The city of Carlisle experienced a “
midnight panic
” when six hundred fans crashed police lines outside the ABC Cinema, necessitating emergency first-aid crews. More
girls “fainted—and got hurt
” buying tickets in Hull. In Portsmouth and
Bristol, anxious promoters, alarmed by what they read in the papers and saw on TV, turned to the police for help, calling in “every burly and able-bodied man on the staff to keep order.” And that was only a warm-up. “
Thousands of girls battled
with police” in Huddlesfield, a town in Yorkshire, when “a stampede broke out,” injuring sixty “screaming teenage fans.” The story broke as front-page news in
Sunday People:

When the box office opened a mass of youngsters surged forward, breaking the cordon of forty policemen…. In the rush, many of the fans were crushed against the cinema walls and shop doorways. Ambulance men who had been on duty all night were kept busy pulling them out, carrying out other fans who had fainted, and taking them into the cinema foyer, which served as a casualty station.

There seemed no limit to the wild scenes. The riots during Bill Haley concerts seven years earlier were basically the handiwork of teddy boys, who used the music as a soundtrack for their ongoing punch-ups. But the Beatles had touched off what appeared to be a mass swoon. Girls of all classes were caught up in the screaming, love pledging, sobbing, hair pulling, and fainting that accompanied each show.

Fortunately, from October 24 through the end of the month, the band began a weeklong tour of Sweden, which temporarily removed them from the public eye. But upon their return, on the morning of October 31, hundreds, perhaps even “
thousands[,] of screaming fans
” thronged the terraced roof of the Queen’s Building at Heathrow Airport, which ignited the hysteria anew.

By coincidence, “the commotion
” caught the eye of American TV impresario and gossip journalist Ed Sullivan, who was arriving in London with his wife, Sylvia, at precisely the same time, to scout talent for future shows. Sullivan, intrigued, corralled a few giggling fans and asked if they knew whether a celebrity was arriving. Was it a member of the royal family? he demanded. The girls just laughed and sashayed away. After an airport official told him it was the Beatles, Sullivan dutifully wrote down the name and instructed his son-in-law, producer Bob Precht, to find out what he could about them.

It didn’t take Sullivan long to learn that a phenomenon was streaking through all of England, and he moved to position himself for an American scoop. That meant striking a quick deal with Brian Epstein.
Sullivan had some idea
of what it would take to land a pop act on the brink of stardom. He’d paid Elvis Presley a staggering $50,000 for three appearances in 1956. What, almost eight years later, could the Beatles possibly command? To Sullivan it was clear that though they were still basically a foreign sensation, it was only a matter of time before their popularity spread to the States. An exclusive would mean offering Epstein enough to keep competitors at bay.

The Beatles had always refused to consider an American visit until they meant something abroad; otherwise, it could prove too humiliating an experience. The boys were all too aware of how American audiences regarded British acts. John was especially sensitive to reports that
Cliff Richard, a longtime megastar, had “died
”—meaning bombed—on an American tour. “
He was fourteenth on the bill
with Frankie Avalon,” John huffed, with some exaggeration.

But Brian Epstein had an instinct—a good instinct—for timing. Not only did he feel the moment was right, he knew—he seemed to know instinctively—how to synchronize it.

One stroke of chronology was already in place. While the boys were in Sweden, Brian had concluded negotiations with United Artists for a feature-length movie to star the Beatles. For a few months other film studios had been dangling offers without any concrete idea of what they wanted to make. This frightened the Beatles, who were dead set against being packaged in a kind of standard ensemble jukebox movie, like
Rock Around the Clock
or
The Girl Can’t Help It.
John, who was especially cautious about their image, told
Melody Maker:
“
We prefer to wait
until we find a film with a good plot that will hold the interest of the teenagers.” (Much later, in blunt terms, he said, “We didn’t want to make
a fuckin’ shitty pop movie
.”) But UA already had a producer in tow—a jovial American expat named Walter Shenson—who’d cast Peter Sellers in
The Mouse That Roared,
which had served to establish the comedian outside England. That scored points right off the bat with John. Shenson recalled that
during his first meeting with the Beatles
, in one of the empty offices at Abbey Road, John, acting as spokesman for the group, confronted him immediately about the type of film he intended to make. “
Oh, I don’t know
,” Shenson told him, shrugging, “but it should be a comedy.” The Beatles cut knowing glances at one another before John said, “Okay, you can be the producer.” It was as simple as that.