The Beatles (79 page)

And Shenson was immediately captivated by their vivid personalities and the kind of zany scene that swirled about them. “
I really found myself
in the middle of a Marx Brothers movie,” he recalls. “And they were awfully sweet.” To Shenson, the Beatles embodied the beguiling blend of natural humor and wholesomeness that the classic movie comedians exhibit. He realized he was “onto something very special, on the level of a Keaton or a Fields.” If he played his cards right, Shenson believed, his little low-budget picture had the potential to be something more—much more.

UA’s guarantee up front of a
worldwide
release seemed like a princely—even absurd—offer. Shenson himself had asked UA boss Bud Ornstein, “You mean those kids with long hair? What do you want to make a movie with them for?” Without skipping a beat, Ornstein roared: “For the soundtrack album.” Somehow, UA had determined that those rights had been withheld from EMI in the Beatles’ recording contract—withheld, or overlooked—and could be worth a fortune, many times over the film’s £200,000 production budget.

Very quickly, Shenson brought Richard Lester, his director on
The Mouse on the Moon,
^*
into the deal. Lester, the irascible scion of a middle-class Philadelphia family, was another expat looking to quit his job grinding out commercials and make his mark in motion pictures. He had worked with the Goons and shared Shenson’s love for their kind of goofy British humor, which seemed to make him a natural choice. “
I’ll do it for
nothing!
” Lester volunteered. This comment amused Shenson, who was grappling at the time with a shoestring budget. “Don’t worry about that, Dick,” he told him, “we’re
all
going to do it for nothing.”

United Artists was prepared to pay the Beatles a small salary plus 25 percent of the movie’s net. On October 29, they met in Bud Ornstein’s apartment to hammer out a deal. “
We laid out the terms
,” Shenson says, “which gave us the Beatles’ services for three pictures, along with the soundtracks for each.” That seemed fair all around, nor did anyone object to a £25,000 fee for Brian and the four boys. But then Brian tipped his chin toward Ornstein, put on his most pugnacious game face, and said, “We’re not going to take less than seven and a half percent.”

A deathly silence fell over the room. According to Shenson, “We just couldn’t believe it! It didn’t make any sense.” Only much later did he realize Brian’s mistake. “
He was talking percentages of
record albums,
” Shenson says, “[in] which, if you get a couple of pennies, you make a lot of money.” Just like that, Brian had let the steam out of his trousers. If the
man wanted seven and a half points, UA was certainly willing to sign off on a deal—right away. Both parties left that afternoon happy with the agreement.

If only someone had bothered to run it by the Beatles.

It was Paul who first had misgivings, not about money and not about terms. “
He wanted to see a script
,” recalls Shenson. Actually, his concerns had less to do with substance than with romance. Earlier in the summer Paul had begun seeing a precocious seventeen-year-old actress named Jane Asher, who was wise to the vagaries of show business. She’d been acting since the age of seven, on stage, screen, and television, and urged Paul to approve a script before committing to any deal. “She was absolutely right,” Shenson says today. “Who makes a film without looking at the script?”

Once it was announced that the Beatles were going to make a movie, the producers were inundated with interest from agents and writers who proposed “
the most banal nonsense
,” in Shenson’s estimation, “just silly stuff, not even close.” No one had the slightest idea how to use the Beatles without treating them trivially, like cartoon characters. Finally, someone—and Shenson believes it was one of the Beatles
^*
—suggested they contact Alun Owen, a Liverpool playwright, to kick around some ideas.

Shenson was appalled
. He was familiar with Owen’s work, gritty working-class dramas à la Clifford Odets, John Osborne, and Arnold Wesker, in what was known as the kitchen-sink school of writing. More recently, his plays had been adapted for television, and while Shenson was impressed with them, he was more concerned by their stunning lack of humor and bleakness. Out of curiosity, he screened Owen’s
No Trams to Lime Street
and considered it “pretty heavy going.” Shenson had only the bare bones of a concept in mind. “
I think it should be an exaggerated
day-in-the-life of the Beatles,” he told Owen, and suggested the playwright meet the boys in Dublin on October 7, where they were doing two shows at the Adelphi Cinema.

In the meantime, the Beatles prepared for their performance in front of the Queen. “
They were nervous
,” says Tony Barrow, “fairly overawed by such an important audience.” Although they had basically just a short four-song spot, all of England would be watching, to say nothing of the figure who, next to God, was the most awesome symbol of the empire.
^*
None of which deterred John. “All day long he was practicing a line he
planned to deliver that night,” Barrow recalls. When it came time to introduce “Twist and Shout,” John explained, he intended to say, “For our last number, I’d like to ask your help. The people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands, and the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your fucking jewelry.” Brian nearly burst a blood vessel. He begged—
ordered
—John to behave himself, to think of how much this meant to the Beatles. And their families! Everyone’s reputation, he warned, was riding on it. Still, John gave him no satisfaction. It was evident to those watching Brian throughout the performance, flushed and sweating buckets, sitting in the second row of the front circle, that he was unsure just how far John would actually go. Friends recall Brian gripping the wooden armrests, his knuckles white with fear, as John introduced their rousing showstopper with the rehearsed remark, then relaxing as it played as written—but without the expletive. “You could almost hear him exhale,” says Barrow, who was circling through the Prince of Wales Theatre on a roving ticket.

The next day the press leaped on the line, as it was repeated everywhere with the humility of an outrageous anecdote. It wasn’t disrespectful (although originally intended as such) or scandalous (much to John’s chagrin), but it certainly wasn’t anything one expected to hear out of a loyal British subject. When the papers hit the newsstands, all the focus was on the Beatles instead of the royalty among the audience. The headline across the
Daily Express
—
BEATLES ROCK THE ROYALS
—was par for the course. The talk around town was comparable: in London, only John Lennon could upstage the Queen.

Another stroke on the clock was beginning to tick off.

By the end of the summer of 1963, the Beatles and their manager had grown weary of dragging themselves back and forth between Liverpool and London, sometimes two or three times a week. The grueling trip had convinced Brian that the Beatles needed to be rescued from the road—at least from unnecessary travel—and its impermanence. None of the boys had a place of his own. One might say they still lived with their parents, but even that was inexact. The two or three nights a month they touched down in Liverpool gave them no more sense of a nest than a layover at another guesthouse. Interaction with families and friends was becoming awkward. And with the constant invasion of fans, as Ringo noted, “
it was impossible to go home
.” Even John, whose wife and son remained Merseyside, lived more or less out of a suitcase, in a low-priced bedsit in Hoylake.

As a remedy, Brian rented the Beatles an unfurnished flat in London, to use as a base when they were in the city on business or playing nearby. The little place, on Green Street, was frightfully sparse—no furniture to speak of, just three bedrooms with nothing more than single beds and lamps. A tortured hi-fi in one corner played a never-ending selection of loud music. “
Overflowing ashtrays
and record jackets [were] strewn over the floor.” It was everything they could do to make it seem habitable, congregating in George and Ringo’s room, endlessly smoking cigarettes and talking into the night. But if there was a bleakness about it, Ringo and George didn’t seem to mind. As George recalled, “
It was such a buzz
because we’d been brought up in little two-up two-down houses in Liverpool, and now to have a posh flat in Mayfair, and with a bathroom each, it was great.” To suggest that it resembled anything close to home, however, was way off track. “
There was no homeliness
[sic] about it at all,” according to Paul, who got stuck with the closet-size room in the back. “There was nobody’s touch. I hated it.” Despite its austerity, the Beatles made no effort to improve the lonely space—they never so much as bought a kettle for afternoon tea.

On those rare days when they weren’t jammed up with interviews and gigs, the Beatles used their spare time to explore the city streets. It was not yet the Happening it would become, not yet even swinging London; that was still a year off. But the momentum was clearly building. The “
obligatory period of post-war austerity
” gave rise to radical social changes and a generation waiting to break loose—and to experiment. London was where the action was, and it was in the throes of a youthful renaissance that sought to take the starch out of the Union Jack.

In fact, the transformation was already under way. The postwar generation—those specifically of the Beatles’ age, just becoming adults—was coming into its own, and slowly but surely taking over the city. There was already a young presence visible on the streets. London, being the Continent’s port o’ call for American culture, had it all: record labels, bookshops, art galleries, clubs, cafés—a whole smorgasbord of attractions operating outside the bounds of traditional society. Disenchantment with the mainstream reverberated through these ranks; a new wave of political and philosophical thinking began to take hold. Traffic pulsed through the gaudy boutiques that had sprung up on Carnaby Street, where mods
kitted up in dazzling hues launched a provocative new clothes consciousness. Artists, writers, musicians, poets, painters, activists: dreamers. “
So many factors commingled
to produce the cultural earthquakes,” writes Jonathon Green in his introduction to
Days in the Life.
And now the Beatles lived on the fault line.

But they couldn’t live in London as the Beatles: one for all and all for one. London wasn’t Hamburg, where nothing mattered and no one seemed to care. A crash pad was all right for George and Ringo, but John, for one, had a family to think about. Eventually he moved with Cynthia and Julian into a tiny fifth-floor maisonette at 13 Emperor’s Gate, Kensington, directly above the one occupied by Bob Freeman, who had photographed the Beatles for their album covers.

Paul laid claim to John’s empty room, but shortly thereafter he, too, decided to split away from the group’s flat. Aside from disliking the place, he’d become increasingly involved with Jane Asher and her personal life. More and more often, after a hectic day conducting Beatles business, Paul would make a beeline for her family’s town house on Wimpole Street. From there, he and Jane disappeared into the glare of brightly lit streets, where they reaped the benefits of London’s nightlife. Throughout the fall of 1963, they spun madly from the West End to Covent Gardens to the National Theatre to the Royal Albert Hall to the Establishment Club, to anywhere there was something of cultural interest going on. Plays, exhibitions, concerts, parties, one after another—there was never a dull moment. Late at night, when the crowds thinned out, they would idle down Cork Street, browsing in the windows of the high-end galleries where Hoppers, Giacomettis, and Man Rays were displayed like the crown jewels, sharing their firsthand judgments and educating their eyes. They were also frequent guests of artistic royalty: Maggie Smith, Harold Pinter, Jill Bennett, Arnold Wesker, John Mortimer, Kenneth Tynan. Jane, it seemed, knew just about everybody, and just about everybody was fascinated by the Beatle on her arm.

This was quite an education for a working-class boy from Liverpool. Paul may have felt occasional twinges of insecurity concerning his lowbrow northern identity, but it did nothing to curtail his eagerness to participate in the scene. “
It seemed great to me
,” he told his biographer, Barry Miles. “I was very young and energetic and eager to experience all these great thrills that London had to offer.” In the midst of so many prominent
wits and garrulous conversationalists, Paul attempted to hold his own, reining in the lazy Scouse accent in favor of the more refined diction his mother had drilled into him.
Although by no means an intellectual
—he called his smarts “
an intuitive brightness
”—Paul had an acute sense of people, a knack for engaging an audience, and a musician’s ear for timing. He always had a good story about some aspect of Beatlemania. His was a world completely alien to the tweedy London social set, almost as alien, in fact, as the world of Liverpool and the North. This was the kind of information that only recently had begun to fascinate Londoners, not only for the richness of the settings but also because these worlds were converging in a way that had become relevant to popular culture. Besides, when Paul found himself in over his head, he simply turned on the charm, which never failed to dazzle.