The Beatles (80 page)

Paul wasted no time anguishing about his circumstances. “
Coming in from the provinces
to the center—isn’t that what cities are all about?” he argued. “Aren’t cities made up of ants, the outside ants attracted to the Queen’s lair? It seems to me that’s what it is.” It mattered little that he knew practically nothing of London when he arrived. After several trips around the fashionable arts circuit, his creative instincts had been aroused. This recherché existence was an extension of everything that had brought him this far, all that contributed to his nature as a Beatle. Few men of his background ever got the opportunity to be part of this—and even fewer got an entrée to it from a more alluring benefactress than Jane Asher.

Friends describe Jane Asher as “your typical girl next door,” but that holds true only if you live next door to the Muses. She was all of seventeen when Paul first met her and already a fixture in the London acting community. Most young girls who debuted onscreen at the age of five would have gladly settled for the life of an ingenue, but Jane Asher was thwarted by beauty and sophistication. “
Every man who ever met Jane
fancied her,” Alistair Taylor recalls. She was slim-waisted and sylphlike (barely topping Paul’s shoulders), enormously striking, with delicate features and
a pale, creamy complexion
framed—to Paul’s surprise when introduced backstage at the Royal Albert Hall concert—by a mane of brilliant scarlet hair. “
We’d thought she was blonde
,” Paul recalled, “because we had only ever seen her on black-and-white telly doing
Juke Box Jury,
but she turned out to be a redhead.”
^*

Bearing as well as beauty impressed. After an adolescence of auditions and finishing school, Jane developed enormous poise accentuated by a lithe theatricality that made her gestalt seem somehow too perfect, as though it were a facade. When she spoke, her resonant, stage-trained voice, refined without a trace of pretentiousness, commanded the kind of attention that stopped conversations cold. And yet she was not at all self-absorbed, but rather of innate dignity. Like Paul, Jane had the aura. “
She was smart and sexy
,” recalls Peter Brown, “one of the most charming young women I ever met.”

The middle one of three gifted children, Jane was an unconventional mix of gentility and eccentricity. Her father, Richard, a psychiatrist and incorrigible kook, nervously cranked a coffee grinder while his patients poured out their hearts during analysis; her mother, Margaret, a tall, auburn-haired—“dominant”—woman of noble Cornish heritage, operated a music conservatory out of their eighteenth-century home—she had taught the oboe to no less a prodigy than George Martin—and groomed her children for stardom. It was in this latter pursuit that the family shone. Over and above Jane’s accomplishments, her brother, Peter, a rather serious jazz musician, amassed credits in a number of secondary film and radio roles, while her younger sister, Claire, appeared regularly as an actress on the radio soap opera
Mrs. Dale’s Diary.
For Jane, being courted by a Beatle made perfect sense. It gave her another strong foothold in the creative community but was also offbeat enough to remain consistent with the family personality.

At once, Paul and Jane were desirable. “There was
something about seeing them together
that was magical,” says Tony Barrow. “With those two gorgeous faces and all that incredible charisma, they looked like a couple of Greek gods.” Everywhere the couple went, people gravitated to them. They attracted a circle of friends from among London’s grooviest and most free-spirited. “
Both of them came with plenty
of their own flash,” says John Dunbar, who lived around the corner from the Ashers and was one of London’s leading young scenemakers.

And they were inseparable. Friends began saying that you were as likely to see Paul with Jane as with John. They spent
every night “out and about
” on the town and then, afterward, talking or necking in the Ashers’ downy parlor. If it got too late, Paul would simply sack out in the little music room on the top floor of the town house, next to Peter’s bedroom, where a guest bunk was always made up. Even without the personal touches,
it sure beat the dormitory-like Green Street, which was becoming more objectionable to him with each passing day.

Nothing could have satisfied Paul’s fantasies of a family more fittingly than the Ashers. They were so well educated and widely traveled, so sophisticated in their tastes, be it the books they voraciously consumed or the exquisitely prepared food served at mealtimes. From their intense, if fitful, table conversations, Paul realized he didn’t know as much about the arts as he thought. (Or much else, for that matter.) Their facility with words was extraordinary; it fascinated and humbled him. Everything they had bespoke elegance and fine choice. “
It was really like culture shock
,” he recalled.

It was even more unforeseen when in November Jane suggested that he move permanently into the Ashers’ magnificent town house; if he liked, the attic room was available, along with auxiliary membership in the family. The magnanimity of it must have shocked Paul, who had been living out of a suitcase—or in a filthy van—for so long that it was hard for him to remember the last time he had had his own room. To say nothing of a girlfriend living only one floor below. It was not an invitation that required much deliberation. “
For a young guy
who likes his home comforts,” he noted, it was a dream come true.

But it was only a part of the dream. By November, America arrived. Brian had spent months laying plans to take the Colonies back for his boys. Armed with an arsenal of star-making weapons—including the movie contract, merchandising offers, a potential booking on Ed Sullivan’s show, an extraordinary new single, a most impressive packet of press clippings, and a good deal of outrage—he arranged several meetings in New York, between November 5 and 13, that were necessary for an eventual launch. The trip was also timed to introduce Billy J. Kramer to executives at Liberty Records, which had taken a U.S. option on the young NEMS star.

Still, nothing illustrated the challenge as sharply as the cocktail party thrown in Brian’s honor upon his arrival in New York. The party was part of the strategy hatched by Walter Hofer, a homespun but canny music lawyer who exercised his talents on NEMS’ behalf in the United States.
^*
Hofer figured that people who met Brian face-to-face would be impressed by the same elegance and determination that he’d noticed when Dick James had introduced them in 1962. So he telephoned every VIP in his
Rolodex, inviting them to his home in the Beresford, one of New York’s most swank addresses, at Central Park West and Eighty-first Street. “
I invited the whole industry
,” Hofer recalled, all the label bigwigs, important promoters, independent promo guys, the trade press, every major deejay. Some of music’s “most prominent names,” the heavy hitters, adorned the guest list. And nobody came.

Canvassing a sampling of record stores along Broadway was as discouraging to Brian as the reception at Hofer’s. Not a glimmer about the Beatles surfaced anywhere. It was as if they didn’t exist. And it wasn’t just the absence of the Beatles that amazed him. Aside from Anthony Newley—and you had to really search to find Anthony Newley—there wasn’t a single record by Billy Fury, Johnny Kidd, or Cliff and the Shadows. When he called Capitol Records to confirm his appointment to discuss the Beatles, a secretary asked him: “Are they affiliated with a label?”

Despite the chill, Brian attended to his appointments, many of which had been hurriedly set up during the week of the Royal Variety Performance. The most pressing one, at the outset, was the ongoing negotiation with Ed Sullivan. A notoriously prickly veteran of the New York show-business scene, Sullivan knew little about talent itself. He was impressed by a performer’s ability as far as any stage act went, but his experience as a gossip columnist lent itself more to recognizing tips and hot stories than substance. So when it came to the Beatles, Sullivan was more enthused, he later said, that they were “
a good TV attraction
, and also a great news story.” On a hunch, he offered Brian what was then a fairly extravagant deal for the Beatles: three appearances on his show, at a fee of $4,500 each, “
plus five round-trip
airline tickets and all their expenses for room and board while in America.”

Brian seized a rare opportunity to capitalize on this generosity and, thus, went for broke, offering the impresario a chance to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, with Gerry and the Pacemakers. There was an unwritten rule that you didn’t hustle Ed Sullivan. But Brian was “so charming, and so convincing” that Sullivan booked the Pacemakers for a guest spot on his March 15 show, which was certainly a coup.

The next play was at Capitol Records, where Brian was determined to storm the enemy gates. None of the American A&R staff wanted to be told how to conduct their business, especially by Brits, with their posh accents and stiff-necked etiquette. Nothing significant had ever broken out of the U.K., and if any of them dared admit their true feelings, nothing ever would.

Brian’s contact at Capitol was a man by the curious name of Brown
Meggs, who ran the label’s East Coast pop department. Under normal circumstances, Meggs probably would have made himself unavailable to a manager without portfolio, but unbeknownst to Brian, L. G. Wood had paved the way. Earlier that fall, he had sent Roland Rennie to “visit” Meggs, along with a letter of introduction from Sir Joseph Lockwood, EMI’s formidable chairman whose phone extension happened to be 4-6-3, or GOD. Rennie insists it was nothing more than a friendly chat “
to get over this hurdle
with the Beatles.” But he also acknowledges that subtle “pressures were put on” Capitol to get on the stick. Incredibly, it made not a lick of difference: Dave Dexter used the occasion to issue another pass.

As a result, Len Wood himself flew to the States, a visit comparable in frequency to that of the pope. Wood had already summoned Alan Livingston to a meeting in New York. Livingston, a permanently tanned, smooth-talking, Hollywood-style protégé of Frank Sinatra, was the president of Capitol Records and on the board of EMI. More attuned to image than music, he operated Capitol in the manner of an old-style movie studio mogul, surrounding himself with talented A&R men whose decisions he either rubber-stamped or rejected. The prerogative—backed by Capitol’s considerable muscle—gave Livingston substantial clout in the music business. So strong was his autonomy, in fact, that it was unthinkable that anyone would, or even could, make demands on him. “
But L.G. wasn’t asking anymore
,” says Paul Marshall, referring to the Beatles’ forthcoming single. “He told Alan, ‘You
must
take it.’ ”

Must:
Livingston was surprised by the ultimatum. Capitol and EMI had never before operated on those terms. Each was supposed to have “the right of first refusal” on the other’s product, nothing more. And he was surprised by Wood’s demeanor, by the vehemence in the voice of this otherwise imperturbable Englishman. L.G. was, in fact, so agitated that he refused to leave it alone until Livingston agreed to put the record out.

Years later Livingston would tell a significantly different story.
According to a 1997 interview
with the BBC, he insisted that Capitol’s decision to release the Beatles was his idea. After a surprise visit from Brian Epstein, he recalled: “I… took the record home to my wife… and said, ‘You know, I think that this group, they’ll change the whole music business if it happens.’ ” It was a ridiculous claim, considering the paper trail of rejections from his office as well as other substantiated accounts. Capitol had done everything possible to avoid the Beatles. But shoved against the wall by its British masters, it no longer had a choice.

Fortunately, in this case, Capitol was handed a lulu of a record that launched the new group—and the label—into the stratosphere.

The record Brian delivered to Brown Meggs was “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Beatles’ most inspired production yet, the apotheosis of the bust-out “Merseybeat” sound that took all its most harmonious elements, the guitar-oriented riffs and vocal harmonies, and condensed them into a two-and-a-half-minute rave-up that fairly jumped off the grooves. From the unsparing two-chord intro, there was no letting up. “
Oh yeah, I’ll tell you something
…” The energy was impossible to let go of. Part easygoing pop, part joyous rocker, part roller-coaster ride, it came at the listener from every angle, with rhythmic jerks and handclaps and inadvertent detours from the standard four-chord structure. As if the overheated arrangement wasn’t tantalizing enough, the Beatles’ performance was extraordinary, from John and Paul’s slashing harmonies to Paul’s sudden full-octave leap into falsetto, capped off by stirring confessions—“
I can’t hide, I can’t hide
”—that seem to gain in fervor each time they are sung. If the suits at Capitol were duly affected by the record, they never let on. But no doubt about it: “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was like no record they’d ever heard.