The Beatles (97 page)

If the Beatles were at all starstruck, they didn’t show it. Longtime movie fans, they always enjoyed meeting their screen heroes, but the turnout at the party seemed on the slim side, rather far from the hip. “
We saw a couple of film stars
,” John relented, but added: “We were expecting to see more.” Then an invitation arrived that absolved the anemic turnout.

Burt Lancaster was screening the new Peter Sellers movie,
A Shot in the Dark,
at his Bel-Air estate and thought the Beatles might get a kick out of joining him. Was that
the
Burt Lancaster, they asked Derek—
the man
with all the teeth? Ringo was absolutely beside himself. A stone cowboy freak, he’d seen Lancaster in
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Apache, The Kentuckian,
and
Vera Cruz
the moment they were released and had the actor’s persona, with the leer and cobra smile, down pat. Burt Lancaster! Sure, they’d watch a movie with him. They’d shop for groceries with him, if that was the offer.

Lancaster’s pad, in George’s opinion, “
was a very expensive
, impressive Hollywood home,” with a sunken Olympic-size pool buried in a grotto of lighted waterfalls and lagoons with a tributary that fed directly into a bedroom—you could just swim right in—and a panoramic view of West Los Angeles that seemed lifted from a movie backdrop. But it wasn’t nearly as impressive as Lancaster himself, a bronzed god “
about eight feet tall
” whose aura probably set off car alarms up and down the hills.
Ringo, who came dressed
in western-style gear, with a holster and toy guns strapped around his waist, drew on their host as he lumbered through the door. “Hold ’em up there now, Burt—this town ain’t big enough for the
two of us,” he drawled. It was the equivalent of some goofball meeting the Beatles and bleating, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But Lancaster played along, flashing his dazzling grin and going for an imaginary weapon. “What have you got there?” he frowned at Ringo’s plastic gun. “Kids’ stuff.” The Beatles were in heaven.

The next day, during a fatiguing heat wave, more stars—and more guns—continued to show up, beginning right after lunch when Colonel Parker arrived in a station wagon loaded with presents for the Beatles. A huge box carried to the patio spilled over with rhinestone-studded leather belts and holsters with each of the boys’ names engraved on the back and “From Elvis and the Colonel” burned inside. The Beatles expressed their thanks, but that was as far as they were willing to go. There was something slightly off base, something condescending about the spirit of the gift-giving that registered on the boys’ shit detectors. “Bang, bang,” Paul deadpanned, aiming his gun at the Colonel, who was sitting across the table from him. Ominously, John pointed a gun at his own head and mimicked Paul—
“bang!”
—as George grumbled: “
I wish we had real guns
.” It cast an awkward hush over the table, broken finally by the Colonel’s twangy appeal to “have fun, fellas,” before hightailing it out of their compound.

Soon afterward,
Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee
stopped by to pay their respects, followed by Jayne Mansfield, a tough little number who had “
harangued and hassled
” Derek Taylor for days in an attempt to have her picture taken with the Beatles. Brian had laid down the law about using the Beatles in photo ops: it was
out of the question,
especially with cheesy celebrities, but Derek occasionally made exceptions. Mansfield wasn’t to be one of them. Having gotten the tactful Lancashire brush-off, she finally showed up at the house, “adamant about meeting them.” She refused to take no for an answer. It set up an awkward situation, awkward for its exchange in front of the boys and awkward because of its inexcusably harsh pitch, but in the clamorous give-and-take, Mansfield’s suggestion that everyone meet at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go seemed like a solution they could live with—anything, as long as it removed her from their doorstep.

Truth be told, the Beatles were itching to get out, tired of being cooped up and handled, eager to sample L.A. nightlife without being on a leash. John, Neil, and Derek had actually gone clothes shopping at Beau Gentry earlier in the day and were encouraged by the fact that no one had accosted them. Maybe, Derek concluded, they could survive an outing to the Whiskey. Brian wouldn’t approve, but he had disappeared again, leaving Derek in charge.

Calls were made to the club, whose press agent guaranteed the Beatles “
absolute privacy
.” Johnny Rivers was playing, and George and Ringo set out at 10:30 in a white Cadillac convertible, while John followed in a police car with Mansfield and a few guys from the press corps, leaving Paul curled up in a hammock. “
It was bad from the get-go
,” recalls Larry Kane, who had squeezed into the backseat before Derek could give him the boot. “Before anyone knew what was happening, John grabbed Mansfield and they started making out like mad. It was almost obscene the way they went at it like that, right there in front of us.”

It was evident from the moment they pulled into the Whiskey’s parking lot on Sunset Boulevard that “
Beatlemania [was] in full frenzy
, the owners having broadcast [the] visit all over town.” Somehow, John elbowed his way inside the jam-packed club, where a banquette had been reserved, but George and Ringo had to be literally lifted and passed over the crowd to keep them from being trampled. Instantly “
the whole of Hollywood paparazzi
descended,” George remembered. Photographers zeroed right in on the money shot: busty Jayne Mansfield sandwiched between three-quarters of the Beatles. Wordlessly, the boys let them do their bit, withstanding an explosion of flashbulbs. It was over soon enough—except that Robert Flora, a stringer for UPI, refused to cut the Beatles any slack. “He just kept snapping pictures of them with one of those old-fashioned box cameras that flashed real big,” says Larry Kane, “and they wanted to be left alone.” After a suitable grace period, George warned Flora “to get lost,” which worked for about a minute. Soon he drifted back, peppering the table with flashes. “Will you just move him?” John asked a bouncer diplomatically, waving Flora aside. “
Tell him to drop his camera
, come over and join the table. Anything,
but stop flashing.
”

But as the bouncer turned around, Flora reached over his biceps and boldly fired off another shot at the table. “Get the fuck out of here!” George roared to a stunned entourage. Jumping halfway to his feet, he snatched up his glass—a half-drained scotch and Coke—and hurled its contents at the camera. The drink missed its mark and hit actress Mamie Van Doren instead, who was making her way over to the table.

The next day, predictably
, the incident was splashed across the front page of the
Herald Examiner,
along with “photos by Bob Flora” of the entire drink-throwing fiasco. One of the pictures shows George clearly in action, establishing a new public image to contradict that of the so-called quiet Beatle. (
In Baltimore
, two weeks later, he would reinforce this side of him by booting a local photographer in the ass.) “
That was horrendous
,”
admitted George, who regarded the skirmish as a lapse in judgment. The Beatles had always worked so hard to keep from losing control like that in public, from embarrassing themselves in front of fans. But it also underscored how much things had altered since they’d hit the road back in June. In fact, the whole gestalt of Beatlemania had radically changed. The fans were becoming more aggressive, the situations more dire, the press more unforgiving, the future more uncertain. From now on, the way the Beatles interacted with
anyone
had to be carefully refocused. One thing was for sure: venturing out in public was no longer a smart or safe bet. As Derek Taylor recalled: “When in future days someone would say—and someone often did say it—‘You guys never go
out
anywhere. Don’t you ever feel shut in?’ we would recall the time we went night-clubbing [sic] with Jayne Mansfield and sigh.”

The American tour dragged on through most of September, with little variation in its madcap routine. The cities sped by in a blur: Denver, Cincinnati, New York, Atlantic City, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit… Everywhere they went, there were greater displays of mayhem, the fans ever more determined to cross the Beatles’ path. Their schemes got more inventive—and more preposterous, too—as the tour progressed and gathered steam. In Indianapolis a college student posed as a room-service waiter at the Speedway Motor Inn in order to collect their autographs. That stunt was clever enough to amuse the boys.
But at the old Muhlbach
Hotel in Kansas City, a mother got stuck crawling through the air-conditioning ducts trying to locate the Beatles’ suite.

Mothers! They put their daughters to shame when it came to the nightly groupie scene. There was always an abundance of gorgeous young women willing to do anything—and to anyone—in order to meet one of the Beatles. But the mothers were even more determined to score one of the boys. “
Older women would come up
to us all the time and say, ‘I want to meet the Beatles,’ ” recalls a journalist who traveled with the entourage. “I’d say, ‘I can’t do that.’ And they’d say, ‘No, you don’t understand. I want to make them happy.’ ”

The variety of women that paraded through the Beatles’ rooms was extraordinary for its range and magnitude. “
After most shows, you couldn’t
get into their suite without wading through the crush of available
girls,” Wendy Hanson recalled. “It resembled the waiting room of a busy doctor’s office. Derek or Neil would poke his head through the door and say, ‘Next,’ until, one by one, they’d work their way through the entire group.” Invariably, when Neil confronted a promoter about arrangements following a show, he’d be waved off in mid-sentence—“Don’t worry, that’s all been taken care of”—which usually meant that hookers were waiting in their dressing room. “
The Beatles
hated
that
,” says Tony Barrow, who encountered it on subsequent tours. “The promoters used to think they were being terribly helpful, but those girls were gotten rid of as fast as the Beatles could get rid of them.”

Most of the time. But in Atlantic City, at a motel party following the concert at Convention Hall, the girls on call were too spectacular to resist. John, especially, couldn’t take his eyes off a slim and flashy young blonde who “
reminded him of Brigitte Bardot
.” And again, in Dallas, when bunnies from a private club showed up, the boys yielded to temptation. This time it was Paul who fancied a tall blond cowgirl standing somewhat behind the others. Art Schreiber, who happened to be passing through the suite, was startled when Paul motioned with his chin and whispered, “I like that one. Can you get her for me?” Answered Schreiber: “Listen, pal, I’m no fucking pimp. I’m a reporter.”

The Beatles were in dire need of a substitute distraction when the tour mercifully rolled into New York. “
This is it!
This
is what it’s all about!” Paul gushed, as their car emerged from the Midtown Tunnel slightly before four on the morning of August 28. They had been flying since midnight, having taken off directly after the last show in Cincinnati, where the temperature onstage peaked at a torturous 115 degrees. Exhausted though they might have been,
the city hit them
like a handful of amphetamines. New York, New York: it was a sight for sore eyes—and a jolt to weary senses.

John immediately ordered their driver to scan the local radio stations and, sure enough, it was just the same as the last time they’d arrived. Their songs reverberated right across the AM dial. A thrill like that never wore off!

“This is it!” Paul said again to no particular response, though everyone nodded in unison.

The Plaza Hotel now knew
what to expect and refused to have the Beatles back, so at Ed Sullivan’s suggestion, they’d shifted headquarters to the Delmonico Hotel, a dowdy high-rise on the corner of Fifty-ninth
Street and Park Avenue, where Sullivan lived year-round and could vouch for their welfare.
But when their limo pulled
up to the entrance canopy and they got out, about eighty teenage girls broke through police barricades. The boys knew how to slip unscathed through these type of crowds, but a plucky fifteen-year-old named Angie McGowan, who lived just a few blocks south, pounced on a startled Ringo, ripping the St. Christopher’s medal from a chain around his neck. In the havoc she also shredded his shirt, according to an account in the
New York World-Telegram,
“then retired triumphantly into the crowd.”

New York, New York: double trouble, but alluring as ever. Two sold-out shows at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium drew nearly thirty thousand teenagers to what Robert Shelton, the
New York Times
pop music critic, labeled “
a screaming success
.” Shelton, partial to Greenwich Village folksingers, warned: “[The Beatles] have created a monster in their audience. If they have concern for anything but the money they are earning, they had better concern themselves with controlling their audiences before this contrived hysteria reaches uncontrollable proportions.” It was a ridiculous admonition. No one was going to control Beatlemania, much less tame the defiant monster. The Beatles, more than anyone, had transformed the rock show from a conventional performance into a bash to blow off some steam. The audience was asserting itself without even realizing what it was doing. The feeling generated at the Beatles shows bordered on spiritual anarchy, and being nothing short of exhilarating, nothing was going to stop it. In under a year, the Beatles had redefined the experience in terms of sheer numbers, money, and energy. No one, not even Elvis, had that great of an impact all at once. A whole new chapter of musical prophecy was being written.