The Love You Make (18 page)

chapter Five

Beatles Rock Royals

—
Daily Express
headline November 4, 1963

Despite the enormous recording success
, despite the sold-out concerts and growing popularity with the public, the mainstream, “Fleet Street” London press continued to ignore the Beatles. What little press they received was on the entertainment pages about a band from the North country that had made good. Although they were drawing record-breaking, hysterical crowds in small cities all over the North, in London they had appeared only at a few minor pop concerts and teen TV music shows. While Brian was trying to bring them into the mainstream London bookings, with exposure that would be commensurate with their recording popularity, he always seemed to come up against a brick wall. In Brian’s mind, at least, it was all part of a conspiracy by three brothers.

The brothers were Lew and Leslie Grade and Bernard Delfont. As Brian saw it, the Grades practically had a cartel on the English entertainment business that crisscrossed to form a web which entrapped him and his boys. Lew Grade, later to become Lord Grade, owned the huge Associated Television Corporation, Britain’s largest independent producer of TV programs. Lew Grade also personally produced the United Kingdom’s most popular TV variety show, “Sunday Night at the Palladium,” on which an appearance was crucial for an act to gain national attention. Brother Leslie Grade headed the largest show business agency in the country, which represented personalities such as Laurence Olivier and also packaged films, stage shows, and TV programs. The third brother, Bernard, owned several prestigious theaters, was a major force behind the West End theater business, and by appointment to the Queen booked the most prestigious of all live shows, the Royal Command Performance. The fact that the three brothers had anglicized their name from Winogradsky and that Bernard had chosen a name as pretentious as “Delfont” was a topic of much discussion in Brian’s office, where his Jewish heritage was both a matter of pride and a sore point. Something about the brothers’ success irked Brian, and it irked him even more when they chose to ignore the Beatles.

The problem began when at the first sign of the Beatles’ success, Leslie Grade’s agency had approached Brian to sign the Beatles to the Grade agency for representation and booking. Since it was a large, powerful agency that could help the Beatles the most, this seemed like a reasonable move. But for these services the Grade Agency would receive 10 percent of the Beatles’ very considerable income from live performances. Brian, who had been acting as both manager and booking agent for the boys, would then be expected to reduce his commission to only 15 percent. What’s more, Brian was now busily promoting his own concerts all over the north of England, using lesser known NEMS-managed acts to open the bill for the Beatles. In this way he made money as manager of all the groups, as booking agent and as promoter. His income—much of it in cash—was enormous. With the Grades “muscling in,” as Brian put it, all that would stop. Even though it might have been beneficial for the Beatles to make some sort of a deal with them, Brian ruled it out of the question—so out of the question that he didn’t even tell the Beatles about it.

Yet by turning the Grades down it appeared that Brian had caused himself a major problem; the three brothers were blackballing him from mainstream entertainment. Whether or not this was a reality, it was very much the truth for Brian, and one that he perceived as a major stumbling block for the boys’ progress. Still, he would not give in. He was confident that the boys would become so big on their own that the Grades would be forced into dropping their demands.

Brian finally had his way in September of 1963, when the Beatles had the number-one single, the number-one album, and the best-selling extended play record in the British Isles. Orders for the single called “She Loves You” had been coming in since June, when they didn’t even have a title, and by the time the lyrics were written, in a hotel room three nights before it was recorded, over half a million copies were already presold to record stores. In “She Loves You” George Martin had been able to incorporate in magic proportions all the ingredients of the three previous singles into one ineluctably attractive song. It had easy, “sad-glad” rhymes and lyrics sung in those distinctive harmonies, every chorus tagged with a sly, infectious musical hook, a simple “yeah, yeah, yeah” that became not only the Beatles’ trademark but an international euphemism for rock music. “She Loves You” didn’t climb the charts—it exploded with a fury into the number-one position, selling faster and harder than any single ever released, and became the largest-selling single in the history of Great Britain, not to be outsold until fifteen years later by, ironically but not surprisingly, a Paul McCartney tune called “Mull of Kintyre.”
⁵
At this point Lew Grade could do nothing in the face of the tens of thousands of requests to see them on “Sunday Night at the Palladium,” and an invitation was extended for them to appear on October 13. Brian, not willing to let well enough alone, insisted the Beatles top the bill, and had his way, too.

An audience of fifteen million saw them that night, a staggering number at the time and the largest of their career so far. The day of the performance Argyle Street, where the Palladium was located, was filled with fans waiting for their arrival, while inside the theater a stack of presents piled up in their dressing room. It was only a matter of hours before the press and TV newsmen heard what was happening on Argyle Street and were sent to cover the event. The newspaper reports the next day varied from estimates of 500 fans to thousands waiting in the street, chasing after their limousine as it pulled up to the stage door. One photographer, Dezo Hoffman, who had been covering the Beatles for several weeks, claims that only eight girls were in the street in front of the Palladium. He says the photographs were cropped so they would look like more and that the press reports were a clever ruse instigated by Brian. Whatever actually happened that night, the Beatles were irrefutably front-page headlines the next day for the first of countless times. Now even the man-on-the-street, who didn’t listen to rock and roll, was beginning to hear about something called, improbably, unforgettably, “the Beatles.”

Three days later the Beatles made further headlines when Bernard Delfont announced, with Brian’s and the Beatles’ permission, that the Beatles would also be on the bill at the Royal Command Variety Performance the first week of November at which Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother would be in attendance. In the intervening weeks the elite of the Fleet Street press bore down on them as they continued to tour, and the population at large learned more about the peculiar phenomenon that followed the Beatles wherever they appeared; the audiences cheered, wept, screamed, and sometimes even tore their clothing in what sociologists explained as “the focus of a form of mass hysteria.” The main story, however, was hair. Nobody could get over the Beatles haircut.

On November 5, the night of the Royal Command Performance, 500 policemen cordoned off the Prince of Wales Theater. It was uncertain who was the bigger draw or the more difficult to protect, the Beatles or the Royal Family. After a very boring show consisting of a trio of zither players, barnyard animal puppets, and Marlene Dietrich, the boys were announced to an uproar in the audience. John’s ad lib, “Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands, the rest of you can just rattle your jewelry,” brought the house down.
⁶
The following day the newspaper headlines were again unanimous about the Beatles. The Daily
Express
story, “Beatles Rock Royals,” was not uncommon. The
Express
put a photograph of the Beatles on the front page five times that week, they were such a good story. But it was the
Daily Mirror
that summed it up best in a single headline, just one word, a word the whole world would soon hear: BEATLEMANIA!

The day after
the Royal Command Performance Brian carefully packed all the newspaper headlines and press reports about his clients into his suitcase and boarded a plane for New York. Across the Atlantic, America beckoned to him like some glittering Shangri-la, a land of prosperity and glamour, a country he wanted desperately to claim for the Beatles. Even though Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had told the British, “You never had it so good,” Great Britain seemed dull in comparison to what was happening in the United States. Unemployment was relatively low, salaries high, gas was cheap and tail fins big and flashy. Most homes had TV, some of them color. New York had become the center of jet-set society, leaving Paris a haughty second. The leaders of the New Elegance, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, were so much like royalty their kingdom was referred to as Camelot. America also had California, with a musical phenomenon that was totally endemic to its shores, “surfing music,” introduced by a new group called the Beach Boys. It spoke of a way of life of sun and surf and souped-up cars that no Englishman could possibly understand. In America there was a smug, chauvinistic superiority, and it was quite clear that nothing was either wanted or needed from Great Britain. Not even the Beatles.

Brian Epstein was bent on proving otherwise, but all along it had been an uphill fight. The EMI-owned record company in America, Capitol Records, was routinely alerted at the first signs of chart activity on “Love Me Do” but didn’t show any interest in releasing the song in the United States. When the Beatles’ second single, “Please Please Me” became number one, George Martin personally recommended the single to a Capitol Records executive in New York. Martin received a polite note in return saying, “They won’t do anything in this market.” Now free to take the single to another record company in the U.S., Brian subsequently pitched “Please Please Me” all over the American market, but nobody “heard” the Beatles happening in America. It was beach music they wanted. Finally, Brian managed to sign the single to a small record label in Chicago called Vee Jay, whose claim to fame was that it had once been the label on which the Four Seasons recorded. True to the predictions of the bigger record companies, “Please Please Me” died on the vine with sales of only a few hundred copies. The next single, “She Loves You,” an immediate number-one hit in England, was also turned down by all the major record companies and was signed to an even less well known label than Vee Jay, this one called Swan. “She Loves You” also vanished the moment it was released.

Thus the elegant Englishman with the clippings under his arm was determined to make a beachhead in America. The trip would be short but crucial. He would have to convince a major record company to take them on, and he would have to book the right venue to present them to the American public. The only glimpse of them had been on a few seconds’ worth of footage on Jack Paar’s NBC series, “Prime Time.” Television was, naturally, the right way to present them to a country as vast as America. The Beatles’ appearance on “Sunday Night at the Palladium” had proved the power of television to Brian when record sales quadrupled the next day. In America, Brian set his sites on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” the top-rated entertainment TV show in 1963.

Not surprisingly, Ed Sullivan was willing to negotiate for an appearance by the Beatles on his show. Sullivan was a keen-eyed showman and impresario. He knew the potential of giving the Beatles their first American exposure, even if as a curiosity. Sullivan remembered, first of all, their return to England from their Swedish concert the previous autumn. Sullivan—along with Prime Minister Edward Heath—was at Heathrow and had his trip interrupted by their tumultuous arrival. He was impressed that this “gimmick” was not only still around but had a string of number-one hits in their homeland. His London sources were full of Beatles’ exploits, and the time seemed ripe to book them.

A meeting was arranged in Brian’s hotel suite with Sullivan’s son-in-law, Bob Precht, who produced the show. Precht explained diplomatically that Sullivan would be interested in signing them for one appearance but only as a sort of a novelty item. Brian was astonished; he intended for them to headline. Indeed, Brian would have it no other way. They wanted to appear on the Sullivan show because he was the best, but they were the best too, he explained. The deal that Brian and Precht finally struck was rather extraordinary. The Beatles would headline not one, but two shows on consecutive Sundays, February 9 and 16, 1964. For each show they would receive, in toto, $3,500. Even with Sullivan paying the airfares—which were arranged as a promotional consideration on the show—the $7,000 fee wouldn’t cover expenses. Brian, in effect, had signed them to headline but had to float the trip to the tune of some $50,000.

Now, with a signed contract from Ed Sullivan in his pocket, Brian went to Capitol records. At a meeting with the director of eastern operations, Brown Meggs, Brian played their newest single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which, he said, had been produced specifically with the “American sound” in mind so that it would appeal to the U.S. market. Brian insisted that coupled with their appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, the new song could break as big in America as it had in England. But Meggs was not as positive, and reluctantly, he agreed to release “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on a limited basis in January of 1964, a month before their appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. Brian couldn’t have been happier with the timing.

Brian returned home to England a satisfied man that mid-November of 1963. It was just a week before Lee Harvey Oswald would lay America wide open to his boys. For the first of many times, the American dream was shattered by an assassin’s bullet. In a country that seemed so invulnerable to harm, everything was lost in a single moment. December and January in America would be months of grim mourning. The funeral dirges that played relentlessly on American radio stations faded into the soft yet still-sad Christmas carols of the season. By January the nation wanted desperately to hear something happy, to find a diversion, some distraction from the morbid tragedy that had intruded into our lives. America needed a tonic. Little would anyone have expected it to be a pop group.