The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  It was the first of many such extraordinary events that would be repeated during the coming years. “We were like kings of the jungle then,” John remembered, seeing tony London at his feet. The scene dwarfed any dream they’d had in their heads all these years. Paul was especially impressed by the magnificence—and the glory. Before the show, the two bands were herded up a wide set of marble stairs at the back of the hall, facing Prince Consort Road, for a photo op. In the late afternoon, with sunlight sifting in through the mullioned windows, Paul remembers looking over at the others, beaming in their smart, stylish clothes, and thinking, “This is it! London! The Albert Hall!” Years later he would admit to the thrill it gave him, standing there with the other boys, the world seemingly at their fingertips. “We felt like gods!” he said. “We felt like fucking gods!”

  Little did he realize that this was just the beginning.

  Chapter 23 So This Is Beatlemania

  [I]

  No television show in Great Britain was more popular—or selective—than Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. It was an institution: practically every set in the country was tuned to it each Sunday night as the top English stars and visiting American performers took part in the prestigious but corny variety show that aired live from the Argyll Street theater. Every major celebrity eventually put in an appearance: Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Laurence Olivier, Elizabeth Taylor, Nat King Cole—Cliff Richard. If, to Americans, the pinnacle of success was playing Carnegie Hall, its British equivalent was the Palladium, “home of the stars.” In Ringo’s estimation, “there was nothing bigger in the world than making it to the Palladium.” He’d always dreamed about it as a boy. It was the yardstick for success. “My mum, Annie, always used to tease Ritchie—‘See you on the Palladium’—when he was a boy, just practicing,” recalls Marie Crawford. “You’d always hear a parent say that as a joke, knowing their child had about as good a chance of getting there as winning the football pools.”

  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 d
ays 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.

  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 t
old 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?”