by Bob Spitz
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.
[II]
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 f
requent 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.
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 cam
e.
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.