The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Though the review made no strides in the advancement of rock criticism, it gave the record a commendable launch. It also helped distract from the pack of would-be marauders who were pecking at the kingdom walls. Competitors were flooding the market with anything that might capitalize on the Beatles’ success. All along, there had been scores of singles that made no pretensions as to their agenda: “My Boyfriend Got a Beatle Haircut,” “Yes, You Can Hold My Hand,” “Beatle Fever,” “The Beatle Dance,” “The Boy with the Beatle Hair,” “Beatle Mania in the U.S.A.” (by the Liverpools, no less), “We Love You Beatles”—there were too many to keep track of. A start-up label, Top Six, announced that its debut album would provide a full menu of Beatles covers, coincidentally entitled Beatlemania. Another new label, Dial, was banking on a group called the Grasshoppers. Even Decca, at the behest of onetime Beatles producer Mike Smith, recognized the value of ancestry by signing a band called the All-Stars to be led by Pete Best. To their credit, the Beatles wasted not so much as a glance on any of these coattail surfers, their evil eyes trained on more unbenign targets that threatened to cut into their royalties.

  Vee-Jay Records had become an irksome problem. The bankrupt Chicago label had revived itself on the back of its two monster Beatles smashes. As far as the boys cared, that was fair and square. Vee-Jay had licensed “Please Please Me” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret” in good faith and were entitled to the windfall they eventually produced. But the label had gotten greedy. The original demo tape submitted two years earlier had other material on it, and despite repeated requests by Roland Rennie for its return, Vee-Jay, under new leadership, claimed that it was nowhere to be found. But Vee-Jay promptly issued the extraneous songs on an album titled Introducing the Beatles that sprinted up the charts at a remarkable pace.* Brian pleaded with EMI to protect the Beatles’ position, and in February a New York federal court awarded Capitol a temporary injunction against Vee-Jay to halt distribution of the album. But that only succeeded in sidetracking the renegade label.

  The sessions in Hamburg also continued to haunt them. Polydor Records had licensed the masters for “My Bonnie” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” to MGM in the States. Now, attempting to parlay that success, the labels were releasing “Cry for a Shadow,” the instrumental George had patched together in 1961, to coincide with the release of “Can’t Buy Me Love.” And Sheridan, who had since joined Bobby Patrick’s Big Six, announced that they intended to record a song called “Tell Me If You Can” that he’d cowritten with Paul in Germany.

  “Brian didn’t get very good deals on anything,” George argued later, with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time the abundance and grandeur of the deals themselves kept the Beatles from articulating their fears. Anyone who wanted a pound of their flesh, John joked, should get in line; with four of them in the picture, there was plenty to go around. Even if John could bring himself to laugh about it, there was a growing suspicion among them that Brian “wasn’t astute enough” to handle the heavy traffic. The EMI record royalty, the Dick James publishing deal, the Seltaeb merchandising agreement, the UA movie contract, even their road shows with promoter Arthur Howes—Paul took to calling them “long-term slave contracts”—were grotesquely inadequate.

  No sooner had Brian returned to London than his New York agent, GAC, cabled with news that offers—“spectacular offers”—were pouring in from American promoters, requiring an immediate answer from the Beatles. “We had fifty times as many offers as we could handle,” Norman Weiss, their U.S. agent, revealed, and he urged Brian to immediately set aside dates for a major U.S. tour. And the money was staggering for a pop group: a minimum guarantee of $20,000 up front against as much as 80 percent of the gate. Absolutely no one received that much for a single performance, not even Frank Sinatra. The handful of entertainers who could even get close to that amount had been icons for fifteen or twenty years—Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Judy Garland.

  This was completely new territory. The string of eligible arenas in America, those with seating capacities of 7,000 to 20,000, had never presented rock ’n roll shows before. They were primarily sports facilities or convention halls, deviating from the schedule once a year when the circus came to town. Among the cast of possible promoters, few had experience staging any type of show. Five years later a network of rock impresarios would establish itself, with a dominant promoter in almost every major city, but in 1964 none existed. Presenting the Beatles required that a local promoter handle tickets, publicity, staging, security (“no fewer than one hundred uniformed police officers”), sound (including “a hi-fidelity sound system… and a first-class sound engineer”), and hospitality (“clean and adequate dressing room facilities… [and] two seven-passenger Cadillac limousines, air-conditioned if possible”). Who knew how to pull that all together?

  There were already ominous signs. It was inevitable that competition would eventually loosen their vise grip on the charts, and, sure enough, groups such as the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals, and Freddy and the Dreamers edged above them periodically in swings that were treated as certain downfall. When the Beatles toppled out of the number one spot, however briefly, it was front-page news. The dailies suggested that their popularity had peaked. “Are the Beatles finished?” a tabloid wondered. Rumors circulated that John was leaving the band, and even though he dismissed it as “foolish gossip,” the speculation persisted. Harder to dismiss was the cold reception given to the closed-circuit film of the Beatles’ Washington, D.C., concert. Not only was the turnout conspicuously flat, but the deal structure was such a mess that determining what royalties were owed the Beatles became next to impossible.

  In late March John’s book, In His Own Write, was published by Jonathan Cape and sold forty thousand copies on the first day of its release. It wasn’t creative writing in the literary sense: the text was woefully slight, a mere seventy-eight pages, the format haphazard, the syntax clumsy and fragmented—all quirks that normally earned terse rejection slips from publishers. It looked nothing like a regular book with its crude, “scrappy” line drawings and chicken-scratch marginalia. “There’s nothing deep in it,” John insisted, “it’s just meant to be funny.” If anything, it was a descendant of “The Daily Howl” that he had passed around at Quarry Bank and was later serialized in Mersey Beat, studded with the puns and nonsensical wordplay he called “gobbledegook,” along with a generous dose of sick humor. But it possessed an undeniable power. It had a rude, freewheeling irreverence that thumbed its nose at literary pretension, all of which appealed to the emerging “alternative” culture. It seemed to confirm what commentators had been saying about the rumblings of a “cultural earthquake” and a new, anything-goes permissiveness. And if John lacked the craftsmanship of a traditional author, there were pillars of the establishment ready to explain and defend his book. The BBC called it “a laugh a minute,” and no less an institution than the Times Literary Supplement extolled it as being “worth the attention of anyone who fears for the impoverishment of the English language and the English imagination.”

  In fact, the Beatles were now welcome at several doors where, until only recently, they were scorned as riffraff. The Variety Club, that snooty, old-line showbiz establishment, named them “Show Business Personalities of 1963” in an awards ceremony at the Dorchester Hotel presided over by prime minister hopeful Harold Wilson. Then, on March 23 they received the prestigious Carl-Alan award from Prince Philip in a ceremony at London’s Empire Ballroom, before accepting five Ivor Novello Awards for “outstanding contributions to British music.”

  Awards. Awards. Awards. Everything was finally breaking their way. Record sales were astronomical; at one point in April the Beatles had fourteen singles on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, a feat not so much unparalleled as obscene. A world tour had been set, beginning June 4 in Scandinavia, continuing through Hong Kong and Australia, and culminating in a late-summer tour of North America. And the film was moving forward at a fairly painless cl
ip. There were just a few more weeks of shooting before the Beatles scattered for vacation.

  No one had any forewarning when, in April, Freddie Lennon finally turned up. The Beatles were in the midst of shooting a difficult scene at the Scala Theatre, a gorgeous old vaudeville house in Soho, which had been spruced up by Dick Lester’s set designers for the movie’s live concert performance. Everyone at NEMS was posted there, because of the swarm of fans blocking the streets and trying to get inside, so no one stopped the grizzled old man who hobbled into the Argyll Street office. “I’m John Lennon’s father,” he told the receptionist, who reacted as one might to the reappearance of Anastasia.

  John had told people he was an orphan. Shaken, the receptionist passed the news to a secretary, who immediately located Brian Epstein. “Brian went into a panic,” according to Brian Sommerville. He sent a car for John without any explanation.

  It seems doubtful that John recognized his father on first sight. He had seen Freddie Lennon only twice in his entire life, and not since 1945, just after his fifth birthday, at a seaside retreat in Brighton. Now Freddie was sitting across the desk in Brian’s private office, a stooped-over, toothless sea dog with smoke-gray hair slicked back in the style of a faded sharpie.

  “I stuck out my hand to shake his,” Freddie remembered, “but John just growled at me and said suspiciously, ‘What do you want?’ ” Brian felt the hostility immediately and endeavored to subdue John, instructing him: “You can’t turn your back on your family, no matter what they’ve done.”

  It helped defuse the situation temporarily. Still, John wasn’t particularly sympathetic toward the broken-down man and the timing of his visit. “He turned up after I was famous,” complained John, who remained “furious” at Freddie for abandoning him as a child. “He knew where I was all my life—I’d lived in the same house in the same place for most of my childhood, and he knew where.”

  It may have crushed John to grow up without a father, but it took no effort for him to cut short Freddie’s visit and ultimately order him from Brian’s office. Whatever reasons had rendered his father no longer incommunicado, it was more convenient for John that Freddie remain at large.

  Because the set was basically closed to the media, there was an intensified hunger for stories about the boys. Usually during these crunch periods, the Beatles were made available to do some small, meaningless interview specifically aimed at keeping the newshounds at bay, but with the lockdown on the set, it seemed that they’d dropped out of sight. Some reporters, like the Mirror’s Don Short, simply decided to take things into their own hands. Up until that time, there was an unwritten policy between the press and NEMS that designated the Beatles’ private lives as being off-limits. “It was casting a sprat to catch a mackerel,” Short says of the unique accommodation. “We gave up the small, personal stories to land the big one. If something dicey came up, we just put a wrap on it. It was easy, considering the tremendous access we were given, and it also gave the Beatles a built-in sense of security.” With the boys suddenly absent from the scene, however, all bets were off. There was too much pressure, Short says, to keep their name in the paper and for rival journalists to “stay ahead of the pack.”

  He finally got the break he’d been waiting for. A few days before Easter, Short was passing through a nightclub when a breathless source tipped him off that two of the Beatles were about to fly north on a weekend holiday, one of them with a new girlfriend in tow. That was all he needed to hear. Bolting from the club, Short made a beeline for the Mirror’s offices and spent a few hours on the phone, calling every aviation contact he knew who might have information on the Beatles’ whereabouts. It didn’t take long for him to pick up their scent. “They’d gone by private plane from one of the airports [outside London],” he discovered—John with Cynthia, and George with Pattie Boyd, a beautiful young model who had a bit part in the movie. Now that was a scoop! According to Short’s source, there was a reservation in their names at Dromoland Castle, in a remote corner of western Ireland, which is where he wound up, flying puddle jumpers, late that same night.

  “They had checked in under assumed names,” Short recalls, “so the hotel denied they were there. So I actually climbed up the outside of the hotel, with a bottle of scotch in my pocket.” Oblivious to the danger or, by this time, merely irrational, he leapfrogged from balcony to balcony, peering into open windows in search of his prey. Finally, after half an hour, he struck gold. “There was John and George, with the two girls, having dinner on the floor, on a huge rug, and I burst in through the window.” They couldn’t believe their eyes. The Beatles were so astounded by Short’s appearance, to say nothing of his nerve, that they welcomed him in, ordered extra food, drank his scotch (as well as a few bottles held in reserve), and gave him an exclusive story.

  Don Short wasted no time in breaking the news. Pattie Boyd was a very slim, angelic-looking young woman, pleasant and unpretentious, with a style that was as natural as it was alluring. In a genuinely matter-of-fact way, she seemed to be a reference point for all the bold new fashion that was percolating in London—what Mary Quant called “the total look”: chic and funky clothes, shaggy haircut, sexy miniskirt, pale “dollybird” makeup, antique jewelry. “Whenever fashions changed Patti [sic] was in there first with all the right gear looking beautiful as ever,” Cynthia wrote in one of her memoirs. Much later, Twiggy admitted that she based her look on Pattie, who never begrudged anyone her personal beauty tips. “Pattie always managed to look fabulous with very little effort,” Peter Brown remembers. “George wrote ‘Something in the Way You Move [sic]’ about her; Eric [Clapton] wrote ‘Darling, You Look Wonderful [sic] Tonight’ about her. That’s Pattie—she is that person.”

  As a favor, Richard Lester had cast her as an extra in the movie, along with her younger sister, Jenny, knowing they would dress up the scenery around the Beatles.* According to several friends, Pattie not only had an eye on George, she been following his career from a distance from the start. He picked up the signals on the very first day of production, during a scene in which she appeared as an immodest schoolgirl. “When we started filming, I could feel George looking at me,” she recalled, “and I was a bit embarrassed.” It might have been less awkward had she not been “semi-engaged” to a boyfriend, Eric Swayne, with whom she’d been living for two years. At the time, Swayne said he felt “confident about [his] relationship with her,” but within a week Pattie and George were making their own plans.

  Don Short wanted a photo to go with his story, which, “in those days,” he says, “was taboo. You never published a picture of a Beatle with his spouse or girlfriend. But suddenly none of us cared anymore.” Short had flown in a photographer expressly to get the prize shot, but by the next morning the hotel was crawling with other press. Word had leaked out about George’s new romance, which put a premature end to the vacation. Reporters, determined to identify the young woman, had all the exits covered. It got so bad, the couples became prisoners of their room. Eventually John and George went downstairs to check out, acting as decoys so the girls could sneak away unnoticed. “In the end, Cyn and I had to dress as [chamber]maids,” Pattie told Hunter Davies. “They took us out a back way, put us in a laundry basket, and we were driven to the airport in a laundry van.”

  The women were, in fact, only one small cloudburst in the mammoth typhoon of press that surged through the spring of 1964. Everyone followed the Beatles like a favorite soap opera. Not a day went by that didn’t offer ample stories about their exploits, even if they were only vague speculation. Papers reported on where they were last seen and with whom, how they were dressed, what they had for dinner, when they went home (and with whom). The gloves had come off; all angles were now fair game.

  [III]

  To Ringo, the movies were magic and the experience of making one even more marvelous, indescribable. Years later he could still say: “It was all so romantic, with the lights and coming to work in the limo.” And UA, which never even saw a syn
opsis of the script, had been viewing each day’s rushes with mounting excitement. What had begun as a quickie, low-budget exploitation feature riding on the Beatles’ fleeting fame now looked more and more like a quirky little gem. The Beatles were funny. They were naturals in front of the camera and “made it seem as if the picture was ad-libbed or improvised.” What’s more, its style was so distinctive: shot in black and white, using mostly handheld cameras to capture the energy of a documentary film, and chock-full of sequences that were as outrageous as they were innovative.

  For convenience, on the set, everyone had been calling it The Beatles Movie until something more suitable came along. There are several “official” versions of how the title was finally arrived at. What they all agree on is that it occurred during a lunch break at Twickenham Studios, where either Paul remarked to Bud Ornstein—or John to Walter Shenson—“There was something Ringo said the other day…,” at which point, the two Beatles recounted their drummer’s penchant for “abusing the English language.” “Ringo would always say grammatically incorrect phrases and we’d all laugh,” George recalled. One that sprang easily to mind had popped out at the Heathrow press conference, when Ringo described having his hair cut at the British embassy soiree. “I was just talking, having an interview… and then ‘snip’… Well, what can you say? Tomorrow never knows.” Tomorrow never knows! The Beatles cut wicked glances at one another when that gem fell out. And John promptly wrote it down, to use in one of his stories and, later, songs. There was another malapropism—or “Ringosim,” as John called them—that had already appeared in John’s book, In His Own Write: “He’d had a hard day’s night that day.” One of the boys entertained the lunch gathering with details of its origin, following a grueling late-night gig, but they were already one step ahead of him. “We’ve just got our title!” one of the producers exclaimed.