The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Two days later, on June 12, in Adelaide, the numbers got crazy. In gorgeous weather, the Beatles were loaded into a Ford convertible and paraded along a nine-mile stretch of the Anzac Highway lined by 250,000 people, almost half the city’s population. Over a policeman’s objections, the Beatles crawled up to perch on the car’s trunk in what George later referred to as “the J. F. Kennedy position.” It was an incredible sight from that viewpoint, sending a “shock,” especially to John, who admitted that it dawned on him “you might get shot.” An additional thirty thousand more fans crammed into the square outside the gates of Town Hall for the official greeting by Adelaide’s Lord Mayor, several stories above the gathering. “It was like a heroes’ welcome,” said Paul, who leaned way out on the balcony and flashed the crowd the old reliable thumbs-up, not realizing Australians regarded it like being given the finger.

  The scene, sans the thumbs, was repeated in Melbourne, where, despite “a bitterly cold day, some 250,000 people lined the route from the airport to the [Beatles’] hotel.” According to the New York Times, it was “nearly twice as many as turned out to see Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip” the previous year. Ringo had arrived earlier that morning with Brian Epstein on a “horrendous” thirty-hour flight from London through Los Angeles, made tolerable by a running poker game with Vivien Leigh and Horst Buchholz. Ringo assured an attentive press corps waiting at Essendon Airport that he felt refreshed and recharged, although doctors warned that his tonsils would eventually have to come out. Otherwise, he expressed relief to be out of the hospital, the scene of so many childhood setbacks, relief to be in Australia, relief to be back in the mix—and ready to rock ’n roll.

  In fact, the rocking started even before his reunion with the Beatles, when Ringo’s car was surrounded outside the Southern Cross Hotel by an estimated three thousand fans. A moment of real panic ensued while officials decided how to deal with the boisterous crowd. Everywhere Ringo looked, kids were pressed up against the windows, screaming and pounding on the doors, clambering over the hood. It was “a madness we had not seen in Adelaide,” observed Derek Taylor, who watched “the melée” develop from an overhanging balcony. Usually there was a contingency plan to avoid such an encounter, but for some unknown reason, it had been abandoned en route. Impractical as it might seem, they decided to go in through the front entrance. A police inspector built like a bulldozer slung Ringo over his shoulder and, charging, made a beeline for the hotel. A hotel official leading the charge stumbled in the fray—which sent an errant body block into the police inspector. In a flash, everyone went down like tenpins. Ringo was knocked to the ground and engulfed by the crowd. By the time he was rescued from the throng, he was scuffed and badly shaken.

  Later, when the other Beatles arrived, the crowd in the street had swelled to an estimated twenty thousand, some of whom were whipped up in a terrific heat. Others, many of them young girls who had been waiting since dawn, suffered from hunger and exhaustion. The police force, which had been monitoring the situation nervously, called in the army and navy to help maintain order, but it was short-lived. By late afternoon, with chants of “We want the Beatles!” ringing through the square, the shaken troops, now four hundred strong, felt control slipping from their grasp. They didn’t know where to look first: at the barricades being crushed, the girls fainting out of sight, the hooligans stomping in the roofs of cars or pushing through their lines. A fourteen-year-old “screamed so hard she burst a blood-vessel in her throat.” It was “frightening, chaotic, and rather inhuman,” according to a trooper on horseback. Their most pressing concern was the hotel’s plate-glass windows bowing perilously against the violent crush of bodies. They threatened to explode in a cluster of razor-sharp shards at any moment. Ambulances screamed in the distance, preparing for the worst; a detachment of mounted infantry swung into position.

  Just when it all seemed hopeless, at the point when one more thrashing body would undoubtedly deliver the coup de grâce, a roar went up that seemed to suck all the kids away from the hotel. Look! Up in the air—it’s a bird, it’s a plane…Suddenly, all five Beatles appeared on the first-floor balcony in hopes of defusing the situation. Another roar went up, this one even more deafening than the first, as John put a finger across his upper lip, threw the Nazi salute, and goose-stepped jauntily across the platform, screaming, “Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”

  If this is how Australia was, what would America be like? There, Beatles fever was running at an all-time scalding high. Public demand seemed insatiable. In Chicago eighteen thousand tickets were sold before a single ad appeared; two thousand fans stormed Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, scooping up every available seat; the entire block of twelve thousand tickets for Philadelphia’s Convention Hall was gone in “70 hectic minutes”; for all twenty-seven concert dates—the same thing. American deejays kept cranking up the heat.

  Before that, however, there was unfinished business back home. The buzz was particularly loud concerning a swarm of notable challengers, such as the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Manfred Mann, the Yardbirds, Them, the Dave Clark Five, and the Zombies. The Beatles were especially concerned by news that they’d been knocked from the chart’s top spot by a single called “House of the Rising Sun.” What was this cheeky record? they wanted to know. And who were these predators calling themselves Animals? It was time to find out.

  The Beatles arrived back in London, determined to attack it all at once—but first they had a date at the movies.

  The premiere of A Hard Day’s Night wasn’t expected to be normal, even by movie-gala standards. By 7:30, an hour before curtain, the streets around Piccadilly Circus were jammed by a crowd of twelve thousand fans jockeying to get a glimpse of the stars. Inside the London Pavilion, the Beatles, dressed in stiffly pressed tuxedos and glossy patent-leather shoes, stood in the midst of their families and the posh crowd. Joining them were Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowden. Earlier that day the band had watched a run-through of the film at a private screening, with Brian, Derek, and Walter Shenson, who insists they “behaved like delighted little kids” watching themselves romp across the screen. Slouched down in the stalls, with their feet up on the backs of the seats in front of them, they wolfed down popcorn and howled like hyenas or groaned with embarrassment, depending upon the scene. Shenson, hunkered in the balcony, was confident that they had a monster hit on their hands.

  With few exceptions, the critics agreed that A Hard Day’s Night was a winner. The Times called it “off-beat” and an “exercise in anarchy” with a spontaneity exceptional in British films. In the Daily Express, critic Leonard Mosley struck the same euphoric tone, calling it “delightfully loony” and adding “there hasn’t been anything like it since the Marx Brothers in the ’30s.” Later, Bosley Crowther, whose opinion in the New York Times was read like scripture, praised it as “a whale of a comedy” that “had so much good humor going for it that it is awfully hard to resist… with such a dazzling use of the camera that it tickles the intellect and electrifies the nerves.”

  The Beatles preened unflinchingly in the afterglow. “I dug A Hard Day’s Night,” John said initially. “We knew it was better than other rock movies,” though “not as good as James Bond,” he relented. Later, in a puff of vengefulness, he backpedaled, saying, “By the end of the film we didn’t know what had happened and we hated it.” But by then it didn’t matter. On July 8 the movie opened to critical success and amazing business. The next morning there were lines around the block. United Artists blanketed Britain “with a record 160 prints of the picture” and was bragging to reporters that it “would gross at least a million pounds in Britain alone,” which wasn’t bad, considering the film cost less than a quarter of a million pounds to make. Publicly, the Beatles acted indifferent to the success. Still, at every opportunity, they cruised past the Pavilion to check on the length of the queues. Chris Hutchins, who accompanied them on just such a junket, remembered their delight at the lines snaking around the theater. “That’s the stuff!�
�� he recalled John shouting from the backseat of a car a few days after the premiere. “A couple of hundred more for the sevens-and-sixes* and we’ll all be rich!”

  That smugness was nowhere to be seen two days later for the northern premiere of the film. On July 10 the Beatles arrived in Liverpool aboard a capacity-filled Britannia turboprop, but they might as well have flown in on their own buoyancy for all the butterflies in their stomachs. “It was extraordinary to see how very nervous the Beatles were,” recalled BBC deejay David Jacobs, a member of the London entourage that accompanied the boys north. “They were absolutely terrified [of going back].” Ringo acknowledged: “[Friends] kept coming down to London, saying, ‘You’re finished in Liverpool.’ ”

  Outwardly, Paul scoffed at the “one or two little rumors,” as well as the hyperbole from routine “detractors,” but whatever tension he may have experienced was complicated by another development. A few months earlier Paul had settled a paternity claim with a young Liverpool woman, paying her $14,000 in exchange for her silence and the repudiation of all claims against him. Everyone assumed that the problem had gone away, but on the morning of the Beatles’ triumphant homecoming it seemed to have ghosted in from the cold. The night before, the girl’s disgruntled uncle papered Liverpool with thirty thousand leaflets baring the gory details of the alleged paternity. He had been thorough, too, hitting every public telephone kiosk in the center of Liverpool as well as the Press Club in Bold Street, where he was sure reporters would feast on the incriminating facts. Brian’s attempts to head it off proved too little, too late. Unable to face the inevitable tempest, he dispatched Derek Taylor in his place to warn Paul, who, to Taylor’s disbelief, seemed callously unconcerned by the news, shrugging “with astonishing nonchalance” and mumbling, “OK.” How Paul kept his composure was beyond all explanation. Was he that insensitive to the predicament? Did hubris blind him to the possible backlash? It’s impossible to know. Whatever his intention, astonishingly the approach paid off, without a word of the accusation finding its way into print.

  “Being local heroes made us nervous,” John admitted. The prospect of facing family, friends, and fans—and not just any fans but the fans, their “own people,” as Paul called them—was nerve-racking. No one knew what to expect. It didn’t help matters that as the airplane descended, the once-familiar landscape appeared strange and forbidding. “Miles away from Speke Airport… we saw them,” David Jacobs remembered, “thousands upon thousands of what looked like black currants packing the route to Liverpool.” The entire city had turned out to greet them! They hadn’t been forgotten—or worse, written off—after all. A wave of relief swept through the cabin, followed by childlike glee: “Look! Over there! By the Ford factory… by the freight yard… by the bus depot…” They were incredibly moved by the sight. People—Scousers—everywhere. And as they disembarked, a massive crowd surged forward—cheering deliriously, shouting their names. Two hundred thousand people crowded the square outside Town Hall. From the balcony high above the city, the Beatles could make out all the familiar old haunts: the movie theaters and chip joints, the institute and the art college, Gambier Terrace and Ye Old Cracke, Hessey’s, the original NEMS storefront, the Kardomah and the Jacaranda and the Cavern, and, across the docks, the river Mersey, dark and brooding in the enveloping dusk. “Did you ever imagine that this day was coming?” a reporter asked Paul, who for once was caught without a slick, ready-made comeback. “Never like this,” he answered haltingly. “We never imagined, you know, we’d come back to this.”

  For his part, John could not resist the knife. “You want to get some teeth for these people who are cheering us,” John advised the Lord Mayor, who seemed befuddled by the outrageous remark. (Little did he realize the extent of the Beatles’ worldly exposure, having witnessed firsthand the superiority of other cultures’ hygiene. The contrast, glaring in front of them now, with rows of “gap-toothed grins,” was shocking.) King for a day—and fortified by pills—John wasn’t about to let it rest. “What’s the matter,” John persisted, “can’t you spare the money?” Then, without any forewarning, he strode to the front of the balcony, put a finger across his upper lip, and threw the Nazi salute to the unsuspecting crowd.

  That evening more than six thousand congregated outside the Odeon Cinema, the scene of countless teenage trysts, for the invitation-only screening of A Hard Day’s Night, and more than fifteen hundred formed a queue around the block for its official public premiere, at 10:30 the next morning. No longer enchanted with their “awkward” acting turns, the Beatles waved under the marquee but refused to sit through another performance. As soon as the houselights dimmed, they ducked out a side door, went straight to the airport, and caught a 1:30 A.M. flight back to London.

  The Beatles had been in London only intermittently since returning from Australia, and there wasn’t much time left—a couple of weeks, at most—before the start of their American tour. As the next departure loomed, personal obligations requiring their attention piled up.

  John, in particular, needed to rescue his family from their impossible housing situation. The tiny flat in Emperor’s Gate was under constant siege by fans who were staked out at the entrance for what seemed like twenty-four hours a day. Though security now accompanied John at all times, Cynthia was repeatedly confronted by “really weird characters… hovering around the flat, sitting on the stairs directly outside the door.” It was like a human obstacle course just trying to get in and out of the place, all the more threatening when Cynthia had Julian in tow. There were times, she said, when anyone could accost them. “We had no protection from nutcases when John was away,” she bemoaned.

  There wasn’t a moment of privacy to be had in that place. A friend who visited for a weekend recalled: “People were ringing the phone all the time. John would answer… and disguise his voice. ‘I’m sorry, John’s not here.’ ‘But we seen him come in.’ ‘Well, he must have gone out the back door.’ ‘There is no back door!’ It was amusing at first, but it just went on and on; it never ended.”

  Finally, it became too much of a nuisance and John put his foot down: they were moving, he announced, instructing Cynthia to begin house-hunting at once. One of the Beatles’ corporate accountants, who happened to live in nearby Weybridge, invited them to tea in between house inspections—and the rest was kismet. The neighborhood seemed perfectly suited to John and Cynthia’s needs: it was tranquil and undisturbed without being secluded, with a whiff of exclusivity—Cynthia called the area “select”—that befitted a young celebrity. It took them about twenty minutes to locate a comparable house for sale: a twenty-seven-room timbered mock-Tudor mansion at the top of a leafy rise in the ultraposh enclave of St. George’s Hill Estate. The sprawling three-acre property, about twenty miles southwest of London, was called Kenwood and belonged to an American woman who was asking £40,000. John bought it on the spot, despite its needing a good deal of work.

  With the Beatles set to tour in three weeks, the task of preparing the house fell entirely in Cynthia’s lap. John, inundated by obligations, couldn’t be distracted; though his thoughts inevitably drifted to his family, the band’s dance card was booked solid by back-to-back TV appearances and one-nighters in an effort to strengthen the franchise before leaving the country. At the BBC’s Paris Studio, they taped another episode of From Us to You, their fourth in the hokey music series, then swept out to Blackpool, scene of so many riotous Beatles shows, for an ABC-TV special and a concert at the Opera House. On what should have been a rare day off, John and Paul crashed a Cilla Black recording session, where their old Cavern mate was cutting “It’s for You,” a single they’d written especially for her. There was a fund-raiser at the Grosvenor House for the British Olympic team, a visit to Madam Tussaud’s to check out their likenesses, and a breathless two-day excursion to Stockholm, all interspersed with a dozen or more interviews with local flacks to promote the release of the A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack. “They were the hardest-working entertainers I e
ver met,” recalls a fellow musician.

  Between it all, Brian had coaxed the Beatles into attending a revue at the London Palladium to benefit the Theatrical Charities Appeals Council. The postmidnight show, on July 23, indicated just how far they’d risen in the London entertainment caste system. Billed as “The Night of 100 Stars,” it was a red-hot who’s who of establishment showbiz celebrities led by Laurence Olivier, Buddy Greco, Shirley Bassey, Harry Secombe, and Marlene Dietrich and fanned by rumors that Frank Sinatra, in town to promote Robin and the Seven Hoods, would most likely attend.

  The Beatles endeavored to put their best faces on the event, but as the night wore on, as one old hoofer after another plodded across the Palladium stage, lines of boredom and outright scorn began to show through the facade. The revue was unending. To relieve the boredom, the Beatles began downing flutes of champagne, a drink for which they were particularly unsuited. Sitting around small, dimly lit cocktail tables at the back of the stage, they smoked to neutralize their discomfort while the resentment and disdain slowly bubbled toward the surface. The set of their mouths was impossibly lipless, grim, giving their faces the same anesthetized cast as their wax effigies in Madam Tusaaud’s. Ever resourceful, Mal Evans found an old wooden oar backstage and began using it to shuttle whiskey and Cokes to the boys onstage. That immediately did the trick. “By the time we were getting drunk, we’d become fed up with all that bullshit showbiz nonsense anyway!” George recalled.

  The final outrage came when a disturbance ruffled from the wings, and the frail, insectlike figure of Judy Garland wandered into the spotlight. It seemed impossible, like a mirage. Only two weeks earlier she’d suffered a nervous collapse in Hong Kong, and a few days after that she checked into a London hospital with mysterious “cuts” on her arms. The mere sight of her alone—alive—brought down the house. The audience leaped to its feet, cheering and whistling, shouting, “Sing, Judy, sing!” “Do ‘Over the Rainbow!’ ” Shaking her head, she waved humbly and began to back away from the footlights, but when the orchestra broke into the inimitable introduction, Garland regaled them with the song.