The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  But as the bouncer turned around, Flora reached over his biceps and boldly fired off another shot at the table. “Get the fuck out of here!” George roared to a stunned entourage. Jumping halfway to his feet, he snatched up his glass—a half-drained scotch and Coke—and hurled its contents at the camera. The drink missed its mark and hit actress Mamie Van Doren instead, who was making her way over to the table.

  The next day, predictably, the incident was splashed across the front page of the Herald Examiner, along with “photos by Bob Flora” of the entire drink-throwing fiasco. One of the pictures shows George clearly in action, establishing a new public image to contradict that of the so-called quiet Beatle. (In Baltimore, two weeks later, he would reinforce this side of him by booting a local photographer in the ass.) “That was horrendous,” admitted George, who regarded the skirmish as a lapse in judgment. The Beatles had always worked so hard to keep from losing control like that in public, from embarrassing themselves in front of fans. But it also underscored how much things had altered since they’d hit the road back in June. In fact, the whole gestalt of Beatlemania had radically changed. The fans were becoming more aggressive, the situations more dire, the press more unforgiving, the future more uncertain. From now on, the way the Beatles interacted with anyone had to be carefully refocused. One thing was for sure: venturing out in public was no longer a smart or safe bet. As Derek Taylor recalled: “When in future days someone would say—and someone often did say it—‘You guys never go out anywhere. Don’t you ever feel shut in?’ we would recall the time we went night-clubbing [sic] with Jayne Mansfield and sigh.”

  [III]

  The American tour dragged on through most of September, with little variation in its madcap routine. The cities sped by in a blur: Denver, Cincinnati, New York, Atlantic City, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit… Everywhere they went, there were greater displays of mayhem, the fans ever more determined to cross the Beatles’ path. Their schemes got more inventive—and more preposterous, too—as the tour progressed and gathered steam. In Indianapolis a college student posed as a room-service waiter at the Speedway Motor Inn in order to collect their autographs. That stunt was clever enough to amuse the boys. But at the old Muhlbach Hotel in Kansas City, a mother got stuck crawling through the air-conditioning ducts trying to locate the Beatles’ suite.

  Mothers! They put their daughters to shame when it came to the nightly groupie scene. There was always an abundance of gorgeous young women willing to do anything—and to anyone—in order to meet one of the Beatles. But the mothers were even more determined to score one of the boys. “Older women would come up to us all the time and say, ‘I want to meet the Beatles,’ ” recalls a journalist who traveled with the entourage. “I’d say, ‘I can’t do that.’ And they’d say, ‘No, you don’t understand. I want to make them happy.’ ”

  The variety of women that paraded through the Beatles’ rooms was extraordinary for its range and magnitude. “After most shows, you couldn’t get into their suite without wading through the crush of available girls,” Wendy Hanson recalled. “It resembled the waiting room of a busy doctor’s office. Derek or Neil would poke his head through the door and say, ‘Next,’ until, one by one, they’d work their way through the entire group.” Invariably, when Neil confronted a promoter about arrangements following a show, he’d be waved off in mid-sentence—“Don’t worry, that’s all been taken care of”—which usually meant that hookers were waiting in their dressing room. “The Beatles hated that,” says Tony Barrow, who encountered it on subsequent tours. “The promoters used to think they were being terribly helpful, but those girls were gotten rid of as fast as the Beatles could get rid of them.”

  Most of the time. But in Atlantic City, at a motel party following the concert at Convention Hall, the girls on call were too spectacular to resist. John, especially, couldn’t take his eyes off a slim and flashy young blonde who “reminded him of Brigitte Bardot.” And again, in Dallas, when bunnies from a private club showed up, the boys yielded to temptation. This time it was Paul who fancied a tall blond cowgirl standing somewhat behind the others. Art Schreiber, who happened to be passing through the suite, was startled when Paul motioned with his chin and whispered, “I like that one. Can you get her for me?” Answered Schreiber: “Listen, pal, I’m no fucking pimp. I’m a reporter.”

  The Beatles were in dire need of a substitute distraction when the tour mercifully rolled into New York. “This is it! This is what it’s all about!” Paul gushed, as their car emerged from the Midtown Tunnel slightly before four on the morning of August 28. They had been flying since midnight, having taken off directly after the last show in Cincinnati, where the temperature onstage peaked at a torturous 115 degrees. Exhausted though they might have been, the city hit them like a handful of amphetamines. New York, New York: it was a sight for sore eyes—and a jolt to weary senses.

  John immediately ordered their driver to scan the local radio stations and, sure enough, it was just the same as the last time they’d arrived. Their songs reverberated right across the AM dial. A thrill like that never wore off!

  “This is it!” Paul said again to no particular response, though everyone nodded in unison.

  The Plaza Hotel now knew what to expect and refused to have the Beatles back, so at Ed Sullivan’s suggestion, they’d shifted headquarters to the Delmonico Hotel, a dowdy high-rise on the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Park Avenue, where Sullivan lived year-round and could vouch for their welfare. But when their limo pulled up to the entrance canopy and they got out, about eighty teenage girls broke through police barricades. The boys knew how to slip unscathed through these type of crowds, but a plucky fifteen-year-old named Angie McGowan, who lived just a few blocks south, pounced on a startled Ringo, ripping the St. Christopher’s medal from a chain around his neck. In the havoc she also shredded his shirt, according to an account in the New York World-Telegram, “then retired triumphantly into the crowd.”

  New York, New York: double trouble, but alluring as ever. Two sold-out shows at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium drew nearly thirty thousand teenagers to what Robert Shelton, the New York Times pop music critic, labeled “a screaming success.” Shelton, partial to Greenwich Village folksingers, warned: “[The Beatles] have created a monster in their audience. If they have concern for anything but the money they are earning, they had better concern themselves with controlling their audiences before this contrived hysteria reaches uncontrollable proportions.” It was a ridiculous admonition. No one was going to control Beatlemania, much less tame the defiant monster. The Beatles, more than anyone, had transformed the rock show from a conventional performance into a bash to blow off some steam. The audience was asserting itself without even realizing what it was doing. The feeling generated at the Beatles shows bordered on spiritual anarchy, and being nothing short of exhilarating, nothing was going to stop it. In under a year, the Beatles had redefined the experience in terms of sheer numbers, money, and energy. No one, not even Elvis, had that great of an impact all at once. A whole new chapter of musical prophecy was being written.

  It was inevitable that Dylan would show up. While the Beatles had linked themselves musically to Elvis, it was Dylan with whom they would reshape their generation.

  Paul had discovered him first, buying the Freewheelin’ album before they’d left for Paris at the beginning of the year. That record hit the turntable the moment the Beatles settled into their suite at the George V. “And for the rest of our three weeks in Paris we didn’t stop playing it,” John recalled. In fact, George considered the experience “one of the most memorable things of the trip,” alleviating the irritation of being cooped up in their rooms.

  One can only imagine the impact that Dylan’s music had on the boys. The album itself was the first of many watersheds in his long career. That sure command of language might have drifted by unnoticed were it the work of an older, more experienced interpreter, but from a twenty-two-year-old folksinger, this
articulation of self-expression had major resonance. There was plenty to chew on, from the sentimental arguments made in “Blowin’ in the Wind” to the lovesick bitterness of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” to the barbed topicality of “Masters of War” and especially the verbal whiplashing given to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” “I’m sure this kind of thing found its way into our music, and into our lyrics, and influenced whom we were interested in,” Paul explained many years afterward. “Vocally and poetically Dylan was a huge influence.” Certainly, in addition to the obvious effect it had on his language and style, Dylan’s lyrics served to turn John inward as a songwriter. From that point on, he said, “I’d started thinking about my own emotions…. Instead of projecting myself into a situation, I would try to express what I felt about myself.”

  The revelation was not merely a self-conscious one. In ten years, no other artist, not even one as inventive as the Beatles, had been able to cultivate rock’s literary essence. Paul Simon, one of the more articulate young songwriters to tap into that reservoir, understood just how liberating Dylan’s contributions actually were. “He made us feel at a certain time that it was good to be smart, to be observant, that it was good to have a social conscience.”

  There is no way of knowing how, or even if, this posed a threat to the Beatles. But John responded to the challenge much as Simon described it, probably because he was better equipped. The older John got, the more experience he acquired and discoveries he made, the less songs about holding hands and sharing secrets kept him engaged. As a songwriter, his perspective had expanded, and he was trying to break out of the mold. In Dylan, John had finally found what was, for him, a new direction. It is no coincidence that John began writing “I’m a Loser” while still in Paris. The song is clearly his attempt at constructing an early self-portrait, with its revealing soft focus on relationships and fame. “I think it was Dylan who helped me realize that,” John concluded, “not by any discussion or anything, but by hearing his work.” John reveled in the new possibilities of substance and character that might free his imagination from the mush he worked on with Paul.

  Dylan caught up with the Beatles in their suite at the Delmonico about an hour after their first Forest Hills concert. It was a particularly maddening night. They were in the midst of having dinner with Brian, Neil, and Mal when he arrived with his road manager, Victor Maimudes, and New York Post columnist Al Aronowitz, who had coordinated the get-together as a favor to the boys. Of their initial introduction, John commented: “When I met Dylan I was quite dumbfounded,” but within minutes he managed to get over any initial shock. Dylan was eccentric and intense but cool, very cool, in a way that only another pop phenom could appreciate. There was the usual checking-out process, followed by awkward stabs at conversation, until ultimately everyone discovered that they spoke the same language.

  It didn’t take long before someone retrieved the communal pillbox from John’s leather bag and Drinamyls and Preludins were offered like after-dinner mints to the edgy guests. The Beatles downed a handful on most nights of the tour as a way of staying up—and up—when their bodies ached for sleep. But Dylan took one look at the assortment of gaily colored pills and shook his head. “How about something a little more organic?” he suggested. “Something green… marijuana.”

  The Beatles recoiled. They were scotch and Coke men, chain-smokers. Granted, there were the pills, but they served a purpose other than getting stoned.

  “We’ve never really smoked marijuana before,” Brian interjected, sensing the boys’ immediate discomfort. This, unbeknownst to him, wasn’t entirely true. “We first got marijuana from an older drummer with another group in Liverpool,” George recalled. Besides, an acquaintance had shared a joint with the Beatles at the Star-Club in Hamburg, but it was what Neil called “just the sticks,” which probably meant a deposit of stems mixed with dried oregano or some such filler.

  “But what about your song—the one about getting high?” Dylan wondered. In his inimitable rasp, he sang: “ ‘And when I touch you, I get high, I get high…’ ”

  “Those aren’t the words,” John said stone-faced. “It’s ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide.’ ”

  No matter. Rolling “a skinny American joint,” Dylan handed it to John, who gave it a dubious look and passed it on to Ringo, dubbing him “my official taster.” Ringo was no blushing maiden. Without a word, he retreated to a back room sealed with rolled towels—there was a battalion of New York City policemen on a security detail in the hall—and smoked it down to his fingertips. A few minutes later he emerged with a twisted grin plastered on his face. As Paul recounted the experience, “We said, ‘How is it?’ He said, ‘The ceiling’s coming down on me.’ And we went, Wow! Leaped up, ‘God, got to do this!’ So we ran into the back room—first John, then me and George, then Brian.”

  The effect it had on the boys was spectacular. “We were just legless, aching from laughter,” George told Derek Taylor, who joined them later on in the suite. Paul greeted Taylor by gathering him up in an immense bear hug and revealing “he’d been up there,” pointing to the ceiling, and Brian pressed his P.A. to smoke some weed, which he politely declined. The pot had loosened up Brian to a degree that was truly emancipating. He became entranced by his reflection in the mirror. After a moment or two he stood back, then pointed to himself, and blurted out: “Jew!” to everyone’s hilarity. Paul noted how that was the first time Brian had ever referred to himself as a Jew. “It may not seem the least bit significant to anyone else,” he admitted, “but in our circle, it was very liberating.” And a sign to those not red-eyed of Brian’s deep self-loathing.

  Meanwhile, Paul entertained his own moments of mind-blowing significance. For a period of time he frantically crisscrossed the suite in search of pencil and paper to capture the profundities that were leapfrogging around his brain. “Get it down, Mal, get it down!” he implored his faithful roadie, appointing the also significantly stoned Evans his trusty Boswell. Exasperated, Paul scratched out his own cogent musings on a slip of paper, which Mal obediently stashed away for safekeeping, or at least until the next morning, when Paul read its contents aloud to the other Beatles. It said: “There are seven levels,” nothing more, which amused everyone to no end.

  An unusually gregarious Dylan was delighted by the Beatles’ curiosity and readiness to experiment. They got right into the groove, which relaxed the recalcitrant bard, who lit joint after joint, fanning the fateful flame. “He kept answering our phone, saying, ‘This is Beatlemania here,’ ” John recalled. But it was something much more than that, something as close to a cultural milestone as could be determined by academics and savants. “We were smoking dope, drinking wine and generally being rock ’n rollers, and having a laugh, you know, and surrealism. It was party time.”

  That it was: party time. And nothing would ever be the same again.

  Chapter 27 Lennon and McCartney to the Rescue

  [I]

  When do you think the bubble will burst?

  It was astounding how many times the Beatles could be asked that question—and in how many myriad ways. The American press had pounded them with it, tossing it out like a beach ball at every opportunity. “I’ll probably open my own hair salon,” Ringo predicted in dead earnest. Paul supposed he’d fancy teaching. And as for John and George—they hadn’t a clue. The future: what twenty-one-year-old boy even thought further than two days ahead?

  How long do you expect Beatlemania to last?

  “Till death do us part,” John muttered through tightly clenched teeth. And what about his ambition, that is, after the bubble burst? “Count the money.”

  For all the pissing and moaning about the shelf life of pop stardom, the Beatles were, by all accounts, rock-solid. They’d banked a record $1 million-plus from the American tour (including an astonishing $150,000 for a single show in Kansas City), which seemed a mere pittance in light of the $5.8 million in U.S. rentals for A Hard Day’s Night. Record sales were soaring
, with no apparent letdown. By October 1964, EMI had shipped an estimated 10 million Beatles discs—a staggering number, just mind-boggling—accounting for the company’s 80 percent surge in pretax profits. (Capitol followed suit, announcing a 17 percent sales rise “largely due to Beatle [sic] records.”) When Elvis was awarded his second gold single (for sales of more than 500,000 units) it was seen as an unsurpassable record, and now the Beatles owned three, with numbers four and five within reach. The Daily Mail put their earnings from abroad at $56 million—this at a time when a Cadillac cost $3,600.

  Only the year before, according to his autobiography, Brian had considered accepting £150,000 for a 50 percent share in the Beatles. Variety also reported that he was actively pursuing the sale of a quarter interest in the Beatles for $4 million, as a tax hedge. Now he turned down $10 million from an American syndicate to buy the Beatles, convinced he’d only scratched the surface of the rockpile.

  Still, Brian was all too aware of how abruptly the wheel of celebrity turned, and he therefore wasted no time in planning for the future. There were promises of half a dozen TV and radio appearances, the most important being the American variety show Shindig!, which agreed to film a special segment around them originating from London. Another holiday pantomime (still three months off and already sold out for its entire run) began production, along with a new Christmas flexi-disk for their sixty-five thousand fan club members. And by the end of October, they had also concluded plans for their next movie—“this one in color… and with a much stronger plot line,” according to Walter Shenson.

  The most anticipated project, of course, was a new album for Parlophone; the recording sessions kicked off less than a week after the Beatles returned from abroad. It seemed ridiculous to try to squeeze it in so quickly, on top of their other obligations, but EMI had made clear that they “need[ed] another album” out by mid-November, in time for the holiday market, and the Beatles, still ever its faithful subjects, were programmed to comply.