The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Ronnie Spector wasn’t “so square,” like the Supremes, but even she “sensed that something strange was in the air” since the Ronettes’ last visit in 1964. Sometime after she arrived, Spector recalled, John steered her into one of the bedrooms, where a handpicked audience was packed along the walls watching a young girl have “sex every which way” with “one of the guys in the Beatles entourage.” Then, in another bedroom, with liquor and a magnificent view to embolden him, John tried to talk her into a more intimate scene.

  The atmosphere surrounding the Beatles was turning cruel and pitiless. Instead of reshaping their image, they were sharpening it in ways that offered no identifiable quality. Most everyone who came into contact with them could feel it. Larry Kane, the young Miami newscaster who had accompanied the previous tour, rejoined them in New York and was startled by the edge of detachment that had crept over the entourage. “It was alarming how hard-shelled everyone had become,” Kane says. “There was a kind of Us and Them mentality to protect against the outside world.” The Beatles had always been circumspect, even distrustful, toward outsiders. “Now, there was an ambiguousness about everything, a way in which they kept you off balance. One moment they could be playful or attentive; if they were in a bad mood, however, they might try to intimidate you—or simply freeze you out. You never knew what to expect. And I got the sense that they liked it that way.”

  Not liked—but needed. The demands on the Beatles were extraordinary, the characters and situations growing less distinguishable. More so than ever, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

  On Saturday, August 14, they taped their third—and final—appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Chris Hutchins remembers sitting in the studio audience next to Cilla Black, who was also on the bill, and marveling at how hard the boys worked to put their set across. “Four hours of constant rehearsals,” according to Hutchins. “Six songs, no break, just total dedication.” Getting an adequate sound balance was further complicated by a solo spot featuring Paul playing an acoustic version of “Yesterday.” But though the configuration was highly irregular, the performance otherwise came off without a hitch.

  As the sun went down, the Beatles boarded a helicopter on the East River, bound for Shea Stadium, in Flushing, New York. It was a clear, sumptuous night, and as the aircraft lifted up, the jagged silhouette of the city, tinted by speckled neon light, resembled a vaulted jewel box. The Beatles, looking gaunt-faced and anxious, barely glanced at the scenery. They actually loved New York—George called it “one of the most amazing cities in the world”—but between the helicopter, which they dreaded, and the destination, which seemed unreal, it was all they could do to keep their food down.

  A 56,000-seat horseshoe where the perennially crummy Mets played baseball, Shea Stadium was bathed in a halo of opalescent light and looked more like a stage prop from eight thousand feet up. “For the boys,” recalls Barrow, “seeing the stadium was an absolute high. They were awestruck, gobsmacked, as the Liverpool expression goes.” No band had ever played to an audience so large. The show was already in progress, featuring an interminable number of opening acts, with King Curtis’s glorious backup band pounding away against the tsunami of screams. The pilot switched on a two-way radio so his passengers could monitor the sound onstage. As he swung over the parking lot, a deejay preempted the stadium P.A. system, shouting: “You hear that up there? Listen… it’s the Beatles! They’re here!” The sky lit up as thousands of flashbulbs exploded. “It was terrifying at first when we saw the crowds,” said George, “but I don’t think I ever felt so exhilarated in all my life.” Geoffrey Ellis, who sat bewildered in the cockpit, sweating in a crisp blue suit and tie, didn’t know what to make of the whole crazy scene. “I was caught up in the extraordinary fantasy,” he recalled, “that all those kids… kept looking up to the heavens as though God was descending to the earth.”

  It was too dangerous to land the helicopter on the baseball field, so it was diverted to a macadam strip near the old World’s Fair site, where the Beatles were transferred into armored cars. “It [was] organized like a military operation,” according to photographer Bob Whitaker. Every aspect of the arrival was timed to split-second precision in order to elude canny fans.

  Ed Sullivan, who was filming the concert for a TV special, paced anxiously in the Mets’ dugout as the boys and Brian arrived. A little of the terror showed when the actual size of the place hit them. It was huge—ridiculous, John said. As the Beatles looked at the stands from the dugout they fell back in laughter. Everywhere they looked were kids—wall-to-wall kids. “It seemed like millions of people,” Paul recalled, “but we were ready for it.”

  As the Beatles charged from the dugout to the stage situated over second base, “mass hysteria” broke out. More than fifty thousand kids jumped to their feet and screamed, wept, thrashed, and contorted themselves in a tableau that, to some, must have personified pure bedlam. “Their immature lungs produced a sound so staggering, so massive, so shrill and sustained that it quickly crossed the line from enthusiasm into hysteria and was soon in the area of the classic Greek meaning of the word pandemonium—the region of all demons,” wrote the stunned reporter for the New York Times. Another compared the roar to “a dozen jets taking off.” Mick Jagger, who, along with Keith Richards, was watching from a seat behind the first-base dugout, was visibly shaken by the crowd’s behavior. “It’s frightening,” he told a companion.

  All of this without a note of any music.

  More than fifty 100-watt amplifiers had been set up along the base paths of the diamond, but they were no match for the wall of piercing sound that blared from the stands. The fans drowned out all the singing and most of the music. All that could be heard above the roar was “the pulsation of the electric guitars and thump of drums,” and even then only sporadically. The Beatles played their standard half-hour set—“not a minute more, not a minute less,” as Brian mandated it—but conditions on the stage never improved. “It was ridiculous!” John remarked of the experience. “We couldn’t hear ourselves sing.” During two numbers, he wasn’t even sure what key they were in. And later, after watching the replay on TV, he noted: “You can see it in the film, George and I aren’t even bothering playing half the chords, and we were just messing about.”

  Measured by dollars and cents, however, the show was a runaway success. Variety reported that the Beatles “shattered all existing… box office records, with a one-night gross of $304,000”—the Beatles cleared $180,000, or as the New York Journal-American calculated it, “$100 a second”—and took a giant step toward reshaping the concert business. For promoters everywhere, the Shea Stadium concert was a major breakthrough. It freed them from the constraints imposed by a gym or cinema, thus turning a pop performance into an event.

  The Beatles bonanza continued its late-summer push across North America, rekindling the excitement in cities such as Toronto, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, and Minneapolis. In each location, the usual concert halls had been usurped by open-air stadiums and arenas, with scenes of screaming and hysteria replayed like half-hour sitcoms. Aside from a minor skirmish in Houston, when unruly fans swarmed the plane, climbed on the wings, and banged on the windows—“It happens every time we come to Texas, we nearly get killed,” John quipped—the spirit in the chartered tour plane was constantly convivial, marred only by mechanical problems as the plane descended into Portland.

  Some of the Beach Boys were planning to visit backstage between shows in Portland, a visit everyone in the entourage looked forward to. Larry Kane, who was sitting over the left wing, remembers eavesdropping on a conversation between John and George that touched on their curiosity about Brian Wilson, when he happened to glance out the window. “Flames were shooting out of one of the engines in the rear,” Kane recalls. Trying not to attract undue attention, he headed into the cockpit and notified the pilot, who voiced the exact sentiment that Kane was feeling: “Oh, shit!” This was more than anyone had bargained for. The ine
vitable black smoke finally alerted other passengers, who rushed to the windows. “John totally freaked. He went to the emergency door and attempted to open it. We were about eight thousand feet up and it took several of us to pull him away. Then George totally freaked.” No doubt he and the others flashed Buddy Holly. It turned grim in the cabin as the pilot struggled to maintain control of the plane. John took a seat next to Paul, both of whom “sat silently, with fixed, serious expressions,” as the airport loomed into view. They could make out the outline of workers foaming the runway and fire engines speeding alongside. Ringo, “pale-faced,” asked a reporter what to do in case they crashed, but an answer seemed entirely too ridiculous for words.

  Thankfully, the plane, billowing smoke, bellied through the sea of white lather, stopping safely half a mile from the terminal. When the thrum of turboprops ground to a halt, there was a long, anxious silence. It was broken by the sound of a seat back groaning as John sprang to his feet. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he announced: “Beatles, women, and children first!”

  When the Beatles arrived in Los Angeles two days later, still reeling from the emergency landing, they finally got what they coveted most: peace and quiet. There were two sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl flanked by a tantalizing four-day layover, and rather than confining them to a hotel suite, Brian had rented a luxurious horseshoe-shaped house on stilts on a secluded road in Benedict Canyon, off Mulholland Drive. It had everything they wanted—gourmet cooks, a staff of maids, an imposing gatehouse, an Olympic-size swimming pool, an intimate movie theater, lush bougainvillea-scented gardens. Better yet, there was no entourage, no meddlesome press, no annoying deejays, no Brian, no record-company flacks. And best of all, no fans. Thanks to the rugged terrain, there was a sheer drop from the pool right down the hillside, studded with bracken, cacti, and boulder-size rubble.

  During those lazy days, under picture-postcard skies, the Beatles lounged by the pool, pulling on “the fattest joints” anyone had ever rolled and gorging themselves on a round-the-clock buffet to stem the “munchies.” John and Mal swam with cigarettes in their mouths, seeing who could keep them lit the longest. Paul strummed idly on an acoustic guitar, while Ringo, and later John, sorted through a selection of casual sports clothes that had been sent over by a Hollywood boutique. At night they crowded into the screening room for a preview of What’s New Pussycat?

  Throughout the next day, celebrities arrived to pay their respects—Eleanor Bron, the actress who costarred in Help!, Joan Baez, Peter Fonda, and half the Byrds, along with a few delectable birds on loan from the Playboy Mansion, invited to cheer up the boys. At Tony Barrow’s urging, the press also attended (as a gesture of goodwill) but were heavily chaperoned lest they come upon one of the Beatles unawares.

  As it happened, there was something they wanted to hide. John and George had been waiting for the perfect opportunity to take another acid trip and decided that this setting was ideally suited. Their objective was to initiate Paul and Ringo because, as George explained, after the tripping, “we couldn’t relate to them anymore.” The experience had changed their outlook, if not their lives, and inasmuch as the Beatles were a cliquish family with a unique vision, it was essential to get everyone, especially their mates, on the same page. “We got some [acid] in New York; it was on sugar cubes wrapped in tinfoil and we’d been carrying these all through the tour until we got to L.A.”

  Paul, cautious as ever, wanted nothing to do with it. But Ringo was game, as was Neil, who had Paul’s share, with enough left over for Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Peter Fonda. “We were all ripped on LSD,” recalls Fonda, who joined the guests around the pool, while Paul worked in his usual capacity “to keep everything calm and level.”

  By midday, the hills opposite the house were ringed with teenagers who screamed and shouted any time so much as a maid walked across the deck. Several kids actually attempted to climb the steep slope to the house but were intercepted by security guards who helped them to safety rather than letting them risk a fall going back down the hill. To make matters worse, three girls had rented a helicopter and buzzed the house, flying so low that the water in the swimming pool rippled. “The Beatles actually enjoyed the ingenuity of it,” says Tony Barrow, “and they grinned and posed for the girls, who leaned dangerously out of the helicopter, taking pictures and waving.” Only George’s feathers were ruffled. He had been splashing around in the pool, zoned out of his skull and grooving on the “great feeling,” but when the girls flew overhead, he retreated to a chaise longue between McGuinn and Fonda, where he sank into a deep funk. “He said, ‘You know, man, I feel like I’m gonna die,’ ” remembers Fonda, who tried to assure George that LSD occasionally triggered strange reactions that needed to be ignored. The two men “bounced that around for a while,” until Fonda sensed a real panic building and decided to tackle the feeling head-on. “Well, look,” he confided to George, “I know what it’s like to be dead, man.” And he explained how in 1950, at the age of ten, he accidentally shot himself while playing with an old pistol and lost so much blood that his heart stopped three times. “The thing is, I almost died. And I’m not dead. I’m here, I’m alive. It’s okay, George—everything’s gonna be all right.”

  John, who had been passing by and overheard only a fragment of the conversation, leaned reproachfully over the recliner. “What do you mean, you know what it’s like to be dead?”

  Fonda, more than “a bit wasted,” stared blankly at him. “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

  “Who put all that shit in your head?” John snarled.

  The two Beatles watched half fascinated, half horrified, as Fonda lifted his shirt to display the blotchy wound. “I know what it’s like to be dead,” he repeated, which, by this time, began to gnaw on George as well.

  Weirdness abounded in Los Angeles. First, the police refused to cooperate with the Beatles, saying that “they could not be responsible for their security.” Then Phil Spector invited them to his mansion and did a number with drugs and guns. Both circumstances produced some awkward moments for the boys, but nothing that would compete with their visit with Elvis.

  For over a year Brian and Colonel Parker had been attempting to arrange a summit between their two megastars, with only egos—massive egos—standing in the way. “Keen to preserve their artists’ prestige,” neither manager wanted to blink first when it came to deciding who would accept the other’s invitation. But in the end, the Beatles conceded, agreeing to pay their respects to the King.

  Elvis had just returned from Honolulu, where he’d been filming Blue Hawaii, and was holed up with the Memphis Mafia at a rented house in Bel-Air. When the Beatles arrived, sometime after ten o’clock on August 27, they were “laughing… all in hysterics,” partly from nerves, which they all suffered, and partly from the joints they’d shared in the car. The house was unusually big and ornate—“like a nightclub,” John thought. Inside, Elvis was posed regally on a huge horseshoe-shaped couch, the King, larger than life in a flame red blouse beneath a tight-fitting black jacket and black slacks. A big arm was thrown around his queen-in-waiting, Priscilla Beaulieu, and on either side, his loyal squires: Joe Esposito, Marty Lacker, Billy Smith, Jerry Schilling, Alan Fortas, and Sonny West.

  Perhaps more than anyone else, John was shaken by the sight of his boyhood idol. Before he’d gotten a guitar, before skiffle, before Paul, George, and Stu jump-started his own pop odyssey, John had heard “Heartbreak Hotel” and knew “it was the end for me.” Now, John resorted to buffoonery, acting and jabbering as if he were Inspector Clouseau. “Oh, zere you are!” he clowned, peering absentmindedly at his host over his glasses.

  The other Beatles were speechless, gazing around at the Vegas-like setup of pool tables, craps tables, and roulette wheels crowding the den. A well-stocked jukebox stood purring in the corner. The room was bathed in red and blue light, which gave it the appearance of a cheesy after-hours club. No one knew what to do, or say. After a brief, embarrassing silence,
Elvis summoned them to sit down beside him but grew weary of the Beatles’ vacant stares—“It was hero worship of a high degree,” Paul admitted—and started clicking nervously through the channels of a wall-size TV set.

  “If you guys are just gonna sit there and stare at me, I’m goin’ to bed,” Elvis huffed, tossing the remote control on the coffee table. Turning to his girlfriend, he said, “Let’s call it a night, right, ’Cilla? I didn’t mean for this to be like the subjects calling on the King. I just thought we’d sit and talk about music and jam a little.”

  “That’d be great,” Paul said, suggesting they try a song by “the other Cilla”—Cilla Black—at which point guitars and a white piano were produced, along with ample drink. “We all plugged in whatever was around, and we played and sang… ‘You’re My World,’ ” John recalled. Unwinding gradually, they segued into a few Presley barn burners—“That’s All Right (Mama)” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” with Elvis carrying the melody and Paul vamping on the piano—before finishing with “I Feel Fine.”

  By now John had slipped from feather to thistle. “Zis is ze way it zhould be,” he mimicked, “ze szmall homely gazering wiz a few friends and a leetle music.” Chris Hutchins, who recollected the visit in his 1994 chronicle, Elvis Meets the Beatles, writes that beyond the faux French accent, John chided Elvis rudely—and in front of his pals, no less—about his lack of chops, the post-army soft-core singles, and string of cornball movies. “I might just get around to cuttin’ a few sides and knockin’ you off the top,” Presley said with a shrug, feeling hard-pressed to respond. Nobody could dispel the “uncomfortable undertones… and superficial cheerfulness” that punctuated the evening until sometime after two, when the Beatles finally departed.