John and Paul loved Paris, John deciding here this week that it was his favorite city in all the world. It would remain his toppermost, or thereabouts, for the rest of his life, the ambience appealing on all levels, especially the artistic and idealistic. “All the kissing and holding … was so romantic, the way people would just stand under the tree kissing,” he would recall. “They weren’t mauling each other, they were just kissing. To be there and see them … I really loved it.”3
It isn’t known if he and Paul got l’amour in Paris. So numerous were their conquests back home it’s hard to imagine them going without on holiday, but this was very much foreign soil. “John and Paul liked all the girls,” says Jürgen. “They loved the style of what I called ‘the bohemian beauties,’ the pseudo existentialists, girls who looked the part but didn’t subscribe to the ideas.” Such girls, though, didn’t necessarily like John and Paul.
I had a great-looking French girlfriend, Alice, who had long black hair, a beautiful figure and a bohemian flair. I raved to her about John and Paul, and I raved about her to them, so we arranged to meet at the Café Royale on Boulevard Saint-Germain. The three of us were sitting there when Alice came along, and I could tell immediately from her face there was something wrong. She didn’t want to sit down, then she started to say how dare I bring her together with this kind of wild type. John and Paul had their Elvis hair and leather jackets, and they really stuck out. She was appalled. They were looking at us not realizing they were the cause of this French dispute, and then she left. That was the last time I saw her until years later when we happened to meet and I told her those two guys were John Lennon and Paul McCartney …4
A day or two later, the situation might have been different. John and Paul had admired Jürgen’s cool Paris style since first meeting him in Hamburg twelve months back, and they weren’t going to Spain until they’d invested a few francs in some similar gear. As Jürgen says, “It sounds conceited but it’s the truth: they really wanted to look like me.” At their request, he took them to the weekend flea market at Porte de Clignancourt, at the northern end of Métro Line 4. Searching through the racks, John bought a green corduroy jacket like Jürgen’s, Paul found an eye-catching patterned polo-neck, and they looked for—though didn’t find—the Vollmer style of shoes, “like half-boots.”
Their most daring purchase was two pairs of flared trousers, similar though different to the bell-bottoms worn by sailors—but the first time John and Paul wore them was also the last. As John would explain, “They were flapping around, and we felt like fools in anything that wasn’t skintight, so we sewed them up by hand that very night”—a comment that conjures up the quaint image of Lennon and McCartney working away with needle and thread under a murky light in a Montmartre hotel room. But alteration was essential: they knew precisely how the trousers, if left unchanged, would be received back home. What was OK in Paris would not be OK in Liverpool; the Beatles’ audience was mixed male and female and they didn’t want to alienate either by, in John’s words, coming across queer.5
Only Frenchmen wore flares at this time, and here too was the collarless round-neck jacket they’d seen worn by Astrid and (made by her) Stuart. It was the Pierre Cardin design, from his spring 1961 Paris collection, and both John and Paul liked it. “The kids by the Moulin Rouge were wearing flared trousers, in ’61, and round-neck jackets,” John would recall. “Cardin had invented them. We liked the jacket and went to a shop and bought one.”6
They were also keen to check out the Paris music scene. The dominant teenage trend in France, strongly centered in the capital, was yé-yé—a derogatory phrase coined by the conservative French press for songs with the “yeah yeah” shouts of rock and R&B. Its style was melodic pop, sweet songs about boys and romance sung mostly by adolescent girls for adolescent girls. Yé-yé had a mascot, a chouchou (sweetheart), which was a caricature drawing of a young man with a pudding-basin haircut, hair fringed down over his eyes.
Rock had made little impact here since erupting out of America in 1956—it was a foreign culture sung in a foreign language. But in spring 1961 it suddenly exploded with a French voice in the streets and theaters of Paris, and with it came the same taint of juvenile delinquency that accompanied its rise in America and Britain. John sent a postcard to a Beatles fan back in Bootle saying “Paris is great, only no ‘Rock.’ (Well, a bit of crappy French Rock.)” This was an informed view, because they checked it out for themselves. They went to the Olympia Theatre to see France’s top rock star Johnny Hallyday, an 18-year-old who modeled himself on Elvis in the way he looked, sang, spoke and gyrated.
They also saw a poster for a Festival de Rock at Bal Tabarin, the famous can-can nightclub in Pigalle that had turned (temporarily) from high kicks and bare breasts to rock guitars. Here they watched several groups reminiscent of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes—bequiffed lead singers with choreographed guitarists. Topping the bill was Vince Taylor, the British-born, American-bred rocker who’d recorded for Parlophone with Tony Sheridan, and who now did a carbon-copy of Gene Vincent’s act.
Thinking they could do better, the Nerk Twins tried to push themselves into the scene, for at least this one evening and perhaps in the hope of several. They managed to talk to Taylor (maybe raising their mutual connection with Sheridan) and asked him if they could play; Taylor said they should speak to the Bal Tabarin management. As John’s French wasn’t up to the task, they browbeat Jürgen into having the conversation for them.
I found out who the manager was and said to him, “I have two great British rock ’n’ roll musicians here. They play in Hamburg and we love them. Can they play at the club while they’re here in Paris?” It was slightly absurd because John and Paul didn’t have their guitars with them, but there was no interest anyway. The Parisian arrogance was such that saying they were “big in Liverpool and Hamburg” made no difference. For Parisians, only Paris counts.
John and Paul happened to be in Paris during a particularly unstable time: a bomb wrecked the foyer of the ABC Music Hall this same week, and, a few days later, a Ray Charles show at the Palais des Sports was postponed by the detainment inside the arena of six thousand Muslims protesting the enforcement of a night-curfew. All of Paris—all of France—was embroiled in a pivotal moment in Algeria’s bloody fight for independence from colonization; terrorist activity was at its peak, leading to the Paris police shooting dead forty demonstrators during a protest rally. Paul would retain the memory of Frenchmen crowding around a TV shop, watching a speech by President de Gaulle.7
But no number of blaring sirens could persuade them to leave and move on to Spain. They were into the second week now, and as they’d promised to be home by October 15 there wasn’t any point in going further from it. A two-week trip to Spain, with a brief stop in Paris, became a fortnight in Paris, and they were more than content at that. John celebrated his 21st birthday in the city he’d come to love, and a pact agreed between the Beatles not to give one another presents was maintained, save that Paul sprang for the hamburger and Coke that was John’s big-birthday dinner.8
Paul had borrowed a camera from Mike, and some fun photos resulted from the trip—of John at the Dunkirk ferry, in dark glasses outside the Louvre and under the Eiffel Tower, and of John and Paul seated at a café table. In one picture, Paul wears his bowler hat while sitting on the bidet in their Montmartre hotel room, fully dressed in his leather jacket and jeans and reading the newspaper upside down. Another shot has them both exposing underpants, with Paul wearing a wig and John’s glasses, his jacket askew, while John is in a furry hat, his hand stuck inside his shoe, his eyes shut and tongue poking through in full crip mode. Photos like this, with John and Paul together, were taken by Jürgen. Another shows les Nerk Twins outside the club they’d hoped to play, the Bal Tabarin—though their heads are cut off. “I didn’t know how to use that camera,” Jürgen says. “They wrote to me afterward and said, ‘You’re a professional photographer and you’ve cut off our heads.’ ”9
> Vollmer was responsible nonetheless for the greatest legacy of this Paris fortnight: it was at the Hôtel de Beaune, two hundred steps from the Seine, that he cut and restyled John’s and Paul’s hair. This was the moment they finally shed the greased quiffs of youth, the Ted hair that had been their image for four or five years, and went instead with the clean, combed-down Paris style.
It wasn’t Jürgen’s idea, because he liked them as rockers. He says they wanted it, “because they’d have more chance with the bohemian beauties on the Left Bank.” This was true, but it also went deeper. They wanted it because they liked it, because it was new and different, because when they got home to Liverpool they’d be like no one else—this was always their desire, in everything—and because, in having this style, it was, by definition, not English. Eight years later, thinking back to being 21 and in Paris, John remarked on his mother country’s lack of sartorial elegance with the words “I was ashamed to go on the Continent and say I was British.”10
As they knew only too well, that harridan of a concierge doggedly prevented guests receiving night visitors, but daytimes at the Hôtel de Beaune were different. Jürgen had a small room on one of the upper floors—up steeply winding tile-and-wood steps—and this was where the deed was done. He cut Paul’s hair first, because he felt more comfortable with him, and then he did John’s. The shorn locks were shoveled under the bed. In Hamburg, Jürgen had called it the “Caesar” style, combed down and a little to the side with a diagonal parting; it was described well by Paul, though with an unfortunate connotation, as “a kind of long-haired Hitler thing.”11 It stayed this way until it was washed and grown out, after which the diagonal parting disappeared and the hair came down straight to a fringe, halfway to one of those yé-yé chouchou.
The Beatles haircut was born that afternoon, perhaps October 12 or 13, 1961, in the tranquility of 29 rue de Beaune, a narrow side-street shaded by tall buildings. The quiet was pierced the following morning when the concierge discovered the debris under Jürgen Vollmer’s bed. She would not be the last to scream over the Beatles’ hair.
Little is known of how the Paris sojourn concluded, save for a comment made by Paul five years later—“We just flew home at the end; a real lazy hitchhiking holiday.”12 Certainly John and Paul were back in Liverpool in time to meet the Beatles’ obligations … but they weren’t the same lads who’d left Lime Street a fortnight earlier. They were now even tighter friends, with Paris in their step, continental clothes in their cupboard and, above all else, that new hairstyle. Let people try to copy them now.
TWENTY-TWO
OCTOBER 15–DECEMBER 3, 1961
“RIGHT THEN, BRIAN–MANAGE US”
Neil Aspinall would always remember the moment. “We went to collect John, and his hair was down. But it was when we went to collect Paul that we realized something was going on, because not only was Paul’s hair down as well, but he skipped out of his house—in that way that he does—pointing at his hair and generally unable to be subtle about it. His hair was different and we had to notice it.”1
The Beatles’ first booking after the break was a curious one: a Sunday afternoon Variety concert for charity in a big cinema in Maghull, ten miles north of Liverpool. It was a fair drive, especially as they fetched George from Speke before setting out, so there was plenty of van time to chitchat about bell-bottoms, birds and the Bal Tabarin. But it was a sticky journey: Pete and George were still peeved over being ditched for two weeks, and now John and Paul had come home different. Nothing was said, however. Nothing needed to be said. One of them couldn’t resist pointing, but things were not spelled out. In this group, you were either hip to the thinking or you weren’t.
Matters took care of themselves over the next few days. George altered his hair to join the new look—in fact, he took it further, choosing the full comb-forward style while, for the time being, John and Paul persevered with partings. Pete left his just as it was. In his fourteen months with the Beatles he’d gone full tilt into whatever new look they’d chosen, often picking up on things before Paul, but he was proud of his Tony Curtis hairstyle and didn’t want to change. He tried the comb-down once, wasn’t happy, restored it how it was, and kept it that way.
Pete would always say the others never asked him to switch—and that, had they done so, he would have gone with it: “If they’d said they wanted to get some uniformity—could I sweep my hair forward and wear a fringe?—I’d most probably have done it, but there was no mention of it.”2 This is true, but not the whole truth, because a dilemma had been created … and while Pete intimates he was blind to it, his best mate Neil wasn’t. “George changed his style to match John and Paul’s but this was a real tester for Pete. It was like a gauntlet had been thrown down. And Pete absolutely didn’t want to put his hair down. A decision had to be made—and he decided no.”3
The Albany, Maghull, was the biggest stage Pete had played, and the biggest for the others since Manchester ’58 as Johnny and the Moondogs; it was their first theater performance as the Beatles, their first charity show, and the first time they appeared in a printed souvenir program—there was a short biography of them and a photo (those hairstyles were out of date, though). Their old pal Jim Gretty, the country musician and Hessy’s guitar salesman, put the show together to raise money for the St. John Ambulance Brigade—the Beatles played for nothing and Gretty hoped they’d attract youngsters to fill the 1,400 seats. Comedian Ken Dodd topped the bill and the other acts were a mixed bunch of aging, willing amateurs, including several operatic tenors.
It was a disaster. The place was cold and only one-third full, the show ran too long, and the Beatles were awful. The front row was full of authority figures John couldn’t stand—the local mayor in his chains, the mayoress, aldermen, councillors, chairmen and their wives—and these middle-aged, rock-hating dignitaries saw the Beatles at their worst. They’d no idea how to work the larger stage or project themselves to such an auditorium, no clue about volume or sound balance, and there was actual internal discord. Perhaps anticipating this, show producer George Martin (a local ambulance driver) switched them to go on last. They were fortunate that the Crosby Herald reporter (writing what would be the Beatles’ first concert review) was young, liked the music and wanted to say something positive. As Alan Walsh remembers, “There was a kind of stunned silence when the Beatles came on, like ‘What’s this lot doing here?’ And compared to everybody else, they were very loud. I wrote, ‘The Beatles closed the show with their own brand of feet-tapping Rock.’ ”4
They did it again—another second-rate show played for nothing—just two nights later, when their fan club tried its hand at promotion. Maureen O’Shea and Jennifer Dawes hired the ballroom of “the Davy Lew,” the David Lewis Club, and hoped for a bumper night, open to non-members too. But because the event’s only ad ran in the Echo this same evening (after Jennifer’s mother lent her the £5), fewer than fifty turned up—not even enough to cover the rental. The Beatles were disappointed; they also wrongly assumed the ballroom would have its own PA system, which meant they had no microphones; and then their amps malfunctioned. As Pete recalls, they spent most of the evening “sitting on the edge of the stage chatting to the birds.” Jim McCartney was there—one of the first times he saw the Beatles—and he can’t have been impressed.5
Jim had a good rapport with the fan club girls. Maureen and Jennifer spent many an evening at 20 Forthlin Road, watching TV, chatting easily and singing along while he played piano. When he revealed he’d never been to the Cavern, the girls said they would take him. “He was absolutely amazed,” says Maureen. “He thought the Cavern was pretty disgusting but was pleased to see where his son played. He understood what it was about and why young people liked it.” Jim’s visits became regular, especially on days when Paul was heading home in the afternoon. The Cavern was only a short walk from Jim’s Chapel Street office, cutting through Exchange Flags at the back of the Town Hall, and he’d usually stop at a butcher’s and buy sausages
or chops for dinner. He’d wait in the bandroom and hand them over to Paul with instructions about how and when to cook them, and at what time he should start preparing the potatoes.6
Then, one evening at Forthlin Road, Jim made Maureen and Jennifer a proposition they hadn’t seen coming. He said the two girls should manage the Beatles. Says Maureen:
Jim said, “You’re doing the Beatles’ fan club, so why don’t you manage them?” We just looked at each other. We were both secretaries and had no experience of anything like that. He asked how much we earned—I was on about £11 a week and Jennifer £13—and he said the Beatles would pay each of us £15, because the boys were getting £15 a night. It seemed like a good deal and was a serious offer: he said it in front of Paul, and Paul wasn’t stopping him.
Quite how much the other Beatles knew about this is a little cloudy, but Jennifer is certain “they went along with it.” “Paul was the main communicator but the impression we got was that they all seemed quite serious about it—like, ‘We haven’t got anyone looking out for us, so if you want to do it, you can.’ The Beatles really wanted to get on and felt they should have someone speaking up on their behalf. We were about the same age as them but they seemed to think we were more mature, and we did want them to be a bit more professional.”
The girls went back to St. Helens all shook up. Where to start? As Maureen says, “I don’t think anyone explained what we would do as the Beatles’ managers, and we thought we’d have to learn. I remember going home on the bus saying it would be tough and we’d really have to study.”7
John and Paul’s crazy first week home continued with some distinction on the Thursday, when the Beatles had an evening booking at Litherland Town Hall on a bill with Gerry and the Pacemakers. Angered by their peremptory cancellation of four dates, Brian Kelly was now limiting the Beatles to one a week. Was it asking too much for them to show contrition?
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