The Love You Make

by Peter Brown

  On May 9, 1963, shortly after Paul returned from his vacation in the Canary Islands with George and Ringo, he met such a girl. She was only seventeen years old, as pure as she was beautiful. Her name was Jane Asher, and she was a titian-haired, green-eyed gem. Already an accomplished actress, she had made her film debut at the age of five as a deaf mute in Mandy. After numerous stage roles in the West End, she became the youngest actress to play the part of Wendy in Peter Pan on the English stage and subsequently starred as the ingenue in the Walt Disney film production of The Prince and the Pauper. At the time Paul met her at a concert of pop groups at the Royal Albert Hall, she was a frequent panelist on the TV show “Juke Box Jury,” and Paul had seen her several times. She was at the concert as the celebrity teen reporter for the BBC radio program “Radio Times,” and they were introduced in between acts when the Beatles were asked to pose for a photograph with her.

  Later, after the show, she joined the group at the Royal Court Hotel on Sloane Square for sandwiches and coffee. After, they went to the flat of a New Musical Express journalist off the Kings Road. Although they all fancied Jane more or less, and George Harrison monopolized most of the conversation, it was moon-eyed Paul at whom she smiled the most. When it became obvious later in the evening that Paul was swooning over her, the others left on the pretext of getting dinner to give Paul some time alone with her. Much to their surprise, when they returned to the flat two hours later, Paul and Jane were still sitting in the same place, engrossed in a conversation about, of all things, favorite foods. Paul had never made a move toward her.

  It would be accurate to say that Paul fell in love with the whole idea of Jane Asher as much as the girl herself. She was a girl of breeding and innocence, a girl heretofore unavailable to a Liverpool lad the likes of Paul McCartney. She was, first of all, a bona fide virgin. Born on April 5, 1946, she still lived with her family in a grand, five-story town house on Wimpole Street in London. Her father was Dr. Richard Asher, a respected psychiatrist and consultant in blood and mental diseases at the Central Middlesex Hospital. Her mother, Margaret, was a professional musician and a one-time professor of music at the London School of Music, where, coincidentally, she taught oboe to George Martin. Jane’s younger brother Peter was a Cambridge graduate and a promising musician and songwriter. He would shortly form a singing duo, Peter and Gordon, and with a McCartney composition called “World Without Love,” he would hit the top of the record charts alongside the Beatles. Jane also had a younger sister, Clare, as pretty as she.

  From the start, there was no doubt in Paul’s mind that this was the perfect tableau into which he wanted to step. The Ashers as a clan were unlike any family he had ever met in Liverpool. Paul was invited to join in frank, often exciting family discussions around the dinner table, and it wasn’t uncommon to spend an evening at home with them just talking. Dr. Asher, Paul found to his delight, was a brilliant storyteller, and Paul looked forward to spending time with him. A bit intimidated by this group at first, Paul started to read for knowledge for the first time in his life. Jane supplied direction with books and tickets to the ballet and theater. He soaked it up like a sponge, gratefully, happily, settling into this new life with Jane. “I don’t want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on,” he told the Evening Standard in an interview, “but I’m trying to crowd everything in. I vaguely mind anyone knowing anything I don’t know. I’m trying to cram everything in, all the things that I’ve missed. People are saying things and painting things and writing things and composing things that are great, and I want to know ...” He took to quoting poetry in conversation, often incorrectly, but no one bothered to correct him. They could see he was a young man in love.

  Eventually Paul and Jane’s romance was discovered by the press when a photographer took a photo of them as they left the Prince of Wales Theater after seeing Neil Simon’s Never Too Late. The question that followed them around for the next five years was, “Will they get married?” It was asked almost everywhere they went. “Just say I smiled when you asked me that,” Paul told a reporter enigmatically. Years later Paul himself couldn’t quite believe that he had courted her for such a long time without bedding her, but he did. At the end of each evening he either went back to a hotel room or caught the last flight out of Heathrow for Liverpool. One night, when he missed his flight, Mrs. Asher graciously offered the guest room to Paul, just a flight of stairs away from where Jane slept. It was, after all, foolish of him to rent hotel rooms in London all the time. Paul moved in with his clothing and guitar and stayed for two years, with all the blessings the household offered.

  Love also found Ringo Starr. Ringo was the most bewildered of all with the Beatles’ sudden success. Although outgoing, he was shy and suspicious of strangers. He never considered himself especially attractive and now fast city women were throwing themselves at his feet. Although he loved women as well as the next northern man, he didn’t feel comfortable on the nightly round of conquests, pulling a bird at a nightclub. Most of his free time was still spent in Liverpool, where he stayed at his mother’s little house in the Dingle. For a long time, while he was in the Rory Storm group, he had gone out with a girl named Geraldine. He had even asked her to marry him and gave her an engagement ring, but she returned it after the engagement was broken off, and Elsie Greaves still has the ring to this day. While he was dating Geraldine he had noticed a small, chirpy girl named Maureen Cox, who went out with Rory Storm’s guitarist Johnny “Guitar.” But Maureen was somebody else’s girl at the time, and he didn’t even speak to her until three weeks after he joined the Beatles. She was an assistant hairdresser at a second-floor beauty salon near the Cotton Exchange called Ashley Du Pre’s. He noticed her standing in a crowd of girls in front of the Cavern Club one lunchtime as he drove up in his new car, a used blue and cream Ford Zodiac, not unlike Brian Epstein’s car. Maureen remembers the moment vividly and to this day remembers the car’s license plate number, NWM 466. Ringo parked the car out front and on his way into the club he smiled shyly at her. He asked if she was coming to the show the next night, and Maureen said she was. She had big, dark, sad eyes, and she was barely sixteen years old. Ringo asked if she wanted to go out after the show, and Maureen said that would be difficult; the show didn’t end until after eleven P.M. and she had a standing rule with her parents to be on the front doorstep of their house by ten minutes to midnight.

  Therefore it was arranged that their first date be in the afternoon. Ringo made plans to pick her up at the beauty parlor when her shift was over. Maureen was so nervous that morning the other girls sent her out to do some shopping to keep her mind off the forthcoming date. Ringo arrived while she was gone and self-consciously took a seat in the reception area, while the ladies waiting to get their bouffants combed cooed and giggled over him. When Maureen returned to Ashley Du Pre’s and began to climb the flight of steps up to the second floor, she immediately spotted Ringo’s black, ankle-high boots through the glass door to the salon. “Oh, my God,” she whispered to herself as she went up the steps, “this is really going to happen ...”

  The first date went extremely well. The two discovered they were a perfect match for each other. He was simple and uneducated, she was a sweet, giggly thing with not much to say, as mousey as he was homely. She had been educated for the previous five years at a convent school, which she left to become a manicurist’s assistant. She had been a fan of the Beatles even from her Rory Storm days, and just looking into Ringo’s eyes gave her palpitations. That first date they kept busy; they went to the park, then to hear singer Frank Ifield, then to the cinema for a double feature, then to the Pink Parrot, a popular bar, for drinks, and finally to Allan Williams’ Blue Angel club for a last dance. Exhausted from the full day of activity, Ringo returned Maureen to her parents’ house at exactly ten minutes to midnight. She saw him exclusively after that, and at least to Maureen’s knowledge he saw no other girl. The affair, she had to admit, had its drawbacks. Ringo was often out of town, and when he was i
n Liverpool the Beatles show didn’t end until very late. For the first six months of their relationship they never spent more than an hour together at night.

  The other girls in the Beatles’ loyal coterie of fans at the Cavern saw Maureen as an interloper, but she was tenacious and cunning as far as her “Ritchie” was concerned. As for the relationship progressing past the dating stage into something more serious, Maureen didn’t even entertain such notions. Marrying a Beatle was a Liverpool taboo. Part of their attraction was their availability. Still, she had hope; perhaps one day when she was seventeen or eighteen things would change. Once, when she heard a rumor that John Lennon was secretly married, she asked Ringo about it. “If he is,” Ringo said, “we don’t want to talk about it.”

  chapter Five

  Beatles Rock Royals

  —Daily Express headline November 4, 1963

  1

  Despite the enormous recording success, despite the sold-out concerts and growing popularity with the public, the mainstream, “Fleet Street” London press continued to ignore the Beatles. What little press they received was on the entertainment pages about a band from the North country that had made good. Although they were drawing record-breaking, hysterical crowds in small cities all over the North, in London they had appeared only at a few minor pop concerts and teen TV music shows. While Brian was trying to bring them into the mainstream London bookings, with exposure that would be commensurate with their recording popularity, he always seemed to come up against a brick wall. In Brian’s mind, at least, it was all part of a conspiracy by three brothers.

  The brothers were Lew and Leslie Grade and Bernard Delfont. As Brian saw it, the Grades practically had a cartel on the English entertainment business that crisscrossed to form a web which entrapped him and his boys. Lew Grade, later to become Lord Grade, owned the huge Associated Television Corporation, Britain’s largest independent producer of TV programs. Lew Grade also personally produced the United Kingdom’s most popular TV variety show, “Sunday Night at the Palladium,” on which an appearance was crucial for an act to gain national attention. Brother Leslie Grade headed the largest show business agency in the country, which represented personalities such as Laurence Olivier and also packaged films, stage shows, and TV programs. The third brother, Bernard, owned several prestigious theaters, was a major force behind the West End theater business, and by appointment to the Queen booked the most prestigious of all live shows, the Royal Command Performance. The fact that the three brothers had anglicized their name from Winogradsky and that Bernard had chosen a name as pretentious as “Delfont” was a topic of much discussion in Brian’s office, where his Jewish heritage was both a matter of pride and a sore point. Something about the brothers’ success irked Brian, and it irked him even more when they chose to ignore the Beatles.

  The problem began when at the first sign of the Beatles’ success, Leslie Grade’s agency had approached Brian to sign the Beatles to the Grade agency for representation and booking. Since it was a large, powerful agency that could help the Beatles the most, this seemed like a reasonable move. But for these services the Grade Agency would receive 10 percent of the Beatles’ very considerable income from live performances. Brian, who had been acting as both manager and booking agent for the boys, would then be expected to reduce his commission to only 15 percent. What’s more, Brian was now busily promoting his own concerts all over the north of England, using lesser known NEMS-managed acts to open the bill for the Beatles. In this way he made money as manager of all the groups, as booking agent and as promoter. His income—much of it in cash—was enormous. With the Grades “muscling in,” as Brian put it, all that would stop. Even though it might have been beneficial for the Beatles to make some sort of a deal with them, Brian ruled it out of the question—so out of the question that he didn’t even tell the Beatles about it.

  Yet by turning the Grades down it appeared that Brian had caused himself a major problem; the three brothers were blackballing him from mainstream entertainment. Whether or not this was a reality, it was very much the truth for Brian, and one that he perceived as a major stumbling block for the boys’ progress. Still, he would not give in. He was confident that the boys would become so big on their own that the Grades would be forced into dropping their demands.

  Brian finally had his way in September of 1963, when the Beatles had the number-one single, the number-one album, and the best-selling extended play record in the British Isles. Orders for the single called “She Loves You” had been coming in since June, when they didn’t even have a title, and by the time the lyrics were written, in a hotel room three nights before it was recorded, over half a million copies were already presold to record stores. In “She Loves You” George Martin had been able to incorporate in magic proportions all the ingredients of the three previous singles into one ineluctably attractive song. It had easy, “sad-glad” rhymes and lyrics sung in those distinctive harmonies, every chorus tagged with a sly, infectious musical hook, a simple “yeah, yeah, yeah” that became not only the Beatles’ trademark but an international euphemism for rock music. “She Loves You” didn’t climb the charts—it exploded with a fury into the number-one position, selling faster and harder than any single ever released, and became the largest-selling single in the history of Great Britain, not to be outsold until fifteen years later by, ironically but not surprisingly, a Paul McCartney tune called “Mull of Kintyre.”5 At this point Lew Grade could do nothing in the face of the tens of thousands of requests to see them on “Sunday Night at the Palladium,” and an invitation was extended for them to appear on October 13. Brian, not willing to let well enough alone, insisted the Beatles top the bill, and had his way, too.

  An audience of fifteen million saw them that night, a staggering number at the time and the largest of their career so far. The day of the performance Argyle Street, where the Palladium was located, was filled with fans waiting for their arrival, while inside the theater a stack of presents piled up in their dressing room. It was only a matter of hours before the press and TV newsmen heard what was happening on Argyle Street and were sent to cover the event. The newspaper reports the next day varied from estimates of 500 fans to thousands waiting in the street, chasing after their limousine as it pulled up to the stage door. One photographer, Dezo Hoffman, who had been covering the Beatles for several weeks, claims that only eight girls were in the street in front of the Palladium. He says the photographs were cropped so they would look like more and that the press reports were a clever ruse instigated by Brian. Whatever actually happened that night, the Beatles were irrefutably front-page headlines the next day for the first of countless times. Now even the man-on-the-street, who didn’t listen to rock and roll, was beginning to hear about something called, improbably, unforgettably, “the Beatles.”

  Three days later the Beatles made further headlines when Bernard Delfont announced, with Brian’s and the Beatles’ permission, that the Beatles would also be on the bill at the Royal Command Variety Performance the first week of November at which Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother would be in attendance. In the intervening weeks the elite of the Fleet Street press bore down on them as they continued to tour, and the population at large learned more about the peculiar phenomenon that followed the Beatles wherever they appeared; the audiences cheered, wept, screamed, and sometimes even tore their clothing in what sociologists explained as “the focus of a form of mass hysteria.” The main story, however, was hair. Nobody could get over the Beatles haircut.

  On November 5, the night of the Royal Command Performance, 500 policemen cordoned off the Prince of Wales Theater. It was uncertain who was the bigger draw or the more difficult to protect, the Beatles or the Royal Family. After a very boring show consisting of a trio of zither players, barnyard animal puppets, and Marlene Dietrich, the boys were announced to an uproar in the audience. John’s ad lib, “Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands, the rest of you can just rattle your jewelry,” brought the house dow
n.6 The following day the newspaper headlines were again unanimous about the Beatles. The Daily Express story, “Beatles Rock Royals,” was not uncommon. The Express put a photograph of the Beatles on the front page five times that week, they were such a good story. But it was the Daily Mirror that summed it up best in a single headline, just one word, a word the whole world would soon hear: BEATLEMANIA!

  2

  The day after the Royal Command Performance Brian carefully packed all the newspaper headlines and press reports about his clients into his suitcase and boarded a plane for New York. Across the Atlantic, America beckoned to him like some glittering Shangri-la, a land of prosperity and glamour, a country he wanted desperately to claim for the Beatles. Even though Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had told the British, “You never had it so good,” Great Britain seemed dull in comparison to what was happening in the United States. Unemployment was relatively low, salaries high, gas was cheap and tail fins big and flashy. Most homes had TV, some of them color. New York had become the center of jet-set society, leaving Paris a haughty second. The leaders of the New Elegance, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, were so much like royalty their kingdom was referred to as Camelot. America also had California, with a musical phenomenon that was totally endemic to its shores, “surfing music,” introduced by a new group called the Beach Boys. It spoke of a way of life of sun and surf and souped-up cars that no Englishman could possibly understand. In America there was a smug, chauvinistic superiority, and it was quite clear that nothing was either wanted or needed from Great Britain. Not even the Beatles.