Other papers, too, were awakening to the existence of a population whose chief interest was not oversexed cabinet ministers but a pop record whose wild “yeah, yeah, yeah” chorus kept piercing the summer static. For “She Loves You,” having gone straight to number one on advance orders of half a million copies, was still there, almost two months after its release. Radio disk jockeys such as Brian Matthew no longer even bothered to announce it. “Do you realize,” Matthew frequently enquired of his listeners, “how many songs in the current Top Ten are written by, if not sung by, the Beatles?”
To Brian Epstein, this was still no more than a facet of success on every front. Brian’s big autumn project was the launch of NEMS Enterprises’ first female artist. Priscilla White, the Cavern Club’s gawky cloakroom girl, now renamed Cilla Black, was to be, not a discovery like the Beatles and Gerry but a creation, wrought by Brian’s own feminine taste. For weeks, he had lavished attention on Cilla; on her clothes, her hair, her makeup. He had taken her to George Martin, and Martin—privately thinking her a “Cavern screamer”—had recorded her singing the Lennon-McCartney song “Love of the Loved.” Tony Barrow, in Monmouth Street, was producing the usual stylish NEMS press release, describing Cilla’s recherché taste for wearing men’s jeans, and relaying Cavern Club slang such as “gear,” “fab,” and “endsville.”
On October 13, the Beatles were due to appear on British television’s top-rated variety program, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. The show went out live on Sunday nights from the famous old, gilt-encrusted theater, in Argyll Street, just off Oxford Circus. In form it was straight music hall, with jugglers, trampolinists, a “Beat the Clock” interlude in which members of the audience underwent ritual self-humiliation, and finally a top-of-the-bill act that was quite likely to be the pop singing sensation of the moment. At the end, the entire cast stood on a revolving platform among chorus girls and giant letters spelling out SUNDAY NIGHT AT THE LONDON PALLADIUM.
News of the engagement had circulated among Beatles fans and there were girls waiting on Argyll Street that Sunday morning when the Beatles arrived at the Palladium to rehearse. The photographer Dezo Hoffman, who accompanied them, counted “about eight girls. The car drew up—we went inside, no trouble.” Since rehearsals lasted all day the Beatles were provided with a roast lamb lunch in their dressing room. While they were eating it a group of girls ran into the auditorium and had to be ejected.
The show that night broke all precedent by putting on its top-of-the-bill act first, for a few seconds only. Bruce Forsyth, the emcee, then appeared and stuck out his long chin. “If you want to see them again,” Forsyth taunted, “they’ll be back in forty-two minutes.” That final, short, inaudible performance, before they hurried aboard the revolving stage, was watched by an audience of 15 million.
Next morning, every mass-circulation British newspaper carried a front-page picture and story of riots by Beatles fans outside the London Palladium. “Police fought to hold back 1,000 squealing teenagers,” the Daily Mirror said, “as the Beatles made their getaway after their Palladium TV show.” Both the Daily Mail and Daily Express had pictures of the four Beatles peeping out in supposed dread of a mob, this time said to number five hundred. “A Police motorcade stood by,” the Mirror continued, “as the four pop idols dashed for their car. Then the fans went wild, breaking through a cordon of more than 60 Policemen” (20, the Express said). “With engines racing, the cavalcade roared down Argyll Street and turned into Oxford Circus, heading for a celebration party at the Grosvenor House hotel.”
This official outbreak of Beatlemania in Britain has certain puzzling aspects. In every case, the published photograph of those “1,000 squealing teenagers” was cropped in so close that only three or four could be seen. The Daily Mail alone published a wide-angle shot—Paul McCartney and Neil Aspinall emerging from the Palladium, watched by one policeman and two girls.
“There were no riots,” Dezo Hoffman says. “I was there. Eight girls we saw—even less than eight. Later on, the road managers were sent out to find the Beatles a girl each, and there were none.”
ELEVEN
“EVEN THE JELLY BABIES ARE SYMBOLIC”
In 1963, the simple fact was, Britain’s population had become unbalanced by a vast surplus of people under eighteen. The decline in infant mortality, together with the mysterious nonappearance of a third world war, had allowed an entire generation to grow up virtually intact. They were the babies born after 1945 and raised in a Britain struggling to transform itself from postwar drabness to the material well-being so long observed and envied in America. Cars, radios, washing machines, all the luxuries still cherished by their parents were, to these young people, simply the mundane furniture of life. Television spread the whole world before them, to be casually viewed and judged. In 1960, the kindly Macmillan government abolished the two-year period of compulsory military service that had shaped young men’s lives since the end of World War II. For those between sixteen and twenty-one no obligation remained save that of spending their ever-increasing pocket money on the amusements demanded by their ever-quickening glands.
Pop music was the most obvious sign of youth’s growing economic power. What had begun in 1956 as a laughable, disreputable adolescent outburst was now an industry turning over 100 million pounds each year. The attitude toward teenagers remained largely unchanged: They were, as in 1956, a puzzling, fractious element of the population, endlessly deplored and advised by politicians, headmasters, and clergymen. They were also a market, undreamed of in size and potential, to be wooed and cajoled by the retail trade at every level.
The British teenage girl of early 1963 faithfully reflected the numerous boom industries who battled for her weekly pay packet. Her hair, teased up into a huge hollow bouffant, or “beehive,” represented hours spent at the hairdressing salon and in arduous private back-combing and curling with heated rollers. Her face was deathly white but for two coal-black eyes embellished with false lashes like those popularized by the singer Dusty Springfield. She wore trousers, or “trews,” with loops under each foot, but more usually a formal dress with a wasp-tight waist and a full skirt ballooned by starch-stiffened petticoats into the semblance of an outsized tea cosy. Her shoes, invariably matching her handbag, were white or beige with winklepicker points and the stiletto heels that had wrought destruction on polished dance floors across the land.
Her boyfriend was an even more interesting sight, for young males were gradually reviving the conventions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in dressing as colorfully as females. He might be a mod, a faction of which went in for ostentatiously neat Italian suits and trilby hats and rode about on Vespa or Lambretta motor scooters. He might, on the other hand, be a rocker, the heirs of the fifties Teds, who favored the macho look of early Elvis rock ’n’ roll, draped themselves in black leather, decorated themselves with tattoos, and aspired only to do a “ton” (100 mph) on their thunderous motorcycles. The mods and rockers had sprung up in 1963, simultaneously and with an instant mutual loathing of one another. All that summer, in innocent seaside resorts like Clacton and Margate, their set-piece battles had surged back and forth, trampling day-trippers, deck chairs, and children’s sand castles.
In autumn, the mod–rocker war was eclipsed by a new kind of teenage excess that was not new but was louder and wilder than Britain had ever known it before. Television and cinema newsreels added live pictures to those appearing daily in all the national papers. The pictures showed girls in their hollow-spun bouffants and spectral make-up, their black eye make-up running in rivulets down their faces. The sound was of incessant screaming.
Girls had screamed for pop stars before, but never quite like this. Never—as they did at the Beatles’ Cambridge concert—hunched into a fetal position, alternately punching their sides, covering their eyes, and stuffing handkerchiefs and fists into their mouths. Later, when the curtain had fallen and the last dazed girl had been led through the exits, a further difference from t
he screams that greeted Valentino became manifest. Hundreds of the cinema seats were wringing wet. Many had puddles of urine beneath them.
Such scenes had been commonplace for six months already: The difference now was that newspapers reported them. Fleet Street had realized that the Beatles were more than a momentary diversion—they were a running story of guaranteed reader interest. The riots faked on Argyll Street were to be seen, ten times more spectacularly, along the route of their current package tour. On October 26 in Carlisle—the small border town they had last seen as nobodies with Helen Shapiro—six hundred fans stood in line for thirty-six hours to buy tickets. When the box office opened, the line moved forward with such ardor that nine people were crushed and had to receive hospital treatment.
Fleet Street’s initial line was simply reporting on the girls’ hysteria. It changed the moment someone took the trouble to visit the Beatles’ dressing room. There, in the tiny space hemmed in by teacups and stage-suit bags, the hacks found what every journalist craves and what he will distort the plainest fact to manufacture—good quotes. For when John and Paul got going no one had to invent the dialogue.
“How long do you think the group will last, John?”
“About five years.”
“Are those wigs you’re wearing?”
“If they are, they must be the only wigs with dandruff.”
“What kind of guitar is that, Paul?”
“It’s a Hofner violin bass. Here, take a look.” The bass—now widely copied by other groups—would be tossed into the startled questioner’s lap.
“Are they expensive?”
“Fifty-six guineas. I could afford a better one but I’m a skinflint.”
Ringo, still unsure of himself, would be coaxed forward to say a mordant word or two. If asked why he wore so many rings on his fingers, he replied it was because he couldn’t get them all through his nose. “I don’t like talking,” he explained. “Some people gab all day and some people play it smogo. I haven’t got a smiling face or a talking mouth.”
George, unless specially asked for, would remain apart, his hollow face cupped in a high black turtle neck, his eyes under the Beatle bangs not happy. He would tune guitars assiduously, John’s as well as his own, despite knowing they had not the remotest chance of being heard. Even at this early stage, the fan uproar, the flailing screams and toys and jelly babies, were a source of detestation to him.
Certain journalists, on the strength of past favors, were exempt from the moments when Neil Aspinall, at a secret signal, would clear the Beatles’ dressing room of the press. Maureen Cleave from the Evening Standard was one such: John Lennon called her “the Just William woman.” Another was Ray Coleman, from Melody Maker. The Beatles liked MM because it troubled to discuss their musicianship as well as the riots. Coleman, a quiet, clerkly figure, would stand in the wings, telling John the words of songs that, even though John himself had written them, he could barely remember from day to day. Usually, when he ran on stage, the words would be written on the back of his hand.
Peter Jones, of Record Mirror, found himself in the most difficult position. Jones had written the first article about the Beatles in a national publication; he was now contributor-in-chief to their fan magazine, Beatles Monthly. He was at once privy to their most intimate moments and sworn to secrecy concerning all that might have shown them not as cuddly toys but as ordinary, imperfect human beings.
The papers did not mind revealing that all four of these new national role models, especially George, were heavy smokers. But on other matters Peter Jones had to remain silent. He could say nothing about the hatred they already felt for performing night after night, and how Neil Aspinall sometimes literally chased them from their dressing room into the wings. Jones could not mention the rows they frequently had with one another, or with Brian. Nor could he make even the vaguest mention of what everyone in the Beatles’ entourage called “the girl scene,” the sexual encounters with young women, handpicked from their night’s audience or stage-door crowd, that continually went on in hotel bedrooms or bathrooms or out-of-the-way theater passages or toilets.
“At times,” Jones says, “they could pick on someone for a kind of corporate cruelty that was absolutely merciless. Down on the south coast there was this old journalist who went into the swimming pool with them while some photographs were being taken. All four of them really set on this quite elderly guy—pretending it was all fun, but it wasn’t. They were so rough with him, they actually broke one of his toes.”
Such stories, if written, would not have been printed. Fleet Street had settled on its view of the Beatles—the four happy-go-lucky Liverpool lads who looked absurd, but knew it, and whose salty one-line witticisms seemed to epitomize the honesty of the working classes, blowing through the seedy lies of the Profumo upper crust. “You had to write it that way,” an ex–Daily Mirror man says. “You knew that if you didn’t, the Sketch would and the Express would and the Mail and the Standard would. You were writing in self-defense.”
Within a week of the London Palladium show, Britain’s attitude toward the Beatles had completely changed. No longer were they just a silly pop group that incited teenagers to be even sillier than usual. They were also, unprecedently, endowed with wit and intelligence. The inclusion among their cover versions of several songs originally recorded by American girl groups—notably the Marvelettes’ “Please, Mister Postman” and the Cookies’ “Chains”—underscored their Liverpool toughness with appealingly paradoxical sensitivity. Whatever the prejudice engendered by their hair and clothes, it vanished as soon as their voices began to speak, in what was half-remembered, through ages of music hall and radio, as comedy’s natural dialect:
“None of us has quite grasped wharrit’s all about yet. It’s washin’ over our ’eads like a yuge tidal wave—”
“—I don’t s’pose I think mooch about the future. Though, now we have made it, it would be a pity to get bombed—”
“I get spasms of being intellectual. I read a bit about politics. But I don’t think I’d vote for anyone. No message from those phoney politicians is coomin’ through to me.”
“—We’ve always ’ad laughs. Sometimes we find ourselves gettin’ hysterical, especially when we’re tired. We laugh at soft things that other people don’t get—we call it ‘The Cruelies’—”
“Is it true that you were turned down by Decca?”
“A guy at Decca turned us down.”
“He must be kicking himself now.”
“I ’ope he kicks himself to death.”
On October 16, an announcement was made that both confirmed their new status beyond any doubt and brought Fleet Street northward in a still more maddened pursuit. The Beatles had been chosen to appear in the Royal Command Variety Performance in London on November 4. Bernard Delfont, the organizer, told reporters he had picked them on the insistence of his ten-year-old daughter. Buckingham Palace, to which the list went for approval, offered no objection.
Late in October, Brian Epstein moved his entire organization from Liverpool to London. “It happened at about a week’s notice,” Tony Bramwell says. “Eppy walked in and said he was going south—were we coming?” Tony, Alistair Taylor, Laurie McCaffery the switchboard girl, immediately went home to pack. Freda Kelly’s father refused to let her go, although she pleaded. Almost the entire staff managed to reassemble itself in London to greet Brian when he arrived, looking as if he had expected nothing else.
The new NEMS office was on Argyll Street, only a few doors away from the London Palladium. Brian drew great satisfaction from being so close to this famous old theatrical monument. He drew equal satisfaction from his new cable [telegram] address: Nemperor, London. It was Bob Wooler, the Cavern’s pun-loving disk jockey, who had once said to him on the telephone, “Is that the Nemperor?”
Brian now had his own London flat, in a fashionable building in William Mews, Knightsbridge. One of the first people he took there was Brian Sommerville, an old friend of h
is who had recently left the Royal Navy and was now working in Fleet Street. “The flat was very Brian,” Sommerville says, “all white walls and black leather cushions. While I was there, he showed me a proof of the Beatles’ new LP cover. He was already starting to suggest that we might work together.”
Once installed in the new flat Brian began to entertain lavishly. David Jacobs, his lawyer, had introduced him to many of the show business celebrities for whom Jacobs’s firm also acted. He developed a particular friendship with Lionel Bart, the East End ex-skiffler who had won, and was rapidly losing, a fortune as a composer of West End musicals. He loved all show people, and in their cocktail chatter found a measure of security. Show people did not care who was, or was not, gay.
He had, as his success grew more hectic, placed increasing reliance on Jacobs and on his accountants, Bryce, Hanmer and Isherwood of Albemarle Street, Mayfair. Bryce, Hanmer were, in fact, a Liverpool firm whose London office made a speciality of theatrical clients. Dr. Walter Strach, one of the firm’s senior members, a gaunt and melancholy Czech, thus found himself, in late 1963, charged with the responsibility of finding London accommodation for all four of the Beatles. Total secrecy was maintained, to evade the fans and to keep the rents within reason.
For John and Cynthia a flat was rented in Emperor’s Gate, Kensington, just behind the Cromwell Road terminal where, in those days, one could check in for flights from Heathrow airport. Thanks to the almost psychic powers of detection bestowed on Beatles fans, the hideaway became instantly and universally known. Girls waited all day, as well as most of the night, around the pilastered front porch, even venturing into the hallway, if the front door was left open, to settle down with blankets, sleeping bags, and vacuum flasks. Across the road was a student hostel with a balcony that looked directly into the Lennons flat. Whenever Cyn looked, she would see figures hanging over the balcony and waving. Six flights up, without a lift, she spent days at a time, with baby Julian, in conscientious isolation.
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