George and Ringo moved together into a flat lower down in the William Mews block where Brian lived. Old ladies, carrying Pekinese dogs, looked askance at the girls who instantaneously took up stations on the front steps. Brian was torn between excitement at having two Beatles so closely under his wing and terror that George and Ringo might find out what, in any case, they had known about him for years. Even when he asked them to one of his gay parties he seems to have hoped they would view the all-male gathering as no more than coincidence. “Do you think they noticed?” he later anxiously asked a friend.
As to the living arrangements of Paul McCartney, not even the most tenacious journalist trying to get his foot in the door could hazard a guess. Whereas George and Ringo’s address, like John’s, would invariably be specified in newspaper reports, Paul, since leaving the President Hotel, could only be said ambiguously to be living at “an address in Central London.”
Four months earlier, at a pop concert in the Albert Hall, the Beatles had met a young actress called Jane Asher, herself on the way to becoming a celebrity through her appearances on the BBC TV show Juke Box Jury. The Beatles crowded round her in their usual way, all four instantly proposing marriage. The others guessed at once that such a “classy” girl, red-haired and madonna-like, would appeal strongly to the socially ambitious Paul. They had asked her back to their hotel for a drink and, after some winking and nudging, had left her and Paul alone in the bedroom. It quickly transpired that Jane, as well as being only seventeen, was still a virgin. When the others came back she and Paul were sitting there, deep in discussion about their favorite kinds of food.
Jane’s background, as much as her chaste beauty, fascinated Paul. Her father, Sir Richard Asher, was a noted psychiatrist. Her mother, a professional musician, had taught George Martin the oboe. Her brother, Peter, belonged—as did Jane herself—to a teenage top drawer that played its rock records in the studies of elegant town houses and formed the earliest clientele of the music clubs and boutiques now springing up in the West End and Chelsea. Since heeding his mother’s plea not to talk like other children in the projects, Paul McCartney had dreamed of worlds like this.
The fans knew that Paul and Jane were often seen together, at parties or the theater. The Ashers’ house in Wimpole Street was plagued by telephone gigglings and breathings that Sir Richard could not shut off because the line belonged to his medical practice. What few people knew, even within the Beatles’ entourage, was that Paul now spent all his time in London with the Ashers. Returning from the Continent late one night he had missed his connection to Liverpool, and Jane’s mother had offered him the spare room. That room was now permanently his.
To young men long used to staying out all night, London in 1963 offered many diversions. The old West End night spots, with their clientele of debutantes and Guards officers, were giving way to with-it clubs like Wips, whose advertisement promised “pirhanas in the dark above London’s skyline…black velvet and new faces…music, strong, hard and moody.” In Soho, for a brief season, flourished the Establishment Club, named for all the hapless official targets, from Royalty downward, flayed nightly by the satirists in its floor show. In Mayfair, handily close to George and Ringo’s shared flat, was the super-posh Saddle Room, kept by the television personality Hélène Cordet, from which the two Beatles would often return home to Williams Mews by horse-drawn carriage. Just off Leicester Square was the Ad Lib—its very name a declaration of London’s unlimited treats—where pop stars mingled with their own kind and excluded outsiders in the same way that Pall Mall gentlemen’s clubs had for the past two centuries.
Newspaper acquaintances, like Ray Coleman, who ran into the Beatles after dark at the Ad Lib, could be sure both of an eventful night and of a large bill to be camouflaged among expenses. “None of them ever seemed to have any money,” Coleman said. Peter Jones, the journalist in closest contact with them, received an impression, not so much of Liverpool thrift as of spasmodic insolvency. “If I was on my way to see them, I’d ring up first. Often they’d say, ‘Here, pick up some food for us on the way, will you?’”
The fact is that, although the Beatles were Britain’s biggest-selling pop group, their income was—and for a long time remained—astonishingly small. The records now selling in millions earned them, under their original Parlophone contract, a fourth of a penny per double-sided disc. Their concert appearances, richly profitable to promoters and cinema circuits, often realized barely enough to cover their travel and hotel expenses. For Brian was still letting them work at rates agreed to months previously.
At Bryce, Hanmer and Isherwood, Dr. Strach’s first act—after sorting out certain small tax difficulties arising from their Hamburg days—was to form the Beatles into a limited company for which the grave Czech gentleman himself acted as both treasurer and secretary. It was to Strach that the bills for their flats and living expenses came. In those days, the doctor remembered, his main concern was to amass a reserve of money to pay income tax after—as must invariably happen—the Beatles had stopped earning money as pop stars. The residue of their earnings, therefore, simply lay in bank accounts, expecting that evil day. For meals, drinks, the suits and shirts and boots they wore once and then discarded, they turned to Neil Aspinall, their road manager, and the float Neil always carried. Larger expenditure was discouraged by the black-suited figure whom, without much conviction, the Beatles called “Uncle Walter.”
Dr. Strach remembered how Brian Epstein strove at every step to make his dealings with the Beatles fair. “He always worried that he might be taking advantage of them. He came to me once and said he wanted to give them a piece of his company, NEMS Enterprises. He gave them 10 percent of it, so they would get back some of the 25 percent they paid him. Brian didn’t have to do that, but he wanted to. He was a decent, honest, average human being.”
Punctilious in small matters, and small amounts, Brian could not adjust his sights to the bigger and bigger commercial prospects now materializing on every side. At the same time his pride would not allow him to ask advice from older, more experienced people in the same business. Resolutely he did every deal for the Beatles in person, never revising a payment scale still based more on Liverpool’s values than London’s. And among his pursuers the word rapidly spread. Brian Epstein—in the American entrepreneurial phrase—was not streetwise.
In the autumn of 1963 he received an offer for the Beatles to appear in their first feature film. This was already a recognized way of capitalizing on pop music success—simple exploitation movies in which the thinnest background was given to the regurgitation of Top Twenty hits for a cinema audience. United Artists, the company that approached Brian, were at that stage chiefly interested in sales of a Beatles soundtrack album.
UA had already hired Walter Shenson, an independent American producer based in London with some reputation for making successful low-budget comedy films. Shenson agreed to meet Brian, together with Bud Orenstein, UA’s office head in London, to discuss the terms under which the Beatles would be allowed to appear.
“I knew Bud Orenstein well,” Walter Shenson said. “So I went over to his flat before Brian arrived to talk over the deal that we’d be prepared to make. I knew nothing about pop music or managers. I said: ‘What do you think he’s going to ask for?’ The film was low budget, with not much to pay in advances. Bud and I agreed it would be fair to offer Brian and the Beatles 25 percent of the picture.
“Then Brian came in. He seemed very nice. We put to him the fee we’d thought of—the Beatles would get a salary of twenty-five thousand pounds to work on the picture—and he agreed to that. Then we asked him, ‘Mr. Epstein, what would you consider a fair percentage of the picture?’ Brian thought for a minute, then he said, ‘I couldn’t accept anything less than seven-and-a-half percent.’”
Uproar spilled over into the Beatles’ first European tour—a series of concerts in Sweden from October 24–29. Self-possessed Swedish girls now jigged and shrieked as wildly as any Caverni
te, and sensible Swedish boys wore their hair in what Scandinavian newspapers called the Hamlet style. At a concert in Stockholm fans rushed the stage, breaking through a forty-strong police cordon and trampling George Harrison momentarily underfoot. Between concerts, Paul wore a disguise so effective that not even the other Beatles could recognize him.
Their return to London on October 29 showed them for the first time the full extent of their British following. At Heathrow airport, as their aircraft taxied to a stop, a concerted scream broke out from hundreds of girls massed along the terminal’s terraced roof. The invasion had thrown the whole airport into a chaos in which such other celebrities as Britain’s prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home, and the newly elected Miss World passed by, totally unnoticed.
The Royal Command Variety Peformance is an institution dating back to Queen Victoria, whose little dour face masked a fondness for theatrical glamour and who would “command” all the latest entertainers, like Buffalo Bill Cody, to give private performances for her and her family at Windsor. From this had evolved an annual royal charity gala featuring a marathon bill of top entertainers that gave the West End its most glamorous night of the year and was later seen by the rest of the nation on TV. In 1963, the Queen could not attend, being heavily pregnant with her fourth child, the future Prince Edward, and her place in the royal box was to be jointly filled by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret. The Beatles were placed seventh on a nineteen-act program that included Marlene Dietrich; comedians Charlie Drake, Harry Secombe, and Eric Sykes; the self-styled Red-Hot Mama Sophie Tucker; and the dancing pig puppets Pinky and Perky.
But there was no question as to the night’s real draw. Long before dusk, on that raw afternoon, five hundred policemen had been drafted to duty outside the Prince of Wales theater, off Leicester Square, where the usual crowd, assembled to glimpse the royals, was swollen by several thousand girls, screaming and chanting, “We want the Beatles.” Marlene Dietrich, a legend of thirty years’ standing, was able to enter the stage door, unrecognized. But when the Queen Mother herself appeared, waving and smiling, followed by Princess Margaret and her photographer husband, Lord Snowdon, a basic British instinct asserted itself: the screaming and chanting changed to applause and cheers.
Brian Epstein, in all the hurry and excitement, very nearly found himself without the evening clothes that are de rigueur at a royal performance: His dinner jacket, he remembered, too late, was hanging in the wardrobe at home in Liverpool. To add to the tension he was due to fly to America the next morning. His parents, Harry and Queenie, sitting in the audience, had almost resigned themselves to not seeing him when, just before curtain up, in his hastily fetched tuxedo, he lowered himself into the empty seat next to theirs.
The Beatles, cooped up with Neil and Mal Evans in a dressing room no more munificent than usual, were also evincing signs of strain. Their spot in the show was brief—four songs near the end, surrounded by carefully rehearsed bows. What Brian feared more than musical slipups was that, despite his entreaties for decorum, some ad-lib would be made, offensive to royal ears. John had already threatened one ghastly ad-lib if the audience proved unresponsive: “I’ll just tell ’em to rattle their fuckin’ jewelry.”
Brian’s fears proved groundless. The audience of stiff-shirted showbiz notables and their wives could not have been more susceptible to the Beatles’ insouciant charm and the cheekiness that by instinct they measured out in precisely the right amount. Paul struck the exact note at once, surveying the dignified dark and saying, “How are yer—all right?” A joke between songs, about “Sophie Tucker, our favorite American group,” produced a ripple of confirming laughter. Then it was John’s turn, to announce the final number, “Twist and Shout.” The line that had jangled Brian’s nerves in the dressing room came out as a perfect mingling of impudence and deference: “Will people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry…”
The next day’s papers were unanimous. “Beatles Rock the Royals,” said the Daily Express. “Night of Triumph for Four Young Men,” said the Daily Mail, roguishly adding, “Yes—the Royal Box was stomping.” It was reported that the Queen Mother had listened to “Twist and Shout” with every appearance of enjoyment and that Princess Margaret had definitely leaned forward, “clapping on the off-beat.” John’s little joke was quoted everywhere, as was the banter overheard later when the Beatles stood in the royal receiving line. Asked by the Queen Mother where they were appearing next, they had together murmured “Slough.” “Oh… that’s near us,” Her Majesty replied with such warmth as to suggest she might seriously consider popping over from nearby Windsor Castle to catch the gig.
The Daily Mirror’s coverage of scenes outside and inside the Prince of Wales theater bore the simple headline “Beatlemania!” The Mirror simultaneously gave the epidemic a name and offered its six million readers this deeply infected diagnosis:
YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!
You have to be a real sour square not to love the nutty, noisy, happy, handsome Beatles.
If they don’t sweep your blues away—brother, you’re a lost cause. If they don’t put a beat in your feet—sister, you’re not living.
How refreshing to see these rumbustious young Beatles take a middle-aged Royal Variety performance by the scruff of their necks and have them Beatling like teenagers.
Fact is that Beatle People are everywhere. From Wapping to Windsor. Aged seven to seventy. And it’s plain to see why these four cheeky, energetic lads from Liverpool go down so big.
They’re young, new. They’re high-spirited, cheerful. What a change from the self-pitying moaners, crooning their lovelorn tunes from the tortured shallows of lukewarm hearts.
The Beatles are whacky. They wear their hair like a mop—but it’s WASHED, it’s super clean. So is their fresh young act. They don’t have to rely on off-colour jokes about homos for their fun.
To say that Britain, in November 1963, succumbed to an all-excluding obsession with a four-man pop group—even one that had made royalty smile—would be palpably absurd. The mania was Fleet Street’s; it therefore appeared to blanket the land. In a single week after the royal variety performance, the Daily Express ran five front-page stories indicative of Beatlemania at every compass point. Its chief rival, the Daily Mail, soon afterward ceased bothering even to use the name “Beatles” in headlines. A small cartoon logo of four fringed heads gave all the identification that was needed.
Naturally, the press soon winkled out the fact which Brian had striven so to conceal—that John Lennon was married, with a baby son. The fans, however, far from resenting Cynthia, seemed to regard her as part of John’s inexhaustible originality. She continued, nonetheless, to exist in the deepest hinterland, at the top of the Emperor’s Gate flat or some sternly defined public corral, fenced off by a road manager’s shoulder.
The scope of Fleet Street coverage was widening from theater sieges and screaming and the cheeky things they said. On November 10, the first school headmaster sent the first teenage boy into public martyrdom for sporting a Beatle haircut. On November 18, the first vicar invoked their name, requesting them to provide a tape of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful, Yeah Yeah Yeah” for his Christmas congregation. Two days later occurred the first parliamentary mention. A Labor MP in the House of Commons demanded that police protection for the Beatles should end. On the Express editorial page there appeared a prophetic cartoon. The prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home, genuflecting before the Beatles, asked: “Gentlemen—could we persuade you to become Conservative candidates?”
The quality papers, traditionally aloof from such proletarian topics, now weighed in with purportedly scientific analyses of the Beatles’ effect on teenage girls. The Observer published a picture of a Cycladic fertility goddess that, it was maintained, “dates the potency of the guitar as a sex symbol to about 4,800 years before the Beatle era.” The livelier-minded Sunday Times commended the Beatles for enriching the English lan
guage with words from their private slang—like “gear” and “fab”—that were now in fashionable use. The Sunday Times went on to examine Beatlemania in a style and vocabulary that were to be widely imitated. “‘You don’t have to be a genius,’ says a consultant at a London hospital, ‘to see the parallels between sexual excitement and the mounting crescendo of delighted screams through a stimulating number like “Twist and Shout,” but at the level it is taken, I think it is the bubbling, uninhibited gaiety of the group that generates enthusiasm.’”
The habit quickly spread of consulting the medical profession, especially its psychiatric branch, for opinions that would lend scientific weight to the orgies of chortling prose. And doctors and psychiatrists, sensing regular fees, were careful to pronounce nothing unfavorable. Not even the News of the World could find anything in Beatlemania against which to caution its credulous readership. Psychologists, the NotW said, in its usual comfortably inexplicit way, had been trying to discover why the Beatles sent teenage girls into hysteria. One of them had come up with this explanation:
This is one way of flinging off childhood restraints and letting themselves go.… The fact that thousands of others are screaming along with her makes the girl feel she is living life to the full with people of her own age.… [T]his emotional outlook is very necessary at her age. It is also innocent and harmless.
The girls are subconsciously preparing for motherhood. Their frenzied screams are a rehearsal for that moment. Even the jelly babies are symbolic.
EMI hastened to release the second Beatles LP, recorded by George Martin in mid-July and incubated through autumn until sales of the first album, and its spin-off singles, should finally subside. This second album, With the Beatles, appeared on November 22. Never before had a pop LP been released not to cash in on a Top Ten single but on the strength of its overall content. Advance orders alone totalled 250,000 copies—more than for Elvis Presley’s biggest-selling album, Blue Hawaii.
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