Fab

by Howard Sounes

  The young men set up a US licensing operation named Seltaeb - Beatles spelt backwards - to capitalise on the new American interest in the band. To raise start-up capital, Fenton and Byrne went to friends in the Chelsea Set, fashionable, often wealthy young people living in and around London’s King’s Road. These gadabouts were the progenitors of swinging London, though many preferred jazz to pop in 1964. ‘I didn’t like the Beatles’ music,’ says Fenton, not untypically. ‘The “She loves you Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” stuff to me was like my worst nightmare. That was the only way I could justify selling Beatles toilet paper to people. I felt there was a similarity there.’ An Old Etonian friend of Byrne’s, Simon Miller Mundy, invested £1,000 ($1,530) in Seltaeb and got his friend, Lord Eliot, to invest the same. By coincidence, Eliot was Jane Asher’s cousin. ‘London in those days was very, very small,’ notes His Lordship (who became Lord St Germans on the death of his father). ‘Her mother’s father was [an earlier] Lord St Germans.’ In advance of the Beatles’ visit to the USA, Nicky Byrne booked himself into a suite at the Drake Hotel in New York and began fielding offers from US manufacturers who wanted to produce Beatles products. Within days Seltaeb had signed licences for everything from Beatles golf bags to toothpaste, bringing in a revenue of $3.5 million (£2.2 m). ‘It was absolutely astonishing,’ comments St Germans.

  As the Beatles’ first visit to America approached, Seltaeb and their manufacturing partners became concerned that Capitol Records wasn’t doing enough to promote the band. So they took independent action. ‘We had every lift boy in New York saying, “The Beatles are coming - which floor do you want? ”’ remembers John Fenton. Disc jockeys such as B. Mitchel Reed began counting off the days, hours and minutes to the Beatles’ arrival. Rival DJs, notably the irrepressible Murray ‘the K’ Kaufman on WINS, joined in, using Beatle as an adjective. 7 February 1964 became Beatle-Day or B-Day:

  It is now 6:30 a.m., Beatle time … They left London 30 minutes ago … They’re out over the Atlantic Ocean, headed for New York … The temperature is 32 Beatle degrees …

  Announcements went out over the air in the New York area that any girl who made it to the newly renamed Kennedy Airport in time to greet the boys would receive a buck and Beatles T-shirt. The T-shirt manufacturer bussed girls to the airport to make sure of a success. By the time Pan Am Flight 101 landed there were thousands of fans at Kennedy screaming for the Beatles. ‘Without Seltaeb the Beatles would have found it a lot harder to conquer America. We really whipped up hysteria there,’ says Fenton with a touch of exaggeration. After a slow start, Capitol Records had started to push the Beatles, spending upwards of $50,000 on promotion [£76,500], promising to make 1964 ‘the year of the Beatles’. It all helped to create the day the Beatles arrived in America; the ‘turning point’, Brian always called it.

  When the door of the Pan Am jet opened, and the Beatles emerged onto the steps, clutching Beatle bags, a heaving mob surged forward to greet them, held back by gum-chewing New York cops. The ensuing airport press conference was a bear pit. Paul, George and Ringo appeared nervous. Lennon exuded more confidence, telling the squabbling press pack to ‘shut up’, which made them laugh. While some reporters were evidently intent on deflating this Beatles bubble, their tricky questions served as a foil for the Beatles’ wit. After a hesitant start, everyone got off a good line, including Paul. Told by a reporter that Detroit had a ‘Stamp Out the Beatles’ campaign, he rejoined: ‘We’re bringing out a “Stamp Out Detroit” campaign.’

  A fleet of Cadillacs conveyed the band into Manhattan, where they booked into the venerable Plaza Hotel. Impresario Sid Bernstein watched the limousines pull up at the Fifth Avenue entrance amidst a scrimmage of fans. Paul paused on the threshold, turned and waved. ‘I said, “Wow! He’s a good-looking kid and he’s got the smarts.” The girls were screaming for Paul. There was a lot [more] screaming for him than the other boys.’ A little later Brian took Bernstein through to meet the lads in their suite on the twelfth floor. ‘They had the shades drawn, and they are looking out the window and waving to the kids downstairs. “Mr Bernstein, this is crazier than where we live. These kids are mad!”’

  The trip could have ended in disaster right there. Brian consorted with male escorts and cruised for rough trade in Central Park during his stay at the Plaza, according to former NEMS employee Geoffrey Ellis. The Beatles’ manager may even have been photographed in a compromising situation in his suite. A story that a press photographer, lowered outside the hotel in a bosun’s chair to shoot pictures in through the windows, got a snap of Epstein with a rent boy was later reported in a book by Ross Benson. Unlikely though the story sounds, John Fenton says Seltaeb hushed up a scandal by buying an item that would have incriminated somebody involved with the Beatles on the trip. He won’t say who, other than it wasn’t a member of the band, but states: ‘If it hadn’t been for us there would have been no Beatles in America because they’d have been killed stoned dead by the federal rape law.’ It was only because of their connections with ‘Italian gentlemen’ in the New York merchandising business that they managed to take the evidence out of circulation. ‘It was a huge indiscretion which could have got them into a lot of trouble.’

  It is hard to appreciate how unusual the Beatles looked to a mainstream American television audience when they appeared live on the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday 9 February 1964. ‘We came out of nowhere with funny hair, looking like marionettes or something,’ Paul has reflected. ‘Up until then there were jugglers and comedians like Jerry Lewis [on the show], and then suddenly, The Beatles!’ When Sullivan - a grim-faced man with an awkward manner - had introduced them, the camera first found Paul, who sang lead on ‘All My Loving’, the first of five songs divided between two spots. The 700-strong studio audience squealed with pleasure throughout, while an estimated 73 million people across the United States watched on TV, the highest Nielsen rating yet recorded. For many young Americans this was the moment that ushered in the 1960s as we have come to perceive the decade - a time of exploration, modernity and increased personal freedom. The Beatles would become the soundtrack to their young lives, ensuring that all four band members, not least Paul, would command attention and affection in the US for the rest of their careers.

  Two days later, when the Eastern Seaboard was blanketed in snow, the Beatles took a train from Penn Station to Washington DC to play a show at the Washington Coliseum. During the southbound journey the press were able to hang out with the Beatles in the Pullman car, finding the Englishmen relaxed and playful. By the time they pulled into the capital they were all friends, though Al Aronowitz of the Saturday Evening Post detected evidence that Paul was letting the attention go to his head. The others were calling him ‘the star’ sarcastically. Another journalist on the train had a ticklish question for the star. David English of London’s Daily Mail took Paul aside and told him his office had information that a Hamburg barmaid was claiming to have given birth to his daughter. What did he have to say to that?

  The woman in question was Erika Wohlers, one of the girls the Beatles apparently hung out with in Hamburg, though Paul’s German barmaid friends have only a dim memory of Erika and no recollection of her dating Paul. ‘Maybe he went with her one day, I don’t know. But she definitely wasn’t his girlfriend, because I was going out with him every day,’ says Paul’s regular Hamburg girlfriend Ruth Lallemann. In any event, Erika claims that she had an affair with Paul in Hamburg and that the daughter she gave birth to at Hamburg’s Barmbeck Hospital in December 1962, a month shy of her 20th birthday, was Paul’s.

  In July 1962 my doctor informed me that I was pregnant. There was a lot of arguing with Paul because he was of the opinion that we were still too young to have a baby. Paul and the owner of the Star-Club wanted me to have an abortion, but I refused, and on 19 December 1962 my daughter Bettina was born.

  Here is the first problem with Erika’s story. Working back nine months places conception in March 1962, when the Beatles were in England. Erika’s
explanation: ‘Bettina was born prematurely, in the seventh month.’ (The Beatles were in Hamburg from 13 April to 2 June 1962.) Erika claims that Paul’s ‘less than favourable reaction’ to the pregnancy ended their relationship. After her daughter was born, she placed Bettina in care, and went to work as a barmaid. By the time of the Beatles’ first US adventure Bettina was 14 months. When David English tried to confront Paul with this story on the train to Washington, McCartney avoided the reporter. When English persisted, PaulI exclaimed: ‘Oh fuck, why did you have to say that now?’ This was less than an admission and, lacking hard evidence that Erika’s story was true, the Daily Mail didn’t publish. But that wasn’t the end of the matter.

  ‘THE BEATLES IN THEIR FIRST FULL LENGTH, HILARIOUS ACTION-PACKED FILM!’

  A week after returning from the USA, the Beatles began work on their first feature film. Paul and his band mates had grown up with the cinema, and had great affection for jukebox movies such as The Girl Can’t Help It. In their career to date there had been an element of play-acting, while their contract with Brian made explicit reference to their ambition to make pictures together. Epstein now cut a deal with the American company United Artists for the Beatles to star in a movie named after a Ringoism. ‘It’s been a hard day …’ the drummer sighed at the end of another gruelling day, only to notice it was already night, causing him to correct himself mid-sentence, ‘… day’s night.’ Playwright Alun Owen wrote the script, having had the benefit of spending time with the band on the road, while the director was 32-year-old American Richard Lester, who would shoot quickly in black and white on a low budget, United Artists wanting the movie in theatres before the Beatles craze passed.

  A Hard Day’s Night was a musical, essentially, featuring tracks George Martin had in the can, plus new songs written especially. But the cinema-verité style in which Lester shot the picture gave it the feel of a documentary, one in which four cheeky but nice youngsters are pitched against their own over-excited female fans (most of them mere children, as can be seen from the crowd scenes in which Lester used real fans) and adult authority figures who are depicted as comically inept, creepy, or out of touch and pompous, the latter exemplified by an advertising executive into whose office George Harrison stumbles. ‘Now, you’ll like these. You’ll really dig them. They’re fab and all the other pimply hyperboles, ’ the advertising executive tells the Beatle, whom he assumes has come to help them promote a new range of shirts.

  ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in them,’ replies George. ‘They’re dead grotty.’

  ‘Grotty?’

  ‘Yeah, grotesque.’

  Spending time with the Beatles, Alun Owen had picked up on slang expressions like grotty and fab commonly used by and, in at least one instance, coined by the boys. The first usage of grotty in English was by George in the film, according to the Oxford English Dictionary; while fab - simply an abbreviation of fabulous - had been in common usage among young British people since 1961, but came to be associated primarily with the Beatles who, in their early days, were sometimes billed as ’the fabulous Beatles’. The Beatles’ PR man Tony Barrow wrote about the ‘fabulous foursome’ in his press releases, shortening this to the ‘fab four’. More than any other trendy term, fab suited them.

  The Beatles acquitted themselves adequately in A Hard Day’s Night, though Richard Lester thought Paul tried too hard: Paul was the most theatrical of them all. He had a girlfriend who was an actress. She and her parents and her brother went to the theatre a lot and Paul went with her. He loved the theatre. He loved show business, as it were, in a way that the others didn’t care. I think this was a disadvantage to him, that in a way Paul sometimes tried too hard to act … Had he been less enamoured of the trappings of cinema and the theatre he might have been a bit more relaxed.

  It would be hard for Paul to be truly relaxed. He was under too much pressure. While making the movie, the Beatles were also recording an original soundtrack album, for which he and John had to come up with new songs. They rose to the challenge, with Paul largely responsible for the stand-out tracks, such as ‘Things We Said Today’, the lyric of which had a new maturity. Paul was also responsible for ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, a 12-bar blues rearranged by George Martin as the band’s next single, going to number one virtually simultaneously in the UK and the USA. The success of the song in the United States was proof that American fans hadn’t forsaken them after their flying visit. Indeed, plans were being finalised for a full-scale US tour. Before this took place the Beatles were committed to play shows in Denmark and Holland, after which they had to schlep halfway round the world to Hong Kong and Australia. When Ritchie fell ill with tonsillitis the day before departure, stand-in drummer Jimmy Nicol was despatched in his place, clear evidence that not all Beatles were equal. It is inconceivable that the tour could have gone ahead without Paul or John.

  The mania followed the band on tour abroad, with scenes equally if not more excessive than seen in Britain and America. Young Dutchmen and women leapt into the canals of Amsterdam in a desperate attempt to reach the Beatles on a boat trip they took through the city. A girl caller got through to the Beatles’ Copenhagen hotel suite saying she was dying and her last wish was to speak to a Beatle. Journalist Derek Taylor, who had recently joined the Beatles’ entourage as an additional PR man, was taken in, but Paul had seen and heard enough of the mania to guess it was a ruse, taking the phone and ticking off the caller, as Taylor recalls: ‘“Now Mary Sue,” he said, lofty, dry and mildly admonishing, “you know you shouldn’t go around telling lies …”’ When they got to Australia, so many people gathered around the Beatles’ Melbourne hotel that the city centre was brought to a standstill, while one fan reportedly burst a blood vessel screaming. It was at this frenzied stage in the tour that Ritchie rejoined the band, continuing with them for shows in Sydney, where Paul celebrated his 22nd birthday with a party attended, at his own suggestion, by the winners of a beauty competition.

  All these foreign concerts were triumphs. Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Australia had fallen to the Beatles, to paraphrase Brian Epstein. Only Paris held out, but France would fall. Two and a half years earlier, Brian had been the manager of a provincial record shop. Now he saw himself as the Napoleon of Pop, and his next campaign would be his biggest: the Beatles’ invasion of the United States.

  CONQUERING HEROES

  Before going back to the USA there were two British premières for A Hard Day’s Night, the first at the Pavilion in London on 6 July 1964, Jim McCartney bringing a delegation of ‘relies’ down from Liverpool to support ‘our Paul’. The film opened with the resounding first chord of the theme song - CHUNNNNG! - sending John, George and Ringo running helter-skelter towards a train station, pursued by their fans and the press. The lads meet Paul, dressed in disguise, and board a train where they bump into some schoolgirls (one of whom, a pretty young model named Patricia ‘Pattie’ Boyd, became George’s girlfriend, later his wife). The subsequent plot was simply the process of the Beatles coming to London to perform on a TV show, which gave them an excuse to perform their songs. Over and above the musical sequences, which were excellent, the Beatles came across as likeable and natural lads with aspects of a comedy troupe, almost cartoonish in appearance, while the picture itself was clean and sharp. As the credits rolled, you wanted more.

  Afterwards everybody repaired in a celebratory mood to the Dorchester Hotel where Paul introduced his father to Princess Margaret, a hitherto unimaginable situation for the Liverpool cotton merchant. At the end of a long meal, with the ‘relies’ lounging around the table, full to bursting, Paul presented Dad with another surprise: a picture of a racehorse. ‘Thank you, son. It’s very nice,’ said Jim, who was to celebrate his 62nd birthday the following day. ‘It’s a horse,’ Paul told his old man, with the exasperation of youth.

  ‘I can see that, son.’

  ‘It’s not just a painting … I’ve bought you a bloody horse.’ So Jim McCartney came into possession of Drake’
s Drum, a £1,000 gelding. The affection between father and son represented by this gift is a contrast to John Lennon’s unhappy relationship with his father, the ne’er-do-well Freddie Lennon, who’d made himself known to his son recently after years of estrangement, only to be greeted with icy indifference. Later John slammed a door in his father’s face.

  Still, the McCartney family was not without their disagreements. At 22, Paul found himself an exceedingly rich young man in a family who’d never had much. Though careful with his money, Paul felt compelled to share his good fortune around. He handed out gifts, notably Dad’s racehorse, and helped family members financially. Brother Mike told Paul he couldn’t support himself on the bits of money he was earning as a member of Scaffold; at least he couldn’t live the way Paul was. ‘Sometimes my brother is rather slow in catching on but when eventually he does, he soon makes up for it,’ Mike would write in his memoirs. ‘On seeing the impossible situation I was in, being a Beatle brother with very little personal money … he arranged for me to receive a weekly tax-free “covenant” of ten pounds from his accountant till I was on my feet.’ Several other family members became financially dependent on Paul, who helped them buy houses, and in some cases put them on what became known as the McCartney Pension, so they never had to work again. This didn’t necessarily engender harmony.