There were other lingering concerns, such as a memorial to President Kennedy. Although the public had been writing the World’s Fair chief with their suggestions since the assassination, Moses was not about to make the delicate process of choosing an appropriate memorial to the slain president a democratic one; he would handle it privately and in own his way. He told his friend Gilmore D. Clarke, a respected landscape artist who had designed Moses’ beloved Unisphere, in mid-January that he wanted a sculpture or bust of Kennedy, but something that would not offend public tastes. “A really fine objective piece of portrait sculpture in the conservative tradition,” he instructed. “No distorted Epstein, Moore or Lipchitz stuff to become the subject of public controversy.” The last thing that the World’s Fair needed was another uproar regarding art, particularly one that risked incurring the wrath of an American public still mourning its fallen leader.
At the end of the month, Moses got the news that he had been fearing: President Johnson wouldn’t be able to attend the opening day ceremonies. It was a severe blow to the prestige of the Fair. Moses knew that any New Yorker old enough to remember the 1939–40 World’s Fair could recall that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had addressed the crowds at Flushing Meadow; what’s more, the speech was broadcast on a new technological device called a television, two hundred of which were strategically positioned around the city, allowing citizens to actually hear and—more importantly, see—their president. Moses also knew that when the New York newspapers found out, they would have a field day.
In the meantime, he received friendly cooperation from one of the most powerful men in show business: Ed Sullivan. The television impresario, whose eponymous-named Sunday-night variety show was one of the most-watched programs in the nation, contacted Moses in early February regarding the special World’s Fair–themed show he was preparing; if there was any aspect of the Fair that Moses wanted specifically promoted, Sullivan said, he only had to ask. The Master Builder trusted Sullivan’s showbiz instincts implicitly and responded that anything the TV host thought would “contribute to the exposition’s success” was fine with him. Sullivan’s was exactly the kind of carte blanche cooperation that Moses expected from all of New York’s media elite but, much to his endless chagrin, rarely, if ever, received.
Moses need not have worried about the presidential snub flooding the press, however: The New York media was about to become preoccupied for the next several weeks with the arrival of the Beatles, who would capture the hearts and minds of the nation’s teenagers, who would then buy their 45 singles and LP albums by the millions. The same day that Sullivan wrote Moses—Friday, February 7—the TV showman was expecting his special guests, the Beatles, to arrive via transatlantic Pan Am jet at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Jamaica, Queens, shortly after 1:00 p.m. They were coming to New York to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night, as they would for the next two weeks.
The Beatles were still something of a gamble. The previous October Sullivan witnessed Beatlemania firsthand when he happened to be at London’s Heathrow Airport at the same time that the band returned from a tour in Scandinavia. He immediately got in contact with the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, and booked the group on his show. However, his crosstown rival, Jack Paar, had secretly obtained a concert clip of the band and played it for his bemused audience in early January. Paar’s audience hadn’t been impressed. Neither had the New York Times’ television critic, Jack Gould, who wrote the next day that the Beatles were like “[Elvis] Presley multiplied by four, their calisthenics were wilder, and . . . might prove infinitely more amusing.” Gould predicted the band would flop, doubting that Beatlemania would be “successfully exported. On this side of the Atlantic, it is dated stuff.”
He had a point. In the early 1960s, rock ’n’ roll had flamed out. The proof, as Gould noted, could be found on the charts: The week that Paar aired his Beatles clip, the top song in the United States was “Dominique” by the Singing Nun—an actual Belgian nun—who became an international recording sensation (and also landed a spot on The Ed Sullivan Show). The year 1963, according to music and cultural critic Greil Marcus, was a low point for the music he grew up listening to. “Rock ’n’ roll—the radio—felt dull and stupid, a dead end,” he later wrote.
The golden age of rock ’n’ roll of the 1950s and the media sensation that had ensued was over. After his discharge from the US Army, Presley had gone mainstream, recording forgettable songs (“Kissing Cousins”) and starring in even more forgettable motion pictures (including 1963’s It Happened at the World’s Fair, filmed at the 1962 Seattle Fair). Chuck Berry’s star had faded after he was jailed for transporting a fourteen-year-old girl across state lines; Little Richard returned to the church; Jerry Lee Lewis married his thirteen-year-old cousin; and Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, and Ritchie Valens were dead. So it seemed was rock ’n’ roll.
The Beatles knew it, too. “We were new,” John Lennon confessed to Rolling Stone, rock’s paper of record, years later. “When we got here you were all walking around in fucking Bermuda shorts with Boston crewcuts and stuff on your teeth. The chicks looked like fuckin’ 1940s horses. There was no conception of dress or any of that jazz. I mean we just thought, ‘What an ugly race.’ It looked just disgustin’.” But Lennon and his bandmates knew that the roots of the Beatles sound—rock ’n’ roll, R&B, Motown, soul, pop, even flashes of country and western, all crafted with Tin Pan Alley–like polish—were anything but new. They were here to preach the gospel of American music to the country that had invented it.
The Beatles had a unique vision of American music, one that was untainted by the country’s great historic stain of race. In February 1964 music was segregated like everything else in the country. The color line in music had black music on one side (Berry, the Drifters, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, the Isley Brothers) and white music on the other (Presley, the Everly Brothers, the late Holly). Others, most importantly Elvis, a country boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, had blurred the line before, but the Beatles were different; they unabashedly and openly loved the music of black America.
“We used to really laugh at America, except for its music,” Lennon confessed in the same Rolling Stone interview. “It was the black music we dug. Over here even the blacks were laughing at people like Chuck Berry and the blues signers. . . . The whites only listened to Jan and Dean and all that. . . . Nobody was listening to rock ’n’ roll or to black music in America. We felt like [our] message was, ‘Listen to this music.’. . . We thought we were coming to the land of its origin. But nobody wanted to know about it.”
They soon would. By the time the Beatles’ jet landed at JFK, the band’s single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was the No. 1 song in the country and would be for the next six weeks. In fact, the band would have a monopoly on Billboard ’s top spot for the next fourteen weeks—an unprecedented feat at the time—with two more No. 1 songs: “She Loves You” and “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Sullivan’s gamble would pay off beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations.
America would get its first taste of Beatlemania in early 1964, the lads becoming, in many ways, their own four-man World’s Fair. If Moses wanted to know what would attract young teenagers, whom he expected to be repeat customers at his exhibit, he only had to observe the scene at JFK Airport. Waiting for the English youths—two of the mop-tops were twenty-one years old; the other pair, twenty-three years old—were three thousand teenagers who had been whipped into hysteria by a barrage of record label hype: Capitol Records had plastered posters and bumper stickers all over proclaiming messianically “The Beatles Are Coming!” Local deejays encouraged kids to “cut school” and make a beeline for the airport to “see the Beatles.” But Murray the K, who spoke in a brash, pseudo-hipster slang, turned his Queens-based AM station, WINS, into a self-styled Beatles headquarters, proclaiming February 7 “B-Day” and referring to himself as “the fifth Beatle.” Airport officials were shocked at the spectacle. “
We’ve never seen anything like this here before,” one told the New York Times. “Never. Not even for kings and queens.”
After landing, the Beatles were shuffled into a makeshift press conference with a roomful of cynical New York newspapermen, many of whom were wondering just what all the hysteria was about. They soon found themselves getting played by the quick-witted Brits, each of whom could hold their own with the most grizzled reporters. The questions came at the band rapid-fire. The answers were just as fast.
Q: “Are you for real?”
A: “Come have a feel.” (Lennon)
Q: “Do you ever have haircuts?”
A: “I had one yesterday.” (Harrison)
Q: “How about the Detroit campaign to stamp out the Beatles?”
A: “We’ve a campaign of our own to stamp out Detroit.” (McCartney)
Q: “What do you think of Beethoven?”
A: “I love him. Especially his poems.” (Starr)
In one brief, spontaneous, noisy, off-the-cuff press conference, the four lads from Liverpool did what Moses had rarely (if ever) done in four decades: They charmed the abrasive and jaundiced New York press corp. Two days later, when the Beatles played their five-song set on The Ed Sullivan Show, seventy-three million Americans tuned in to watch—a record audience for an entertainment program. That was three million more than Moses was promising to attract to his World’s Fair over two years. Someone in Flushing Meadow should have seen the writing on the wall.
New York music promoter Sid Bernstein certainly did. He had booked the band into Carnegie Hall based solely on glowing reports from the British press. Fortunately for Bernstein, the Carnegie dates were in the same month as the band’s Ed Sullivan Show appearances. “That practically ensured my dates,” Bernstein recalled, “because anything on Sullivan twice in a row was tantamount to being a superstar.”
Bob Dylan noticed, too. In February 1964 he was driving cross-country with four friends in a sky-blue Ford station wagon, trying to escape himself. Dylan was still reeling from a November 1963 exposé in Newsweek revealing his true origins—he wasn’t the half-Indian high plains drifter he pretended to be, but a Jewish kid from a working-class family in Hibbings, Minnesota. Needing a change of scene, Dylan and company left New York on February 3, meandering their way to California, where he was scheduled to play a concert in Berkeley at the end of the month. Along the way, they stopped in Virginia (where the singer’s road manager, Victor Maymudes, donated clothes to striking miners), North Carolina (Dylan knocked on poet Carl Sandburg’s door, only to be turned away), and New Orleans, where they partied during Mardi Gras. It was the festive atmosphere of the Big Easy that inspired Dylan to write a new song with stream-of-consciousness kaleidoscopic lyrics called “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
They were driving somewhere in California when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” came over the radio. “Did you hear that?” Dylan asked his friends. “Fuck! Man, that was great! Oh, man—fuck!” When the song ended, Maymudes flipped the knobs as he drove, looking in vain for another station playing the Beatles. “Don’t worry about it, man,” Dylan told him, as he stared out the window in silence for miles. “We kept driving along,” recalled Maymudes, “but we lost Bob somewhere back on Route 1.”
At seventy-five, Moses was hardly hip enough to hear what Dylan was hearing. His musical tastes included the insipid stylings of bandleader Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, not only a close friend, but one that Moses made sure played weekly concerts at the World’s Fair. Just as Beatlemania was about to hit New York City like an invading army, Moses was writing liner notes for Russian-born conductor and arranger Andre Kostelanetz’s April 1964 album Wonderland of New York—a record which he thought served as “an excellent medium to invoke the spirit of our town.” Kostelanetz’s popular radio broadcasts of light classical music and lush orchestral recordings of the American songbook helped pioneer a new musical genre: easy listening.
A week after the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan debut, Mary C. Dillion of Ridgefield, Connecticut, a young fan of both the Beatles and the World’s Fair, mailed Moses a suggestion: Wouldn’t the Beatles make “a wonderful addition” to the Fair? She noted how their Carnegie Hall concert was sold out—20,000 fans were turned away from the 2,870-seat concert hall, in fact. Perhaps, she wanted to know, could Moses use his enormous clout and “ask them” to play the Fair? “Please write me and tell me what you think of my idea.” He did.
Two days later, Moses mailed his curt response:
Dear Miss Dillion:
Absolutely nothing doing.
Sincerely,
Robert Moses
But before the World’s Fair was over, Moses would realize that his young correspondent was right. The Beatles would eventually play Flushing Meadow and prove two things in the process: One, that they were, without question, the biggest pop stars on the planet; and two, they wielded far more influence among young audiences than Moses or his World’s Fair.
15.
I don’t have to be who you want me to be. I’m free to be who I want.
—Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, February 27, 1964
I don’t care what Cassius Clay says, “You are the greatest!”
—Fan letter to Robert Moses, April 1964
In January 1964 Robert Moses, in a moment of uncharacteristic humility, told the New York Herald Tribune that “the most I can possibly expect is to be remembered for a very short time as the Archie Moore of public works.” The simple, innocuous comment, like many things Moses did, served multiple purposes. In one sentence he paid homage to his friend Moore, the former light middleweight boxing champion who had a prestigious career that spanned decades, while also passing subtle judgment on the current state of boxing, a sport that was then still a beloved American pasttime. By 1964 Moore had hung up his gloves after a lifetime in the ring; he was part of the sweet science’s old guard, representative of another era. Moore had been defeated in November 1962 at the hands of boxing’s future: a young brash pugilist unlike any other named Cassius Clay.
For millions of Americans, the twenty-two-year-old bronze-skinned Clay was a nightmare; for millions of others, he was the realization of a dream whose time had finally come. A former Olympic gold-medalist, at six feet, three inches and two hundred pounds, Clay was graceful in the ring and entertaining outside of it. He was handsome, even beautiful, and full of pseudo-poetic bravado, a man who playfully—and repeatedly—referred to himself as “the Greatest.”
While in Miami, during a brief break in their tour, the Beatles filmed their third consecutive appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show before dropping by the Fifth Street Gym, where Clay was training. Like the Fab Four, Clay was an ascendant star never far from a microphone. But when the Beatles arrived for a quick photo op with the boxer, they were annoyed to be kept waiting. “Where the fuck’s Clay?” Ringo shouted to no one in particular. As the quartet headed for the door, the Louisville Lip appeared, winning over the Liverpool Lads with his infectious wit.
“Hello there, Beatles!” he boomed as he entered the gym. “We ought to do some road shows together. We’ll get rich.” As photographer Harry Benson recalled, “Clay mesmerized them.” Used to being the most irreverent guys in the room, the band had met their match. Not that Clay was impressed. After the Beatles left, the young boxer turned to a reporter and asked, “So who were those little faggots?”
Whatever he thought of them, Clay was new, just like the Fab Four. Clay was no Jackie Robinson. As the second basemen for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the first African American to break Major League Baseball’s race barrier in 1947, Robinson endured the worst racist taunts imaginable from both fans and players, at times even his own teammates. And he endured them mostly in silence. The Dodger executives who had signed him insisted that was the only way, which ultimately made him a target of criticism by Black Nationalists. “Robinson was the white man’s hero,” Malcolm X p
ointedly told reporters with Clay at his side.
But 1964 America was a new era, and Clay was a new type of sports hero. He would not—he seemingly could not—keep quiet. He had fought—and talked—his way to a shot at the heavyweight championship of the world in late February. To claim the title, however, he had to defeat reigning champ Sonny Liston, who was as mean and vicious inside the ring as out. A surly illiterate gambler and ex-criminal with connections to the Philadelphia mob, Liston, it was said, could also punch harder than anyone else. If most Americans didn’t know what to make of Clay, they knew what to think of Liston: He was a thug.
In 1962 he had squashed the reigning champ, gentleman pugilist Floyd Patterson—who had the backing of both President Kennedy and the NAACP—in a first-round knockout. Liston epitomized everything that was ugly about the sweet science. “We have at last a heavyweight champion on the moral level of the men who own him,” New York Post columnist Murray Kempton wrote. Considered “the meanest man alive,” Liston was photographed in a Santa Claus cap for the December 1963 cover of Esquire. It was meant to be both a thought-provoking comment on race in America and a joke, but some Americans weren’t ready for such humor—not even Esquire’s sophisticated readers, many of whom wrote angry letters or cancelled their subscriptions. “We got a ton of hate mail,” recalled George Lois, the Bronx-born Madison Avenue maestro who had conceived and shot the cover, one of dozens he would create throughout the 1960s to ensure that Esquire was the most important journalistic chronicler of what was new in American culture.
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