The Beatles Are Here!

by Penelope Rowlands

  It was an incongruous sight last night, one that brought together the chic and shriek sets. The latter sat mostly in seats ranging from $5 to $25 each; the former sat mostly in seats costing $50 each (380 were sold) or $100 each (224 were sold).

  The Beatles, when they finally got on stage, shortly after 10 P.M, sang for 25 minutes strumming out tunes that nobody could hear. They sang 10 numbers, but as they did, teenagers rose to their feet and jumped and twisted in the aisles; others tossed jelly beans, slices of bread or rolls of toilet tissue toward the stage.

  Flashbulbs illuminated the theater, from the orchestra up to the remote reaches of the upper balcony, and policemen stood elbow to elbow in front of the high stage, neither frowning nor smiling, just looking tired.

  For everybody, the Beatles, and their adoring fans—it was a long hard day and night.

  Fooled by Chauffeur

  The Beatles, who had been in Dallan [sic] and stopped over in the Ozarks earlier yesterday, landed in a remote cargo area to avoid the mobs at Kennedy Airport. Then, at 5:30 P.M., they left by helicopter for Manhattan.

  At that time, there were 4,000 teen-agers squashed behind police barricades along 43d Street and Seventh Avenue near the theater.

  Unwisely, they assumed that these spots would give them a view of the Beatles’ entrance. But at 6:10, the Beatles’ chauffeur, Louis Savarese (whose biggest thrill behind a wheel came when he drove the King of Burundi to the World’s Fair this summer), slyly slipped the rented Cadillac through West. 44th Street, sliding up on the sidewalk just beyond Sardi’s.

  Then, as a few dozen teenagers spotted the British mopheads, and came rushing and howling toward the car, 40 policemen ringed the singers. The best the girls could do was smear fingerprints over the car, and rock it back and forth a bit. By then, however, the Beatles were safely indoors,

  Many girls—there were relatively few boys at the Paramount last night—were in obvious pain at having missed the Beatles’ entrance: a few of them began to weep. Others just howled louder than before.

  Awarded a Scroll

  By 8 P.M., the theater was filled. The pre-Beatle show included songs by Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme, Leslie Uggams and the Tokens, Bobby Goldsboro, the Shangri-Las, the Brothers Four, Jackie De Shannon and Nancy Ames. All of them worked without fees, as did the Beatles.

  Following their performance, the Beatles were honored with a presentation of a scroll by Leonard H. Goldenson, chairman of the United Cerebral Palsy Associations. It read:

  “To Jack Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr who, as the Beatles, have brought an excitement to the entertainment capitals of the world and who, as individuals, have given of their time and talent to bring help and hope to the handicapped children of America.”

  After their 10th number, the Beatles ran off the stage and left the building at 10:45 P.M., before the crowd inside could get to them.

  The chic set was not interested in chasing them, for they—those who had either $50 or $100 tickets—had a champagne party in the downstairs lobby to attend.

  In seven limousines, the Beatles and 14 members of their entourage sped to the Riviera Idlewild Hotel, for a night of rest before flying back to England today.

  Only two people were in the lobby when the Beatles arrived, neither of them Beatmaniacs. They were reading newspaeprs [sic] and went back to them when the Beatles disappeared up the elevator.

  In Love with Gorgeous George

  by Penelope Rowlands

  (the girl in the middle in the photo)

  THE ARTICLE, WRITTEN by Gay Talese, ran in the September 21, 1964, issue of the New York Times. Headed “Beatles and Fans Meet Social Set,” it described how almost four thousand “hysterical teenagers, who should perhaps have been home in bed or doing their homework,” had gathered at the Paramount Theatre the night before. Arriving hours before the group was due on stage, they “screamed and squealed at everything.”

  A photograph shows a row of young women doing exactly that behind a banner reading “Beatles Please Stay Here 4-Ever.” The girls have an operatic look: They might be a row of divas, mouths open wide in song, arms flung dramatically wide.

  I’m standing dead center, pushing forward, with a frenzied expression. I’m flatchested, freckle-faced, and curly haired—a very young thirteen. For months I’ve been screaming and squealing every chance I get. I’ve snuck into hotels with groups of similarly obsessed girls. I’ve chased after autographs, any possible souvenir, including a square of fabric from John Lennon’s boxer shorts that I bought for a dollar from an ad in a fan magazine. The thought that this might be a hoax crossed my mind, but only briefly. I knew for a fact that this cloth had once touched a Beatle’s flesh. Somehow, I could tell.

  When I first opened the Times and saw this photo, after school in my family’s crowded apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, it could have been a thrill. But it distinctly wasn’t. I prayed that my mother would miss it, but she was no sooner home from her secretarial job at St. James’s, the Episcopal church our family had attended for five generations, than the phone rang with family friends passing on the news. By the time my new stepfather—I couldn’t bring myself to pronounce his name—returned to our apartment for the first time, I was on my way to being grounded for eternity.

  It was the first day of their, our, new conjugal life. They’d headed off on their honeymoon the week before, leaving us three children in the care of our maternal grandmother. Racing off to Bucks County with a man we scarcely knew, my mother called out: “Be sure you don’t go down to the Beatles’ hotel while I’m gone!”

  I ignored her, of course. I couldn’t have done otherwise, for George Harrison was the most important person in my life. While I first fell for his looks—he was twenty, jocular, glossy haired—my devotion went far below the surface. I knew that he would understand me as no one else did, and that I would do the same for him.

  Loving George was more than just a feeling, it came with a future, a life. I’d imagine us making the scene together in Swinging London—the locus of everything that mattered back then. I kept his picture in a cheap gold frame from Lamston’s and kissed it every night.

  So I really had to go.

  I headed down to Delmonico’s, the hotel where the band was staying. I’d spent time down there a month earlier, too, when the Beatles were last in town. For two days that August, the corner of 59th Street and Park Avenue became an encampment. Thousands of girls clustered behind barricades. Police patrolled on horseback. Tourists stopped by.

  It became de rigueur to at least have gone over to look. At one point both of my brothers went down to see if they could find me in the crowd. (They couldn’t.) I was astonished that my studious older brother, Eliot—an opera fan, to my intense mortification—had made the pilgrimage. Nine-year old Richard became an instant convert. “It was exciting!” he recalled, years after the fact.

  The next month, when I went down there again, I took the IRT instead of the safe, familiar Fifth Avenue bus. Riding the subway made the adventure even more illicit—I wasn’t meant to take it alone. Still, with my mother and that man safely away in Pennsylvania, I felt free to do as I liked.

  I stepped off the train at the Bloomingdale’s station, climbed the filthy, trash-strewn stairway to the street, then headed a block west. I could almost feel the frenzy of a thousand restive girls as I turned the corner onto Park. The crowd, when I reached it, seemed monstrous, alive. Thrilling! Policemen patrolled in pairs; passersby stopped to stare.

  I took my place among the pack, my sisters in screaming, girls who, in memory, look remarkably alike, with the straight hair I envied; their Beatles-inspired bangs cascaded glossily down past their eyebrows. When I arrived they were talking excitedly among themselves. John—someone was sure of it—had been sighted on the eighth floor. We stared up, as one, and waited. Whenever we saw a shadow move, or a curtain ripple, we’d shriek.

  We’d been screaming together, all over New York, for the past
six months. Just weeks earlier, we’d waited in a quiet frenzy at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, where the brightly lit stage looked silvery in the humid, late summer night. When the Beatles walked out, four tiny stick figures in the distance, we rose as one. We heard only a chord or two of music. Mainly there was this enormous roar, and we were part of it. After forty minutes or so the figures retreated, the stage went dark, and we emerged from our collective trance. I would be hoarse for days.

  Why did we scream? In my case, it seems clear. My world was closing in. My American mother had brought us back to her native New York from England, yanking us out of her unhappy marriage, some years earlier. Lately she’d become unrecognizable, sipping bourbon with her new husband—a “Mad Man” before the term was coined—each night in a ritual they call “The Cocktail Hour” and laughing at things that don’t seem funny at all. I slink past them, hoping not to be noticed, yet craving attention in a way that feels almost physically like pain. I head for my room, a shrine to the Fab Four, its walls covered with pictures from fan magazines (including my favorite, which offers an “A to Z on Gorgeous George”). Enveloped by the Beatles, in love with George, I am safe.

  In my free time I roam the city in quest of one band or another. One Sunday, my best friend, Addison, and I, lurking outside the Ed Sullivan Theatre on Broadway in hopes of encountering the Dave Clark Five, find ourselves, anticlimactically, face-to-face with an elderly French singer instead. We ask for his autograph but, in truth, we couldn’t care less.

  Standing around us are girls wearing tweed caps over their long black bangs. With their dark eyeliner and kabukiesque foundation makeup, they’ve got The Look, the one that I, in spite of my white lipstick and mod touches, can never quite pull off.

  They don’t look our way as we chat with this creaky Frenchman whom no one has come to greet. None of us, clearly, is worth a glance. The singer signs his name twice, once each for Addison and me, and when he’s done he fixes me with a long stare. “You’re beautiful,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye that I later learn is legendary. “You’re not like them,” he adds, still twinkling, inclining his head toward the cluster of girls. “You’re a flower.” And then he is gone.

  His opinion counts for nothing, but I’m buoyed up just the same. “I can’t believe Maurice Chevalier told you you were beautiful,” Addison repeats the whole way home on the Madison Avenue bus. But the best is yet to come. A day or so later, sneaking around in the city after school, I miraculously come across the lead singer of Gerry & The Pacemakers as he and his entourage walk briskly down the hallway of a Midtown hotel.

  “Are you getting married?” I ask, falling in step beside him, in response to a rumor that’s flashed among us girls.

  “If you’ll have me,” he teases, then steps into an elevator and is gone.

  I soar. Gerry is from Liverpool—our Mecca—and his “Ferry Across the Mersey” is played every other minute on our favorite radio stations, WMCA and WABC. Joke or not, his proposal is valuable currency at school, where my life is deteriorating daily. I daydream through classes; my report card is a series of Cs and worse. When I’m told that I’ll have to repeat a grade the following year, it doesn’t matter to me at all.

  By the next summer, when the Beatles return, everything has changed. My mother has returned to Earth, and my stepfather, while never quite beloved, has at least been integrated into our lives. And I’m newly sophisticated. With my faux Courrèges dress, ivory tights, and matching white lipstick, I at last have The Look.

  On a stifling night in August I head out, yet again, to hear the Beatles play. A friend and I take our places in the volatile crowd, this time at Shea Stadium. The ant-size figures emerge. They play “Can’t Buy Me Love,” but all we hear this time, too, are the opening chords. The thrill of it all lasts long after a helicopter arrives to whisk the band away.

  A full year later, I’m back at Shea. It’s August once more and, of course, sweltering hot (air conditioning isn’t yet widely used). I remember one moment at the stadium quite distinctly, even as I’ve forgotten so much of the rest: the instant when, standing in the sweating, frenzied crowd, I realized that I no longer cared in the same frantic way. I shrieked, of course, but only intermittently. Suddenly, it all felt embarrassingly young.

  Today, decades later, the Beatles are revered throughout the world. But they were never adored as directly and simply as they were by us, the very first wave of Beatlemaniacs, who chased them down streets and hotel corridors and drowned out every word they tried to sing. There were thousands of us—each one was unique—but the arc of our passion was the same. There was a time for us when the Beatles were everything. But then, as we had to, we moved on.

  A Letter

  from Vickie Brenna-Costa

  Vickie Costa

  xxxxxxxxxx

  xxxxxxxxx

  October 15, 2007

  Penelope Rowlands

  c/o Vogue

  4 Times Square

  New York, NY 10036

  Dear Penelope,

  I more than enjoyed your article “Nostalgia” in the August Issue of Vogue.

  Still sipping wine from my very late supper on Monday Oct. 8th, around 10:20 pm NY time. . . . I was leafing through Vogue when I came to your article on the Beatles.

  It quickly took me back in time to those very days you spoke about . . . for I too was a bonafide Beatlemaniac. However, when I turned to page 106 and saw the photo of the “row of divas” it was so surreal . . . as I saw myself right there, Brownie camera in hand!

  I screamed to my husband “I’m in Vogue magazine!”. He said “C’mon, don’t be ridiculous.” I had to look again. No, there I was standing next to my childhood friend so I knew it was me.

  I almost flipped out! You see, I never saw the original article in the Times. And here I was 43 years 17 days later! . . . My 15 minutes had arrived!

  I am your “screaming sister” on the left side of you (with camera) And I remember talking with you that very day, for I too was very much in love with George.

  Your Forrest Hills/Shea Stadium descriptions were right on! It was a very special time in a young girl’s life. And yes—as we had to—we moved on.

  For me to happen upon your article was sheer serendipity!

  Thank you so much for writing this.

  Sincerely,

  Vickie Costa

  p.s. Did you get an archival print of the photo?

  Henry Grossman, photographer

  I WAS A busy photographer in 1964. I looked back at my list of job numbers. In the two weeks around my Beatles takes I was photographing Kennedy at the White House, Lyndon Johnson here, a Broadway show there. . . .

  Time magazine sent me to photograph The Ed Sullivan Show.

  I knew who the Beatles were, kind of, from the news, but not a lot. I had no expectations when I went in to shoot. I had no ideas about the band. I wasn’t listening to their music.

  I photographed the line waiting to get into the theatre. There were lines of girls waiting and screaming. While they were playing, I was photographing the audience. I saw the impact the Beatles had. The girls were screaming and crying.

  I understand that what Sullivan did was that he taped one show in New York, then broadcast it in two separate sections, so that it looked like two broadcasts. He only did one tape [from New York], but he made two shows out of it.

  [The first and third of the Beatles’ consecutive Ed Sullivan Show appearances were derived from this taping in New York; the second show was broadcast live from Miami Beach.]

  I was just amazed at the panoply of photographers at The Ed Sullivan Show. I’d seen it before: I had photographed Kennedy during the campaign and seen how groups of photographers chased him around; at his first press conference as president there were lines of them.

  I moved around during the broadcast. I shot on the ground floor. I sat in the balcony. I moved around up there. I covered it from every angle I could. After the show there was a photo opportunity where we pho
tographers lined up to get shots of the Beatles.

  At their first press conference in New York, I remember being amused by them and liking them. They weren’t smarmy or nasty or anything like that. They were just fun. They had great fun, and great intelligence.

  When [the photos of the Sullivan Show for Time] came out, the British paper the Daily Mirror called me and asked if I would go to Atlantic City for a day with the Beatles, and then a concert, and I went. (The paper had an office in New York and I was a photographer for them.) I spent a day and a night with them there.

  They were playing Monopoly and cards in a hotel. I have a picture of George lying on the floor playing Monopoly with [the singer] Jackie DeShannon. Ringo was playing poker or something with somebody.

  At one point I said, “So Ringo, how do you like America?” He took me by the arm and showed me a view of a blank wall looking over a parking lot. He said, “Henry, this is all we’re seeing of America.” I spent a day and a night with them down there.

  At the Atlantic City concert there was a lot of screaming, a lot of yelling. I don’t think I was wearing cotton in my ears at the Sullivan Show but I certainly did at the concert because of the screaming. The Beatles later said they stopped playing together because of it.

  I have a picture from Atlantic City with a cop holding his ears like this. [Lifts his hands to his ears.] It wasn’t from the music, it was from the screaming.

  The following year, the Mirror sent me to spend a week with them down in Nassau, in the Bahamas, where they were filming Help. I got to know them. They were fooling around a lot.

  When I came back to New York, I showed the pictures to Life magazine before sending them off to London.

  Life said “Go back!”

  I lived at that time at 54th Street and Seventh Avenue. The Stage Deli was right around the corner. So I went in and spoke to Max Asnas, the owner. I said, ‘I’m going back to see the Beatles, down in Nassau.’ He gave me bagels, lox, and salami to take down to them, so I did. They loved it!