The Beatles Are Here!

by Penelope Rowlands

  My long lost friend Joann was living in Arizona. I found her number, called her, and told her to get the magazine. I told her not to open it but to call me when she got it. I wanted to hear her scream. (She opened it anyway.) Then I wrote you a letter in care of Vogue but there was no reply. They obviously didn’t forward it. About two years later, it clicked in my head to try to find you. I searched for you on Facebook and there you were.

  By the way, you, Joann, Linda, and I are in the Scorsese film about George. We’re right there in the street. You can see the sign, BEATLES PLEASE STAY HERE 4-EVER. I’m fiddling with my camera, scrooched down so you can’t see my face. You and Joann are both facing the camera.

  I had a suitcase full of memorabilia: ticket stubs, buttons, magazines, pieces of towels from the Plaza Hotel (guaranteed to have been used by them . . . LOL), things like that, all kinds of things. Many years later I asked my mother for the suitcase but she had thrown it away. . . . A suitcase full of memorable treasures, gone! I would love to see that stuff now.

  It was when I saw A Hard Day’s Night in 1964 that I really saw their “true” personalities come alive. It was then that I felt a stronger connection to George. It was something in his eyes. I felt as though I knew him, really knew him, as no one else could.

  After watching the Scorsese film, I realized that, to this day, I still feel a connection, a certain affinity, with George, and I think I know why. He was a searcher. George was searching for God, and so was I.

  America’s Beatlemania Hangover

  by Debbie Geller

  AMERICA WAS STILL in mourning after the assassination of John Kennedy in November 1963. The nation was desperate for something entertaining and something light to replace the unrelenting presence of loss and grief. Then along came the Beatles, this breath of British fresh air and merriment, to charm and divert America back to mental health again. So the story goes.

  I was much too young to know anything about national moods or historical trends when I sat down with my sisters to watch The Ed Sullivan Show that Sunday night. All I knew was that we were excited beyond reason and couldn’t wait to see what they were really like. Apart from a few photographs, for most Americans, John, Paul, George and Ringo were pretty mysterious. So when they arrived in New York on February 7, there was pandemonium. It was a feeding-frenzy media circus—even if those were clichés yet to be invented.

  In the few weeks leading up to the Beatles’ arrival in New York, they had already transformed my life. And I’ll always be grateful. We lived in Levittown, Long Island [New York], the archetype of American suburbia—the first step on the ladder for second-generation Americans on their way out of the decaying cities. Conformity and upward mobility were the most obvious features in the town. And it was no place for a left-wing, atheist, divorced family like ours. We were outcasts, treated more with suspicion than curiosity.

  Within days of moving to our new home, I was asked by some of the neighborhood kids what religion we were. I had no idea of what they were talking about. I had never even heard the word before. This show of ignorance was greeted by hilarity and frustration. One girl finally begged me to just say anything. It didn’t matter what we were, we just had to be something. But I wasn’t able to indulge even that simple request. The role of local freak was given to us as a freehold. I wasn’t so much bullied as barely tolerated.

  But then a girlish democracy was created with the arrival of the Beatles. The old nasty prejudices suddenly melted away. Girls who had once teased and mocked me for everything from bad hair to reading too much were suddenly curious to know which Beatle I liked best. Life was getting easier. So when the curtain came up on The Ed Sullivan Show and the unusually animated host introduced “these youngsters from Liverpool” to a cacophony of screams, I already loved them. They were my ticket to acceptance and all the normal pleasures of being young.

  It is hard to describe how fresh and delightful they looked that night—so eager to please and so pleased with themselves in a way that was completely guileless. When they sang “Till There Was You,” the boys were introduced by name. White captions appeared under each face to distinguish Paul from George and George from Ringo.

  John was identified with the immortal tag line: “Sorry, girls, he’s married,” a phrase that’s still popular today.

  That’s how I learned that the one I liked best was George. It wasn’t Paul after all—what a revelation! During the postmortem at school the next morning, I announced my discovery with confidence. Although Paul was the undisputed favorite, my choice was accepted with respect. And no one ever made fun of me again.

  THERE CAN NEVER be another television moment like that one again—not in this hundred-channel-plus world. Forty percent of this country will never watch the same program at the same time. That’s what made this event so unusual and so memorable. Most shared national moments are bizarre, at their most benign. Usually they are tragic and traumatic. But the Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan is the rare, probably unique exception. It is the one shining occasion when 73 million people enjoyed the same thing at the same time.

  THIS HAS BEEN a freezing winter. It obviously wasn’t this cold in the winter of 1964—you can tell by the photographs. No one then looks as cold as they have in New York these days. There is also a freeze in the air that wasn’t there forty years ago. Candidates for president are talking about hope and promising to “take the country back.” I would like more than anything to believe them, but cynicism and distrust seem like the only realistic responses to politicians’ words.

  And there are no artists to capture the imagination either, no one whose vitality and talent transform the world around them. That’s what the Beatles did on that unforgettable night. The old black-and-white familiar images of four English boys on a cheap-looking stage go beyond nostalgia. Instead, they’re a heartbreaking reminder of how hard it will be to ever feel so optimistic again.

  “Cousin Brucie” Morrow, disc jockey

  IN 1962, WHEN I first started getting these records by a group called the Beatles, none of us really took it too seriously. We’d had music from overseas before, but nothing that would cause a sociological change like the Beatles did. So we didn’t think about it much.

  But then something started happening. We were watching what was going on in Europe, in Hamburg, and all the places this band was visiting. The Beatles were causing riots! This was wonderful, in a way, because we needed something to happen in music at that time. We needed something very special. The music and radio industries were getting kind of dull. Nothing exciting was happening in American music. It was getting flattened out. Music was just lying there. The attitude in corporate America was “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and that’s very wrong.

  We needed new energy.

  So when the Beatles came over, these four “moptops” from overseas, all heck broke loose.

  The band didn’t happen overnight. It was a pretty long process, at least several years. John Lennon and Paul McCartney grew up listening to American rock and roll, blues, rhythm and blues, and jazz. They loved our expression of music. They loved the Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis.

  At first they were replicating American music, they hadn’t developed their own style. Then they began taking that music, beginning with rock and roll, and refining it, adding new energy and excitement to it. They developed this over the years, and a new sound came out—this whole new British sound—based on American rock and roll. They refined it and they went wild.

  Their music was important, but what was more important at that time, in our lives and in our society, is that we needed something to latch on to, we needed to smile. We weren’t smiling too much. We had assassinations. The nation was really divided. Youth was divided against anybody over thirty. You remember the old expression “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”?

  The Beatles really helped to bring the music world, the American music industry, together. They started fixing it. Well, t
hey sort of helped to bring everybody together.

  MY CAREER AND the name Cousin Brucie were born many years before the Beatles. You can trace it back to probably ’58 when I was on [New York radio station] WINS.

  We had Elvis and the Everly Brothers and all the early, early rock and roll groups—like the Drifters. I was very involved with all of them. I did a lot of shows with them; for years I was involved with Palisades Park. So my career was developing, it was doing very, very well. Still, the Beatles were probably the most important thing that happened in my career. They gave it a tremendous surge, a tremendous surge.

  Because of the power of the New York radio station where I worked, WABC—which we eventually called “WABeatlesC”—I was the disc jockey who got the Beatles records before anybody else. This was literally due to power—because of this fifty-thousand-watt clearance from the transmitter, record companies like EMI and Capitol would make sure I received the records first. The other radio stations in the rest of the country wouldn’t get them till the next day.

  When new Beatle records came out it was huge, huge. They would arrive in my office with an armed guard and a promotion man. It was kind of weird—the guard would have an attaché case, with the new record in it, handcuffed to his wrist. I had to promise not to play it until the next day.

  AM radio, which preceded satellite radio, had an interesting physical characteristic: It bounced off of the ionosphere. If you remember your physical science, you’ll recall that the ionosphere rises at night. As it got later, the AM radio signal would bounce. The higher the ionosphere layer, the farther I would reach; by nine o’clock, I was reaching forty states. That’s how I got a national image.

  When other radio stations and Beatlemaniacs found out that I had a new record, and that I was going to be playing it, they would record it. I’d play it on the air and suddenly Pittsburgh, say, would have it or Wisconsin or Chicago. They’d have it that same night, they’d tape it off the air. It got so crazy with people taping that every ten seconds I would announce “Exclusive! Cousin Brucie Exclusive! Exclusive!” and it would completely obliterate the record. It was a terrible thing to do but the audience understood. We had to do it so nobody else would copy the record, especially our local competitors.

  Whoever got a Beatle record exclusive first won the game. We got the highest ratings. We would always get them.

  THE BEATLES HAD an amazing sociological influence. I don’t think that when they came here they knew what they were going to cause.

  Beatlemania was an amazing thing, not only for the music industry but for the clothing industry, television, and the news. People started changing the way they spoke, the way they wore their hair, the way they dressed. Everybody changed their attitudes and we suddenly all became Anglophiles. It was very funny.

  I’ll give you a cute example: A boy named Johnny would call me from the Bronx, and he’d say something like—this is before the Beatles came over, a couple of weeks—he’d say “Hey, Brucie, this is Johnny from the Bronx, I live on the Grand Concourse. Will you play a record for my girlfriend, Shirley? Play something by Chuck Berry, will ya? We love him.”

  About three weeks later this same young man would call and this is what happened: “Ello, is this his majesty Brucie? This is Sir Jonathan of the Grand Concourseshire in Bronxville, would you mind playing a record for me and me bird?”

  That, by the way, is very true. It happened many times. Suddenly everybody developed English accents and we were excited about something and people started smiling again. So the Beatles gave us something tremendous. Tremendous! A big party, that’s what they gave us.

  OH SURE, I met the Beatles many times. If you listen to my shows on SiriusXM now, you hear a promo that says something like “Hi, this is John! This is George! This is Paul! This is Ringo! We love you, Cousin Brucie!” They did that promo for me and they used to call me all the time from their car—this was before cell phones, they had mobile car phones.

  I was at the original thing, the press conference they did at Idlewild Airport (which had just been named, you know, Kennedy, JFK Airport). They came on my show several times.

  Anytime they came to New York they would come over to me because WABC—WABeatlesC—was a major station here in the city and, as I say, when I was on at night I reached forty states. Before satellite radio, that was a big deal.

  On their first visit, I was up at the Warwick Hotel where they were staying, waiting to broadcast a live interview from their suite. While they were entering the hotel, a crowd of girls surged at them from across the street. They’d been herded behind police barricades at the Hilton Hotel but, when the Beatles came in by limousine, they broke through the barricades and came running to grab ahold of their heroes. They ripped Paul’s hair and grabbed John’s clothing and a certain young lady got hold of Ringo.

  When the Beatles finally made their way upstairs, I said to Ringo, “What’s the matter? You don’t look good.” He said, “Somebody grabbed me St. Christopher’s medal,” and then I went on the air right away.

  Of course, I knew I had something very important—if you got anything like that exclusively from the Beatles, it gave you a terrific winning possibility for ratings.

  There were five or six thousand kids standing outside the hotel with their transistor radios. If I’d go over to a Venetian blind that was facing the kids, or even just say on the air something like, “Ringo, why don’t you or Paul or John go look through the window at the kids”—you’d hear the kids [imitates a roaring sound] go crazy. All you had to do was shake the Venetian blind.

  I went on the air and said to the kids: “Look, somebody must have found Ringo Starr’s St. Christopher medal.” I didn’t say “took it” or “stole it.” I said “somebody found it.”

  I said, “Look, if you return it you will not be in trouble and you’ll come up here with Cousin Brucie and you’ll meet Ringo and he’ll give you a kiss.” Well, of course the place went crazy, you heard them outside—W A A A G H!—through the windows. There were thousands of them.

  When I got off the air a Mrs. McGowen called me. She said, “Cousin Brucie, my name is Mrs. McGowen and my daughter, Angela, found Ringo’s St. Christopher medal.” Of course she ripped it off his neck, we all knew that, but “she found it,” her mother said.

  “Is she in any trouble?” she asked.

  I said, “No, on the contrary, she’s going to be a very big hero in the newspapers and television and radio because she ‘found’ the St. Christopher medal.”

  I knew right away that I had a tremendous news piece and I didn’t want anybody else to get it.

  I said, “I would like you to stay right where you are, I’m going to send a car for you.” So I sent a car for them and I sequestered them at the Hilton Hotel. That night I had my security guards from WABeatlesC get the girl and bring her back to me at the hotel. A huge number of press corps were there, television, radio, movies, you name it, all in that room, and Ringo and myself.

  If you go onto the Internet, you can see the whole thing. The young lady was there with her friends and she got a kiss and Ringo got his St. Christopher’s medal. To this day he remembers that medal and how I found it for him.

  I INTRODUCED THE Beatles at Shea Stadium with Ed Sullivan—that was a very important part of my career. The Beatles were in the dugout at Shea and they were very nervous because there were sixty-five thousand screaming kids. You could feel the cacophony, the pressure of the emotion of the place.

  John Lennon said to me, “Cuzzin”—he used to call me “Cuzzin”—“is this dangerous?” and I said, “No. John, let me tell you something. They’re there for one reason, to share space with you. This is love, you’re hearing love, emotional love, they just want to see you.” Of course I wasn’t too sure what was going to happen because it was a dangerous situation.

  On the way up to the stage Ed Sullivan was in front of me. He was a real square fellow. He didn’t really even know what the Beatles were, very honestly. He didn’t know
their power.

  So he turns to me and says, “Is this dangerous, Cousin Brucie?”

  I looked at him with his eyes bulging and I wanted to get him. I just knew I had him. And I said, “Yes, Ed, very.”

  He said, “It is? Very?”

  And then he goes up another step. I follow, and he says, “What do we do?”

  I thought to myself I got him!

  To him I said, “Ed, pray!”

  And he asked, “Pray?” He got so scared.

  Anyway, to make a long story shorter, we went up there. I introduced Ed, he introduced the Beatles. Nothing happened of any disastrous nature that day. The police asked me to patrol with them and I went around Shea Stadium with them, calming everybody down and talking to them. The police were great.

  So nothing really bad happened, everybody was contained and they were there, as I’ve said, with huge emotional love. There was so much energy—and this is something I love to say—that Con Edison, our public utility, could have turned off their turbines and electricity still would have been delivered to New York City because of the emotion and the energy.

  As for the screaming girls, it was historic, you know? Why they did it is really a great psychological question. I’ve talked to shrinks about it, psychologists about it. We all need heroes. And people tend to be very emotional. Now boys, unfortunately for them, they hold it in, they don’t get as crazy outwardly emotionally. They hold their emotions in.

  Women, young girls especially, have a capacity to let their emotions flow. And it’s good, because they release it, and that releases tremendous energy. When they have somebody they love, they build up this pressure and they release it. Men do not do that too often.