By far the most striking thing about With the Beatles was its cover. Brian had for months been showing his proof copy to friends and asking anxiously what they thought. Gone was the look of the Please Please Me album—the cheap, cheeky faces, looking down from high-rise flats. A top London fashion photographer, Robert Freeman, had shot the Beatles, heads and shoulders only, in black and white. Faces halved by shadow, hemmed in by their bangs and high polo necks, they could have been a quartet of young actors or art students. It was the same technique Astrid had used to photograph Stu Sutcliffe three years before in Hamburg, in her black-and-silver room.
A week later came their fifth single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” that advance orders of one million copies placed instantly at number one. The pre-Christmas air seemed to transmit little other than that loping, hand-clapping beat. The album, meanwhile, had its independent existence in the stunning combination of Lennon-McCartney songs like “All My Loving” and “It Won’t Be Long,” with Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” Berry Gordy’s “Money,” and other R&B songs so little known to the general pop audience, it was thought the Beatles must have written those also.
Never again would pop music be considered the prerogative only of working-class boys and girls. With the Beatles was played not only in the projects but in West London flats, in young ladies’ finishing schools, and in the blow-heated barns where country squires’ daughters held their Christmas dances.
On November 5, the day after the Royal Command show, Brian Epstein flew to New York, accompanied by Billy J. Kramer, that handsome but awkward young man. Landing at the airport still called Idlewilde, they drove in a yellow cab toward the magic skyline that reveals itself at first in miniature like the crest on a souvenir ashtray. Brian, on the drive, was full of what Broadway plays they would see in between his several very important business meetings. These meetings, Billy J. gathered, were the merest preliminary to the Beatles’ instant subjugation of the North American continent. Even if Brian himself ever believed this, he ceased to do so as the cab entered Manhattan and the streets became sheer glass on every side.
America up to now had regarded the Beatles as it regarded every British pop performer—an inferior substitute for a product that, having been invented in America, could only be manufactured and marketed by Americans. The view was reinforced by the half-century in which American artists, through every musical epoch, had dominated the English market as against only one or two freakish incursions by English acts traveling the other way. In the same fashion now, American pop music dwarfed its English counterparts in size and wealth, in the complexity of its chart systems and the corollary role of hundreds of independent radio stations. Even so big a British name as Cliff Richard had attempted only one American tour, halfway down the bill, amid deafening indifference. The British, it was agreed in the boardrooms of Manhattan, should stick to the things they knew best, like whisky, woolen sweaters, and Shakespeare.
America in late 1963 had already ordained the new direction of teenage music. Three brothers from California, Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, and their cousin Mike Love, known collectively as the Beach Boys, were already internationally famous for their close-harmony songs hymning the West Coast pleasures of surf riding, drag racing, and crew-cut, freckled sex. That surfing sound, like previous pop styles, reflected a nation still jingoistically confident in the perfection of all its values; whose new young president, John F. Kennedy, had precisely the same sun-healthy, college-fresh appeal.
George Martin had found the anti-British barrier impossible to penetrate, even though, thanks to Sir Joseph Lockwood’s entrepreneurial drive, EMI owned the American Capitol label. When “Please Please Me” went to number one in Britain Martin had immediately sent it to Jay Livingstone, Capitol’s boss in New York. Back from Livingstone came the reply, “We don’t think the Beatles will do anything in this market.”
Martin, to his great annoyance, was therefore obliged to hawk “Please Please Me” around other American labels in direct competition with Parlophone’s own parent company. It was finally accepted by Vee Jay, a small Chicago-based firm. Released by Vee Jay in February, “Please Please Me” had instantly vanished without trace. The same happened in May with “From Me to You.” Martin offered it to Capitol, who gruffly refused it; issued by Vee Jay, it rose no higher than 116th in Billboard magazine’s chart.
In August, when “She Loves You” began its eight-week blockade of the British charts, Martin appealed for the third time to Jay Livingstone, and was again told that in Capitol’s opinion the Beatles had no prospects in America. Instead, “She Loves You” was issued by a small New York label, Swan. The sound engulfing the British Isles did not even penetrate the Billboard Hot 100.
One American entrepreneur at least—a tubby, sentimental New York agent named Sid Bernstein—disagreed with Capitol’s prognosis. Bernstein worked for the General Artists Corporation, America’s largest theatrical agency, but having a thirst for culture, spent his leisure time attending an evening course on the subject of Civilization. “Our teacher had told us to study the British way of life as a great democracy comparable with our own. He said the best way to study England was to read the British newspapers. That was how I first heard about what the Beatles were doing over in Europe.”
Quite early in 1963, Bernstein says, he was telling his superiors at GAC that the mania he had read about in the British press could happen in New York City. “I could see what they were, and that they were going to be monsters here. I wanted them.”
Brian arrived in New York, unaware that Sid Bernstein had been trying for several weeks to contact him by transatlantic phone. “I couldn’t sell the idea to anyone at GAC,” Bernstein says, “so I decided to make it my own independent promotion. I had already booked Carnegie Hall, the most famous auditorium in New York. You couldn’t get Carnegie Hall unless you made the reservation months ahead. I chose February 12, 1964—Lincoln’s birthday. The lady I dealt with at Carnegie Hall had a thick Polish accent. ‘The Beatles?’ she said, ‘Vat are they?’ I knew that Carnegie Hall would never allow a pop concert to happen in its famous auditorium. I said, ‘They’re a phenomenon.’ ‘Oh, a phenomenon,’ she said, thinking that was maybe a type of string quartet.”
Brian had only one friend in New York. Geoffrey Ellis, the Liverpool estate agent’s son, was still working there for the Royal Insurance Society. Geoffrey had not seen Brian since he was home on vacation in 1962 and Mrs. Epstein confided to him that the family were “letting Brian get this group thing out of his system.” Geoffrey was astonished to see what a real impresario Brian had made himself; how earnestly he dissuaded Billy J. Kramer from buying a cheap shirt, “because it’s not your image, Billy.”
Dick James, the music publisher, had recommended him to Walter Hofer, an attorney who already acted for James’s company in New York. Hofer, hospitable and an Anglophile, at once invited Brian up to his office on West Fifty-seventh Street. “From the beginning he was full of questions,” Hofer remembered. “How did American TV work? How did the radio stations work? While he was in town, I gave a cocktail party for him, which was a disaster. No one had ever heard of Brian Epstein. No one came but a few people from Liberty Records, because Billy J. Kramer was signing with them.”
Similarly, no one at Capitol Records recognized the severely dapper young Englishman who came in to see their director of eastern operations, Brown Meggs. Brian had called in person to try to persuade Capitol to give the Beatles an American release. With him he had a demo of the song that John and Paul, working in the basement of Jane Asher’s house, had striven to invest with “a sort of American spiritual sound.” And, indeed, to Capitol’s hypersensitive ears, the song did have something that three consecutive British number ones had lacked. Brown Meggs, after much corporate deliberation, agreed that Capitol would release “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Even so, it was made clear to Brian, the company did not expect a great response. The release date was January 13, 1964.
Brian’s other appointment was to meet a little sharkskin-suited elderly man with heavy jowls, a gruff voice, and an air of misanthropy often detectable in those renowned as talent spotters and arbiters of the public taste. At the Delmonico Hotel, Brian Epstein, for the second time, found himself face to face with the great Ed Sullivan.
For fifteen years, Sullivan’s CBS television show had been famous for breaking in new entertainers, not only in New York but across the whole American continent via hundreds of local stations served by the CBS network. Sullivan, a former sports journalist, combined an uncanny instinct for the sensational with an air of bewilderment that his fellow Americans could find such things remotely entertaining. It was Sullivan who had booked Elvis Presley to sing “Hound Dog” on condition that the cameras showed him only from the waist up. Sullivan’s introduction then was simply a shrug and the words: “America, judge for yourselves.”
Ed Sullivan had been aware of the Beatles since his recent talent-spotting trip to Europe, when he and Mrs. Sullivan were among many travelers at Heathrow airport inconvenienced by their homecoming from Sweden. He had asked to meet them, and been sufficiently impressed to offer Brian a tentative booking on his show early in 1964.
Sullivan’s idea at that stage was to use the Beatles as a minor novelty item in a show constructed around some established American entertainer. Brian, however, insisted they should receive top billing. The Sullivan show’s producer, Bob Precht—who happened also to be Ed Sullivan’s son-in-law—remembers how surprised both he and the great man were by this unforeseen tactic. Top billing was conceded against a deal otherwise far from munificent. “I said that if we were going to pay the Beatles’ airfares out here,” Precht says, “we ought to get more than one appearance out of them.” It was agreed that the Beatles should appear in two Ed Sullivan shows, on February ninth and sixteenth, and should record more songs to be used in a subsequent transmission. The fee for each appearance would be $3,500, plus $3,000 more for the taping. “Even for an unknown act,” Bob Precht admits, “that was about the least we could pay.”
If America had not fallen, it was at least prepared to listen. Brian had that much to comfort him when, a day or two afterward, he and Billy J. Kramer flew back to London. He had persuaded Capitol. He had persuaded Ed Sullivan. Short of the fatigue, the phoning back, the waiting, and the compromise, these would seem dazzling achievements. And halfway over the Atlantic, as he read the British papers, Beatlemania grew audible again.
America, if Brian had only known it, was already his—was moving nearer his unconscious grasp as, far away in Texas, the mechanism of a high velocity rifle was cleaned and checked, and a vantage-point selected. America fell to him on the morning in Dallas that the presidential motorcade set off on its route, supremely confident and open to the sunshine, and the curbside ciné-enthusiast turned his camera toward the limousine that carried a young man’s unprotected head. This was November 22, the day the Beatles’ second album went on sale in Britain. Late that afternoon, the news began to come through that, for every English person, hardly less than every American, would fix in the memory forever the exact time, place, and circumstances of hearing it.
• • •
For their winter tour, through the deepening blizzards of national dementia, Brian entrusted the Beatles to his friend Brian Sommerville, the ex–naval officer turned Fleet Street journalist. Tony Barrow, NEMS’s original press officer, now had more work than he could handle alone. It was therefore fixed that Barrow should represent Gerry, Billy J. Kramer, Cilla, and the Fourmost while Sommerville—or rather, Sommerville’s one-man PR company—acted exclusively for the Beatles. Small, plump, already balding, he had the aspect of a country squire and a quarterdeck brusqueness that did not at once endear him to his new charges.
The tour was the most arduous one yet—six weeks of one-night concerts at Gaumont, ABC, or Odeon cinemas in a zigzag course from Cambridge to Sunderland. At the same time they were rehearsing their pantomime sketches for a special NEMS Christmas show in London, at the Finsbury Park Astoria. In Liverpool in one twenty-four-hour period, as well as their two evening concerts, they taped appearances for two television shows and performed for a convention of the Beatles Northern Area Fan Club. John and Paul were also working on a dozen new songs for the film that Walter Shenson wanted to shoot the following spring.
In university city or Midland industrial town, the procedure was invariable. Mal Evans went in first, driving the van with their equipment through the blue avenues of waiting police. At dusk, by vainly circuitous routes, would come the Austin Princess limousine containing the Beatles, Neil Aspinall, and Brian Sommerville. They would go straight to the theater, remaining in the dressing room until the performance while Neil brought in food or pressed their stage clothes and Sommerville stood guard testily outside. As soon as the curtain fell Sommerville would shoo them, in their damp suits, out through the police ranks to their beleaguered car. By midnight, they would be trapped inside some provincial hotel that, more often than not, would have stopped serving dinner at 9:00 P.M. On many nights, all they could get to eat were dishes of cornflakes.
In Lincoln, Ringo developed an earache and had to be rushed to the hospital, disguised in an overcoat, hat, and spectacles that, as one reporter noted, “made him look like Brecht being smuggled out of Germany.” Near Doncaster, their car ran out of petrol and they had to thumb a lift in a truck. In Sunderland, they escaped from the theater by running into the adjacent fire station, sliding down the firemen’s pole, and escaping in a police car while one of the engines rushed out to create a diversion.
In Liverpool, the Empire theater had been commandeered by the BBC for a special edition of Juke Box Jury featuring all four Beatles as panelists. Disgruntled technicians, faced with this unprecedented journey outside London, were heard muttering that BBC must stand for “Beatle Broadcasting Corporation.” Before the show, the Beatles mischievously rearranged their name cards so that George Harrison sat behind the one reading “John Lennon.” As panelists, they were not only far funnier and livelier than the usual aging disk jockeys and empty-headed starlets; they also displayed a depth of musical knowledge seldom, if ever, heard on that show before. When the Swinging Blue Jeans’ version of their old Cavern showstopper “Hippy-Hippy Shake” was played, George remarked what a big fan he was of the song’s composer, Chan Romero. At that time, the only Chan most teenage record buyers had ever heard of was Charlie.
The advantage of Brian Sommerville as publicist was that he spoke in an upper-class voice, in a tone to which policemen, doormen, and other potential obstacles almost all automatically responded. The Beatles, hemmed in as tightly by authority figures as by screaming fans, recognized the need for someone, like Sommerville, peppery and abrasive. “I had a good relationship with John; he called me ‘old baldy-something-or-other.’ Paul and I got on well enough, though I always found him rather two-faced. Ringo was just Ringo. I did have one serious fight with George. He never regarded me with anything but muffled dislike.”
Throughout the tour, Sommerville was left totally in charge to screen the press seeking interviews, sign the hotel bills, and negotiate strategy with theater managers and the police. Brian would appear at irregular intervals, in his overcoat and polka-dotted scarf. “He’d float into the dressing room, usually with a piece of paper for them to sign,” Sommerville says. “But if there was any trouble, you could count on Brian to be miles away. He had this wonderful knack of being able to disappear during a crisis.”
Backstage rows were frequent between Brian and Sommerville. It irked Brian to see anyone close to the Beatles but himself. He even suspected Sommerville of trying to usurp his own growing fame as their mentor and mouthpiece. “Brian already saw himself as a star in his own right,” Sommerville says. “He wanted to do the things they did, like appearing on Juke Box Jury. He was hurt because he hadn’t been asked to chair the special Mersey edition of Thank Your Lucky Stars. The worst rows we had were after I’d made s
ome comment, and the press quoted me instead of Brian. ‘You had no right to do that!’ he’d say.”
And yet, at times, Brian would seem unable to pluck up courage to go into the Beatles’ dressing room, but would stand out in the auditorium, suddenly as distant from them as the farthest screaming girl. “I saw him once,” Sommerville says, “in one of those northern ABCs, when the curtains opened and the scream went up. He was standing there with tears streaming down his face.”
It had become clear at an early stage, to various sharp-eyed people, that the Beatles were capable of selling far more than phonograph records by the million. Beatlemania demonstrated as never before to what extent young people in Britain were a market, gigantic and ripe for exploitation. From October 1963 onward Brian Epstein carried in his wake a little trail of businessmen, coaxing, cajoling, sometimes begging to be authorized to produce goods in the Beatles’ image.
Merchandising as a concept was largely unknown in mid-twentieth-century Britain, even though the Victorians had been adept at it. Walt Disney, that peerless weaver of dreams into plastic, was imitated on a small scale by British toy manufacturers, producing replicas of television puppets. Pop singers until now had lasted too short a time in public esteem to sell any but the most ephemeral goods.
No precedent existed, therefore, to warn Brian that there were billions at stake. He saw the merchandising purely as public relations—a way to increase audience goodwill and keep the fan club happy. He worried about the fan club and keeping it happy.
The first Beatles products catered simply for the desire, as strong in girls as in boys, to impersonate their idols. In Bethnal Green, East London, a factory was producing Beatles wigs at the rate of several thousand each week. The hairstyle that Astrid’s scissors had shaped for Stu Sutcliffe became a best-selling novelty, a black, fibrous mop, hovering just outside seriousness, 30s (£1.50) apiece. A Midlands clothing firm marketed collarless corduroy Beatles jackets like the one Astrid had made for Stu, the one that the Beatles at the time despised as “Mum’s jacket.” Girls, too, wore the jackets, the tab-collar shirts, even the elastic-sided, Cuban heel “Beatles boots,” obtainable by mail order at 75s 11d (£3.80), including shipping and handling.