Christmas 1963 signaled a fresh avalanche of Beatles products into the shops. There were Beatles guitars, of plastic, and miniature Beatles drums. There were Beatles lockets, each with a tiny quadruple photograph compressed inside. There were red and blue Beatles kitchen aprons, bespeckled with guitar-playing bugs. The four faces and four signatures, engraved, printed, or transferred, however indistinctly, appeared on belts, badges, handkerchiefs, jigsaw puzzles, rubber airbeds, record racks, bedspreads, “ottomans,” shoulder bags, pencils, buttons, and trays. There was a brand of confectionery known as Ringo Roll, and of Beatles chewing gum, each sixpenny packet warranted to contain seven photographs. A northern bakery chain announced guitar-shaped “Beatles cakes” (“Party priced at 5s”) and fivepenny individual Beatles “fancies.”
Brian, in the beginning, personally examined the products of each prospective licensee. In no case, he ruled, would the Beatles directly endorse any article. Nor would they lend their name to anything distasteful, inappropriate, or overtly exploitive of their fans. And, indeed, parents who had scolded their children for buying trash were frequently surprised by the goods’ quality and value. The Beatles jacket was smart, durable, and well-lined. The official Beatles sweater (“Designed for Beatles people by a leading British manufacturer”) was 100 percent botany wool, hardly extortionate at 35s (£1.75).
Soon, however, unauthorized Beatles goods began to appear. Though NEMS Enterprises held copyright on the name Beatles, infringement could be avoided simply by spelling it “Beetles.” The vaguest representation of insects, of guitars or little mop-headed men, had the power to sell anything, however cheap, however nasty. Even to spot the culprits, let alone bring lawsuits against them, meant a countrywide monitoring such as no British copyright holder had ever been obliged to undertake. NEMS Enterprises certainly could not undertake it. And so, after one or two minor prosecutions, the pirates settled down, unhampered, to their bonanza.
By late 1963, the merchandising had got into a tangle that Brian had not the time or the will to contemplate. He therefore handed the whole matter over to his lawyer, David Jacobs. It became Jacobs’s job not only to prosecute infringements, where visible, but also, at his independent discretion, to issue new manufacturing licenses. Prospective licensees were referred from NEMS Enterprises to Jacobs’s offices in Pall Mall. Since Jacobs, too, was deeply preoccupied with social as well as legal matters, the task of appraising designs, production strategy, and probable income was delegated to the chief clerk in his chambers, Edward Marke.
Among the other cases currently being handled by M. A. Jacobs Ltd were several claims for damages by the relatives of passengers lost aboard a wrecked cruise ship, the Lakonia. The waiting-room where these bereaved litigants sat also served as a dumping ground for cascades of Beatles guitars, plastic windmills, and crayoning sets. Mr. Marke, though a conscientious legal functionary, knew little of the manufacturing business. So David Jacobs, in his turn, looked round for someone to take on this tiresome business of making millions.
His choice was Nicky Byrne, a man he had met at one of the numerous cocktail parties he attended. Byrne, indeed, was rather a celebrated figure at parties, of which he himself gave a great many at his fashionable Chelsea garage-cum-flat. Small, impishly dapper, formidably persuasive, he had been variously a country squire’s son, a Horse Guard trooper, and an amateur racing driver. His true avocation, however, was membership of the Chelsea Set, the subculture of debutantes, bohemians, heiresses, and charming cads that, since the mid-fifties, had flourished along and around the King’s Road.
Nicky Byrne was not a totally implausible choice, having in his extremely varied life touched the worlds of show business and popular retailing. In the fifties, he had run the Condor Club in Soho where Tommy Steele was discovered. His wife, Kiki—from whom he had recently parted—was a well-known fashion designer with her own successful Chelsea boutique.
The offer from Jacobs was that Byrne should administer the Beatles’ merchandising operation in Europe and throughout the world. He was not, he maintains, very eager to accept. “Brian Epstein had a very bad name in the business world at that time. Nobody knew who was licensed to make Beatles goods and who wasn’t. I got in touch with Kiki, my ex-wife, to see what she thought about it. I mentioned this company firm in Soho that was meant to be turning out Beatles gear. Kiki said, ‘Hold on a minute.’ She’d had a letter from a firm in the Midlands, asking her to design exactly the same thing for them.”
Nicky Byrne was eventually persuaded. He agreed to form a company named Stramsact to take over the assigning of Beatles merchandise rights. A subsidiary called Seltaeb—Beatles spelled backward—would handle American rights, if any, when the Beatles went to New York in February to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Five partners, all much younger than Nicky Byrne, constituted both Stramsact and Seltaeb. One of them, twenty-six-year-old John Fenton, had already been doing some merchandising deals of his own via David Jacobs. Two others, Mark Warman and Simon Miller-Munday, aged twenty and twenty-two, respectively, were simply friends of Nicky’s who had been nice to him during his breakup with Kiki.
Nicky Byrne’s most picturesque recruit after himself was twenty-three-year-old Lord Peregrine Eliot, heir to the Earl of St. Germans and owner of a six-thousand-acre estate in Cornwall. Lord Peregrine’s qualification was that he had shared a flat with Simon Miller-Munday. Although extremely rich, he was eager to earn funds to recarpet his ancestral home, Port Eliot. For one thousand pounds cash, His Lordship received 20 percent of the company.
Only Malcolm Evans, the sixth partner, a junior studio manager with Rediffusion TV, had any definite professional ability of any kind. Evans had met the others at a Nicky Byrne party, the high spot of which was the pushing of a grand piano through the Chelsea streets. “Nicky had got the entire Count Basie Orchestra to play at his party,” Evans says. “I remember that they were accompanied on the bagpipes by a full-dress pipe major from the barracks over the road.”
The contract between Stramsact-Seltaeb and NEMS Enterprises was left to Jacobs to draw up, approve, even sign on Brian’s and the Beatles’ behalf. “I was at my solicitor’s, just round the corner,” Nicky Byrne says. “He told me, ‘Write in what percentage you think you should take on the deal.’ So I put down the first figure that came into my head—90 percent.
“To my amazement, David Jacobs didn’t even question it. He didn’t think of it as 90 percent to us, but as 10 percent to the Beatles. He said, ‘Well, 10 percent is better than nothing.’
Christmas, far from diverting the mania, actually seemed to increase it. The Beatles became Christmas in their fancy dress, playing in the NEMS Christmas Show at Finsbury Park Astoria. One of the sketches was a Victorian melodrama in which George, as the heroine, was tied on a railway line by Sir Jasper (John) and rescued by “Fearless Paul the Signalman ’” They had acted such plays and farces for years among themselves. Mal Evans, their second road manager, stood by, laughing, as all did, at the good-humored knockabout fun; Mal had just received a savage tongue-lashing from John for having lost his twelve-string acoustic guitar.
Beatles records made the December Top Twenty literally impassable. As well as “I Want to Hold Your Hand” at number one, it contained six songs from the With the Beatles LP—indeed, the album itself, with almost a million copies sold, qualified for entrance to the singles chart at number fourteen; the customary seasonal gimmick record was Dora Bryan’s “All I Want for Christmas is a Beatle.”
Two anxiously awaited messages that Christmas went out to the British nation. The first came from Queen Elizabeth, speaking on television from Balmoral Castle. The second came from four young men, unknown a year ago, speaking to their eighty thousand fan club members in a babble of excited voices. They sang “Good King Wenceslas” and wished their subjects “a very happy Chrimble and a gear Near Year.”
“An examination of the heart of the nation at this moment,” the London Evening Standard said, “would fi
nd the name ‘Beatles’ upon it.” Under the heading “Why Do We Love Them So Much?” columnist Angus McGill said it was because “like well-bred children they are seen and not heard.” Maureen Cleave, in another article, could only conclude that “everybody loves them because they look so happy.”
In marketing terms, the figures they represented were still barely believable. “She Loves You” had sold 1.3 million copies; “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had sold 1.25 million. They had transformed the British music industry from complacent torpor to neurotic—though still unavailing—competitiveness. A tiny record label called Parlophone towered over the frantic A&R men with a run of success, unequaled to this day. For thirty-seven weeks out of the previous fifty-two, George Martin had had a record at number one. He was currently reading a memo from his EMI superiors explaining that he would not this year qualify for the staff Christmas bonus.
Pop music was legitimized—and not only socially. At the end of December a ballet, Mods and Rockers, was scored with Lennon and McCartney music. The Times published an article by its classical music critic, William Mann, who pronounced John and Paul to be “the outstanding English composers of 1963” for qualities of which they were probably unconscious. In their slow ballad “This Boy” Mann detected “chains of pandiatonic clusters,” and in “Not a Second Time,” “an Aeolian cadence—the chord progression which ends Mahler’s ‘Song of the Earth.’” He further noticed their “autocratic but not by any means ungrammatical attitude to tonality… the quasi-instrumental vocal duetting… the melismas with altered vowels.” That one article raised for all time the mental portcullis between classical and pop; it also ushered in decades of sillier prose.
No Englishman, however cantankerous, could any longer profess ignorance on the subject. Not even Field Marshal Lord Montgomery, hero of El Alamein, who, speaking from the garden where he still kept Rommel’s desert caravan, threatened to invite the Beatles for the weekend “to see what kind of fellows they are.”
Nineteen sixty-four began on a note of post-Christmas acidity. In the Top Twenty “I Want to Hold Your Hand” yielded its number-one position to a non-Lennon-McCartney song, “Glad All Over” by the Dave Clark Five. Since the Five all came from the same north London suburb, they were greeted as harbingers of a “Tottenham Sound”; they had “crushed” the Beatles, several front-page headlines said. The Daily Mail published a cartoon in which a group of girls contemptuously regarded one of their number. “She must be really old,” the caption ran, “she remembers the Beatles.”
As a prelude to America, they were to visit Paris. Brian had booked them a three-week engagement at the Olympia theater, beginning on January 15. The crowd that massed at Heathrow to see them off descried only three Beatles being herded out to the aircraft. Ringo Starr, the newspapers said, was fogbound in Liverpool. Ringo, in fact, most unusually, was having a fit of temperament and had declared he wasn’t fookin’ coming. Across the Channel, further large and small hitches waited.
The Olympia, a wholly Parisian cross between cinema and music hall, was operated by a wily French promoter named Bruno Coquatrix. For three weeks of nightly Beatles shows Coquatrix was paying Brian Epstein a fee that did not cover their travel and hotel expenses—particularly since Brian, with typical expansiveness, had booked the entire entourage into the expensive George V hotel. To offset the loss Brian Sommerville did a publicity deal with British European Airways. The Beatles were issued with special inflight bags lettered BEAtles. For carrying and prominently displaying these they and their guardians received three weeks’ unlimited air travel between London and Paris.
Brian justified the low fee, once more, against the publicity value. France, until now, had remained noticeably indifferent to Beatlemania. He was determined that the Beatles should conquer Paris, and that Paris should be in no doubt concerning who had engineered that conquest. Before the journey, he asked Dezo Hoffman the photographer to print up five hundred giveaway pictures of himself. Hoffman persuaded him this was not a good idea.
A vast contingent of British journalists went to Paris to cover the event. This time, the Daily Express led the field, having signed up George Harrison to write a daily column. The writing was actually to be done by Derek Taylor, a Hoylake-born Express reporter, formerly the paper’s northern dramatic critic. This cultural background, no less than his Italianate good looks, recommended Taylor to Brian for what was a deliberate attempt to give George a share of the limelight. “It will be nice for George,” Brian told him. “John and Paul have their songwriting and Ringo is—ah—rather new.”
The George V’s foyer was thronged with expectant photographers, hungrily noting the comings and goings of various important stakeholders in the quartet. George Martin, their record producer, had flown over to supervise a German-language recording of “She Loves You.” Dr. Strach, their accountant, was there; so was Walter Shenson, their prospective film producer, accompanied by Alun Owen, a Liverpool playwright whom the Beatles themselves had requested as scriptwriter. Nicky Byrne, of the Stramsact company, was there to arrange large deals, so he expected, for Beatles merchandise in France and throughout Europe.
As well as variety acts such as jugglers and acrobats, the Beatles shared the Olympia bill with two singers whose French followings greatly exceeded theirs. One was Sylvie Vartin, France’s own turbulent pop chanteuse. The other, Trini Lopez, was an American with a huge Continental chart success called “Lemon Tree.”
Lopez’s manager, Norman Weiss, instantly sought out Brian at the George V. Weiss worked with the American General Artists Corporation, whose former associate, Sid Bernstein, had already booked Carnegie Hall in New York in the hope of being able to present the Beatles there. February 12, the date of Bernstein’s booking, was only three days after their first Ed Sullivan Show. Weiss, therefore, concluded the deal at last on Sid Bernstein’s behalf. Brian agreed that the Beatles would give two concerts at Carnegie Hall, each for a flat fee of $3,500.
They themselves were very different now from the four boys in George Martin’s studio, earnestly doing everything their producer told them. Martin, waiting at EMI’s Paris studio to supervise their German-language recording of “She Loves You” (“Sie Liebt Dich”), was coolly informed by telephone that the Beatles had decided not to come. He stormed over to the George V to find them lounging round their suite while Paul’s girlfriend, Jane Asher, poured out tea. Such was Martin’s schoolmasterly wrath that all four scattered in terror to hide under cushions and behind the piano.
On the eve of their first concert, while the French and English press jostled for position outside, John and Paul slept until 3:00 P.M. Dezo Hoffman in the end accepted the hazardous job of waking them. “I told John, ‘Paris-Match is waiting. They want to do a cover story.’ ‘Paris-Match?’ John said. ‘Are they as important as the Musical Express?’”
Emerging into the Champs-Elysées in a circle of retreating lenses they found Paris rather less than ecstatic at their arrival. According to Hoffman, very few passersby even recognized them. The British press made a valiant attempt to stimulate Beatlemania, posing John and Paul at a sidewalk café and hedging them in among waiters and reporters. Vincent Mulchrone remarked on the prevailing apathy in his dispatch to the Daily Mail. “Beatlemania is still, like Britain’s entry into the Common Market, a problem the French prefer to put off for a while.”
Backstage at the Olympia the following night naked violence broke out after the French press had had the Beatles’ dressing-room door slammed in their faces. French photographers, especially those who have served in theaters of war like Algeria and Indochina, are not so easily discouraged. A fierce scuffle followed in which Brian Sommerville received a rabbit punch and Brian—who tried to interpose himself with outstretched arms and a querulous, “No—not my boys!”—was shoved backward by a burly French pressman who was simultaneously treading on his toes.
The show ran late, as French shows invariably do, and the Beatles did not go onstage until well after midnight
. Trini Lopez, who had closed the first half hours before, seemed much more like top of the bill. To add to their unease, a glimpse through the curtains showed the audience to be almost entirely male. “Where’s all the bloody chicks then?” they kept asking in agitation.
During the performance their usually reliable Vox amplifiers broke down three times. George, enraged by his fading guitar, began to complain openly of sabotage. Neither John nor Paul made any attempt to speak French, and the audience, for its part, evinced boredom toward Lennon-McCartney songs. All they seemed to want were rock ’n’ roll numbers like “Twist and Shout,” which they greeted with cries of “un autre, un autre.” At one point, a strange chant became audible. “Ring-o,” it sounded like. “Ring-o, Ring-o.”
The reviews next morning were tepid. France-Soir called them zazous (delinquents) and vedettes démodées (has-beens). According to Nicky Byrne the effect on merchandising prospects throughout Europe was swift and disastrous. Galeries Lafayette, the department store, decided, after all, not to fill an entire window with Beatles goods. Nor did Lambretta, the Italian motor scooter corporation, proceed with its plan to market a special model with a Beatles wig for a saddle.
The barbs of France-Soir, in common with everything French, had ceased to matter to the zazous and their entourage several hours earlier. Dezo Hoffman, eating dinner at a small restaurant with Derek Taylor, received an urgent summons back to the George V. Both returned, to find the Beatles’ suite in a state of eerie quiet.