“Brian was there as well,” Hoffman says. “He was sitting on a chair and the Beatles were sitting on the floor around him. He said the news had come through that ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was number one in the American Top Hundred. The Beatles couldn’t even speak—not even John Lennon. They just sat on the floor like kittens at Brian’s feet.”
TWELVE
“THEY’VE GOT EVERYTHING OVER THERE. WHAT DO THEY WANT US FOR?”
Early on February 7, 1964, when the New York streets were still empty but for snow and steam and fast-bouncing cabs, a disk jockey on station WMCA sounded the first note of impending madness. “It is now 6:30 A.M., Beatle time. They left London thirty minutes ago. They’re out over the Atlantic Ocean, headed for New York. The temperature is 32 Beatle degrees.”
America’s interest, until the eleventh hour, had remained no more than cursory. The American press is at the best of times notoriously parochial, and these were the worst of times. Since November 22, there had been only one newspaper story in America; only one picture, on an amateur’s movie film, endlessly replayed up to that same frozen frame. A young man, next to his wife in an open car, slumped sideways as the bullets tore into him.
Just before a Christmas holiday that very few Americans felt disposed to celebrate, Walter Hofer, the New York attorney, sat in his office on West Fifty-seventh Street. Hofer, like many New Yorkers, had the habit of perpetual work. It was one way, at least, to shut out the dull, slow, directionless feeling that, since President John Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, had shrouded Manhattan like a fog.
“Out of the blue, I got this call from Capitol Records. They wanted to know, was it right that I acted in New York for a British company called NEMS Enterprises? I told them, yes, I did. They said they were trying to find out who controlled the publishing on a song called ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ by this British group, the Beatles.”
Capitol, prepared to release that unknown British group’s record into the sluggish post-Christmas market, had received some puzzling news from out of town. A disk jockey in Washington, D.C., working on station WWDC, had somehow obtained a copy of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and was playing it on the air amid a commotion of interest from his listeners. The record had come not from Capitol but direct from London via the disk jockey’s girlfriend, who was a stewardess with British Overseas Airways.
“Capitol wanted to get clearance on the publishing side, to be able to ship a few hundred copies into the Washington area,” Walter Hofer remembers. “In fact, I had to tell them that the publishing rights had been sold to another company, MCA. Sold for almost nothing, it so happened, just to give the song any foothold that was possible over here.”
While Capitol tried to resolve this trifling matter, a second, identical commotion was reported, from Chicago. A radio station was being besieged by enquiries after playing a song called “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by this British group, the Beatles. Apparently it had been sent on tape from a friend of the disk jockey’s at WWDC, Washington. From Chicago, by the same fraternal taping process, it moved west again, to St. Louis.
In New York, as the sidewalk Santas pessimistically clanged their bells, a drastic change was ordered in the marketing strategy of Capitol Records. A week earlier, Brown Meggs and his colleagues had been uneasy about a prospective pressing for “I Want to Hold Your Hand” of two hundred thousand copies. Now three entire production plants—Capitol’s own and that of CBS and RCA—were alerted to work through Christmas and New Year’s to press one million copies.
By the time the news reached Brian Epstein in Paris, sales were closer to 1.5 million. The night disappeared, after speech had returned, in a wild spree of drinking and piggyback riding and a restaurant party, joined by George Martin and his wife-to-be, Judy Lockhart-Smith, when Brian so far forgot himself as to sit and be photographed with a chamberpot on his head.
Next morning, the American press were there en masse. Life magazine’s London bureau chief, having planned to slip over to Paris merely for lunch, found himself, to his dismay, assigned to write the week’s cover story. Equivalent responsibilities had suddenly devolved onto representatives of CBS, Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. The Beatles, roused from sleep at 1:00 P.M., were brought in, still in their dressing gowns, to meet the first deputation.
The deputation, crop-haired and collegiate-looking as all good American media types ought to be, saw at once what element in the story their readers would find of consuming but abhorrent fascination.
The New York Times tried to put it tactfully.
“Who does your hair while you’re in Paris?”
“Nobody does it when we’re in London.”
“But where did those hairdo’s…”
“You mean hairdon’ts,” John said.
“We were coming out of a swimming bath in Liverpool,” George said, amid earnest note-taking, “and we liked the way it looked.” So the story went out on the AP and UPI agency wires.
The most celebrated journalistic visitor was Sheila Graham, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last love and one of America’s most widely syndicated columnists. She waited an hour and a half while the Beatles underwent medical examinations for their forthcoming film.
At length, only George put his serious face around the door. “Why—hello, dear,” Miss Graham said, rising. “Now tell me quickly—which one are you?”
Nicky Byrne and his Seltaeb partners were already in New York. They had gone ahead of the Beatles to set up merchandising deals according to the 90–10 percent contract in their favor. Nicky Byrne wore an overcoat with an astrakhan collar. Lord Peregrine Eliot wore a scruffy leather jacket belying his ancestral home with its 130 chimney stacks.
New York, by this time, late in January, made only one kind of sound. Every radio station every few seconds played a Beatles record. Capitol had now also released the With the Beatles LP—renamed Meet the Beatles—and, to their blank astonishment, had seen it go instantly to the top of the album charts.
Nicky Byrne and his Seltaeb young men stayed at the elegant Drake Hotel and worked out of offices on Fifth Avenue. Within hours, they were besieged by manufacturers seeking a part in what the American business world already recognized as the biggest marketing opportunity since Walt Disney had created Mickey Mouse.
The procedure was that Seltaeb, having satisfied themselves as to the suitable nature of the merchandise, issued a license in exchange for a cash advance against 10 percent manufacturing royalties. An early licensee, the Reliant Shirt Corporation, paid twenty-five thousand pounds up front for exclusive rights to produce Beatles T-shirts in three factories they had bought for the purpose. Three days after the T-shirts went on sale, a million had been sold.
At Seltaeb’s Fifth Avenue office three or four presidents of major American corporations would obediently wait in line outside Nicky Byrne’s door. With magnificent hauteur, Byrne refused to talk business with anyone below the rank of president. Not the least confusion among these urgent supplicants arose from the knowledge that one Seltaeb director they might deal with was an earl. Lord Peregrine Eliot, more than once, was buttonholed by an anxious, “Say, listen Earl—”
Within a week of setting up in New York Nicky Byrne received an offer of fifty thousand dollars for Seltaeb from Capitol Records. “They were willing to pay the money straight into the Bahamas,” he remembers. “And they were willing to let us keep a half-interest in the company. But I turned them down. Part of the deal was that they were going to get me one of the top American merchandising men—a man who’d worked for Disney and who’d since retired. Then I found out that Capitol had no intention of persuading this man to work with us. I turned them down because they’d lied to me.
“Capitol wouldn’t take no for an answer. They tried everything to get me to sell. They’d checked out my background and found out about my interest in motor racing. At our next meeting, when I said I still wouldn’t sell, the Capitol man said, ‘Just take a look out of the
window, Nicky.’ Down in the street there was one of the most exclusive Ferraris ever made—the 29. Only one had come into America, to be driven by the North American Racing Team. This was it—it had mechanics standing beside it. ‘That’s yours, Nicky,’ I was told, ‘if we can do this deal.’”
“I said, ‘But it’s not as easy as that. I’ve got five partners.’ The Capitol man turned round and said, ‘Joe! Get five more of those.’”
At Capitol Records, $50,000 was hastily allocated for a crash publicity program leading up to the Beatles’ arrival on February 7. Five million posters and car windshield stickers were printed with the cryptic message “The Beatles Are Coming.” A four-page life story was circulated, with promotional records, to disk jockeys across the continent. Certain stations also received tapes of open-end interviews, prerecorded by the Beatles, with spaces left for the disk jockey’s questions. Capitol executives, like so many repentant Scrooges, were photographed in Beatles wigs.
The Ed Sullivan Show, meanwhile, had received fifty thousand applications for the seven-hundred-odd seats at its broadcast on February 9. CBS had a greater number even than for Elvis Presley’s first appearance in 1957. There was similar massive demand for the Beatles’ second appearance for Sullivan, a week later, in a special show broadcast from the Hotel Deauville, Miami. Not a seat remained for their first American concert, at the Washington Coliseum, nor for Sid Bernstein’s two concerts at Carnegie Hall. Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller was one of numerous celebrities whom Bernstein hoped to accommodate by putting extra seats on the stage.
And yet for all this brisk commercial activity, nothing had been done to connect the manifest excitement of American teenagers with the Beatles’ physical presence on American soil. A film clip of them, shown on NBC’s Jack Paar Show, brought confident predictions, notably from the New York Times, that although the Beatles might be coming, Beatlemania definitely was not. “For all Capitol and CBS cared,” Nicky Byrne says, “they were just going to walk off the plane and go to their hotel. Nobody would even have known they were in America.”
Byrne, as a merchandiser of Beatles goods, had his own reasons for desiring something more. “I kept ringing London to say, ‘Look here, Capitol are hopeless, nobody’s doing anything in the way of publicity.’ I couldn’t get hold of Brian Epstein at all. He’d completely disappeared. So had David Jacobs.”
As February 7 drew near Nicky Byrne decided to take the initiative. He enlisted the help of a T-shirt manufacturer and of two New York radio stations, WMCA and WINS. “Every fifteen minutes, the same announcement was made over the air. A free T-shirt for every kid who went out to the airport to meet the Beatles.”
The objects of all this ferocious maneuvering were seen off from Heathrow Airport by one thousand banner-waving fans whose screams Cynthia Lennon mistook, in her innocence, for the noise of their waiting Pan Am jet. Cynthia was to accompany the party and, such was the momentousness of the occasion, even received permission to be photographed by the press corps that packed the VIP lounge. No departure from Britain had so mingled national acclamation and hope since Neville Chamberlain’s flight to Munich in 1938.
The greater part of Pan Am flight 101 was occupied by the Beatles and their entourage. They themselves sat in the first class cabin with Brian, Cynthia, and a new friend, the American record producer Phil Spector. Certain favored press friends also traveled first class, such as Maureen Cleave from the Evening Standard and a Liverpool Echo journalist, coincidentally blessed with the name George Harrison. Harrison, when he retired from Fleet Street in the 1950s, had thought himself out of the rat race. Now he found himself bound on the world’s biggest assignment, with expenses, which, for the thrifty Echo, was equally phenomenal.
In the economy cabin sat Dezo Hoffman and the two road managers, Neil and Mal, already deep in their task of forging Beatle signatures on thousands of giveaway photographs. Scattered among the other press, and eyeing each other just as balefully, was a contingent of British manufacturers with ideas for new lines in Beatles merchandise. Unable to contact Brian Epstein on the ground, they hoped he would prove more accessible at thirty thousand feet. Notes were passed to Brian throughout the flight, and endorsed with a polite refusal.
The Beatles, though resolutely laughing and larking, all showed signs of terror at what lay ahead. None could be convinced they were any different from previous British entertainers who had taken on America, and lost. The example of Cliff Richard was frequently mentioned. George, on a visit to his elder sister in St. Louis, had seen Cliff’s film Summer Holiday relegated to a drive-in second feature. Nor did the work permits Brian had obtained make them feel very special. The H2 classification allowed them to play, within a strict two-week period, “so long as unemployed American citizens capable of performing this work cannot be found.”
Paul McCartney strapped himself tightly into his safety belt, not unbuckling it throughout the whole flight. To Maureen Cleave and Phil Spector he confessed the same unease that George did to his namesake from the Liverpool Echo. “He mentioned all the big American stars who’d come across to Britain,” Harrison said. “He’d been across, unlike the others; he knew what the place was like. ‘They’ve got everything over there,’ he said. ‘What do they want us for?’”
America, at first, presented only the normal aerial view of coast and long piers and the snow-flecked scrubland up to the runway edge. Even after the wheels struck tarmac, no particular welcome was visible save in the earmuffed men who walked backward, signaling with their small round bats. Then, as the terminal buildings came into view, the prospect dramatically changed. Five thousand people waited like a mural beyond the thick window glass. “The Beatles had no idea it was for them,” Dezo Hoffman says. “They thought the president must be going to land in a minute.”
The opening of the door let in a sound that made Heathrow and its cataclysms seem merely decorous. Not only were there more fans than the Beatles had ever seen before: They also made twice the noise. Screaming, they hung over balconies and retaining walls; screaming, they buckled against a one-hundred-man police cordon, oblivious to peril or pain. Blended with the shriek was the shout of photographers, equally possessed, who approached the aircraft clinging to a hydraulic crane. As the Beatles began to descend the steps, a girl on the terminal’s third outside level flung herself into space and hung there on the arms of two companions, crying: “Here I am!” Near the bottom step stood the first intelligible New Yorker, a policeman. “Boy,” he was heard to remark, “can they use a haircut.”
Brian Sommerville, their press officer—who had arrived two days earlier—advanced through the uproar accompanied by Pan Am officials, not the least of whose concerns was to cover up the Beatles’ BEAtle inflight bags. As the remaining passengers descended each received from Capitol Records a packet consisting of a photograph, an “I Like the Beatles” badge, and a Beatles wig. The Beatles had by now reached customs, where every item of their luggage was examined. In one direction, several hundred howling girls were chased back by police and security men; the other way, about one thousand more flung and flattened themselves like insects against the plate-glass wall.
On the first floor of the main terminal, where two hundred journalists waited, Brian Sommerville began to show his quarterdeck irascibility. The photographers, massed in front of reporters and TV crews, were making too much noise for any formal question to be heard. Sommerville, after several more or less polite injunctions, grabbed a microphone and snapped: “Shut up—just shut up.” The Beatles concurred, “Yeah, shurrup.” This produced spontaneous applause.
The New York press, with a few exceptions, succumbed as quickly as the fans. Within minutes, one svelte and sarcastic woman journalist was babbling into a telephone: “They are absolutely too cute for words. America is going to just love them.” On another line, an agency reporter began his dispatch: “Not since McArthur returned from Korea…” Meanwhile, in the conference room, their 198 colleagues continued the interrogation that was su
pposed to have been ironic and discomfiting but that had produced anything but discomfiture. The Beatles were at their flash-quick, knockabout, impudent best.
“Are you going to have a haircut while you’re in America?”
“We had one yesterday,” John replied.
“Will you sing something for us?”
“We need money first,” John said.
“What’s your secret?”
“If we knew that,” George said, “we’d each form a group and be managers.”
“Was your family in show business?” John was asked.
“Well, me dad used to say me mother was a great performer.”
“Are you part of a teenage rebellion against the older generation?”
“It’s a dirty lie.”
“What do you think of the campaign in Detroit to stamp out the Beatles?”
“We’ve got a campaign of our own,” Paul said, “to stamp out Detroit.”
Outside the terminal, four chauffeur-driven Cadillacs waited. The Beatles, ejected rather than emerging from the rear entrance, were each lifted bodily by two policemen and thrust into a Cadillac. Long after they had returned to England their arms would still bear the marks of this helpful assistance. Paul, in addition, had a handful of his hair wrenched by a photographer, to see if it was a wig. “Get out of here, buddy,” a policeman told the leading chauffeur, “if you want to get out alive.”
Outside the Plaza hotel on Fifth Avenue stretched a sea of screaming teenage humanity on which a squad of mounted policemen bobbed as ineffectually as corks. Reservations had been made a month earlier in the individual names of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr, four “London businessmen.” At the time, the hotel checked only as far as to ascertain their good financial status. Directly the true nature of their business became known, a Plaza representative went on radio, offering them to any other New York hotel that would take them.