The film received a West End premiere in July, attended by Princess Margaret and her photographer husband, Lord Snowdon. “There was a big party afterward,” Walter Shenson says. “Nobody thought that Princess Margaret would agree to come to it, so no one invited her. I said we should at least ask. It turned out that she and Lord Snowdon had an engagement for dinner but that they’d love to be asked to stop in for a drink first.
“We were all in the anteroom, having drinks before going in to the food. George Harrison gave me a look and whispered: When do we eat? I told him, We can’t until Princess Margaret leaves.” She and Lord Snowdon had this other engagement but they stayed longer and longer at the Beatles’ party, having drinks, chatting. Finally George went across to Princess Margaret and said, ‘Ma’am—we’re starved, and Walter says we can’t eat until you leave.’ Princess Margaret just burst out laughing. ‘Come on, Tony,’ she called out. ‘We’re in the way.’”
A second premiere took place in Liverpool, accompanied by a civic welcome from the lord mayor. “The Beatles were nervous wrecks about that,” Walter Shenson says. “Even though they’d just come back from a world tour, they were scared about that appearance in Liverpool. “Ah,” they kept saying, “you don’t know what people are like up there.”
They drove in from Speke Airport, along the same Woolton avenues where Paul used to cycle with his guitar on his back, and where John would struggle along with the Quarry Men, carrying a tea chest. All the way, between bus stops, crowds stood waving and cheering. Paul, to his particular pleasure, recognized Dusty Durband, his English teacher from the Institute. And there, beyond what used to be Uncle George’s dairy, was the red sandstone tower of St. Peter’s, where the annual fete would soon be held.
There was a civic reception at the Town Hall, then the four former black-leather troglodytes from Mathew Street emerged onto the balcony with the lord mayor and other dignitaries to wave to the cheering throng below. Unbeknown to them, and the adoring media, the crowd was not composed entirely of well-wishers. A few hours earlier Brian Epstein had heard that leaflets were circulating throughout Liverpool naming a Beatle as the father of a young child recently born to one of their Cavern Club seraglio. Helped by his brother, Clive, Brian had tracked down the claimants and managed to buy their silence.
• • •
It was the year they conquered the world, but did not see it. For them the world shrank to a single dressing room, buried under continents of screaming. More than once, on their zigzag flight down back alleys between the hemispheres, they would ask which country this was. “It all looked the same to them,” Tony Bramwell says. “One more stage, one more limo, one more run for your life.”
In June they toured Scandinavia, Holland, the Far East, and Australasia. Ringo Starr was having his tonsils out and missed three-quarters of the journey; in his place sat Jimmy Nicol, a session drummer small and obscure enough to scotch any rumor of permanent change. Nicol drummed with them until Melbourne, where Ringo rejoined. History from then on relates nothing further of Jimmy Nicol.
Among the entourage for the tour’s Far East and Australian segment was John’s aunt Mimi. In Hong Kong, the police cleared a path for her, crying, “John Mama, John Mama.” The sight of Adelaide and three hundred thousand fans, the largest Beatles crowd ever, proved too much for Mimi’s nerves: After glimpsing New Zealand she flew home to Woolton. “I got into trouble,” Mimi said, “for telling an Australian TV man that John used to be bad at arithmetic when he was at school. So, on TV, this man said to him, ‘If you’re bad at maths, how do you count all that money you’re earning?’ ‘I don’t count it,’ John said. ‘I weigh it.’”
In August, they returned to America to find Beatlemania so rampant as to make the British and European variety seem muted by comparison. At one point in April the first five places in Billboard magazine’s Top 100 records were Beatles records. A Hard Day’s Night, opening in five hundred cinemas across the country, had earned $1.3 million in its first week. Cinema showings were accompanied by as much screaming as a live concert.
The Beatles, traveling in their own private Lockheed Electra, performed in twenty-three cities, crossing and recrossing American air space on a journey totalling 22,441 miles, or more than 600 miles per day. At times they did not know if they were in Jacksonville, Baltimore, Denver, Cincinnati, Detroit, or Atlantic City. Everywhere, there were mayors and senators and senators’ wives and sheriffs and deputies; there were the town’s most exclusive call girls; there were handicapped children, lined up in wheelchairs near the stage, and later brought into the Beatles’ dressing room as if to see or touch them might work a Lourdes-like miracle. The sight always filled John with horror, awakening the fear of disability and disfigurement he had always tried to sublimate by pulling village-idiot faces and shambling around like the hunchback of Notre Dame. In the four’s private language, long before political correctness outlawed such words, “cripple” came to mean anyone in the dressing room who was making themself unwelcome. A murmur of “Cripples, Neil” to their roadie would be the signal for the room to be unceremoniously cleared, to their own seeming regret.
In San Francisco, at the Hilton Hotel, a woman guest was robbed and pistol-whipped, her cries unheard in the noise greeting the Beatles’ motorcade. At Love Field, Dallas, fans broke through the police barrier, climbed onto the aircraft wings, and belabored the windows with Coke bottles. Later at the hotel a chambermaid was kidnapped and threatened with a knife unless she revealed the location of the Beatles’ suite; other girls had to be rescued from the air-conditioning shaft. In Los Angeles, the postconcert escape plan featured an armored truck, all four tires of which proved to be flat. In Seattle, as the Beatles left the stage, a girl fell from an overhead girder, landing at Ringo’s feet. In Cleveland, they were physically dragged offstage while mounted police charged the arena, lassoing two hundred fans together in a giant net. In New York, the whole of Riverside Drive was cordoned off for their passing; in Toronto, they came in from the airport at 3:00 A.M., past seventeen miles of continuous parked cars. Each day the madness differed yet remained the same. It was cops and sweat and jelly beans hailing in dreamlike noise; it was faces uglied by shrieking and biting fists; it was huge amphitheaters left littered with flashbulbs and hair rollers and buttons and badges and hundreds of pairs of knickers, wringing wet.
Out of the itinerary of chaos, a single figure came to personify that ’64 American tour. His name was Charles O. Finley; he owned a baseball team, the Kansas City Athletics. He first approached Brian Epstein in San Francisco, offering one hundred thousand dollars if the Beatles would give an additional concert at his baseball stadium in Kansas City. He said he had promised Kansas City they would have the Beatles. Brian replied that the tour could not be extended.
Charles O. Finley did not give up. He reappeared in various other cities, increasing his offer by degrees to $150,000 if the Beatles would let him keep his promise to Kansas City. At length, in Seattle, as it became clear to Brian and Norman Weiss that the tour might not quite cover its gigantic overheads, Charles O. Finley and Kansas City took on a new significance. It was up to the Beatles, Brian said, and whether they were willing to sacrifice one of their few rest days. The Beatles, playing cards with George Harrison of the Liverpool Echo, said they would leave it up to Brian. So, at the rate of £1,785 per minute, Charles O. Finley and Kansas City were not disappointed.
In New York, a brisk sale was reported in canned Beatles’ breath. In Denver, the bed linen they had used at two stopover hotels was bought by a business consortium and placed, unlaundered, in a maximum security bank vault. The sheets were cut into three-inch squares and sold at ten dollars per square, each one mounted on parchment and accompanied by a legal affadavit swearing it to have once formed part of a Beatle’s bed.
John Lennon started to put on weight. The face, under the Beatles fringe and the mocking, shortsighted eyes, grew rounder—more contented, so Cynthia hopefully thought. Cyn did not know what
happened on tour, nor did she want to know. When she read the letters John received from girls, she laughed them off as he did, doing her best to mean it. She hoped that between tours he would settle down to his unenforced obligations as husband and father. And for a time, that did seem to please him—just staying in at night after Julian was asleep, smoking, reading, doodling, endlessly playing the same Bob Dylan records.
Paul McCartney was more and more often to be seen escorting Jane Asher to Belgravia parties and West End first nights. It clearly gave him huge satisfaction that Jane was not only a classy bird but also now becoming a celebrity in her own right as a stage and film actress and a panelist on television’s Juke Box Jury. With her tumbling red hair and his cheeky Beatles grin, they made a perfect couple and seemed totally wrapped up in each other—unless some big star appeared on the horizon to divert Paul’s attention. “Paul and Jane came out to a dinner party with my wife and me one night,” Walter Shenson said. “Joan Sutherland, the opera singer, just happened to be there. Paul zeroed in on her at once. He left Jane with me and my wife and stayed talking to Joan for the rest of the evening.”
George Harrison had begun dating Patti Boyd, a nineteen-year-old model with a quirky, gap-toothed smile who had played one of the schoolgirl nymphets in A Hard Day’s Night. Pale and waiflike, Patti was the archetype of 1964 high fashion. She now became an object of hatred to George’s fans, who booed and jostled her, even once tried to beat her up.
Equally rough treatment was suffered in Liverpool by Maureen Cox, Ringo’s steady since Cavern Club days. Maureen worked as a hairdresser: On many occasions, the very head she was shampooing would be uttering threats at her via the mirror. At last, Maureen, too, became public, visiting the hospital where Ringo was having his tonsils removed. A dark-haired, rather undernourished girl stood on the London pavement in bewilderment, clutching a carrier bag.
The Beatles gave entertainment also for the millions they were presumed to earn; for existing, like boy maharajahs, in clouds of spending money. George, it was reported, had changed his E-Type Jaguar for a white Aston Martin like Paul’s. Ringo, fresh from his driving test, now drove an Italian Facel Vega. John, who had not yet learned to drive, owned a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari, and a Mini Minor. Their adoption of such consumer status symbols gave vicarious pleasure; their verdict on unattainable luxury was earthily reassuring. An entire newspaper article was based on the revelation that George had tasted his first avocado. “I’ve had caviar and I like it,” he told Maureen Cleave, “but I’d still rather have an egg sandwich.”
All four spent with diminishing pleasure but at increasing speed, in the few seconds possible before the shop became a riot. John, while filming in Bond Street, ran into Asprey’s silversmiths through one door and out through another, having managed to spend six hundred pounds. All day, wherever they were, they bought themselves presents, scarcely heeding the accumulation of presents behind them: the suits by the dozen; shirts by the hundred; the movie-cameras; projectors; watches; gold lighters; the Asprey’s silverware and cocktail cabinets shaped like antique globes. Asprey’s was as good as Woolworth’s, Ringo said—they had everything spread out in the open so you could see it.
The clouds of ready money bought new homes for their families, according to pop star precedent. John’s aunt Mimi left Woolton for a luxury bungalow near Bournemouth, overlooking Poole Harbor. Jim McCartney, now retired from the Liverpool Cotton Exchange, moved out on to the Cheshire Wirral to enjoy the house, the wine cellar, and the racehorse that Paul had given him. Harry and Louise Harrison gave up their Speke council house for a bungalow in the country near Warrington. Only Ringo’s mother, Mrs. Graves, said she was happy where she was. She stayed in the Dingle at Admiral’s Grove, and her husband, Ringo’s stepfather, continued to paint the local authority’s lampposts.
The acquisition of country houses and estates for the Beatles themselves took place in late 1964, in the spirit of yet another swift shopping trip. Again, the task devolved chiefly on Dr. Strach, their accountant. Strach lived in Esher, Surrey, and so concentrated his search around that semirural haven of accountants and stockbrokers.
For John and Cynthia, Dr. Strach found “Kenwood,” a thirty-thousand-pound mock-Tudor mansion on the select St. George’s Hill estate at Weybridge. “Sunny Heights,” a similar, closely adjacent property, was earmarked for Ringo after his—as yet unannounced—marriage to Maureen Cox. The idea at that stage seems to have been for all four Beatles to live together in a mock-Tudor, topiary-encircled compound around a fifth property owned by Brian Epstein. It was one of Brian’s more impossible dreams to have them in his sight for always, to know that John was literally at the far end of his garden.
For John, that location could not have been more unfortunate. A mile or so from Weybridge, in the kitchen of an Esher hotel, a 52-year-old dishwasher was even now working up courage to step forward and claim the leading Beatle as his son and heir. It was, indeed, Freddy Lennon, the father John had not laid eyes on since the age of six.
Aunt Mimi had always feared that Freddy might turn up again—though not in this terrible way, selling his life story to Tit Bits and Weekend magazine. “When they told me who it was,” Mimi remembered, “I felt a shock run right through my body to my fingertips and the tips of my toes.”
A meeting was arranged between John and Freddy that seemed to go well. But when Freddy called at Kenwood later he had the door slammed in his face. Subsequently, via the Beatles’ accounts, he received a flat and a small pension. He resold his life story for diminishing fees, and even made a pop record entitled “That’s My Life.” Julian Lennon did not acquire a long-lost grandfather.
Nor at Weybridge did there materialize Brian’s hoped-for village of Beatles mansions. George broke the pattern by buying a bungalow on a different stockbroker estate, at Esher. And Paul, though offered several properties in the district, refused to commit himself yet. The house that Paul bought, and everything in it, was to be the result of minute social calculation. “He telephoned me one night,” Walter Shenson said, “but it was my wife he wanted to speak to. They talked for a long time. Paul was asking about a red velvet couch he’d seen at our house. He wanted to know where he could get one made exactly like it and how much it would cost.”
Patti Boyd was discovering that to be a Beatle’s girlfriend was like joining a cell of Resistance fighters. Her initiation had been when she and George and the Lennons attempted a weekend at a secluded hotel in Ireland, and awoke next morning to find the world’s press all had their address and room number. Patti and Cynthia left the hotel disguised as chambermaids and concealed in two wicker laundry hampers.
That summer, in a bid to go on vacation, they split into two groups. Paul and Jane with Ringo and Maureen flew to the Virgin Islands by way of quick airline changes at Paris, Lisbon, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Lennons, George, and Patti were sighted variously in Amsterdam, Vancouver—where a radio station incited local teenagers to form “Beatles posses” to hunt them down—then Honolulu and Papeete, Tahiti. From Papeete they put to sea in a cabin cruiser stinking of diesel oil and largely provisioned with potatoes. The vessel at once ran into heavy seas, causing Cynthia to be sick in the nearest receptacle: her new flowered sun hat.
Drugs occurred, like everything else, in almost wearisome profusion. The need dated from Hamburg and the months without sleep; it remained, amid the dizzying fame, to prop their eyes open through each night’s arduous pleasure. Now the pills were bright-colored, like new clothes and cars—French Blues, Purple Hearts, Black Bombers, and Yellow Submarines. The reflex grew in their growing boredom with everyday pleasures. More exciting than worship or sex, champagne or new toys, was to swallow a pill, just to see what would happen.
In 1964, in certain fashionable London circles, a curious after-dinner ritual was beginning to take place. A member of the party, upon a certain conspiratorial signal, would take out a small plastic bag, a cigarette-rolling machine such as previously used only by the poore
st classes, and a packet of similarly proletarian Rizla cigarette papers. With much thumb twisting and paper licking, a meager, loosely packed cigarette would be made. It would be then passed round the table for each guest to puff, with a deep inhalation, then handed on to the next as reverently as if it were a portion of the Host.
Marijuana, resin of the Indian hemp or cannabis plant, had been used in England hitherto chiefly by West Indian immigrants to allay, with its languorous fumes, the misery of their Brixton tenements. Now, as “pot” or “hash,” the ancient Oriental dream substance became the latest social accessory. That it was also strictly illegal, under laws that had cleansed the drug-crazy Victorian age, bothered no one very much at first.
The Beatles were initiated into pot smoking in 1964. The telltale medicinal fragrance of marijuana joints hung about the set of their second feature film, Help! “They were high all the time we were shooting,” the director, Richard Lester, says. “But there was no harm in it then. It was a happy high.”
It was a laugh, even better than earning millions, to watch the awkward little cigarette rolled; and to breathe down the sweetish smoke that made laughing even easier. It was a laugh to see what characters began to sidle up, their mouths twitching with the promise of even more sensational pleasures. “I saw it happen to Paul McCartney once,” Richard Lester says, “the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, trying to persuade him to take heroin. It was an absolutely chilling exercise in controlled evil.”
Early in 1965, George Harrison took John and Cynthia Lennon and Patti to a dinner party given by a friend of his. “I’ll always remember,” Cynthia says, “that when we walked into this man’s drawing room, there were four lumps of sugar arranged along the mantelpiece. We all had a delicious dinner with lots of wine. When coffee came, one of the four sugar lumps was put into each of our cups.