The Beatles (101 page)

Paul, on the other hand, lived between the cracks. Beatlemania was rampant in London, yet for some inexplicable reason he was free to move about with little regard for the usual encroachments. Throughout the end of 1964 and well into the New Year, Paul became a habitué of London nightlife, aggressively cultivating an image as a young man of substance. Each night, after the Beatles’ business ended, he hit the streets like a tornado, picking up energy as he spun from theater to theater, nightspot to nightspot, often ending the whirlwind spree at one of the posh gambling clubs in Mayfair. Paul loved the upscale atmosphere almost as much as the recognition, both intoxicants to an ambitious young man only two years removed from a Liverpool council estate via Hamburg. There was a wide-eyed fascination as once-closed doors were flung open to him. “Right this way, Mr. McCartney.” “Our best table, Mr. McCartney.” “It’s on the house, Mr. McCartney.”
Mr.
McCartney! He could barely contain his joy over the classy ring to it.

Paul always aspired to tastes he perceived as having “class.” Respect was class, fine art was class, French dining was class. Social status especially provided class, which he solicited in earnest through his ties to the Ashers. Whether it meant courting intellects such as Harold Pinter and,
fearlessly, Bertrand Russell—Paul professed to be “
very impressed by… the clarity
of his thinking”—or having his cigarette lit by the maître d’ at an exclusive joint like Annabel’s, acquiring class became his overriding mandate. Now, with Jane’s stabilizing influence, Paul staged an assault on legitimate theater, exposing himself to the best the West End had to offer, as well as maintaining a steady diet of repertory at the National. Jane herself was deeply immersed in the process of building a distinguished theatrical career. This pleased Paul no end. It was classy in and of itself and provided the perfect contrast to his celebrated splash. Besides, it kept Jane busy while he spread his wings on those nights he wished to fly solo, the upwardly mobile young bachelor haunting such tony nightspots as the Saddle Room, the Talk of the Town, the Astor, and other swish clubs where a “
rubbing-up
” occurred with famous and recognizable figures. Not that they intimidated Paul, who put his own Beatlesque spin on the situation: “
They were on the way out
,” he concluded, “[and] we were on the way in.”

But the social scene, for all its glamour and appeal, took a toll on their work. The critical reaction to the Beatles’ second annual Christmas show had been less than enthusiastic. Even though its staging was more visually elaborate and the Beatles played their usually thrilling set of songs in a cocoon of screaming, nothing could excuse what some viewed as “
the feebleness of the show
as a whole.” Despite deliriously happy audiences, the Beatles couldn’t disguise their discomfort. “
Obviously this show
has its weaknesses,” Paul conceded, but most reviewers had taken a harder look. In
NME,
Chris Hutchins echoed the consensus that the Beatles appeared “bored” and seemed to sleepwalk through the skits. “
In the second sketch
,” he wrote, “these top world entertainers neither move, nor speak, nor sing. They’re cast as waxwork dummies!”

Much the same could be said of their second film,
Help!
Unlike the groundbreaking
A Hard Day’s Night,
which boiled over with reflexive wit and gave insight into the Beatles’ lifestyle,
Help!
was a patchwork of generic wisecracks that sounded flat and artificial. The script, originally entitled
Eight Arms to Hold You,
about the possession of a ring with mysterious powers and those vying for control of it, had been tailored especially for Peter Sellers, who rejected it in favor of an equally frivolous picture called
What’s New Pussycat?
Rewritten in ten days as a Beatles vehicle, the story
took on a fractured, fairy-tale silliness from which it never recovered. No one was really happy with the script, least of all the Beatles, who called it “
a mad story
” as a cover for what they were saying in private.

Not that they could recall much from the shoot. They had packed ample reserves of pot to get them through the process. The Beatles were so stoned, so distracted, they couldn’t remember lines. Brian’s effort to contain the damage went for naught. Even though, as John revealed, they were “
smoking marijuana for breakfast
,” mornings seemed to be the only time scenes got completed. By noon they were out of their gourds. “
Dick Lester knew
that very little would get done after lunch,” Ringo recalled. “In the afternoon, we very seldom got past the first line of the script.”

The only one of the Beatles who capitalized on the opportunity was Ringo, the unwitting star of
Help!
A lifelong movie fan, Ringo projected a vulnerability and unaffected appeal that had come across in
A Hard Day’s Night
and now blossomed in
Help!
He’d always been the Beatles’ unofficial mascot of sorts, the runt of the litter, less handsome and sophisticated than Paul, John, and George and, as such, often a lightning rod for their comic relief. There was also no other band that would have given him the visibility or highlighted his versatility, and by the time they blazed through the States, their intuition had paid off. “
In a poll
taken at Carnegie Hall,” Nora Ephron wrote in her
New York Post
column, “Ringo received the most applause, screams, and gasps from the audience.” “
I Love Ringo” badges
outsold all their other merchandise. The same proved true wherever the Beatles went. “
In the States, I know
I went over well,” Ringo admitted in a moment of pardonable pride. “It knocked me out to see and hear the kids waving for me. I’d made it as a personality.”

While Ringo would never be the Beatles’ central attraction, in
Help!
he certainly made his presence felt. Perhaps part of the transformation was due to Ringo’s feeling more settled. Two weeks before filming started, during a day off in London, he had married his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Mary “Maureen” Cox, in an early-morning ceremony at Caxton Hall, a registry office near Ringo and George’s Montagu Square flat. Everyone, especially George, expressed
how “amazed” he was
at the suddenness of it.
It was a hasty, intimate affair
, designed to provide the utmost privacy; even the other Beatles learned of it only a day in advance. Besides the couple’s parents, very few people were invited. George arrived by bicycle, followed by John, who complained that
Ringo had
forgotten to buy them appropriate boutonnieres (“We were
going to wear radishes
actually,” he told a reporter), and Brian, who served as the best man. (Paul, on holiday at a
Tunisian villa, learned of the wedding hours afterward, from an international operator who delivered a telegram from Brian that read,
RICH WED EARLY
THIS MORNING.
) Everyone had been sworn to absolute secrecy.

There were plenty of reasons for that. “
Maureen hated the spotlight
and was worried that fans might disrupt things,” says Roy Trafford, Ringo’s boyhood friend, who was excluded from the event as a security precaution. “
We went to the Ad Lib
, and in the ladies’ room Maureen confessed how hard everything was for her,” Marie Crawford recalls. “Fans would scratch and spit at her all the time, and call her names. Why, the moment we walked in there, everyone stopped talking.” But there was more to Maureen’s discomfort than the harassment. “I recognized that weekend that Maureen was pregnant,” Crawford says. “She was very sick in the mornings and was beginning to show.”

In spite of everything, Ringo was excited to tie the knot. “
He’s the marrying kind
,” John explained after the news hit the papers, “a sort of family man,” which was true enough. Only a few months earlier, Ringo had told a reporter: “
No matter what the consequences
, I don’t want to remain single all my life. I want to get married some day and I don’t plan to wait too long about it. I’m 23 now and that can seem pretty old when you look out every night and see an audience full of 13-and 14-year-old girls.”

Ringo’s celebrity meant something for the success of
Help!,
but in the end, it was the music that saved their hides. John and Paul had written a splendid collection of songs for the soundtrack. Gone are the standard progressions, rheumy lyrics, and simplistic arrangements. Structurally, the songs still abound with gorgeous, supple melodies complemented by sudden downshifts of chords and wiry guitar licks, interwoven with the sensuous three-part harmonies identified with the Beatles sound. But the creative momentum of the previous year, buttressed by marijuana and a powerful Dylan influence, had broadened the Beatles’ perspective, giving them a new palette of ideas to draw from and explore.

In the weeks during their Christmas show, John and Paul had sketched out most of the material that would provide the soundtrack. John’s music room in the new house—always littered with toys, hundreds of records, and “
twelve guitars
”—was suddenly ankle-deep in sheets of sloppy, pencil-smudged, nearly illegible lyric fragments, the terminally foul air severely polluted by a dense cloud of cigarette and marijuana smoke, aided and abetted by overflowing ashtrays and half a dozen half-filled teacups abandoned in the squalor. A pair of Brunell tape recorders (John claimed he “
had about ten… all linked
up”) lay within arm’s reach of the red couch,
both of them overheated—practically cooking—from being left on for days, one or the other always frozen on
PAUSE
as though waiting for someone to finish his thought. Mostly John and Paul ignored the machines, preferring to jot ideas on paper that they ripped profligately from spiral-bound tablets like traders in the futures market. Sometimes words or phrases they’d considered perfect were rudely scratched out in favor of an alternative with a more wry twist to it. Almost every line of every verse was reworked several times. They spit words out quickly, not self-consciously, sometimes both of them talking over each other, testing rhymes and expressions and inflections in the outpour. Things sometimes got lost in the exuberant flow, but that had always been the way they worked best. “
We made a game of it
,” Paul recalls. “John and I wrote songs within two or three hours—our ‘time allotted.’ It hardly ever took much longer than that.” Or else they lost interest and moved on.

Almost immediately they struck on a tone that distinguishes these songs from their previous output. “Ticket to Ride,” released as a single in advance of the movie, sounds like nothing a rock ’n roll band had ever produced. The entire character of the song is a drastic departure, with its reflective lyrics and tense, irregular patterns that make more demands on a listener. “
It was a slightly new sound
at the time,” John said, upgrading “slightly new” to “pretty fucking heavy” in practically the next breath. Despite the hard language, no one disagreed with his opinion. His chafing vocals swerve around the rambling guitar lick and devious drum fluctuations that play havoc with the tempo, driving it to a playful, if inscrutable, ending. There is no bouncy middle eight, no obvious chorus. In “Ticket to Ride,” John gives voice to self-pitying romantic disappointment, stripped of all adolescent pretensions and reduced to the bitter aftertaste that clings to rejection. “
Resentfulness, or love
, or hate—it’s apparent in all work,” he explained years later, during a particularly abrasive critique. “It’s just harder to see when it’s written in gobbledygook.”

“Ticket to Ride” is hardly gobbledegook, and not at all the self-penned effort for which John eventually took credit. In a hasty reflection, he reduced Paul’s contribution to “
the way Ringo played
the drums.” However, Paul later argued: “
We sat down and wrote it together
…. [W]e sat down and worked on that song for a full three-hour songwriting session, and at the end of it all we had all the words, we had the harmonies, and we had all the little bits.”

That wasn’t always the way John and Paul wrote songs. “
John and I don’t work
on the Rodgers and Hart pattern, one doing music and one
doing lyrics,” Paul explained in an uncharacteristic footnote about their creative process. “He writes a whole song on his own, or I write a whole song on my own, or if we do a song together either he might do the words and I the music, or the other way round.”

Aside from “Help!” and “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” which were near-perfect collaborations, the rest of the material fell somewhere within that boundless range.
John brought in most of
“It’s Only Love” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” while Paul contributed “Another Girl,” which he wrote in Tunisia, and “The Night Before”—a mixed bag in the absolute sense. The one thing they have in common was that they are all Lennon-McCartney compositions. In the almost eight years of the partnership, it had seemed fruitless to try to reconcile their different styles—John’s jagged emotional urgency, Paul’s giddy romanticism; John’s uncompromising, stripped-down homage to rock ’n roll, Paul’s “
lyrical melodies dressed
in clever harmonic frameworks”; John “
impatient
,” Paul “
real optimistic
”—because, in the larger picture, they merged seamlessly into the universally recognized Beatles sound. It serves no purpose trying to dissect the songs to determine who contributed what.

But energy and tone reveal their own clues. The influences for “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” did not go unnoticed. According to Paul, the song “is
just basically John doing Dylan
.” And the lyrics could never have come from McCartney.

Success begat insecurity—the greater the Beatles’ popularity, the more threatened and anxious John had become, not only from his part in the band’s snowballing commercialism but over his appearance and his songwriting as well. Weight, too, had become a nagging problem—John had gotten “plump,” according to a friend—and he was demoralized and depressed by worsening vision. “
He was paranoid about
being short-sighted,” George recalled, “and we’d have to take him into a club and lead him to his seat, so that he could go in without his glasses on and look cool.”