The Beatles (83 page)

To preserve the edge of lunacy that was interrupted with words of sincere thanks, the Beatles signed off with another parody, “Ricky the Red Nosed Ringo,” which collapsed into uncontrollable laughter before regrouping for a final inspirational message.

The result was a resounding success. Long-neglected fan-club members, delighted by the record, were content with what all fans ultimately want—to have something that nobody else can get their hands on, something personal that was in short supply. With the exception of a few disgruntled parents, no one registered so much as a complaint over the way in which membership was handled. And if some head case wanted to make
trouble, Barrow had the power to launch the ultimate defensive weapon: a personal phone call from one of the boys. “In that respect, we never had to worry,” he says, “because we knew the effect something like that had.”

None of the Beatles liked how success had reshaped their appearance. The way Paul saw it, they were way off their stride, still “
on the cusp of showbiz
.” And John, who made no bones about regretting their phony clean-cut image, bristled when a fan described the Beatles’ music as “
genuine
.” Sentiments like that were already becoming a liability to the boys, who felt the edge they’d honed in Liverpool and Hamburg eroding even further.

The latest bit of puffery was the
Beatles Christmas Show,
which, since its announcement in September, had taken on a life of its own. Conceived primarily as “
a resident show
”—that is, a show where the Beatles would remain situated at one location over a period of weeks—it relied on the old-fashioned British tradition of incorporating comedy, music, and pantomime toned down to attract a family audience.

Theatrical production in London was a closed shop: a small, inbred clique of sharp, cunning, and ruthless deal-brokers governed by impresario Lew Grade and his brother Bernie Delfont. Details of every major production in the city eventually crossed their desks. Most legitimate theaters fell under the Grades’ grudging jurisdiction, as did actors and agencies, with an industry’s fortunes tied to their discretionary nod. Outsiders were looked upon as cockroaches.

The Grades were interested only in what they could control, and, in fact, they’d already approached Brian with an offer to absorb NEMS into their kingdom.
Delfont suggested he accept
the princely sum of £150,000 in exchange for half equity in the company. Brian was tempted. He had taken on a good deal more than he was rightfully equipped to handle, and the strain was beginning to “
drive him crackers
.” But when he sounded out the Beatles, they disapproved in four-part harmony. “They said they would rather break up than leave me,” Brian reported, somewhat self-servingly, to a friend. Then, in a more forthright account, he added: “John told me to ‘fuck off,’ which was
very
moving.”

Whatever the case, it was clear that moving NEMS to London was long overdue. With Brian away so much of the time, the Liverpool office had fallen into a long decline, its day-to-day operation, according to Alistair Taylor, “
a shambles, just chaos
.” There was no one with authority to call the shots. And the office manager, Barry Leonard, proved incapable
of picking up the slack. In the meantime, Brian toured office buildings in London, finding affordable space on the fifth floor of Sutherland House, at 4–5 Argyll Street. For the most part it was unfinished, a loftlike open-floor plan that was considered “
quite revolutionary
” for the time, with two enclosed offices and the rest partitioned off in a maze of impersonal cubicles. “They weren’t terribly good offices,” says Taylor, but the location was ideal, right next door to the Palladium. According to Tony Barrow, “[Brian] loved the idea that on the other side of those walls, Judy Garland might be rehearsing.”

In any event, Brian dreaded returning to Liverpool. As far as talent went, the cupboard was bare; the best local bands were already on the NEMS roster. And there was a strange, lingering local resentment. Part of it had to do with the perception that Brian had drained the city of its best bands without any regard for their fans. John had felt it even before the Merseyside musical explosion. “
When I left Liverpool
with the group,” he recalled, “a lot of Liverpool people dropped us and said, ‘Now you’ve let us down.’ ” It was an understandable reaction.

Brian, always an outsider but not one with a gift of assimilation, didn’t help. The last time Brian returned to NEMS from London he “showed up at the office in a
brand-new Jaguar XK-E
,” recalls Frieda Kelly, who watched him pull up from the window. It was a sight to behold, especially in Liverpool, whose factories mass-produced budget-priced Fords and
Z
-cars. In a way, the Jaguar only confirmed what everyone suspected: that NEMS was rolling in money, growing beyond all expectations. But it also embarrassed the Scousers, who considered such extravagance vulgar.

An hour later Billy Hatton, the Fourmost’s bass player, showed up bearing gifts. His mother operated a kiosk in Moorfields, from which he’d lifted a box of ice pops for the NEMS’ staff. “Have you seen Eppy’s car?” he asked, with a snickering grin. “Who threw acid all over it?” Kelly, who was talking to a friend at the time, remembers laughing at Billy’s sick sense of humor. “Then we realized he wasn’t kidding,” she says. “Everyone rushed outside, and sure enough, it was true. What a mess. All the paint had bubbled and began peeling back. It was destroyed.”

The next morning Brian announced the firm was moving to London.

The
Beatles Christmas Show
was the first item launched from NEMS’ new London office. Brian was determined to pull out all the stops and had enlisted help from an old-line variety agent, Joe Collins, whose daughters,
Joan and Jackie, happened to be Beatles fans. Collins hooked him up with Peter Yolland, who specialized in producing Christmas pantomimes in major provincial cities across Great Britain.

“
My idea was to make the Beatles
do things they had never done before,” says Yolland. As far as the music went, he’d leave that up to the individual acts, but during the course of the evening he intended to present them in sketches designed around the age-old pantomime form, with the dramatization of a fairy tale followed by broad comedy and a script full of topical references that encouraged audience participation. As stories went, it was predictably hokey: at the top, the heroine, Ermyntrude, gets thrown out of the house because she’s had a baby; abandoned and alone, she falls into the clutches of a mustachioed villain, Sir John Jasper (played rather villainously by John Lennon, in a top hat and brandishing a whip), who ties her to the railroad tracks, only to be rescued in the nick of time by Valiant Paul the Signalman. There was never a question that the “leggy lovely” in white headscarf and fishnet thighs would be played
en travestie
by anyone other than George; as the youngest Beatle, the time-honored role of panto boy fell naturally to him. That left a hole for Ringo. After some deliberation, he was cast as Fairy Snow, a derelict elf in head-to-toe black, who leaped around the stage, sprinkling white confetti over the other Beatles.

Today, it would be hard to imagine any men of comparable age, much less rock ’n roll stars, submitting to such drivel. But the Beatles did—“quite willingly and without resentment,” says Yolland, who rehearsed the boys under the most congenial of circumstances. No one complained or balked at a procedure, not even George, in perpetual embarrassment over the woman’s getup he was forced to wear.

The Beatles’ spot—a nine-song mini-set—came near the end of the top-heavy two-hour show. Up first were the rest of the NEMS artists, performing medleys of their hits intermingled with Christmas songs, in a footloose, music-hall-style revue. Most of those who attended couldn’t have cared less about its technical flourishes. All the work that went into the staging meant nothing to the mostly female fans, whose only aim was to gaze upon their heartthrobs—gaze with tear-rimmed, tormented eyes, hands clutched arthritically at the sides of their faces, mouths twisted in anguished, blood-curdling screams that fluctuated in waves, as if induced by jolts from electric-shock paddles. Ex–Quarry Man Nigel Walley, now the golf pro at Wrotham Heath in Kent, also fought his way inside the Astoria to catch a glimpse of his old mates. For weeks afterward, Walley
says, he was haunted by those scenes. “
I used to wake up
in the middle of the night, thinking I must have dreamed it all.”

Backstage, the police had their own nightmares to contend with. Getaways had been blueprinted and rehearsed with split-second precision. The size and layout of the Astoria, with its twenty-seven exits, left myriad options. (The police telephoned the producers ten minutes before the end of every show with the details for that night’s route.) Perhaps the greatest safeguard was the mandatory playing of “God Save the Queen” at the evening’s conclusion. During those two and a half minutes, the audience remained standing at attention, virtual captives, while the Beatles, escorted by an usher wielding a flashlight, fled through one of the cobwebbed underpassages.

“
They’re not
listening
to anything,” John complained bitterly about the Beatles’ ecstatic audiences. “All they’re doing is going mad.” The futility of it gnawed at him. Somewhere along the way, the music had taken a backseat to the act, the act of
being
the Beatles. The success it brought, however, didn’t diminish John’s discontent, and he hated himself for encouraging it. Pete Shotton saw that the annoyance was taking its toll. John was feeling trapped in his new celebrity, playing a role that he didn’t relish; week by week, feeling more like a fraud, more like a phony. Says Shotton: “He very quickly realized that… he was getting cut off from the world—and that it was [only] going to get worse. He realized very early on that this was the penalty.”

But there were the perks as well.

Chapter 24
Once Upon a Time in America

A
s sunlight struck the silvery wings outside the starboard windows of
Pan Am Flight 101
, shooting splinters of light across the interior cabin, three of the Beatles huddled at a window to size up the view as the plane banked sharply over the eastern shore of Long Island. In the first-class compartment, John sat rigidly behind the others, holding Cynthia’s moist hand and staring at the back of the seat in front of him. He’d grown subdued during the last, final hour, his face closed over with something a traveling companion read as “doubt.” Initially, John had “
been over the moon
at the prospect” of the visit—paying homage in the land of his forefathers: Chuck, Elvis, and Buddy. But as the reality of it drew near, he became convinced of certain failure.

That morning
a crowd of four thousand
fans had swarmed Heathrow to see the boys off as Beatles music “
boom[ed] out over the public address system
.” It had been a heartening sight as they emerged on the airport tarmac, grinning and handsome in the
new pleated mohair suits
that Dougie Millings had made in London from a series of Paul’s sketches. Thanks to some last-minute choreography staged by Brian Epstein, they stopped in their tracks less than halfway to the plane, then turned and waved in unison, gazing up at the terraced observation deck draped with banners wishing them well and jammed with cheering, screaming teenagers hanging precariously over the rails. The Beatles laughed and shouted back at them, caught up in the spirit. It was impossible not to feel the excitement, their loyal fans solidly behind them, rooting for them, proud that the Beatles were taking it to the States. There was “
nothing like it
in the world,” according to Paul.