The Beatles (87 page)

For their part, the Beatles handled the press with complete poise.
Ostensibly, the conference was called
to announce their three-film deal with United Artists, but the boys, as usual, played it strictly for laughs. John drew chuckles first, revealing that his choice for a leading lady was Brigitte Bardot. How about you, Ringo? someone called out. “I don’t mind meself,” he said, “as long as it’s not Sophia Loren. She’s so tall, I’d have to climb a ladder to kiss her!” The reporters tried in vain to get Brian involved, but he declined, redirecting their attention to the four boys. When confronted with the charge of creating “
false modal frames
,” John grinned and said, “We’re gonna see a doctor about that.” A woman on the other side of the room asked George which of them was sexiest. “Our manager, Brian Epstein,” he fired back, which failed to placate her. “Who chooses your clothes?” she persisted. “We choose our own,” John said. “Who chooses yours?” Refusing to be intimidated, she replied, “My husband. Now tell me, are there any subjects you prefer not to discuss?” John leaned close to the microphone and without missing a beat said, “Yes, your husband.” The room erupted in appreciative laughter.

It went on like that, back and forth, for nearly three hours, with a volley of one-liners that befitted a Friars Club roast. The Beatles seemed able to handle anything thrown at them, never remotely becoming rattled by the barrage of caustic questions. The result was a public relations sensation. Over Brian’s mild objections, the Beatles continued to charm a professional lynch mob that had come to bury them. Not one word was said about the crummy reviews, nor was another bad word written. By the time Alan Livingston interrupted the questioning to present them with two gold records, the Beatles had climbed back into America’s good graces.

On Tuesday, February 11, the Beatles and what seemed like most of the New York press corps left for Washington, D.C., where the boys were to give their first live stage show in America. It had been snowing heavily for several hours, and plans to fly were scrapped at the last minute in favor of a private sleeping car that Brian Sommerville had chartered expressly for the trip. The train had nothing on the limos and luxury planes they’d grown used to, not even on the Liverpool-to-London express. It was a dingy, malodorous cubicle, yellow from cigarette smoke and cramped with rows of dilapidated leather seats blistered by springs. None of that, however, seemed to dampen the festive spirit. Grateful to escape the confinement of their hotel room, the Beatles were at their uproarious best. John and Paul fluttered about the train, chatting with passengers and mugging for the press. George, still recovering from his illness, climbed up into a luggage rack, where he managed to take a catnap. And Ringo, juiced by the unstoppable scene, swept out the car with a broom before grabbing half a dozen camera cases from photographers, then strolled up and down the aisle, shouting, “Exclusive!
LIFE
magazine! Exclusive! I am a camera!”

It was their last chance to unwind before a tumultuous—and rather nightmarish—evening that started the minute they reached Washington. Word had leaked that the Beatles were arriving by rail, and an estimated three thousand kids, spurred on by local disc jockeys, jammed the platform when the train pulled into Union Station. A giant banner dangled above the crowd:
WWDC WELCOMES THE BEATLES.
Flashbulbs exploded ceaselessly, reporters converged on the train, pushing, shoving. There was complete chaos, with fans and press battling fiercely for position. The police, befuddled by the melee, stood uncertainly on the sidelines as Paul led the others out of the wheezing car. Somehow the Beatles fought their way through the crowd and into two waiting limos that skidded along the slushy streets past the capital’s illuminated landmarks. The sky over the city held an immense and shifting light, reflecting off the monuments, pale as pieces of a child’s board game. “Just like in the movies,” Ringo muttered as the scenery whipped by. To their right, in roughly the direction of the Potomac, they passed a mansion that looked like the White House. Or maybe not. While they debated the accuracy of the discovery, the cars pulled up short in front of an enormous concrete building.

The Washington Coliseum was the biggest venue they’d ever played, a crusty old 18,000-seat downtown arena that catered mostly to ice hockey
and boxing events. Brian hadn’t quite prepared them for the size of the place, nor had he warned them about the uncustomary staging. It had been set up like a boxing match, which meant they’d be playing on a platform in the round, a layout that required moving their equipment every few songs.

Three opening acts
warmed up the crowd—a British group called the Caravelles, their old friend Tommy Roe from the first U.K. tour, and the Chiffons.
^*
The Beatles’ plans to watch the girls’ set were scrapped when
Murray the K showed up
unannounced and determined to broadcast his show from their dressing room. It came almost as a relief when it was time for them to play.

In most theaters-in-the-round
, performers enter through tunnels situated under the floor, but because of the mechanics of the ice rink, there was no way to get the Beatles onstage without marching them through the audience.
So Harry Lynn
, the promoter, sent out three disc jockeys in Beatles wigs to distract the crowd, while the boys, flanked by forty ushers, charged up the aisle to a deafening blast of screams. A blinding explosion of flashbulbs blanketed the arena in light. Then another wave of screams, louder and more unruly, echoed off the walls. “
The reaction was so overwhelming
,” Paul gushed breathlessly minutes after the show, calling it “the most tremendous reception I have ever heard in my life.”

From the moment they hit the stage, the Beatles knew this would be no ordinary show. The atmosphere was electric and vaguely dangerous, with a fight-crowd current that harkened back to places like Wilson Hall in Garston. Fearlessly, they huddled together on a postage-stamp-size stage, with fans spilling right over the edges onto it. It was like “
an obstacle course
,” between the tangle of arms reaching toward them and the cables snaked across the floor. Ringo teetered precariously atop a circular skirted platform that, under ideal circumstances, was supposed to have functioned as a turntable for his drum kit. The amps, perched on stands, threatened to topple under the slightest provocation.

“Good evening, Washington!” Paul screamed into a mike, giving the other guys time to plug in and catch their breath.

A camera crew was filming the show for a future closed-circuit broadcast, and from the opening bars of “Roll Over Beethoven” the audience—mostly teenagers—“
went berserk
.” Several dozen police lining the stage
“eyed the audience uneasily,” then leaped into action, tackling fans who tried to vault toward the band. “
All the Beatlemania ingredients
are here in Washington,” reported
NME,
including, the paper noted, “the throwing of jelly beans”—not the soft, squishy jelly babies, as was the custom back home, but their American cousins, with a hard outer shell. “
That night, we were absolutely pelted
by the fucking things,” George recalled. “To make matters worse, we were on a circular stage, so they hit us from all sides… waves of rock-hard little bullets raining down on you from the sky.” It made “
the ring-side seem like Omaha Beach
,” according to a journalist covering the show. “Every now and again, one would hit a string on my guitar and plonk off a bad note as I was trying to play,” George said.

In the long run, it didn’t make a lick of difference to the quality of the show. The Beatles’ performance that night was lit by something special from within. They played with a ripping, amphetamine intensity last glimpsed in Hamburg that went far beyond their usual slick, tightly controlled set. “
Ringo, in particular
, played like a madman,” writes Albert Goldman, “revealing a fire that nobody had ever glimpsed before beneath his workmanlike surface.” It was less a put-down of Ringo’s ability than a revelation of the implicit power contained in his solid backbeat. Something primitive had taken hold of him that converted every thrust, every blow, into energy. Ringo’s arms flailed feverishly and his head shook with a demonic pendulation, making him seem at times almost spastic, at others dynamic and Herculean. It didn’t even matter that “
the acoustics were terrible
” or that the equipment had to be hastily rearranged after every song. Incredibly, it never interrupted the flow or the tension gripping the arena. By the finale, a fantastic sweat-stained rendition of “Long Tall Sally,” the capacity crowd was on its feet, screaming uncontrollably in one mad, sustained roar.

Afterward, the Beatles were dizzy from exhaustion—and exhilaration. Ringo, especially, was in thrall of the fans. “
They could have ripped me apart
and I wouldn’t have cared,” he related backstage, drenched in sweat. “
What an audience!
I could have played for them all night.” As it was, the entire act lasted a mere twenty-eight minutes.

But, after all, it was an embassy party, a very la-di-da affair and not at all the kind of crowd that appealed to the boys. They had been told it would be “a quiet little party” for the overworked embassy staff, but as it turned out, the building was packed with an obnoxious, aggressive mob—the “
full quota of chinless wonders
,” as George Martin described them. “People were touching us when we walked past,” John recalled, none too pleased by the situation. It seemed, in Ringo’s estimation, as if the Beatles were on exhibit, “
like something in a zoo
.” Paul did his best to “
exchange pleasantries
” with the guests, but that became too much even for him. When a “
slightly drunk woman
” wrapped her arms around him and demanded to know his name, Paul responded, “Roger. Roger McClusky the Fifth,” before ducking out from under her clutches.

The Beatles didn’t stick around for any last-minute backslaps. Instead, they were whisked a few miles east to the British embassy, where a “
champagne party and masked
charity ball” was held ostensibly in their honor.
This was precisely the kind of function
they routinely avoided, full of stuffed shirts and other genteel functionaries who regarded the Beatles as a novelty. The embassy was packed with well-dressed British diplomats and
their families for whom the Beatles provided a much-needed glimmer of home pride. Lavish trays of food stretched from one side of the ballroom to the other. And
as the boys made their entrance
down a grand swan-shaped staircase to the rotunda, it seemed as though the entire floor of dancers swirled around them in greeting. It was a lovely gesture. The British ambassador, Sir David Ormsby-Gore, proved gracious and hospitable, even chuckling when Ringo, who looked him up and down, asked: “
So, what do you do
?”

That night it was Ringo who, in a mock Etonian accent, managed to talk John out of making a scene while announcing the winners of the embassy raffle, daring the recipients to exchange their signed copies of
Meet the Beatles
“for a Frank Sinatra.”
But as the raffle presentation wound down
, a debutante snuck up behind Ringo and lopped off a hank of his hair with nail scissors. That did it. Ringo swung around and said, “
What the hell do you think
you are doing?” He was furious, totally out of character. “
This lot here
are terrifying—much worse than the kids,” he fumed.
John started for the door
, swearing under his breath, with Ringo right behind him, calling for a cab. It was all they could do not to make a scene. “
They were very sad
,” recalled photographer Harry Benson, who was part of the Beatles’ entourage. “They looked as if they wanted to cry. John, in particular. They weren’t pugnacious. They were humiliated.”

All of the Beatles felt the same way. They knew how the social set regarded them—four yobbos from Liverpool who’d gotten lucky—how people like that were slumming in their presence.
People like that.
The boys had played along, acquiescing for Brian Epstein even when they dreaded attending such functions. It was part of the game, they decided, though not fully understanding the rules. But that night had finished it.
Yobbos they might be, but that didn’t render them insensitive. It didn’t matter what Brian thought it might do for their career. They wouldn’t play that part of the game again, not with
people like that,
not ever.

The next day most of the entourage flew back to New York, while the Beatles and a handful of selected journalists returned on the train. What should have been a relaxed trip up the East Coast turned out to be another long ordeal. The nuisance and scrutiny of clicking cameras acted like a magnifying lens, focusing the anxiety and resentment of the previous night to an incendiary point. George Martin described the experience as “
some giant three-ring
circus from which there was no let-up.” John, still seething, attempted to bury his nose in a book but was hounded relentlessly by photographers to “be a good sport.” It was as shabby as he’d ever been treated. “
The only place we ever got any peace
,” George recalled, “was when we got in the suite and locked ourselves in the bathroom. The bathroom was about the only place you could have any peace.”

There was the usual mob scene at Pennsylvania Station when the train arrived in New York. In an effort to clear crowds from in front of the Plaza, the police on detail outside the hotel had announced that the Beatles were going straight from the train to Carnegie Hall. As a result, thousands of fans jammed the upper waiting area, with the overflow milling through the lower concourse and scattered along the platforms. In no time it became a perilous scene. The transit police force was unprepared to handle such an enormous crowd and panicked when a mad rush of kids broke through a line of barricades to greet the arriving train.

Unbeknownst to the fans, however, the Beatles’ car had been detached from the train and diverted to an isolated platform at the opposite end of the station, where security guards planned to evacuate them by private elevator. Yet, resourceful kids had already anticipated that, too, and in the end the boys merely charged up the stairs and jumped into a taxi idling on Seventh Avenue.