The Beatles (93 page)

Somehow, Jimmy Nicol took it all in stride. “
He played well
,” Paul admitted with customary graciousness. There were no slipups, barring the odd, tricky count that only Ringo would have anticipated; there were no star trips or ugly scenes. George had been right to object that it wasn’t the Beatles without “
the Four Fabs
,” as he called them, but not even the fans seemed to mind the last-minute replacement. Wherever they went, the Beatles were welcomed like conquering heroes. Their arrival in Amsterdam was greeted by an elaborate motorcycle escort that wound through the city, flanked by auxiliary units of police and the civil guard. The next morning a glass-topped boat collected the Beatles from a ledge outside their hotel for a ten-mile trip through the Amstel Canal. “We passed
at least 100,000 cheering
people who lined the streets on each side of the water to wave, and sometimes almost touch, the Beatles as they passed,” Andy Gray wrote with breathless exaggeration in an edition of the
NME.
“Six police boats accompanied us on the water and they were kept busy, picking up dozens of boys who swam to the boat, some climbing on to shake the Beatles’ hands.” Fans leaped from canal bridges as the boat passed underneath.

But sometimes the vibe turned rude and unpredictable. For example, that same night before the concert, the mayor of Blokker, the Dutch suburb where the old arena was located, approached George in the dressing room with a key to the city. “
Fuck off, yer bald owd crip!
” George snapped, oversaturated by the parade of grinning well-wishers.

Every city, every situation, brought out people who wanted to, in some way, touch them—and wanted to be touched back.
Insisted
on it: promoters demanded that the Beatles meet their families and friends; security men demanded autographs; the hotel manager, driver, waiter, chambermaid, reporter, nurse, newspaper vendor, flight attendant, everyone they came into contact with at every hour of the day, demanded a piece of the boys. And the
fans
—everywhere they went, fans expected, demanded, some sort of personal response: sign this, wave, say hello, touch me, heal me, call me, kiss me, fuck me. And they stopped at nothing: invading the Beatles’ suites, throwing themselves in front of their cars, jumping from balconies, stalking wives, girlfriends, family members,
pets!
In Copenhagen a reporter from the
Express
admonished Paul for his seemingly callous disregard of a telegram that read:
CHILD DYING
IN THIS FAMILY, TWO DAYS TO LIVE. PLEASE CALL. CHILD IS MARY SUE.
” Paul was convinced that it was a hoax, and if not, then a tragedy that was beyond his mortal powers. The world was filled with such tragedies, he argued. Were the Beatles expected to alleviate each one? To prove his point, he instructed Derek Taylor to place a call to the sputtering Mary Sue, who, as it so happened, was in tip-top health and not at all embarrassed.

There were other obligations, too—press conferences, civic receptions, charity balls, processions, literary luncheons, awards ceremonies, record-shop appearances, social engagements… it was unrelenting. On the Beatles’ sixteen-hour flight from London to Hong Kong, there were “welcomes” planned at every refueling stop—in Zurich, Beirut, Karachi, Calcutta, and Bangkok. Far from being honored, the Beatles felt abused. Over Derek Taylor’s objections, they refused to get off the plane anywhere other than Bangkok, fueling their dark mood with a steady diet of stimulants. “
We’d been sitting
on the floor, drinking and taking Preludins for about thirty hours [sic],” George recalled. Then, arriving in Kowloon, exhausted and grimy, they were expected to judge the finals of the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant.

In Australia five thousand fans staged a vigil in a torrential rainstorm when the Beatles’ 707 descended into Sydney.
Fierce crosswinds
tugged perilously at the plane, raindrops heavy as hail slashed at the cockpit windows and drummed on the roof, making the landing on the puddled tarmac a nail-biter—none of which deterred local officials, who put the boys “on the
back of a flat-bed
truck so the crowd could see them.” Their skeletal umbrellas were useless, and the dye in the new capes they had had made in Hong Kong ran, turning their skin a cadaverous blue.

Two days later, on June 12, in Adelaide, the numbers got crazy. In gorgeous weather, the Beatles were loaded into a Ford convertible and paraded along a nine-mile stretch of the Anzac Highway lined by 250,000 people, almost half the city’s population. Over a policeman’s objections, the Beatles crawled up to perch on the car’s trunk in what George later referred to as “
the J. F. Kennedy position
.” It was an incredible sight from that viewpoint, sending a “shock,” especially to John, who admitted that it dawned on him “
you might get shot
.” An additional thirty thousand more fans crammed into the square outside the gates of Town Hall for the official greeting by Adelaide’s Lord Mayor, several stories above the gathering. “
It was like a heroes’ welcome
,” said Paul, who leaned way out on the balcony and flashed the crowd the old reliable thumbs-up, not realizing Australians regarded it like being given the finger.

The scene, sans the thumbs, was repeated in Melbourne, where, despite “
a bitterly cold day
, some 250,000 people lined the route from the airport to the [Beatles’] hotel.” According to the
New York Times,
it was “
nearly twice as many
as turned out to see Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip” the previous year. Ringo had arrived earlier that morning with Brian Epstein on a “
horrendous
” thirty-hour flight from London through Los Angeles, made tolerable by a running poker game with Vivien Leigh and Horst Buchholz. Ringo assured an attentive press corps waiting at Essendon Airport that he felt refreshed and recharged, although doctors warned that his tonsils would eventually have to come out. Otherwise, he expressed relief to be out of the hospital, the scene of so many childhood setbacks, relief to be in Australia, relief to be back in the mix—and ready to rock ’n roll.

In fact, the rocking started even before his reunion with the Beatles, when Ringo’s car was surrounded outside the Southern Cross Hotel by an estimated three thousand fans. A moment of real panic ensued while officials decided how to deal with the boisterous crowd. Everywhere Ringo looked, kids were pressed up against the windows, screaming and pounding on the doors, clambering over the hood. It was “a
madness we had not seen
in Adelaide,” observed Derek Taylor, who watched “the melée” develop from an overhanging balcony. Usually there was a contingency plan to avoid such an encounter, but for some unknown reason, it had been abandoned en route. Impractical as it might seem, they decided to go in through the front entrance. A police inspector built like a bulldozer slung Ringo over his shoulder and, charging, made a beeline for the hotel. A hotel official leading the charge stumbled in the fray—which sent an errant body block into the police inspector. In a flash, everyone went down like
tenpins. Ringo was knocked to the ground and engulfed by the crowd. By the time he was rescued from the throng, he was scuffed and badly shaken.

Later, when the other Beatles arrived, the crowd in the street had swelled to an estimated twenty thousand, some of whom were whipped up in a terrific heat. Others, many of them young girls who had been waiting since dawn, suffered from hunger and exhaustion. The police force, which had been monitoring the situation nervously, called in the army and navy to help maintain order, but it was short-lived. By late afternoon, with chants of
“We want the Beatles!”
ringing through the square, the shaken troops, now four hundred strong, felt control slipping from their grasp. They didn’t know where to look first: at the barricades being crushed,
the girls fainting
out of sight, the hooligans stomping in the roofs of cars or pushing through their lines. A fourteen-year-old “
screamed so hard
she burst a blood-vessel in her throat.” It was “
frightening, chaotic
, and rather inhuman,” according to a trooper on horseback. Their most pressing concern was the hotel’s plate-glass windows bowing perilously against the violent crush of bodies. They threatened to explode in a cluster of razor-sharp shards at any moment. Ambulances screamed in the distance, preparing for the worst; a detachment of mounted infantry swung into position.

Just when it all seemed hopeless, at the point when one more thrashing body would undoubtedly deliver the coup de grâce, a roar went up that seemed to suck all the kids away from the hotel.
Look! Up in the air—it’s a bird, it’s a plane…
Suddenly, all five Beatles appeared on the first-floor balcony in hopes of defusing the situation. Another roar went up, this one even more deafening than the first, as John put a finger across his upper lip, threw the Nazi salute, and goose-stepped jauntily across the platform, screaming,
“Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”

If this is how Australia was, what would America be like? There, Beatles fever was running at an all-time scalding high. Public demand seemed insatiable. In Chicago eighteen thousand tickets were sold before a single ad appeared; two thousand fans stormed Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, scooping up every available seat; the entire block of twelve thousand tickets for Philadelphia’s Convention Hall was gone in “70 hectic minutes”; for all twenty-seven concert dates—the same thing. American deejays kept cranking up the heat.

Before that, however, there was unfinished business back home. The buzz was particularly loud concerning a swarm of notable challengers, such as the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Manfred Mann, the Yardbirds, Them, the Dave Clark Five, and the Zombies. The Beatles were especially concerned
by news that they’d been knocked from the chart’s top spot by a single called “House of the Rising Sun.” What was this cheeky record? they wanted to know. And who were these predators calling themselves Animals? It was time to find out.

The Beatles arrived back in London, determined to attack it all at once—but first they had a date at the movies.

The premiere
of
A Hard Day’s Night
wasn’t expected to be normal, even by movie-gala standards. By 7:30, an hour before curtain, the streets around Piccadilly Circus were jammed by a crowd of twelve thousand fans jockeying to get a glimpse of the stars. Inside the London Pavilion, the Beatles, dressed in stiffly pressed tuxedos and glossy patent-leather shoes, stood in the midst of their families and the posh crowd. Joining them were Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowden. Earlier that day the band had watched a run-through of the film at a private screening, with Brian, Derek, and Walter Shenson, who insists they “
behaved like delighted
little kids” watching themselves romp across the screen. Slouched down in the stalls, with their feet up on the backs of the seats in front of them, they wolfed down popcorn and howled like hyenas or groaned with embarrassment, depending upon the scene. Shenson, hunkered in the balcony, was confident that they had a monster hit on their hands.

With few exceptions, the critics agreed that
A Hard Day’s Night
was a winner.
The Times
called it “
off-beat
” and an “
exercise in anarchy
” with a spontaneity exceptional in British films. In the
Daily Express,
critic Leonard Mosley struck the same euphoric tone, calling it “
delightfully loony
” and adding “there hasn’t been anything like it since the Marx Brothers in the ’30s.” Later, Bosley Crowther, whose opinion in the
New York Times
was read like scripture, praised it as “
a whale of a comedy
” that “had so much good humor going for it that it is awfully hard to resist… with such a dazzling use of the camera that it tickles the intellect and electrifies the nerves.”

The Beatles preened unflinchingly in the afterglow. “
I dug
A Hard Day’s Night,
” John said initially. “
We knew it was better
than other rock movies,” though “
not as good as James Bond
,” he relented. Later, in a puff of vengefulness, he backpedaled, saying, “By the end of the film we didn’t know what had happened and we hated it.” But by then it didn’t matter. On July 8
the movie opened to critical success
and amazing business. The next morning there were lines around the block. United Artists blanketed
Britain “
with a record 160 prints
of the picture” and was bragging to reporters that it “
would gross at least a million
pounds in Britain alone,” which wasn’t bad, considering the film cost less than a quarter of a million pounds to make. Publicly, the Beatles acted indifferent to the success. Still, at every opportunity, they cruised past the Pavilion to check on the length of the queues. Chris Hutchins, who accompanied them on just such a junket, remembered their delight at the lines snaking around the theater. “
That’s the stuff!
” he recalled John shouting from the backseat of a car a few days after the premiere. “A couple of hundred more for the sevens-and-sixes
^*
and we’ll all be rich!”