The Beatles (96 page)

Through Schreiber, an older Cleveland-based radio news director who doubled as a national correspondent for Westinghouse stations, John got an unfiltered education in everything from the U.S. presidency to the upturn of violence in the streets. “We talked a lot about American politics and the racial divide,” recalls Schreiber, who had marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King Jr. and across Mississippi with James Meredith, as well as traveled closely with the candidates on the Kennedy campaign. “Lennon couldn’t get enough of it; he was fascinated. I tried to familiarize him with the segregation in the South, about how blacks moved north to avoid discrimination and go where jobs were available, but that there was as much segregation in the North, only in a different way.”

Prior to the start of the tour, Brian had forbade them to comment on topical issues. It wasn’t appropriate, he felt, for pop stars to air particular opinions inasmuch as it might alienate—or as
George put it, “rattle
”—a segment of their audience, especially over a hot potato like Vietnam. “
We were being asked about it
all the time and it was silly,” said John. “We had to pretend to be like in the old days when artists weren’t meant to say anything about anything.” But the Beatles weren’t about to be silenced—especially George and John, both of whom in a relatively short amount of time became consumed by social and political issues. “
We couldn’t help ourselves
…. We spoke our minds after that: ‘We don’t like it, we don’t agree with it, we think it is wrong.’ ”

Still, even an insignificant incident could put a torch to their careers. John got a taste of it in Las Vegas, after two thrilling shows at the Convention Center. Two young twin girls—perhaps no more than fourteen years old—managed to talk their way into the Beatles’ suite at the Sahara and fell asleep in his room at an extremely indelicate hour. As Derek Taylor maintained, “
It was all perfectly respectable
,” but, of course, he was being paid to call it respectable. No matter what, it didn’t look good. John was a married man after all. And it looked even worse when the girls’ mother showed up in the lobby, concerned that her daughters were still somewhere upstairs with the Beatles.

“
Mal knocked on my door
about two-thirty in the morning,” remembers Larry Kane, “and he told me there was a problem. ‘Put on a jacket and tie,’ he said. ‘We need a clean-cut-looking suit with an authoritative voice.’ ” Kane, having joined the tour only two days earlier, did as he was asked and followed the roadie back to the Beatles’ suite, where he understood John’s dilemma at a glance. Kane was dispatched to the lobby, where he found the girls’ mother waiting, and charmed her into believing that “Mr. Lennon [had] been spending some time with [her] young ladies, signing autographs.” John and Derek were so “badly shaken” by the experience that they had consulted a lawyer by the time they reached Los Angeles.

Perhaps in response,
the Beatles steered clear
of rabid female fans in Seattle, secluding themselves instead in a suite at the Edgewater Hotel on Elliott Bay, where they dropped fishing lines from their window and idled away the downtime. Officials had taken extraordinary precautions to ensure they wouldn’t be disturbed.
A makeshift barricade
constructed out of plywood and razor wire had been positioned around the hotel to discourage fans from storming the entrance, in conjunction with a Coast Guard detail patrolling the immediate bay area, but despite these extreme measures, a number of stowaways still managed to breach security.
Girls were eventually discovered
hiding in a restroom, another in a closet, and several under beds.
Later the Beatles learned
about a plan by the hotel’s housekeeping staff to sell the sheets and shag carpeting from their rooms to a local promotional firm, which offended their sensibilities enough to sabotage the scheme by urinating on everything in sight.

In Vancouver, at Empire Stadium, police security was unprepared for the “
explosive situation
” that erupted on the field, as five thousand kids rushed the stage “
to jam up against
… four crush barriers” separating them from the Beatles. In the process, kids got trampled and had to be rescued from the melee. Even the Beatles had to intervene. “
If you don’t stop
, we’re going to have to leave,” Paul warned the audience halfway through the show, but it had little effect on the situation. “These people have lost all ability to think,” complained a greatly agitated police inspector as he surveyed the scene, trying to redirect his men.
Variety
reported that “some 160 females, mainly in the 10 to 16 year age brackets, required medical attention.” Others were treated backstage or at a nearby hospital for broken ribs and legs, heat prostration, hysteria and “overexcitement,” along with an assortment of cuts and bruises.

“
It was pretty scary
just about everywhere we went,” recalls Chris Hutchins, who never strayed far from the Beatles’ long shadows. “Even
those of us who had experienced Beatlemania in the U.K. were amazed at the disorder lurching around those shows in ’sixty-four.” Hutchens himself got a taste of the danger in Denver when the car he was riding in was mistaken for the Beatles’ and wound up being “badly damaged” by fans outside the Brown Palace Hotel. In New York the situation grew more serious during a security lapse at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. “
Dozens of fans stormed
[the] stage,” he reported in
NME,
“and at one point Ringo was knocked off his stool by [an] overenthusiastic girl who had leaped over steel-helmeted police kneeling in front of the stage.”

But that was only the tip of the iceberg.
In Boston on September 12
, a series of ferocious fistfights erupted on the sidewalk outside the Garden, followed by a wave of pushing and shoving during which two glass doors to the building were smashed and several gates overturned. Cops immediately converged from all sides, with a mounted police team stampeding through the mob and knocking young fans indiscriminately to the ground. “
The police were truly awful
,” recalled Derek Taylor in his memoir of the tour.

Boston was only a warm-up for Cleveland. A force of five hundred uniformed police circulated through Public Hall, clamoring roughly for order by knocking their nightsticks on chairs. They kept a lid on things while the opening acts were on, but as soon as the Beatles hit the stage, all civility broke down. Jelly beans, toys, and much heavier objects were launched at the band’s heads. Then, in the middle of “All My Loving,” the audience rose as one and stood on their seats as a swarm of teenage girls “
surged toward the stage
in a spontaneous banzai charge,” as one reporter called it. A cordon of forty cops tried to hold back the girls but eventually collapsed against the attack, “
as did a brass railing
… bolted to the floor which was ripped out” in the ensuing scuffle.

Instead of regrouping to restore order, the officer in charge, Deputy Inspector Carl Bare, charged onto the stage and attempted to stop the music. At first the Beatles ignored him, continuing to play. Undaunted, Bare elbowed Paul aside and commandeered the mike. “
Sit down, sit down
—this show is over!” he bellowed. When the Beatles refused to respond, the battle line was drawn. Bare advanced on John, who squibbed away, mocking the policeman with a little dance and making a face. A “
hurricane of boos
” flooded the arena. Another policeman, Inspector Michael Blackwell, joined Bare onstage and waved the Beatles into the wings. Predictably, the boys refused to yield, but Blackwell, known locally as Iron Mike, grabbed George by the elbow and steered him forcefully off the stage, at which point the rest of the Beatles reluctantly followed.

Art Schreiber, who was standing in the wings, grew terrified by the crowd’s response. “
It touched off a kind of screaming
I’d never heard before,” he recalls, “a violent, angry, bone-chilling roar that somehow demanded a comparable reaction.” He could see packs of kids roaming aimlessly, menacingly, around the dark hall, pursued by wary policemen.
Several windows were shattered
as disgruntled fans tried to reach the backstage area through an adjoining building.

Calm prevailed thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Derek Taylor. Sensing a disaster in the making, he volunteered to go onstage and plead with the audience for order in return for twenty minutes of additional showtime.
The police were reluctant
to accept at first, as were the Beatles, who had already changed out of their stage clothes and were relishing an early escape. Much like a cagy U.N. negotiator, Taylor swung between both camps in an attempt to broker an agreement, and in the end, the show went on.

In Los Angeles on August 23, the Beatles played to a worshipful crowd of almost nineteen thousand at the Hollywood Bowl, the gilded open-air amphitheater at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. Behind them, reaching into the spectacular starlit sky, another ten or fifteen thousand gate-crashers were massed in the sparsely populated woodlands. John swung his head around reflexively, like a child discovering new scenery, taking in the unexpected guests. “
Welcome to you in the trees!
” he shouted, as the other Beatles plugged in. It was “
a gorgeous California night
, just magnificent” and moistly warm, with incomparable hibiscus-scented breezes.
A lot of importance
had been placed on this gig, what with the celebrity-studded crowd and Capitol Records headquartered a few miles away, and the band fed on it to get wired.

George Martin had arranged with Capitol Records to record the evening’s concert in the hope that it would serve as an interim release, and so the clamshell stage was cluttered with booms and cables. Live albums were still something of an anomaly in the rock ’n roll business, but Martin, who’d struck gold with the
Beyond the Fringe
soundtrack, felt that Beatles fans would support such an effort if it captured the excitement the boys put out onstage. “
They were great as a live band
,” he observed, having seen them dozens of times. But from the moment the tape rolled, there was no containing the screaming. Martin worked frantically with Capitol’s crew,
struggling to filter out the noise, but the VU meters were hopelessly redlined throughout the Beatles’ set. “It was like putting a microphone at the tail of a 747 jet,” he said. “It was one continual screaming sound, and it was very difficult to get a good recording.”

Still, while the
Los Angeles Times
critic claimed that “
not much of the mop-haired
quartet’s singing could be heard” over the shrieking, the crowd was comparatively low-key for a Beatles concert. “It was
almost too well behaved
,” John told KRLA’s Jim Steck over lunch the next afternoon. For a change, he said, the Beatles could actually
hear
what they were playing, which, coupled with the lush surroundings, made the show the highlight of the tour.

Afterward, the boys were feted until nearly dawn by about thirty of the city’s “
best-looking” starlets
, including
the Mod Squad
’s Peggy Lipton and Joan Baez, who were shipped up to the gated mansion the Beatles were renting on St. Pierre Road in a neighborhood known as Hidden Hills. In an unprecedented move, the traveling press corps was also invited, as were wives and girlfriends and a few local deejays. Ray Hildebrand and Jill Jackson, who performed as Paul and Paula, showed up as someone’s guests, along with Billy Preston, whom the Beatles had first met in Liverpool and later at the Star-Club during his tenure in Little Richard’s band. It was a cozy little crowd, “
very casual
,” recalls a guest. The boys, lounging in the living room, introduced the newcomers to their friends on the tour, and as the evening stretched on and the Beatles dropped their guard, the party developed into a predictably wild scene. Guests enjoyed the general run of the house, including the pool and the bedrooms, where the action was in full swing.

Brian, who had been looking forward to enjoying L.A. nightlife, had actually turned in early and was asleep in his sprawling pink and green suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel in anticipation of two important events scheduled for the next day. He’d arranged to have lunch in the Polo Lounge at noon on August 24 with Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s wily old mentor, so they could check each other out and compare notes on managing their two rock phenomena. Then, later, with the Beatles in tow, he would head to a charity garden party in Brentwood to benefit the Hemophilia Foundation hosted by Capitol Records’ president Alan Livingston, whose wife, actress Nancy Olson, was on the foundation’s board.

At the party Livingston went to great lengths to accommodate the Beatles, who, after being cold-shouldered by the label, had rocketed Capitol’s profits into the stratosphere. No expense had been spared to stage
a Hollywood-style spectacular. A festive striped tent had been set up in the spacious backyard, where vendors dispensed soft ice cream and lemonade to a litter of gorgeously groomed children. There were pony rides and games. Security was unparalleled, befitting a presidential visit, with a fully armed riot squad stashed in the garage, just in case. The guest list was a who’s who of local dignitaries, complete with a selection of handpicked celebrities, each of whom was required by the hosts to bring a child: Edward G. Robinson had in tow his granddaughter, Francesa; Lloyd Bridges, his son Jeff; Rita Hayworth, her daughter, Princess Yasmin Khan; Donald O’Connor, his son, Freddy, and daughter, Alicia; Jack Palance, his daughter, Holly; Eva Marie Saint, her son, Darrell, and daughter, Laurie; Barbara Rush, her son, Christopher; Jeanne Martin brought five of Dean’s children a few feet in front of Jerry Lewis, who bolted as soon as he saw them, leaving his son, Gary, behind rather than risk an encounter with his estranged partner.