When They Were Boys (64 page)

The
Daily Mail
proclaimed in its headline, “The Royal Box Was Stomping.” And the
Daily Express
noted, “Night of Triumph for Four Young Men.”

The
Daily Mirror
was the one Fleet Street tabloid that from the beginning tried to “own” the Beatles. The newspaper had 6 million readers, and they were treated to a magnanimous review, with the use of the word “Beatlemania” and several image-making lines:

“It's plain to see why these four cheeky energetic lads from Liverpool go down so big.”

“They're young, new. They're high spirited. . . . They don't have to rely on off-colour jokes about homos for their fun.”

Incredible words from today's perspective, and even more incredible considering their authors were unaware of Epstein's sexual preference and John's incessant obsession with satirizing homosexuals, who were not referred to as “gay,” but as something more offensive.

Obviously, neither Tony Barrow nor Derek Taylor wrote the story. Barrow, though, knew the impact that the concert would provide. Though Queen Elizabeth II was pregnant and could not attend, her mother, also known as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, was there, along with her daughter, the popular Princess Margaret, and her husband, the photographer Lord Snowden.

Once again, writer and press chief Tony Barrow was overwhelmed.

“The combination of the Palladium, TV, the first full foreign tour to Sweden, and the Royal Performance on November 4th, had already built up bits and pieces of major publicity in America. It was all an unstoppable
barrage, and since we were planning a brief visit to the US in February, this was more than we could ask for.”

Add to all of this Epstein's master plan for nonstop concerts in December at cinemas all across Britain, and the charge of the Beatles was in manic mode.

The year 1963—early, mid, and as you will learn, much later—was the biggest year for the boys and Brian. For Tony Barrow, there were seminal moments when everything came together.

T
HE FAVORITE MOMENTS WERE WHEN THE SINGLES
“P
LEASE
P
LEASE
M
E,” AND THEN
“F
ROM
M
E TO
Y
OU,” BECAME NUMBER-ONE HITS IN THE
UK. L
ATER WE BECAME WELL USED TO THE GROUP TAKING EACH RELEASE ALMOST AUTOMATICALLY TO THE TOP, AND THERE WAS NEVER THE SAME THRILL FOR US; IT BECAME AN EXPECTATION
. I
HAVE ALWAYS DATED THE BIRTH OF
B
EATLEMANIA TO THE AUTUMN OF THAT YEAR WHEN WE GOT A HUGE AMOUNT OF MEDIA PUBLICITY IN THE WAKE OF THE
B
EATLES' APPEARANCE ON
UK
TELEVISION'S
S
UNDAY NIGHT AT THE
L
ONDON
P
ALLADIUM—WHEN PRESS PHOTOGRAPHERS CAPTURED THE ENORMOUSLY EXCITING ATMOSPHERE OF THE FANS GATHERING OUTSIDE THE THEATER IN
L
ONDON'S
A
RGYLL
S
TREET—FOLLOWED ONLY A FEW WEEKS LATER BY THE SECOND BURST OF PUBLICITY THAT SURROUNDED THE GROUP'S APPEARANCE IN THE 1963
R
OYAL
V
ARIETY PERFORMANCE, WHICH INCLUDED
J
OHN'S CHEEKY REQUEST FOR PEOPLE TO “RATTLE THEIR JEWELRY
.”

What about The boys?

“It was so nonstop, we were so tired,” Barrow said.

“So much to do and so little time to do it,” John Lennon remarked months later.

“The Palladium was exciting,” Paul McCartney recalled. “The queen's concert . . . well, that was highbrow, and we were nervous. It was a case of ‘touch me, is this really happening?'”

Back home, Allan Williams was incredulous. Could this be happening? In a recent late-morning conversation at the Hard Day's Night Hotel, Williams's cheery cheeks turn flush, as he remembers:

“We used to have a very important national television program every
Sunday.
Live at the Sunday Palladium
or something like that, and I was watching that show [when] the Beatles came on, and they were sensational, and I thought, ‘Fuckin' hell, that's my group!' As they progressed, I was quite pleased, because even though I was only a small item in life, at least I was a cog in the wheel of . . . what was to become one of the most famous pop groups in the world.”

The pioneers in Liverpool—Sam Leach, Allan Williams, Bob Wooler, Brian Kelly, the somewhat angry Mona Best, the family members—were in a state of shock, disbelief, and in some cases, joy. And John's sibling states the simple fact:

“That was my brother.”

The very intense Julia Baird (Lennon) sips her soda, her eyes wandering around the back room of the new Cavern, remembering the excitement in 1963.

“This was the same boy who danced with our mother, lived under the tyranny of Mimi, skipped school—the irreverent but passionate older sibling. He was leading the group that started as a ragtag skiffle gang. He was
famous
. All of England was into him. It was disbelief. But it was so much fun. I wished Mother would have been around to see this, to see where that first guitar had taken him.”

Mal Evans, the unfortunate Mal, recalled the fall of '63 as we reminisced in 1966.

“For Neil and me and Brian, it was, you know, the most amazing time. We went from helping them, to driving them, to protecting them. I tried to be a gentle lad, but now I had to use my size to keep people away. And now we thought, ‘What would happen in America?'”

The seeds for that journey were planted.

That October and November were indeed sensational, but in the offices of some Hollywood executives, the stage had been set for a dramatic sequence of events in a December to remember. And it all happened before the boys' feet touched American soil.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

A DECEMBER TO REMEMBER—THE END OR THE BEGINNING?

“Could I have imagined a future like that? Who could? But, looking back, I knew they had something special, and a level of compassion that was truly unusual for a band on the move.”

—Joe Ankrah, Beatles friend whose band was pushed through racial barriers by the boys

“I knew they were now beyond Merseyside, but I never knew they would go that far.”

—Billy J. Kramer, on his feelings about the group in late 1963

D
ECEMBER 1963 HAD ONLY ONE SIMILARITY TO THAT BLEAK, DEPRESSING
,
and uncertain December 1960 in the aftermath of Hamburg—the weather was damp and cold.

Three years earlier, a chance appearance at Litherland Town Hall revived the sagging Beatles, with the screams of the fans, the sudden chemistry, and the animal instincts flowing from the stage reigniting that one element of life that you can't put a price on: hope. After all, December 1960 was the month the boys almost called it quits.

Now, three years later, Brian Epstein's Beatles were on the verge of the unthinkable—world domination—although again, even in late 1963, there were doubts.

“If we couldn't make it in America, it would be another setback. America would be the key,” John Lennon shared with me almost exactly a year after December 1963.

If there was any problem facing the boys, it was the schedule—at least 223 concerts in 1963, and twenty in December alone, from De Montfort Hall in Leicester on December 1 to New Year's Eve at the Astoria Cinema in London, where they continued their Christmas show for the first eleven days
of 1964. That's thirty-one concerts in forty-two days. And one day later, January 12, they finished with a concert at the London Palladium, the scene of an earlier nationwide TV spectacle. They had just three days left before heading to Europe. There were few breaks in their schedule, rare time off, and the suffocating, almost paralyzing life of arrival, hotel, concert venue, hotel, and departure, complicated by the reality that the boys were known to stay up late, discover sunrise at 11 a.m., and eat poorly. All that, combined with heavy smoking and bouts of heavy drinking, made for an unhealthy environment.

Buddy Tony Bramwell remembers the total exasperation and sense of frustration on the part of the boys, anxiety mixed with excitement. He recalls, when he joined them in their wild finish to 1963, that they were haggard, drunked-out, flush with cigarette smoke, and at the same time sleepless, “yawning with joy, wondering if the ride would continue as it was, getting bigger and bigger.”

Compared to today's helter-skelter tours, the boys' schedule was breathless. The best band in the world was the busiest, and at times, the most tired. But while they were playing, things were stirring, not only across the English Channel in Europe, but to the west, across the ocean.

Press reports began emerging in America. They were spotty, but pen pals Bill Harry, Tony Barrow, and the ever-smooth Derek Taylor made sure the best pictures of the boys and screaming fans made their way into the newspapers. After all, especially late in the year, Americans themselves were in a state of high anxiety, still in shock after the November 22 murder of President Kennedy. A little diversion from national mourning was well received by the press and the people.

There was little film available, although the
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
aired a short clip of the Beatles and their surrounding fanatics on the December 10, 1963, broadcast, leading Cronkite to claim later that he had the Beatles first. He did, in America at least.

The man who had so much impact on the Vietnam War, the man who conquered the space race on TV, claimed the Beatles as his own.

In late 1989, I hosted Cronkite at a community luncheon in Philadelphia.

The news legend said, “Larry, heard you traveled with the Beatles.”

I responded, “Well, yes.”

“You know,” he said, “I had the first film of them.”

“Really,” I replied.

What Walter didn't know was that Tony Barrow and Derek Taylor were unleashing that campaign of specified distribution of Beatles information that may have been one of the most coordinated media campaigns in history, with bits and pieces of film, information, and pictures of hysteria combining to create an imagery of combustible emotion. Crowds in small theaters and ballrooms looked like thousands, when really they were mostly in the hundreds. News reports of a coming “British Invasion” were rampant, with most of the attention paid to the boys' hair, which at that time in history had an effect of shock on adults in America. The buildup was working. And then Christmas came, with a day-after surprise.

The day after Christmas was important. Although a few stations had claimed earlier broadcast, most American Top 40 radio stations began playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on December 26. Its flip side, “I Saw Her Standing There,” was also instantly popular. The 45-rpm record sold over 250,000 copies in the first few days.

In Liverpool, Freda Kelly did her usual due diligence, treating the boys' families like her own, keeping lines of communication open to the growing fan-club base. Barrow and Taylor, on tour and in the offices in London and Liverpool, plotted. The American invasion was not far away. Kelly was still trying to convince Elsie Starkey that while her piggy bank was smart thinking, it was time to stop worrying about filling it, that Richie would be fine.

The tired Fab Four, a term coined by the talented Tony Barrow, was trying to cope with their December schedule, while thinking about what January would bring.

First, there would be a long stint in Paris. It was in Paris that Epstein and the jubilant boys, still in the discovery phase of huge celebrity, would learn that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had reached number one in America. John would later say to me, “We celebrated with milk.” And he said it with a straight face.

As 1963 drew to a close, Pete Best chatted, when he could find him, with his friend Neil Aspinall. Pete, depressed but unselfish, congratulated Aspinall on the good fortune of the group that had left him behind. The Prince of Mathew Street, Sam Leach, watched with curiosity as the local boys began screaming into Earth's orbit. Allan Williams, the man who let them get away, and who told Brian Epstein, “Don't touch them with a fucking bargepole; they will let you down,” was fascinated by their ascent. Deejay and writer Bob Wooler was bittersweet—proud but sad that his boys, even errant John Lennon, who had beaten him up, were headed for America. Tony Bramwell, their helper for so many horrible road trips on so many rugged roads, was humbled, and ready for new worldwide adventures with the boys and many who came after them.

As the clock struck midnight ringing in 1964, Mona Best remembered the warmth and charm of a Beatles performance at the Casbah on New Year's Eve 1960. She was melancholy about those days and worried about Pete, who took an immense interest in his much younger brother Vincent Roag, who was about to turn eighteen months old. Roag, as he was called, the product of Mona's affair with Neil Aspinall, brought brightness and joy to the Best household. Aspinall, who had emerged early as one of the most savvy “protection” people in the business, was mentally preparing himself for France and, of course, America. In another life, Aspinall surely would have been an advance security chief for the White House or 10 Downing Street. He was that good.

Cynthia Lennon was in love and caring for her and John's almost nine-month-old son, Julian. The coming year of 1964 would see a changing relationship with Johnny Boy, although in late 1963 Cynthia was described by friends as “blissful.”