ALSO BY IVOR DAVIS

Five to Die

Divided They Stand

Five to Die: The Book that Helped Convict Manson

THE BEATLES AND ME ON TOUR

THE BEATLES AND ME ON TOUR

Cockney Kid Publishing.

Copyright © 2014 by Ivor Davis

www.ivordavisbeatles.com

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the United States Copyright Law, and except limited excerpts by reviewer for the public press), without written permission from Ivor Davis.

For a complete list of photo credits, please see Photo Credits at the end of the book.

Author services by Pedernales Publishing, LLC.

www.pedernalespublishing.com

Front jacket design: Edward Scully, and Barbara Rainess

Back jacket design: Jose Ramirez and Maurina Sherman

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014939592

ISBN 978-0-9903710-7-6 Paperback Edition

ISBN 978-0-9903710-8-3 Hardcover Edition

ISBN 978-0-9903710-9-0 Digital Edition

Printed in the United States of America

THE BEATLES

and Me

ON TOUR

IVOR DAVIS

Cockney Kid Publishing

In memory of the incomparable Sally Ogle Davis, the muse of my life, who met and interviewed the Beatles long before I did.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My editor Lew Harris who, after knocking me into shape for years at Los Angeles Magazine, returned for an encore performance.

Jose Ramirez and Barbara Rainess, at Pedernales Publishing, for tolerating my whims and rolling with the punches.

Maurina Sherman for correcting the errors of my phrase.

Diana Wilmot for gently pushing me to finish this book.

This project would, unquestionably, still be a scatter of napkins and notes, tear sheets and treasured recollections, if not for immeasurable help and steadfast guidance from my family and friends: Gigi Benson, Harry Benson, Keri Botello, Joshua Burt, Vivienne Collier, Susan Cook, Bernard Davis, Gideon Oscar Ogle Davis (for tech support), Tricia Eatherly Davis, Anthony Delano, Bob Eubanks, Jerry Feingold, Carolyn Fox, Steven Gunther, Krissy Harris, Paul Harris, Jann Haworth, Chris Hillman, Connie Hillman, Karen Hoffberg, Clark Hubbard, Dave Hull, Chris Jones, Kathleen Sexton Kaiser, Robert Lands, Martina Lauchengco, Nancy Lueck, Cyril Maitland, Lucie Scheuer Maitland, Peter Noone, Michael O’Kelly, Jose Ramirez (for back cover design), Gino Robair, Scott Rosenberg, Mike Safier (for his enlightened exegesis of Greenwich Mean Time), Arthur Schreiber, Belle Schwartz, Mark Sennet, Mel Sheeler and the guys at Sheeler Moving and Storage (for looking after my Beatles collection), Anthony Strauss, Dr. David Suskind, Rebecca Davis Suskind (for early editing), Daily Express Syndication, Edward Scully (for front cover design), Rob Teifeld, Victoria Torf, and Terry Wieser.

I thank them all for taking this magical ride with me, back half a century, to a time when the world felt like it was splitting open. Rock ’n’ roll laid the anthemic soundtrack to the dreams and fears and changes that were afoot in the crucible of that pivotal period, and the Beatles were, no doubt, its explosive epicenter.

As everyone knows, the memory plays strange tricks as time goes by. Although my personal time capsule swept me back fifty years and my reminiscences got considerable help from folks who were there, some people might not have seen things quite the same way I did at the time. And there will be those today whose memories differ from my own. But, to borrow the late anchorman Walter Cronkite’s nightly network sign off, “That’s the way it is.”

DIARY OF A 1964 TOUR

August 18, San Francisco

The jet-lagged Beatles arrive after brief stops in Winnipeg and Los Angeles.

Hotel: San Francisco Hilton

Odd fact: To prep for the invasion, hotel staffers were ordered to see the Beatles’ just-released film, A Hard Day’s Night.

August 19, San Francisco

Venue: Cow Palace

Crowd: 17,100

Hotel: San Francisco Hilton

Odd fact: A nervous Brian Epstein rejected a ticker-tape parade before their first concert.

August 20, Las Vegas

Venue: Convention Center

Crowd: Two shows, 17,000 each

Hotel: Sahara

Odd fact: Liberace insisted on meeting the boys because he “loved the way they played piano.”

August 21, Seattle

Venue: Seattle Center Coliseum

Crowd: 14,400

Hotel: Edgewater Inn

Odd fact: The Beatles went fishing through the windows of their waterside hotel. They caught nothing.

August 22, Vancouver

Venue: Empire Stadium

Crowd: 20,600

Hotel: Hotel Georgia

Odd Fact: Rowdy crowds outside Hotel Georgia forced them to skip their planned overnight stay—but they still got stuck with a $350 hotel bill.

August 23, Los Angeles

Venue: Hollywood Bowl

Crowd: 17,000

Odd fact: The Ambassador Hotel rejected the Beatles as unruly, so the band rented a house in Bel-Air and watched a movie at Burt Lancaster’s house.

August 24, Los Angeles

Day off included a charity garden party hosted by Capitol Records boss Alan Livingston.

Odd fact: Groucho Marx gatecrashes the party.

August 25, Los Angeles

Odd fact: The night goes wrong for George as he, John and Ringo hit the Sunset Strip to make merry with Jayne Mansfield at Whisky A Go Go, while Paul is otherwise engaged.

August 26, Denver

Venue: Red Rocks Amphitheater

Crowd: 7,000

Hotel: Brown Palace Hotel

Odd fact: Rare sight of 2,000 empty seats at the spectacular outdoor arena.

August 27, Cincinnati

Venue: Cincinnati Gardens

Crowd: 14,000

Hotel: Vernon Manor Hotel

Odd fact: Local DJs worked out a deal to buy up all the Beatles’ soap, bath mats and towels—although the boys skipped the hotel and never stayed overnight.

August 28, New York

Venue: Forest Hills Tennis Stadium

Crowd: 16,000

Hotel: Hotel Delmonico

Odd fact: Every radio station in New York put out an all-points bulletin to find Ringo’s St. Christopher medal, which had been torn from his neck in an arrival melee.

August 29, New York

Venue: Forest Hills Tennis Stadium

Crowd: 16,000

Hotel: Hotel Delmonico

Odd fact: Edgy Beatles helicoptered from the Manhattan waterfront to both performances to avoid New York traffic.

August 30, Atlantic City

Venue: Atlantic City Convention Hall

Crowd: 19,000

Hotel: Lafayette Motel

Odd Fact: Posters at the convention center did not show the Beatles—but leftovers from an earlier Lyndon Johnson Democratic confab.

August 31, Atlantic City

Day off, with the Beatles screening A Hard Day’s Night.

Odd Fact: A local promoter took the liberty of bringing a contingent of prostitutes to the film screening, from which the band members each chose their evening’s “escort.”

September 2, Philadelphia

Venue: Pennsylvania Convention Center

Crowd: 13,000

Hotel: Bused in from Atlantic City, the boys skipped a sleepover in favor of a flight to Indianapolis.

Odd Fact: Clarence “Frogman” Henry took over for the Righteous Brothers as an opening act. But who really noticed?

September 3, Indianapolis

Venue: Indiana State Fairgrounds and State Fair Coliseum

Crowd: Two shows, 30,000 total attendance

Hotel: Lafayette Motor Inn

Odd Fact: The Beatles lost Ringo, who went for an unannounced excursion. He didn’t return until the next morning.

September 4, Milwaukee

Venue: Milwaukee Arena

Crowd: 11,500

Hotel: Coach House Motor Inn

Odd Fact: Four girls camped out overnight in the hotel boiler room with fruit, cheese and soft drinks—but were discovered before they could intercept their targets.

September 5, Chicago

Venue: International Amphitheater

Crowd: 15,000

Hotel: Stockyard Inn

Odd Fact: A fan tossed a raw steak at the stage, almost striking Ringo.

September 6, Detroit

Venue: Olympia Stadium

Crowd: Two shows, 30,000 total attendance

Hotel: Whittier Hotel

Odd fact: Miss Michigan 1960, Miss Armed Forces and Miss Vermont all were given private audiences.

September 7, Toronto

Venue: Maple Leaf Gardens

Crowd: Two shows, 35,000 total attendance

Hotel: King Edward Hotel

Odd Fact: Hundreds of fans outside the hotel changed the words to the Canadian anthem from “O Canada” to “O Beatles, our idols true and dear…”

September 8, Montreal

Venue: Montreal Forum

Crowd: Two shows, 21,000 total attendance

Hotel: No overnight stay, because Ringo got a death threat.

Odd Fact: Hurricane Dora forced a detour to Key West, Florida.

September 9, Key West

Hotel: Key Western Motel

Odd fact: Thanks to unscheduled detour, no fans at the airport, no fans at the hotel: a blessed relief.

September 10, Key West

Weather gives the Beatles time to enjoy the soggy delights of Key West and watch Fidel Castro’s marathon speech on TV.

September 11, Jacksonville

Venue: Gator Bowl

Crowd: 23,000

Hotel: No overnight stay—the Beatles headed straight to Boston.

Odd Fact. Played to wind-whipped crowd of 23,000, with more than 7,000 unable to make the show due to weather. President Lyndon Johnson showed up—not to see the concert but to inspect the storm damage.

September 12, Boston

Venue: Boston Garden

Crowd: 13,900

Hotel: Hotel Madison

Odd Fact: No tea party for fans as the cops strong-armed them.

September 13, Baltimore

Venue: Baltimore Civic Center

Crowd: Two shows, 28,000 total attendance

Hotel: Holiday Inn

Odd fact: A large cardboard gift box was hauled up to the Beatles’ floor—containing two teenage girls.

September 14, Pittsburgh

Venue: Civic Arena

Crowd: 12,600

Hotel: Skipped an overnight stay and went straight to the airport.

Odd fact: Ringo quizzed by the media about the condition of his tonsils.

September 15, Cleveland

Venue: Public Auditorium

Crowd: 12,000

Hotel: Sheraton

Odd fact: Panicked Cleveland cops stopped the show, sent the Beatles to their dressing room, then relented and let them return to the stage.

September 16, New Orleans

Venue: City Park Stadium

Crowd: 12,000

Hotel: Congress Inn

Odd facts: Local cops did a horseback cavalry charge through fans. The Beatles hung out with Fats Domino.

September 17, Kansas City

Venue: Municipal Stadium

Crowd: 20,200

Hotel: Muehlebach Hotel

Odd fact: Biggest Beatles payday: $150,000 for a one-nighter—courtesy of sports team owner Charles O. Finley.

September 18, Dallas

Venue: Dallas Memorial Auditorium

Crowd: 10,500

Hotel: Cabana Motor Hotel

Odd fact: With Beatles trapped in their suites, their roadies shopped in flagship Neiman Marcus store to buy cowboy hats, boots and other gear.

September 19, Missouri

Time off for a trip to the private ranch of the band’s chartered-jet owner Reed Pigman in the Southern Missouri Ozarks.

Crowd: 12

Odd fact: The Beatles sang just one tune: “Happy Birthday” to Brian Epstein.

September 20, New York City

Venue: Paramount Theatre

Crowd: 3,700 (at one hundred dollars per ticket)

Hotel: Riviera Idlewild Motel

Odd Fact: Beatles sang for charity—then sampled pot with Tambourine Man Bob Dylan.

September 21, New York

Groggy Beatles are homeward bound to London. Triumphant, but relieved it’s over.

INTRODUCTION

It was 1964, and I was the slightly wet-behind-the-ears, twenty-six-year-old West Coast correspondent for one of Britain’s biggest newspapers, the London Daily Express—circulation four million daily.

Based in Los Angeles, I had arrived only six months earlier and contracted with David English, the paper’s foreign editor, to cover, on a freelance basis, an assortment of major breaking news stories. I was the new Cockney kid on the Beverly Hills block who was beginning to live his dream of being a real foreign correspondent. Except I wouldn’t be covering significant “serious” news like that of my hero, Edward R. Murrow. My job was to chronicle the vagaries of Hollywood, which ranged from the marriages of Elizabeth Taylor to the divorces of Marlon Brando and Cary Grant.

My dogged reporting on actor Peter Sellers’ series of massive heart attacks after marrying the twenty-one-year-old Swedish actress Britt Ekland, as well as my work on other assignments that dealt with varied British-tinged showbiz shenanigans, impressed David and, after a time, he hired me full time to be the Express man in Hollywood.

So it was in mid-August, 1964, when I received an unexpected call. English was on the line with my first big job: To cover, from start to finish, a hot British rock ’n’ roll group making its first concert tour of North America.

The Beatles had first set foot in America earlier in the year, with two live performances, and one pre-taped, on the country’s most popular variety hour, The Ed Sullivan Show. Their first appearance, on February 9, had made them an instant sensation, drawing seventy-four million viewers and changing music history forever.

Now I was to witness the repercussions unfold in a twenty-four-city tour, staged over thirty-four days, to begin August 19, 1964, in San Francisco. But it was more than just a ticket to ride; I was not to become simply a front-row-center observer for every one of their sold-out concerts, but part of their entourage. The Beatles were in stretch limo Number 1, along with their manager Brian Epstein. I traveled in Number 2, along with the Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor and two other press reporters. We were flanked by wailing motorcycle escorts, whizzing through the seas of hysterical fans. On the Beatles’ private jet, we flew from California to Canada, Montreal to Milwaukee, New Orleans to New York.

I lived and ate with the boys. We had adjoining hotel rooms. I drank, kibitzed and played cards and Monopoly with them into the early hours of the morning, seamlessly integrated into their lives. In addition, I was given the job of ghostwriting a weekly newspaper column for the youngest Beatle, George Harrison. My access to them was unfettered—unheard of in today’s pop music world.

The access didn’t end when they returned to their homes across the pond. I was also alongside them part way the following summer, when they made their second U.S. tour.

I was there when they popped pills and talked candidly about their passions and the things and people that they disliked; when they told war stories; when they moaned about the lousy sound systems and the crappy merchandise sold at stadiums, about their fear of flying and about how they coped with the revolving door of women that was the inevitable result of their perch as global sex symbols.

I was there the night when a scandal in Las Vegas threatened to derail their tour and when gorgeous Hollywood stars came knocking. I was a fly on the wall for their meet-and-greet with the King himself—Elvis Presley—and a wet towel away the night Bob Dylan introduced them to the joys of marijuana.

This book is my very personal invitation to travel back to the way they were, my vivid recollection of life back then, when communication was so much simpler, when John Lennon called people “twits”—and twitter was something that only birds did.

It is my personal, inside tale of what happened on that first, weird and wonderful North American tour—of thirty-four manic and memorable days.

It was fifty years ago today.

And I was there.

1: MY TICKET TO RIDE

“John [Lennon] looked surprised. He didn’t see the logic. Nor did I. But then it wasn’t a logical scene. It wasn’t a logical year—1964 wasn’t. It was the year of the Beatles, and people who came near the Beatles were not themselves. Their mirrors didn’t know them.”—Derek Taylor

On August 19, 1964, at six o’clock in the morning, the ringing of my telephone jarred me awake in my Beverly Hills apartment. David English, my boss at the London Daily Express, was on the line.

“Ivor, get up to San Francisco and get to know the Beatles,” David said to me. “They’ve just landed. This is their first tour of America—they’re sensations in England, but can they do it in the States? We want you to travel with them on their chartered jet. Eat with them, drink with them, do anything you have to, but stick to them like glue. And tell us everything.”

What had caused the excitement about the boys were the three appearances six months earlier on The Ed Sullivan Show. The first aired live from New York, the second a week later from the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, and the third was taped ahead of time in New York.

“They’re calling it Beatlemania—and it’s spreading. I want you on it,” said English.

In truth, the avalanche of Beatles adoration had not come out of nowhere. By late 1963, the band already was the pop flavor of the year in much of Europe, dominating the charts with songs like “Please Please Me,” “From Me to You,” “Twist and Shout,” “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Even the cynical Aussies, who have a genetic intolerance for anything that even smells of “those pommy bastards,” were demanding Beatles love pills with every meal. America, however, was uncharted territory.

In early November, 1963—ten days before the assassination of President Kennedy was to paralyze the nation—the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, flew to New York to meet Sullivan on the eleventh floor of his Hotel Delmonico headquarters. Sullivan’s long-running variety show, which drew millions of viewers every Sunday night and had introduced Elvis Presley to most of America, was the perfect venue for the Beatles. Later, Epstein would recount that Sullivan’s initial reaction was less than enthusiastic. Though cordial, he told Epstein, “There’s no way your boys are bigger than Elvis.”

The selling of the Beatles was the manager’s main goal, but he also thought he could offset the cost of his first-class tickets to New York by bringing another of his “hot” young talents, British singer Billy J. Kramer, also part of Brian’s burgeoning music stable. Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas had some success with songs like “Do You Want to Know a Secret” and “I’m in Love,” both written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Billy’s role on that trip, however, turned out to be mostly as a spectator.

The Beatles were always Epstein’s main passion. With his impeccable, polished Brit accent, Savile Row suit and handmade Jermyn Street silk monogrammed shirt, he cut an impressive figure as he argued that while Elvis might still be King, his boys were stars in their own right.

Sullivan, so one story goes, had become interested in the Beatles purely by chance. He was traveling back to New York from Europe and was passing through London’s Heathrow Airport when he was startled by hordes of screaming teenagers—mostly female—surrounding the terminal. Scores of police were trying to contain the shrieking fans. He assumed the noisy reception was to greet either the Queen Mother heading off to Ireland or Prime Minister Harold MacMillan arriving home from Scotland. He was intrigued when he discovered that the ear-splitting demonstration was for a pop group called the Beatles.

Sullivan asked his London agent to find out more, and when he received an envelope packed with adoring newspaper clippings, he decided to book them on his show. Still, he had some reservations. He told Epstein that because he’d never seen the Beatles perform, he couldn’t guarantee them top billing.

Epstein agreed and was even satisfied with the Beatles being paid musician’s union minimum of $3,500 (to be split between the four) for each of three shows. But soon after the two shook hands on the deal, a still-jittery Sullivan came down with a case of buyer’s remorse.

According to Beatles author Bruce Spizer, he nervously asked his son-in-law and a producer on the show, Bob Precht, “Has anyone in New York ever heard of or seen this rock ’n’ roll band?” Precht knew how his father-in-law operated; he just shrugged and said nothing.

Epstein used his remaining time in Manhattan to target major publications in a quest for press coverage, and he already had his bona fides. In Britain, music critic Richard Buckle at The Sunday Times had praised the Lennon–McCartney songwriting team as “the greatest composers since Beethoven,” and The New York Times Magazine had an article in the works, “Britons Succumb to Beatlemania,” chronicling the whopping hype surrounding the new group.

On a roll, Epstein garnered an interview with The New Yorker for a piece that eventually ran in the “Talk of the Town” section on December 28—a classy break considering readers of the prestigious magazine were not quite the band’s target audience. But Epstein knew that the movers and shakers read the weekly magazine, and the writer was impressed right away with Epstein, describing him in the article as “more English drawing room accent than Tin Pan Alley.” As he left the interview, Epstein pronounced: “I think America is ready for the Beatles.”

Though delighted with the breaks, deep down he harbored the nagging fear that his boys might fall flat on their handsome faces—and there was good reason for pessimism. Only a year earlier, George Martin, the Beatles’ music producer based in London, had sent a copy of “Please Please Me” to the top executive at Capitol Records, which had American rights to distribute Beatles records in the U.S. Lacking the enthusiastic response Martin and Epstein had been looking for, Capitol president Alan Livingston wrote back: “We don’t think the Beatles will do anything in this market.”

He declined to release the record, off-loading “Please Please Me” (with “Ask Me Why” on the B-side) in February, 1963, to the obscure Vee-Jay Records of Chicago, which handled mostly black artists. Deafening silence from DJs greeted its release. It didn’t help that the first record cover misspelled the new group’s name as “The Beetles.”

Making matters worse, showbiz traffic historically traveled from America to England—not the other way around. British pop stars like Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and Tommy Steele may have been giants in their homeland, but they usually performed dismally when they ventured across the Atlantic. Epstein knew he had to do a massive selling job.

Then, unexpectedly, lightning struck. As Christmas approached, Capitol discovered that a Washington, D.C., DJ named Carroll James had been playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” non-stop, without the company’s blessing: The DJ’s girlfriend, a TWA flight attendant, apparently had hand-carried the record from London. The response was sensational, with the station being bombarded with calls from listeners asking where they could buy the record, which had not yet been released in the U.S.

Capitol relented. Eyeing the lucrative holiday market, it ordered three factories to work non-stop to churn out a million copies for instant distribution. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (with “I Saw Her Standing There” on the flip side) hit stores on December 26 and immediately climbed to the top of the charts. Less than a month later, the company released the album Meet the Beatles, which contained eleven more Beatles songs.

And as it turned out, Sullivan’s own network beat him to the draw by being the first to bring the Beatles to American television. Shortly after Brian had returned to London, CBS Nightly News ran concert footage of the band shot on November 16 in the English seaside town of Bournemouth, along with interviews of the boys. Anchorman Alexander Kendrick referred to their “sheepdog hairdos.”

“Some say they are the authentic voice of the proletariat,” intoned Kendrick. “Some say they are the authentic heart of Britain...in revolt against the American cult of pop singers represented by Elvis Presley and the long line of his British imitators. Some say the Beatles represent authentic British youth, or British youth as it would like to be—self-confident, natural, direct, decent, vital, throbbing. The Beatles themselves seem to have no illusion—they symbolize the twentieth-century non-hero, as they make non-music, wear non-haircuts and give non-mercy…and meanwhile the fan mail continues to roll in…and so does the money.”

The program aired November 21. The next day President Kennedy was assassinated.

The avalanche of publicity was having its effect—particularly in the tight-knit media world of Manhattan. CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite—“the most trusted man in America”—ran a four-minute segment about the Beatles on his December 10 show. The clip offered a welcome relief from the flood of post-assassination stories that filled most of the network news programs.

Also before Sullivan’s show, America’s top-rated late-night talk-show host, Jack Paar, upon hearing of the Sullivan booking, decided to put one over on his crosstown rival by airing footage of the Beatles singing “She Loves You,” from the Bournemouth concert. The clip aired January 3—almost five weeks before their first Sullivan Show appearance. Epstein was delighted, but Sullivan felt betrayed and was furious.

“Pay them off and get rid of them,” he ordered his London agent, Peter Prichard. Fortunately, Prichard ignored the request; a few days later, Sullivan called him back to say that he had changed his mind.

Meanwhile, Epstein pressed ahead. He urged Capitol to pull out all the promotional stops and spend some real money to push his band. The company complied, earmarking $50,000—a gigantic amount for that time—to promote the Beatles’ arrival in the U.S.

Working via ads in the major pop music magazines, such as Billboard and Cash Box, Capitol urged New York fans to greet the new band’s arrival at the former Idlewild Airport, newly rechristened John F. Kennedy International Airport. Radio stations, smelling huge ratings, jumped into the fray.

When one radio station offered free Beatles T-shirts to anyone who showed up at the airport, the hysteria level jumped several notches. Half a ton of Beatles wigs were shipped to meet the demand, along with 24,000 rolls of Beatles wallpaper. Bumper stickers reading “The Beatles Are Coming!” sprouted everywhere as Capitol urged its sales people and employees to “plaster these stickers on any friendly surface.” Staffers were instructed to answer the phones: “Capitol Records—the Beatles are coming!”

It all paid off handsomely. When the boys touched down on February 19, 1964, they received a rapturous reception from over 3,000 teenagers—mostly girls. It was even more mobbed at New York’s Plaza Hotel, where thousands of fans crowded outside, overwhelming the hostelry’s management, who at first requested that the Beatles move out because of all the disruptions. The Beatles themselves were trapped by fans camping in front of the Plaza. The tumultuous reception led the media to announce that Beatlemania had arrived on their own doorstep.

In between their Sullivan stints (ironically, Sullivan himself still had never heard them sing before he introduced them on his show), the Beatles squeezed in some live concerts, starting with the Washington, D.C., Coliseum. Filmmakers Alfred and David Maysles captured the event in a black-and-white documentary.

Back in New York, they did two more live shows at the storied Carnegie Hall before an upper-crust crowd not typical for rock concerts, among them, “Happy” Rockefeller, wife of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, with her twelve-year-old son and ten-year-old daughter; composer–conductor Leonard Bernstein; and all of New York’s top music critics. More than 300 cops were assigned to keep the peace and control the just over 3,000 concertgoers attending each show.

The Carnegie Hall concerts were arranged by New York promoter Sid Bernstein, who had followed the Beatles frenzy in an English newspaper, called Epstein out of the blue, reaching him at his mother’s house in Liverpool, and gotten him to commit.

“I tried to sell him on the idea of the Beatles coming over here,” Bernstein said in his 2000 memoir Not Just the Beatles. “Brian told me, ‘America is not playing our records. I don’t want my boys to play to empty houses. We are superstars here.’ He told me I was the first American to call him—even before Ed Sullivan. I won him over by saying, ‘I’ll put your boys in Carnegie Hall.’”

Bernstein also admitted that he never told the hall’s booker that the Beatles were a rock group. “She thought they were a string quartet or madrigal singers and it wasn’t until it was all over that she learned the truth.”

In typical terse style, Variety magazine’s headline read: “6,000 BEATLE BUFFS FLIP THEIR WIGS IN 2-SHOW CARNEGIE HALL BLOWOUT.”

But that wasn’t all. Bernstein also had the foresight to book the band to appear the next year at Shea Stadium, the home of the New York Mets baseball team and the New York Jets football team. That concert, to be held August 15, 1965, would become part of the Beatles’ second American tour, drawing over 50,000 fans, the biggest turnout ever for a Beatles show. It was filmed as a documentary by a company owned by Ed Sullivan. Bernstein tried to lure the band back to Shea in 1967 with a $1 million offer, but to no avail.

At my home on the West Coast in February of 1964, I watched on my television as the Beatles were introduced by the ever-wooden Sullivan. They bounced onto the stage to wild shrieks and moans and belted out “All My Loving,” “Till There Was You” and “She Loves You.” Each time the camera moved in on a close-up, captions popped up with their names. When Lennon came into sharp focus, a caption read, “Sorry, girls, he’s married.”

Shoe polish and shaving cream commercials followed. Then the Beatles stepped aside for several other British-flavored acts—one being the cast of the musical Oliver!, then playing on Broadway and starring, as the Artful Dodger, a nineteen-year-old Davy Jones, later to become the mainstay of the made-for-TV look-alike Beatles group, the Monkees, along with his co-star, London singer Georgia Brown.

In another coincidence, Oliver! had been written by Lionel Bart, a close friend of Epstein. Also sharing the bill: “Two Ton” Tessie O’Shea, a Welsh singer and banjo player familiar to the Beatles; impressionist Frank Gorshin; some acrobats; a magician who did sleight-of-hand tricks, and a husband–wife comedy couple called (Mitzi) McCall and (Charlie) Brill.

Before introducing the Beatles for their final two songs, Sullivan warned the screamers with mock severity, “If you don’t keep quiet, I’m going to send for a barber.” The boys returned for “I Saw Her Standing There” and the big hit “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Sullivan’s exhortation had no effect on the volume or duration of the unfaltering shrieking.

Three thousand miles west of the Sullivan studio, I, frankly, couldn’t comprehend what all the madness was about. I must confess, I followed the show in a somewhat half-hearted manner. The truly big stories that had riveted the nation, including the president’s assassination, made all the wailing seem unimportant to this budding newsman.

More to the point, I knew that the Beatles had been creating excitement 6,000 miles away in Britain for some time, but what about those other British pop groups like the Rolling Stones and the Animals? What was so special about these lads from Liverpool?

But then came the call from David English. I asked him what I had to do to gain intimate access. “It’s all arranged,” he said. I was to provide daily news stories about the tour. “And,” David added, “we’ve signed George Harrison to write a column and tell us about everything he sees and does in America. Your job is to sit down with him and get his vivid impressions.”

Easier said than done. Harrison was a guitarist, not a writer, and we were concerned that his observational skills might be pretty basic. When it came to penning a column, he would need a little help from his friends. That’s where I came in. I had to make his words readable and entertaining.

Although I had covered show business in Hollywood, I was in no way a specialist on the pop-music front. I had never even attended a rock concert. My strength was that I had a good “nose for news.”

When I hung up from English’s call, I threw a bunch of clothes into my suitcase and raced to Los Angeles International Airport. Ninety minutes later, I was in San Francisco.

Little did I realize that I was about to embark on one of the craziest adventures of my life.

2: I’M WITH THE BEATLES

“Always America seemed too big, too vast, too remote and too American.”—Brian Epstein

The ecstatic Sullivan reception had the precise effect Brian Epstein had dreamed of.

He had first met New York agent Norman Weiss on the phone in late 1963, at the suggestion of top U.K. agent Vic Lewis, a onetime bandleader who had been watching the Beatles’ success in England. Weiss was the head of the General Artists Corporation, one of the biggest New York theatrical agencies, handling world tours for talent like Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Tony Bennett. The pair hit it off instantly, reconnecting in January, 1964, in Paris, when “Les Beatles” played the Olympia with Weiss’ client Trini Lopez topping the bill.

Immediately after the first Sullivan show aired, Weiss called Epstein, getting straight to the point: The Beatles should consider a full American tour.

“I’ve been bombarded with calls from promoters all over the country—every podunk town wants your boys,” he said. “When can you bring them over?”

To sweeten the pot, Weiss, savvy to the ways of dealmaking, told Epstein, “We’ve had fifty times more offers than we can handle, so to sort out the deadbeats you should demand $25,000 up front and get up to eighty percent of the box-office gate.”

It was big bucks, and Brian knew what his answer would be, but first he said he would have to talk to the band. After a quick chat with them he called Weiss back.

“The boys want to do it, so please make the arrangements.” Then he added: “It’s a huge undertaking, but we all want to make absolutely certain that promoters everywhere don’t overcharge for tickets. We want ordinary fans to be able to afford tickets.”

Completely unfamiliar with the geography of North America, time zones or distances that needed to be traveled, Epstein gave Weiss carte blanche to work out the timetable and venues, not realizing that most of the giant stadiums and arenas that were eventually chosen had never before been used for pop concerts. That was to come back and bite the Beatles when it turned out that the venues, designed for sports events, political conventions and circuses, were not equipped with anything like the sound systems required to deliver live music to massive crowds.

Finally, Weiss sent Brian a proposed timetable. Weiss later recalled, somewhat grandly to Beatles author Hunter Davies, that organizing that tour “was more difficult than planning the Normandy invasion.” Indeed, it was the most ambitious rock tour ever. It would start in San Francisco on August 19 and end in New York on September 20.  Ticket prices would run from $2.50 to no more than five dollars. With final adjustments, it included thirty-two performances in twenty-four cities.

Shortly before noon on August 19, I touched down at San Francisco International Airport, jumped into a taxi and headed for the San Francisco Hilton, to be met by an astonishing sight. The hotel was under siege. Thousands of people, most of them teenage girls, and most of them with their teeth encased in metal braces, had surrounded the hotel and were screaming in the wildest mass hysteria I had ever seen (or have seen since). I literally had to muscle my way into the lobby past uniformed sheriff’s deputies with pistols on their belts.

“I’m a guest,” I said, shouting above the screams.

“We’re sold out,” said the receptionist.

“No,” I yelled, still trying to be heard. “I’m with the Beatles.”

I signed in. The hotel security men at the reception desk eyed me suspiciously, then let me pass.

After settling into my room, I tried to reach Derek Taylor, the group’s press officer and Epstein’s assistant. “They’re not taking calls,” said the hotel operator, hanging up abruptly. I tried again. “I’m from England,” I told the operator. “I’m with the Beatles.”

Those were the magic words. She put me through to Taylor, who told me, “Come up to the suite right away, Ivor, and meet the boys.” As I stepped off the elevator on the fifteenth floor, he greeted me with, “Welcome to Beatlemania.”

Derek, a lean, nattily attired fellow with long hair and a skinny moustache and wearing a narrow blue tie, white shirt and no jacket, escorted me into a large anteroom, puffing a cigarette furiously. A former showbiz journalist at the Daily Express Manchester office, he was to be my passport to the inner sanctum.

“Our first concert is tonight, at the Cow Palace…not very far away. And here,” he said, pouring me a shot of whiskey. “You’ll need it. Let me see if Brian and the boys are awake.”

He disappeared, returned a few minutes later and ushered me into an adjoining suite with a central living area. Three doors led off from the main suite. Even from up here you could hear the constant screaming. Two guys in shirtsleeves lumbered up to me.

“Mal, Neil, this is Ivor. He’s traveling with us.”

I shook hands with Mal Evans, a burly six-footer sporting heavy, dark-framed glasses, and Neil Aspinall, a thinner, boyish-looking young man who looked as though he might be a relative of the Fab Four. They could have been Laurel and Hardy, but they were the Beatles’ longtime road managers. “Ivor’s on for the whole trip,” Derek said by way of introduction.

Behind them, a table was covered with what looked like the leftovers of breakfast: some strips of bacon, half-eaten toast, soggy cornflakes, congealed eggs and a teapot with dirty cups and saucers.

“They’re just up,” said Mal, who I later learned had graduated to roadie from nightclub bouncer.

“We’re still a bit jet-lagged,” explained Derek.

“Is it always like this?” I asked, gesturing to the incessant noise from below. He just smiled.

He said that the Beatles organization had booked me a room at all the hotels on the tour and, wherever possible, the band and I would be on the same floor. And I would have a seat on the Beatles’ private jet, which turned out to be a Lockheed Electra chartered to ferry the boys around the country.

“Do I need a badge or a ticket?” I asked.

“No—just stay close to us at all times.” Then he escorted me into one of the bedrooms.

Ringo Starr was plopped on one bed, a phone to his ear. George Harrison sat on the other bed looking at a soundless television, a radio in his hand and headphones around his neck, thumbing through a sprawl of records. A breakfast tray holding a plate of half-eaten sweet rolls, a teapot and a jar of jam sat on a table next to a pile of crumpled newspapers and an ashtray filled with cigarette butts. It was like I had wandered into the dorm room of a gang of unkempt college kids.

“Ivor’s doing your column for the Express,” Derek told George, who blinked and nodded but didn’t say a word, except to ask: “Any toast left?” He changed the television to a channel showing the previous night’s scene of bedlam as the Beatles arrived at San Francisco International Airport.

Derek and I moved back into the main living room. Derek helped himself to a drink, and within a few minutes the other Beatles wandered in. John Lennon was shoeless in a crumpled white shirt and jeans so narrow that it looked as though they’d had an argument with his bare ankles. The whole place reeked of stale cigarette smoke.

The introductions were brief. Derek said to John, “This is Ivor.”

John looked me over. “Ivan the Terrible,” he said.

“No, it’s Ivor,” I corrected, but John would have none of it. “Ivan the Not So Terrible,” he repeated. I found out later that one of John’s boyhood pals was Ivan Vaughan, who in 1957 had taken a young Paul McCartney to see a group called The Quarrymen play at Woolton Parish Church, which was how it all began. Ivan was a witty fellow who, said Paul, was a sort of leader of their group at school; John often tagged “Terrible” onto his name.

“You’re English?” inquired Paul, as he shook my hand warmly, clearly the most welcoming of the lot. “But you live in America?”

“Welcome to California,” I offered somewhat lamely. “Is this screaming usual?”

“Bloody mad,” John muttered. “They’ll all die of laryngitis.”

Ringo ambled in to sponge a cigarette from John and then wandered out as though he was sleepwalking. “What’s the time in England?” he wanted to know.

Derek said, “There’s a press conference at three.”

All the boys looked exhausted and not really in the mood to meet strangers.

It was just one day before that the Beatles had left London’s Heathrow Airport on a commercial jet. Their Pan Am 707—dubbed “The Beatles Clipper”—made a short stop in Winnipeg before heading on to Los Angeles, where they were rushed through customs by Pan Am stewards and then ushered into a room at Los Angeles International Airport for a makeshift, hastily convened press conference. There, they had pulled off their sunglasses, shoved them into their pockets and been led to a polished table with a Pan Am banner posted prominently behind them.

Moments earlier, Hollywood’s hottest couple, newlyweds Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, wove through the sea of frenzied fans to catch a flight for their new holiday home in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. They barely got a glance.

Despite the long transatlantic flight, the Beatles appeared remarkably alert and dapper in jackets and ties. Only John was tieless and despite the heat in the stuffy room wore a pullover under his jacket. The questions came fast and furious, and one man in back screamed “Sit down” to the photographers blocking the view. The calmest people in the room were the Beatles—flanked by Brian, who wore a look that said, “We’re beat…please get me out of here.”

At times, all four Beatles spoke simultaneously, with Ringo and George hastily puffing cigarettes as though they had a train to catch.

“How long are you in L.A.?” a reporter shouted.

“I haven’t a clue,” said John. “I don’t even know where we are.”

“Do you worry about breaking up?” someone else asked.

“We’ve been friends from school for years,” responded Paul.

“Turn ‘round for happy snaps,” John genially told George, when a photographer jumped up and ordered them to face him for a group shot in the middle of the Q and A session.

Then a reporter, who had heard that the Ambassador Hotel had turned down the chance of hosting the Beatles when they were due to perform in Los Angeles a few days later, shouted: “Are you upset about the Ambassador not wanting you?”

“We’re not interested,” said John, “as long as we get a bed each.”

After twenty minutes of chaos, John stood up, signaling the end of the confusion. Reporters rushed forward to get autographs, which the boys signed until Brian whispered in Paul’s ear, “We’ve got to go.” Then they wearily climbed on board for the quick flight north to San Francisco. Taking into account the eight-hour time difference, they had been traveling for almost twenty-four hours.

It had been a savage timetable. Just forty-eight hours earlier they had finished a concert in the British seaside resort town of Blackpool. Now it was eight o’clock on a sunny, but cool Northern California evening. Unfortunately, the Beatles’ body clocks kept telling them it was really the middle of the night.

In a bit of a daze, I left their Hilton suite to get a close-up look at the hysteria below. Hundreds of fans sustained a chorus of unabated cries, while being physically restrained by a line of police officers and sheriff’s deputies. It was a literal wailing wall, with a unified outpouring of grief that grew louder and then quieter for no apparent reason.

I didn’t want to fight the crowd, so I beat a hasty retreat, wending my way back through another phalanx of cops and took the elevator to my room on the eleventh floor. Drawing the curtains aside to get a bird’s eye view of the spectacle below, a huge scream went up. I quickly closed the curtains.

As the tour wore on, the view was the same at every stop, from West Coast to Midwest to East Coast. Yet inside a week I had become strangely inured to the bedlam, used to the noise and even ho-hum about the cacophony of screaming which had become as commonplace as the background hum of traffic.

For me it was to be the start of five weeks of frenzy—America in a blur—as the Beatles and I, now part of their resident press corps, moved from our chartered plane to a reserved limo, amid deafening sirens, to the hotel. Then came the mad dash to the stadium for performances. Then we went back to the hotel, trapped there by thousands of hysterical kids. Later came the shrieking police sirens as we left for the airport or the next stadium to begin the process over again.

It was to be the strangest lifestyle I had ever encountered.

3: I LEFT MY HEARING IN SAN FRANCISCO

“On tour that year it was crazy. Not within the band. We were normal. The rest of the world was crazy.”—George Harrison

They call it the Cow Palace because the place once played host to cattle shows. It is a cavernous space, which during World War II was a staging center for troops heading to the Pacific theater. It went on to host basketball, track-and-field meets and roller derbies.

A month earlier it had overflowed with a very different kind of crowd: the Republican Party’s convention, at which the yelling had been for Barry Goldwater, the ultra-conservative senator from Arizona, who beat out the liberal governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, as the party’s presidential standard bearer.

While I had seen on television the frenzy surrounding the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show six months earlier, even that didn’t prepare me for what was to come.

Earlier that afternoon at the Hilton, Derek Taylor had escorted me to meet the Beatles’ manager. Brian wore a smart charcoal-gray suit, white shirt and tie, as if he were ready to greet his banker rather than marshal the talents of four rockers from Liverpool. He wasn’t overwhelmingly welcoming. We exchanged a few inconsequentialities.

“Where is your home?” he inquired, lip slightly curling. I, in my slightly less polished Cockney accent, replied, “Beverly Hills.”

“You’re English, and you live in Beverly Hills?” he said, showing a little more interest as he asked basically the same question Paul had the day before. “I love Beverly Hills.”

That was about it.

I followed Brian as he moved out of the living room into his adjoining suite, and I watched as, from time to time, he took phone calls or had whispered conversations with Derek. Indeed, much was on the line both for Brian and his boys. They were embarking on the most ambitious concert tour a British group had ever contemplated. They had been a smash on the Sullivan show and attention was being paid. Yet they were untried and untested in this live arena.

Shortly before, Brian had reluctantly said no to the offer of a San Francisco ticker-tape parade. The vivid imagery of President Kennedy’s Dallas motorcade as it passed the book depository was still fresh in his mind.

“What time do I need to book a taxi for tonight’s concert?” I asked Derek.

“Get back here, and you’ll ride with us.”

After a quick shower and a quick bite—“Beatles Burgers” in the hotel’s Gazebo café where the chef had just created the new dish: four mini hamburgers topped with chopped salad—I returned to the fifteenth floor, where the entourage waited somewhat anxiously in the suite’s anteroom without saying much.

Suddenly, the Beatles emerged from their adjoining bedrooms. They were surprisingly edgy, yet appealing in their tight, pocketless dark suits, white shirts and string ties, looking more like tailor’s dummies than rock ’n’ rollers.

Ninety minutes before the concert was due to begin, two stern-faced men appeared, introducing themselves as the hotel manager and the head of security. Few words were exchanged as they beckoned us to follow. This raggle-taggle band, led by the Beatles, marched mutely toward two elevators that were being held open for us, as the security man barked into a walkie-talkie in his hand.

There was no conversation. No niceties. It was a bit like a military operation, twelve of us crammed into the lifts. The head of security punched buttons that took us without stopping down to the basement. As the elevator doors opened, John, in a posh English accent, announced: “Menswear. Ladies underwear.”

We followed our escorts through a few narrow corridors and then exited the building into the early evening air. It was still daylight and surprisingly cool for a summer’s evening. Two nine-passenger black limos, their engines idling, were stationed by the back door—and no sign of any screamers.

The Beatles slid expertly into the first limo. “Get into the second car,” ordered Derek. I jumped in and settled back into the heavy leather interior next to Derek’s assistant, Bess Coleman, and three others, who turned out to be fellow newsmen from England also covering the tour.

None of us had a clue about what to expect, so we just nodded to each other, not bothering to chat, but eager to get to where we were going. As the limos glided smoothly into the roadway, six motorcycle officers appeared. Two moved to the front, two to each side and the other two dropped back into the rear of the convoy.

From the downtown Hilton, it was just a short drive south to the Cow Palace, but an exciting one. I had never traveled in a convoy with a police escort. I felt like visiting royalty as the motorbikes, and the police blowing whistles at every intersection, sped us through every red light. Along the way, I caught glimpses of fans…girls…teenagers lining the streets, waving, shouting, tears running down their faces.

Our entourage arrived to the Cow Palace shortly before seven o’clock. The Beatles, as if fired from a cannon, jumped out and raced through a throng of waiting photographers. Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall ushered them into what looked like large storage boxes—a long line of green trailers that were used as dressing rooms. They clanged the doors shut.

We hung about outside the trailers, not sure what to do, waiting for something to happen. As we did, a couple with a young child appeared. The woman was former child star Shirley Temple Black.

Black, although retired from the movie business, was still considered Hollywood royalty; she lived in Woodside, an affluent suburb south on the San Francisco Peninsula. The little girl with her was her ten-year-old daughter Lori, and the man her husband Charles. The family was ushered into the boxy trailer for introductions and what turned out to be a quick chat and picture. Lori perched herself on Ringo’s knee while George, looking a bit bored by it all, smiled as Charles Black shot a photo. “Lori loves the Beatles,” said the actress, as she headed for her seat in the arena.

Backstage, a San Francisco cop was briefing his fellow officers as though they were preparing to storm the beaches of Normandy: “We will not allow any dancing. No running up and down the aisles. And no going up to the stage.”

The Beatles were ready—but first the crowd was to be titillated by not one, but four warm-up acts. First came the Bill Black Combo, whose leader was Elvis’ old bassist but who, ironically, was absent with an illness and was to miss the entire tour. Next up were the Exciters, a quartet best known for their hit, “Tell Me.”

Third out of the box were the Righteous Brothers: Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, whose “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” was about to make them major stars. They launched into two of their hits, “Little Latin Lupe Lu” and “My Babe.” And finally there came Jackie DeShannon, iconic as one of rock music’s first female—and the sixties’ most in-demand—songwriters. She belted out her self-penned “When You Walk in the Room,” Sonny Bono and Jack Nitzsche’s “Needles and Pins” and Bob Wills’ Western swing hit “Faded Love.”

Of course, for all the interest the crowd paid to the openers, they could have been mannequins in a shop window. Whenever one of the acts was introduced, the crowd reacted in the same way: “We want the Beatles!”

Finally, at 9:20 p.m., it was time.

“There they are—the Beatles!” announced a local DJ.

And there they were. The Beatles sprinted onto the bare stage in their tight suits and the jam-packed Cow Palace exploded into shrill and sustained screaming, lit up by a sea of flashbulbs from thousands of Kodak Instamatic and Brownie cameras.

Without a word, the boys launched into “Twist and Shout,” but who could tell—they were drowned out by the noise. All around me, girls, some holding binoculars, began what I can only describe as a marathon of unending shrieking.

They jumped out of their seats, their bodies shook and shuddered and became so contorted that it seemed they were in the throes of serious epileptic fits or had been possessed by demons. One teenager in blue jeans and a denim jacket two rows behind me shook and wobbled so much I worried that her head might fall off.

The song finished, Paul waved and said, “Make as much noise as you like and really let go—because it’s not our place.” Then they launched into “You Can’t Do That,” “All My Loving,” “She Loves You,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Like an express train, with hardly a pause for breath, they shook and rocked like puppets on strings.

The only time they slowed was to duck a bombardment of tiny projectiles: hard jellybeans rained down on them non-stop, like friendly fire. Most missed their human targets—though more than a few clattered like hailstones onto Ringo’s drums; others fell far short, stinging my ears and hitting my head like sharp pellets. I crouched low in my seat, pulled my jacket over my head and grabbed a newspaper as a kind of makeshift shield.

Why jellybeans? In a 1963 television interview, George had confessed his passion for jelly babies. U.S. fans confused the softer jelly babies with the hard-shelled jellybeans.

John paused near the end of the performance to announce, “Here’s one from our new film.” The rest of his words were drowned out as the band exploded into “A Hard Day’s Night.”

In less than twenty-nine minutes it was all over. Twelve songs, express delivery: Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. The moment they finished their final number, “Long Tall Sally,” they dropped their instruments and raced backstage. The crowd thought they would be back for an encore or to retrieve their guitars, but there was none of that. It was like the later clarion call: “Elvis has left the building.” I moved into the aisle to head backstage and found myself treading in what seemed like a sea of treacle: melted jellybeans.

As I stepped into the media limo I saw Mal holding open the door of an ambulance and the Beatles disappearing into it. It roared off, red lights flashing. Their limo had been abandoned, laid siege to by fans.

Dozens of girls had clambered onto its roof and attached themselves to the doors like human limpets in a horror movie as the security men watched, helpless to curtail the auto carnage. As our driver carefully pulled around the crippled car and headed away from the bedlam, the roof of Limo Number 1 finally buckled under all the pummeling.

A dozen fans broke off from their destruction and tried to give chase. But we were gone, leaving a drained and exhausted crowd of 17,130. Gate receipts amounted to $91,670 with the Beatles hauling away $47,600.

Nineteen people required first aid during the concert. One boy dislocated his shoulder, fifty fans were hurt in a scuffle with police, and two were arrested. Police rugby-tackled fifty more fans who tried to invade the stage.

The soles of my shoes were completely encrusted with the detritus of those now-oozing jellybeans.

And so it went. From one city to the next.

Truth be told, the fans never really got their money’s worth, musically speaking. A mere less-than-thirty minutes of virtually nonstop song bombardment. The set list remained nearly the same throughout the tour—covers of American rock ’n’ roll and R&B, or the band’s fairly simple, early ditties about holding your hand or dancing with you. The hits that resonated throughout America in 1964 were not the ones that were to give the later Beatles their remarkable longevity.

Chatting between songs was sparse, and there was very little interaction with the crowd. It was a rush half hour—the Beatles almost trying to break a completion record. Yet no one complained.

As the tour wore on, the boys relaxed a bit, ever so infrequently improvising. Paul might pause and urge, “Join in with the song. Or stamp your feet. It’s all in good fun…sing, shout, make a bit of noise.” Or when there was a brief break to allow George to switch guitars, John would grab the mic: “Wait a sec while George changes his guitar. Next we’re gonna sing—if George is in tune—the title song from our new movie, A Hard Day’s Night.”

Robert F. Clifton, a former New Jersey cop, who was hired to do security at the Atlantic City concert and got friendly with Paul, remembered it this way: “The Beatles began to play. Don’t ask what they played, because no one except the Beatles can answer that question. No one heard one song, one lyric, not even one note. The cheers never stopped. The screams never died, and the tears from the eyes of young girls never stopped flowing.”

And the jellybeans.

It was like being at a public stoning. In Chicago, a missile crashed noisily just a few inches from Ringo and George—it was a T-bone steak. One night, in Kansas City, a tennis shoe whizzed by my ear and landed on the stage—moments later the mate flew by. I looked around and two rows behind I saw a freckle-faced girl—no more than thirteen years old—who appeared to be in a trance. She was shoeless, standing on her seat, her mouth frozen in a yell that sounded like an air raid siren.

From time to time, something would go dramatically awry. In Cleveland, the show was stopped dead in its tracks by worried cops who decided things had gotten completely out of control. In Boston, an overwrought young man jumped on stage, grabbed John’s hat and then dove headfirst back into the crowd. John played on as if this headgear larceny was par for the course. In Milwaukee, a teen squirmed onto the stage and attached herself to John. He nonchalantly played on with this human appendage wrapped around his legs. It was left to Mal to pry her loose, dropping her back into the crowd like a sack of potatoes. A smiling John took it all in his stride. At the Hollywood Bowl, a young woman jumped into the fountain in front of the stage and tried to swim up to the band members. She had to be hooked and fished out by security.

Other times, it wasn’t such good fun. Ambulances regularly sped from the stadiums with kids who had fainted, been crushed or had broken bones when caught up in a wall of fans.

Finally, Paul would break into “Long Tall Sally.” We scribes sat in the far right front-row seats at every concert, so we could make a speedy getaway; “Sally” was our pre-arranged signal to race unimpeded backstage, from where we would run to our limo and, within seconds, be gone.

The hysteria and police frenzy before, during and after concerts became as much a part of the experience as was the music. Away from the venues, the fans were unbelievably ingenious in their attempts to gain access to the band.

One night, a handful of girls breached security and gained access to our restricted hotel floor by stowing away under two room-service carts. Another girl decided to wend her way to what she thought was Beatles’ suite by climbing up the fire escape. She burst into tears and screamed for ten minutes when she was unable to open the locked window.

Still another group of girls sought access to the Beatles’ floor by claiming to be the boys’ sisters or their American cousins. There was, in fact, a precedent for this ruse: In New York in February, a woman had gone to the Plaza Hotel and requested admittance to the Beatles’ floor, claiming she was George’s sister.

After much to-ing and fro-ing she pulled out an old family photo and showed it to the men running hotel security. She was finally admitted to George’s suite—because she actually was his sister Louise, who had made the journey from her home in Benton, Illinois, to look after George, who had strep throat and a temperature of 104 degrees. Today in her eighties, she lives in Missouri and manages a Beatles tribute band called the Liverpool Legends.

In Dallas, a teen was rushed to the hospital with severe cuts to her head after crashing through a plate glass window at the Beatles’ Cabana Motor Hotel. In Montreal, the boys received a vague death threat phoned in from a fringe French-Canadian separatist group. Ringo was specifically named by another caller who threatened to kill “the English Jew.” (Ringo is English, but not Jewish.) As a result, several Royal Canadian Mounted Police sharpshooters were dispatched to the Montreal Forum, there was a visible stepped-up police presence provided by the Dorval Municipal Police, and a pair of gendarmes were assigned to shadow Ringo. Derek dismissed the incident as “just a bunch of crackpots calling.”

Ringo took the threat a bit more seriously, later admitting to us that during the Montreal concerts he sat crouched as low to the ground as he could go, using his drums as a kind of protective shield. “My chin was touching the floor,” he joked. “I was such a tiny target.”

At a press conference between the two concerts, he regained his sense of humor. When the Beatles were asked, “Do any of you speak French?” Ringo shot back, “Nein.”

But the biggest problem for local police was devising innovative ways to get the band safely to and from stadiums, hotels and airports without traffic jams or serious incidents.

In New York, where the traffic was horrendous, the band reluctantly took to the air, hopping on helicopters for their trips to Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, and the next year to Shea Stadium, even though they all told me they were more scared of choppers than airplane travel.

Decoys were popular and varied. Paddy wagons and ambulances seemed to work best because there were always plenty on hand, and no fervent fan would dare to pursue an ambulance with sirens blaring and red lights flashing. Decoy limos were used with great effect. Other evasive methods included meat and laundry trucks.

I understood why they went to such extremes. Several times I was trapped in our follow-up limo, with its tinted windows, as fans swarmed all over us, threatening to overturn it because they thought they had cornered the Beatles.

Leaving the Milwaukee Arena, scores of fans descended upon us like a swarm of locusts, rained blows on the roof of the car and almost upended us. Terrified, I waved my arms and screamed, “We’re not the Beatles” at the batterers as we rocked and rolled, but it was like shouting in the wind.

Finally, our driver hit the accelerator and we escaped, narrowly managing to avoid running over the throngs. For a moment, I visualized a scene in London of my parents being informed that their eldest son had been crushed to death by teenagers in Milwaukee having been mistaken for a Beatle.

“Just thinking about the Beatles seems to induce mental disturbance,” George Dixon wrote earlier that year in The Washington Post. “They have a commonplace, rather dull act that hardly seems to merit mentioning, yet people hereabouts have mentioned scarcely anything else for a couple of days.”

This first American tour earned the Beatles more than one million dollars. We flew almost 23,000 miles, spent over sixty hours in the air. For me, it was a stunning eye-opener. Sure, you could read and hear all about it, but it was something else when you saw, felt and touched it, when you were enmeshed into the live sounds and the smells and the frenzy. When your car—mistaken for a Beatles limo—was buried by human bodies. It left you questioning your own sanity.

The only respite, oddly enough, came in the form of the old standby: the obligatory press conference.

The press conferences were mini side shows at which the Beatles were fed—live and in living color—to local print, television and broadcast media. They were trotted out like favorite animals at the zoo to provide quotes and sound bites for the papers, radio and television cameras. They were asked silly questions, poked, prodded and cajoled, and as a result they sometimes responded with cockiness, even arrogance.

They never surrendered. Alone, they might have been more vulnerable; together they were a force to be reckoned with, especially when confronted by reporters who were rarely on the same comedic wavelength. John cynically described this foreplay as “fifth-form humor…the sort you laugh at at school,” and at times he told us in private, “The press are pretty putrid.”

It was a delightful improv act as the Beatles dug deep to come up with fresh answers. After all, they’d had lots of practice in Britain, Europe, the Far East and Australia.

“How did you find America, Ringo?”

“We turned left at Greenland.”

“What do you call your haircut, George?”

“Arthur.”

The standard, unified four-man response to the question: “What is success to you?”

“Money.”

The Beatles knew the value of a good throwaway line.

“Will you sing for us?”

John: “No, we need money first.”

“Do you favor lunacy?”

Paul: “Yeah, it’s healthy.”

When there was a negative story about them, they swiftly responded, particularly the time a pundit pompously suggested that their music was corrupting the youth of America.

“What do you think of Detroit’s Stamp Out the Beatles campaign?”

John: “We have a Stamp Out Detroit campaign.”

Often, one Beatle would start a sentence and another would finish it. In Seattle, they were asked, “How long will the Beatles go on?”

Paul: “Don’t know…”

John: “We’re not taking bets...”

George: “Til death do us part.”

Reporter: “Paul, what will you do when your singing career is over?”

Paul: “Don’t know. Probably John and I will carry on songwriting.”

John: “I’m not doing it with you.”

When things dragged on and it was time to wrap it up and prepare for the next show, one of us regulars—with a signal from Derek—would bring things to an end with the oft asked and repeated mock serious question: “When will the bubble burst?”

When, indeed?

For the most part, we traveled from city to city by jet, but on September 2, making the sixty-odd mile trip from Atlantic City to Philadelphia, we changed routine and took a bus, meeting it about five miles outside the New Jersey city to avoid the maelstrom of fans. The press crew arrived by limo, just moments before the Beatles—who had traveled in a refrigerated fish truck. “Fookin’ freezing,” confided the shivering Paul.

With everyone safely aboard and the bus cruising on the interstate highway, we were congratulating each other on such a successful getaway when a speeding yellow taxicab suddenly overtook us, veering perilously into our path. His horn blaring loud and long, the cabbie applied the brakes, and the bus skidded onto the shoulder of the road.

We pressed our noses to the windows and peered out in alarm. Standing next to the cab and waving furiously at us were a couple of familiar skinny guys: It was the Righteous Brothers. Somewhat shamefacedly, they climbed aboard to our wild applause, toting their own suitcases.

Not long after that affront, the Righteous Brothers left the tour. Their pay packet as openers for Beatles was $750 per week at a time when they could be earning $600 for a one-night stand. But, basically, they were fed up with the fact that they were being ignored by crowds who couldn’t care less about them.

George later recalled the breaking point in The Beatles Anthology. At one of the shows, the helicopter delivering the Beatles to the stadium hovered over the stage during the Righteous Brothers’ performance of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” drowning them out.

The Righteous Brothers had had enough. “They were truly pissed off,” George remembered.

Finally, Brian Epstein agreed to let them break their contract. “As opening act, we were pitiful also-rans,” said Medley.

The Righteous Brothers were quickly replaced by Clarence “Frogman” Henry, whose manager, Bob Astor, had worked for Epstein back in England.

Hotel room pillow fight.

Photo: Harry Benson

A PR stunt with Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay.

Photo: Harry Benson

Seattle sellout.

Photo: Express Newspapers

With Ed Sullivan.

Photo: Express Newspapers

Brits invade America.

Photo: Express Newspapers

One lucky fan joins a respite in Central Park.

Photo: Express Newspapers

John’s wife Cynthia wasn’t allowed on the 1964 tour.

Photo: Express Newspapers

Ahoy in Miami.

Photo: Harry Benson

Hello Goodbye.

Photo: Express Newspapers

The reticent George with his ghostwriter: me.

Photo: Ron Joy-Belle Schwartz Estate

Gone fishing...from their Seattle hotel window.

Photo: Express Newspapers

Curtain crashes down on Beatles in Cleveland

Photo: Curt Gunther-Steven Gunther Estate

They’ve got a limo to ride—and sometimes an ambulance!

Photo: Curt Gunther-Steven Gunther Estate

Serenading the Indiana State Fair.

Photo: Curt Gunther-Steven Gunther Estate

Relaxing at Reed Pigman’s Missouri ranch.

Photo: Curt Gunther-Steven Gunther Estate

George backs up a solo by Paul.

Photo: Curt Gunther-Steven Gunther Estate

Brian Epstein tries out an antique thirtieth birthday gift.

Photo: Curt Gunther-Steven Gunther Estate

Protection in Las Vegas.

Photo: Express Newspapers

A twenty-seven-minute one-night stand.

Photo: Curt Gunther-Steven Gunther Estate

4: IT’S A MAD, MAD, MONEYED BEATLES WORLD

“Normally recognizable girls behaved as if possessed by some demonic urge, defying in emotional ecstasy the restraints which authorities try to place on them.”—Child guidance expert Dr. Bernard Saibel, writing in The Seattle Times

On the first day we met, Derek Taylor gave me a schedule listing our complete timetable every single day of the tour from start to finish, as it had been laid out by Norman Weiss. But then, on Day One in San Francisco, Weiss placed an urgent call to Brian Epstein. There was someone he wanted Brian to meet. It was Charles O. Finley, millionaire owner of the Kansas City Athletics football team. Finley was a larger-than-life personality whose middle initial was for Oscar, although his detractors said it stood for Obnoxious.

“I’ve promised Kansas City that they would get the Beatles,” the live wire Finley told Brian the moment he was ushered into Epstein’s suite, “and I have a reputation of being a man of my word. What will it take to make it happen?”

To show he meant business, Finley offered Brian a check for $60,000—far more than they were getting for any of the other concerts. And it was big bucks: Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland were being paid $15,000 for appearances, though admittedly for smaller venues.

The implacable Brian, who couldn’t have cared one iota what kind of promises Finley had made to the people of Kansas City, was astonished at the amount, but quickly rejected it.

“I’m terribly sorry, but we can’t squeeze anything more in. I promised the boys they could have a day off.” He handed back the check.

Unfazed, Finley tore it up, then walked over to the desk in Epstein’s suite, sat down and wrote a new one—for $100,000. Brian blinked but stood firm.

“No, sorry, there just isn’t time.”

Finley shrugged. He tore up the second check and quickly wrote another one. “Will this help?” he said, now upping his offer to $150,000. Brian asked for a moment to take the offer to the Beatles.

The four were in their smoke-filled suite, immersed in a game of cards and well into their third round of drinks when Brian interrupted. He calmly told them that they were being offered an astronomical sum to do one extra concert in Kansas City. They barely looked up.

Finally John dropped his cards, “Do what you want, Brian,” he said off-handedly.

Brian returned to his suite and shook Finley’s hand. “The boys would love to appear in Kansas City,” he said. The date was set for September 17, sandwiched between New Orleans and Dallas.

“Thank you, Brian,” said Finley.

“No, thank you, Mr. Finley.”

“Call me Charlie O. Everyone does,” the beaming Finley replied, unaware that his largesse was making rock ’n’ roll history.

Three weeks later, when we arrived in Kansas, Finley was waiting at the airport in a terrible Beatles fright wig (I thought it made him look more like Moe of the Three Stooges) and drove with Brian to the Municipal Stadium, where 20,280 fans had shown up, along with—so it seemed—just about every cop in the city. Ticket prices ranged from a low of two dollars to a pricey $8.50, and on the back of every ticket was a gag picture of Finley in the Beatles wig.

After the warm-up acts—and, for a change, a local band (Jack Nead and the Jumpin’ Jacks) got a moment of glory—the effervescent Finley, known to relish the spotlight, grabbed the microphone, pulled off his wig and said simply: “Here they are…the Beatles.”

Over the roar, Paul said, “Thank you very much.”

And they were off, shrewdly starting with the evergreen “Kansas City,” written in the fifties by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The crowd roared its approval.

Curiously, there were hundreds of empty seats in the big football stadium—a rare sight on the tour. Other than in Kansas City, only the performance at Denver’s spectacular Red Rocks Amphitheater failed to pack the house because the general-admission price was high at $6.50, and the venue was ten miles from downtown Denver.

The show ended, we drove straight to the airport, heading for Dallas. It was there I was told that, indeed, there were almost 20,000 empty seats in Finley’s stadium, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Beatles.

Finley was embroiled in a feud with the influential Kansas City Star over his management of the hometown baseball team, the Athletics. For Finley, the Beatles were simply a promotion for his team; he even took out ads in the local paper declaring, “Today’s Beatle Fans Are Tomorrow’s Baseball Fans.” And Finley was reviled in his city for threatening to move the bottom-ranked A’s elsewhere. There were calls to boycott any Finley-backed event.

As a result, the sports mogul lost a lot of money on the concert—not just the $150,000 up-front payday, but also another $25,000 that went to the local Children’s Mercy Hospital—a sum he had promised to donate if the show didn’t make a profit. Charlie had a soft spot for the hospital and told us that, as a kid, he had spent more than two years there while being treated for tuberculosis.

Still, he said, he was a happy man because “I kept my promise.”

Capitalizing on the Beatles’ popularity became an accepted, if not acceptable, part of the tour. There were countless independent “entrepreneurs” who hit on novel ways to cash in on the Beatlemania.

Rubbishy souvenirs sold by concert promoters were gobbled up at all venues, and no action was too outlandish if it meant the acquisition of anything and everything that had once belonged to, or been touched by, the Beatles. After hearing that one enterprising hotel employee had helped himself to the boys’ bedsheets and towels, cut them up and sold them as souvenir strips to fans, John led the Beatles into his hotel room bathroom, whereupon they ritualistically urinated on a pile of used towels.

And it wasn’t always about profiteering. Ringo recounted a bizarre incident that had happened to him at the Washington home of the British ambassador, David Ormsby-Gore, during the band’s earlier Sullivan visit to the States.

Much against their will, they had been persuaded to appear at the mansion for an uppity diplomatic reception. It was a scene they barely tolerated, and at the end of the evening, as guests came for autographs, Ringo felt a painful tug at his hair. He swung around quickly and was astonished to see a large, matronly woman brandishing a pair of nail scissors snipping a lock.

“It’s for my daughter,” she told him, somewhat off-handedly, as if this was totally justifiable behavior.

The perception of the Beatles as public property was not an uncommon attitude. As soon as the boys hit town you could bet that within an hour local politicos would be wielding their clout in attempts to meet them. Shortly after we arrived in Cleveland the night of September 15, I heard shouting in the hallway of our hotel floor. It was close to midnight.

I opened my room door, looked down the corridor and saw a middle-aged woman proclaiming to all and sundry that she was the mayor’s wife. She stood outside the Beatles’ suite and, facing three business-suited hotel security men, demanded to be given immediate access. She had a young girl with her, who seemed embarrassed by the exchange.

Derek was summoned, and that evening his diplomacy reservoir was at particularly low ebb. After being berated by the woman he declared: “I don’t care if you’re the fucking Queen of England, nobody gets into the Beatles’ room.” The woman made an angry retreat, and we never did find out if she was who she claimed to be. But the following day, at a more accommodating time, she and her daughter were escorted in for an audience and photo with the Beatles.

“Right loonies,” said John.

In Dallas on September 18, where they were due to play the Memorial Coliseum, the boys—particularly John—expressed a keen interest in driving by the notorious Texas School Book Depository, site of the Kennedy assassination just ten months earlier.

“Let’s take a quick look at the scene of the crime,” John said as he finished off breakfast in his room late in the morning. John had been the most traumatized by President Kennedy’s murder.

“He brought it up time and again in interviews with me,” remembered Art Schreiber, who covered the trip for the Westinghouse network of radio stations. “He was genuinely outraged by America’s passion for guns and the daily reports of violence that played out nightly on television.” And he didn’t hold back. He said he loved what little he had seen of America, but was sickened by what he called, “America’s fookin’ shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later cowboy mentality,” Schreiber said.

The more John demanded to see the assassination site, the more Brian pushed back, insisting: “It’s a bloody waste of time.” He also knew that the Dallas promoter was not keen to show off the location of such infamy following an incident that was still so raw in everyone’s mind.

More to the point, he worried that the Beatles showing up at Dealey Plaza on the eve of their live appearance would produce negative publicity for the upcoming concert—not to mention being a security headache.

“They say there’s nothing to see,” Brian told John, “just a decrepit office building and a lawn.” (Today, of course, the site is a museum, but back then there wasn’t much other than the weathered brown brick building where Lee Harvey Oswald and his rifle had lain in wait for the president.) There was much debate and, finally, as the time of the performance drew closer, Brian shifted the conversation to the concert and the side trip was soon forgotten.

Dallas, however, was almost the scene of an incident of a different kind. By way of subterfuge, upon arrival at the hotel, our limos dropped us off in the back alley near a row of garbage bins. Still, barely had Ringo gotten out of the car when three girls came after him like attack dogs; by the time Mal was able to disentangle the group, the breathless Beatle was literally purple in the face. Somehow, Ringo always seemed to get the worst of it in these frequent stampedes.

Late one night on the Philadelphia leg, we jumped out of the cars in yet another poorly lit alley, only to discover we had to climb an eight-foot ladder to get to the loading ramp that accessed the hotel through a narrow cargo door. We did it, with everyone pushing and shoving each other up the steep iron ladder. I had to heft Ringo’s bottom up as he climbed ahead of me. It was like monkeys in suits practicing a fire drill.

From time to time, however, the Beatles were able to escape the frenzy of stadiums and hotels under siege.

After Dallas, and shortly before we headed for the last stop of the tour—a charity event at the Paramount Theatre in New York—Brian decided it would be a great time to have a short break. September 19 also happened to be his thirtieth birthday and he wanted to celebrate in private with his boys. At the same time, the interlude gave the ever-worrying freelance photographer Curt Gunther, whom the Beatles had become fond of, the chance to photograph the band in a more relaxed setting.

They accepted an invitation to a dude ranch belonging to Reed Pigman, the owner of American Flyers Airline, which we used for transport around the country. Quietly, the Beatles, Brian, Derek, Mal, Neil and Gunther broke away from the traveling media group and set off on a short flight to Pigman’s sprawling dude ranch in Alton, Missouri.

On the first leg of the trip to the ranch they landed at an old Air Force base in Walnut Creek, Arkansas. It was late at night and pitch black when the plane set down. They were met by Pigman, himself, who then ushered them to a tiny concrete runway where his even tinier single-engine plane awaited, idling. He announced he would be their personal pilot and fly them just a hop, skip and a jump over the mountain to his remote ranch.

The plane wasn’t big enough to take everyone, so Curt and Derek rented a station wagon to haul the camera equipment, taking a winding mountain road to the dude ranch. Curt later told me, “Pigman wasn’t going to shuttle back and pick us up the same night. So we decided to drive. It was in the middle of nowhere, and I hadn’t a clue where we were going. But I had bags of cameras, and we also took some of the Beatles’ luggage because there was not enough room on the small plane.”

With some trepidation, the rest of the party climbed aboard for a trip they would never forget. It was close to two o’clock in the morning and the sole illumination on the runway was a few neon standing lamps.

It was only a short flight, but George was particularly nervous, mindful of the plane crash that had taken Buddy Holly’s life a few years earlier. “We flew over mountains, and you couldn’t see a thing. Not a single light, nowhere,” he recalled in The Beatles Anthology.

Pigman sat with a map on his lap, illuminated by a small light, and was heard to mutter on one occasion—much to the alarm of the passengers—“I don’t know where we are.” Several times, George remembered, their pilot pulled out a grimy handkerchief and used it to wipe away the condensation that kept accumulating on the windshield.

Finally, to great relief all, they landed safely on a primitive airstrip on the ranch, where the narrow runway was crudely illuminated—George well remembered—by candles set in tin cans. Pigman, much later, not surprisingly became the target of inside jokes among the Beatles. “Oink, oink, all aboard,” laughed John when next they climbed onto the chartered jet.

Despite the hair-raising hop over the mountains, it turned out to be two days of undisturbed tranquility. They drove go-carts, rode horses, fished, swam, played poker and popped pills washed down with a plentiful supply of booze. Pigman’s wife made a birthday cake for Brian, and they all relaxed and crooned the birthday song.

George, who had virtually no experience behind the wheel of a car in America, decided he wanted to play race driver, so he jumped into a borrowed Ford Fairlane and promptly reversed at great speed, demolishing the door of the ranch’s parked pickup truck. No one was hurt, and George decided to leave the driving to others.

When we met up with the Beatles again in New York, Curt and Derek regaled us with stories of their getaway to the serene ranch in the American hinterland.

“It wasn’t much fun for me,” Curt told me in his mournful voice. “They were so relaxed and out of it that I had to drag them out of bed to get them to go on photo shoots. It was hard work because Brian worried endlessly about making sure they had tame horses and wouldn’t fall off and break a leg. Then Paul got a bit annoyed with me when I told him to toss his cigarette away. ‘Cowboys chew tobacco,’ I told him, ‘but you never see them smoking on horseback.’ All they wanted to do was to play and get high.”

As for Pigman, just eighteen months later, while piloting a transport jet, he had a heart attack at the controls. He and eighty-two of the ninety-seven other passengers and crew on board died in the crash.

5: I WAS GEORGE HARRISON’S GHOST

“Beatlemania. I would never want that again. Really it’s awful, but sometimes it was good. It’s like Cuckoo’s Nest…where you are sane in the middle of something…and they’re all crackers. You know, the guards and nurses and the government…there was definitely a point where it became obvious that we were not crackers but that all we had to do was come to town and people would break the shop windows and the cops would all fall off the motor bikes.”—George Harrison

George had contracted with my newspaper to provide a weekly column, which it announced with a giant, breathless headline on the showbiz pages: “A Beatle Writes for the Express.” One of my jobs was to make his column lively, entertaining and, especially, to try to capture his voice. It was my first try as a ghostwriter and, frankly, I failed miserably at it.

The idea of putting George on their payroll was the brainchild of Derek, who had worked for the Express before he became the Beatles PR man—he wisely quit the paper when Brian offered him the full-time job at more than double his newspaper salary. Derek said that Brian thought it would be good for George; it would give him an extra interest. “John and Paul have their songwriting, and Ringo is rather new,” the manager had said.

Harrison, at twenty-one years old, was the youngest—and least communicative—of the Beatles. My job was to get to know him, worm my way into his skull because—so conventional wisdom went—his pontifications were expected to be of the utmost importance to pop music readers. But unlike Paul or John, George wasn’t a hail fellow well met—in fact, I at first found him rather grumpy—and did not take well to strangers, which along with his deadpan sense of humor may have explained why he was tagged “The Quiet Beatle.”

My photo editor in London, after surveying a set of photos of Glum George in America observed, “His face is so frozen…is he having a stroke or something?”

Derek, who first ghostwrote George’s column before it was turned over to me, considered George his favorite Beatle and introduced us on the first day of the tour in San Francisco, just a matter of hours before their first concert. It was not a particularly impressive encounter. George showed little interest in bonding with his new ghost, and I quickly realized I might have to exert some gentle pressure on him if I was to squeeze out his inner musings, for which he was paid the then-princely sum of £150 (about $450)—more than my entire weekly salary—for only 750 words of wisdom.

The column was to be delivered every Thursday at noon, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). I naively imagined that, as the deadline approached, the highly compensated Harrison would come knocking on my door for an intimate tête-à-tête, spewing forth astute opinions, witty asides and observations.

I hadn’t reckoned on Rocker Mean Time: the fact that after the insanity of each show, the band would head back to the hotel, order room service—usually steak or burgers or egg and chips—down Cokes and whiskey, go to bed around four o’clock in the morning and sleep until mid-afternoon to prepare for the next concert or press conference or trip to the airport. With GMT anywhere between four and seven hours ahead of us—depending on where we were in the States—it made my deadline virtually impossible to keep.

What’s more, in the midst of all the frenzy, Harrison didn’t have much to say for himself. So I quickly made an executive decision: I would concoct my own version of what had happened on the tour for the first couple of columns. Indeed, those first stories that I wrote were totally fabricated—I didn’t even bother to run them past George, fearful he would hate them and grab them up, never to be seen again.

So, while each day I would file hard news reports and personal observations detailing the frenzy and the fans surrounding the tour, weekly I would churn out embarrassingly trite claptrap in George’s name. “It’s Simply Fab in Frisco,” was the forgettable fan-mag headline the editors in London put on George’s first column, which carried the byline “By George Harrison: One of the Beatles”—as if he might be mistaken for George Harrison, the dock worker from Bolton.

So it went. My mighty pen in George’s name grinding out such immortal lines as: “The reception the Beatles fans put on for us at San Francisco airport was simply fab—but not as big as the radio messages sent to our plane.”

Or this one after the tour-opening concert: “Even the cops went wild: 18,000 at the Cow Palace—that’s by far the biggest audience that has seen us…it was one of the most thrilling experiences of our lives…and one of the most painful. I lost count of the times that jellybeans were showered on us from four sides of the gigantic arena. I got hit on the back of the neck, on the face, on the nose, on both hands…and on my guitar.”

It continued along in that benighted way, with another column delivering such meaningless morsels as: “Tomorrow we’ll be in Las Vegas—and of course we’ve all got a system to break the bank at the gambling saloons.”

Something had to change between us, and indeed the inevitable showdown came on September 5 after a concert at Chicago’s International Amphitheater. We were cruising at 25,000 feet in the Electra jet, heading to Detroit, when George came charging down the aisle and stopped at my seat. Without even a civil “Hello,” he said, “I’m told my column is boring—a load of old shite.”

I couldn’t argue the point, but stung by his reprimand, I shot back, “Well it might help if you bothered to tell me what exactly you want to say.”

He looked a little chastened by my blunt answer, turned and headed back to his seat. So before we landed, I wandered up to where he was sitting, concerned that our relationship was now totally soured, and feeling I needed to try and patch things up between us if the Beatle and his ghost were to ever find themselves on the same literary wavelength.

This time, he seemed less tense and angry—perhaps he had been briefed by Derek, who knew the perils of ghostwriting. He beckoned me to sit in the empty seat next to him and finally began to open up a little. He said he was particularly delighted with the Chicago concert because it had given him the chance to meet up with his older sister Louise and her husband Gordon Caldwell. He told me that the last time he had seen her was when she had come to his suite in New York to nurse him back to health prior to the Sullivan appearance.

Louise, he told me, was twelve years older and had emigrated to America nine years earlier with Gordon, a mining engineer. Now she lived in the small Illinois coal-mining town of Benton, some 300 miles from the Windy City.

And he surprised me by saying this was actually the third time he had visited United States in less than a year. His first-ever visit took place, he said, in September, 1963, when he had arrived with his older brother Peter—and on that occasion, no one even noticed.

He said he had traveled to Benton at a time when the Beatles had a rare fortnight off from their schedule: John and his wife Cynthia had taken off for Paris, and Paul and Ringo had gone to Greece with their partners, actress Jane Asher and teenager Maureen Cox, a hairdresser, who was to become Ringo’s wife.

George told me that during his visit, he and Louise hand carried a copy of the unreleased-in-the-U.S. “From Me to You” (which their mother had airmailed to Louise), to local AM radio station WFRX in West Frankfort, Illinois. Disc jockey Marcia Raubach, the teenage daughter of the station owner, liked it so much that she played it repeatedly—the first known recorded Beatles song ever to air in the States.

Also during his stay, Louise suggested that the Four Vests, a popular local group, might like to meet her younger brother, who she claimed, “was pretty famous in England.” They reluctantly agreed; George went to their concert at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in the small community of Eldorado and was finally invited on stage well into the second half of their program. He was introduced as the “Elvis of England” and, with great relish, joined them for “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Matchbox” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

George was thrilled beyond belief to rediscover the anonymity that he had regretfully lost as the Beatles’ popularity boomed in Europe. Two days later he showed up to perform with the group again at a club, this time in Benton, and later, with no audience, he jammed with the group in his sister’s living room.

George said he also was able to squeeze in a side trip to New York, and when he returned to Illinois, he went to the local music store and bought a white and red Rickenbacker 420 guitar for $400.

“That’s a bloody fortune,” Louise said when he told her how much he had paid. “You must be very rich.” (In May, 2014, that same Rickenbacker guitar sold at auction for $657,000).

And George said he checked out a few local record shops: “I asked if they had any records by the Beatles,” he smiled. “The answer was always the same: ‘Beatles? Never heard of them.’”

George told me, “I was chuffed. I could walk around again like an ordinary person because no one recognized me. It’s impossible to do that in England anymore, but here I was, in the heart of America, shopping and walking around. I started to feel normal again.”

He wasn’t the only one “chuffed.” On the last day of summer in 2013, the Illinois State Historical Society unveiled a plaque in Capitol Park in Benton to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of George’s unheralded visit.

Our relationship improved enormously after that chat.

A couple of days later, on September 7, after the Beatles had done two wild shows at Detroit’s Olympia Stadium, we headed for Canada, landing in Toronto shortly after midnight to be met yet again by hundreds of screaming fans. With police escorts, our limos raced to the King Edward Hotel downtown.

The Beatles were all wide awake. John was beginning to show the signs of a nasty cold, but around 2 a.m., after the hotel manager personally escorted all of us up to the Beatles’ floor, he asked, “Would you like anything?” The Beatles ordered a full breakfast: cornflakes, cheese sandwiches, bacon, fried eggs, bread, jam and tea.

Then they went to bed—and so did I. The next day, after the boys returned to their suites from a press conference that was squeezed in before the two evening concerts, Derek called me to George’s room. George looked a bit tired, but he was still very cordial. Mal handed him a tall glass of rum and topped it off with a Coke; George took a Woodbine from a pack in his pocket, lit up and at last made an effort to provide me with a bit more personal color. He began by elaborating on the oddities of life as a Beatle on the road with a theme that seemed to particularly irritate him.

“We’re getting nicely paid,” he said, “and I’m not complaining, because this is what we wanted. We asked for this madness, so you shouldn’t feel sorry for us. But it’s not normal. We’ve been stuck in our rooms for weeks. We don’t get to go anywhere normal people can go, and sometimes it all seems pretty pointless. It’s a drag. We all feel the same way, but it’s stupid to whine about it.”

Then he finally acknowledged: “Sorry I haven’t been around much, but we’re all a bit knackered. I’m pretty pissed that we have to do all those boring press conferences,” he said. “We’re supposed to do them whenever and wherever we land. They’re like wrestling matches.”

He was feeling particularly bruised after his encounter with the Toronto press, and I noticed that George bruised easily. It seemed that if he had it his way, he would prefer to stay silent and leave the bigger egos in the band—mainly John and Paul—to cope with the media morass. All that public adoration pained him.

“We’d just arrived, and this guy sticks a microphone right up my nose and kept asking, ‘What do you think of Toronto? What have you seen of Toronto?’”

“I tried to be civil and said, ‘It looked nice from the sky.’ He wasn’t pleased and kept yammering: ‘Do you like our girls?’ I tried to tell him we’d only been there for a few hours, but he wasn’t happy with that answer. Finally I told him the facts of life. ‘We’re prisoners in our fucking hotel and not here to see the buildings. We’re here to fucking work.’ He wasn’t happy with that.”

Another pushy reporter, George said, dug him painfully in the ribs, then rudely shoved him around to face a TV camera, shouting, “What do you think of the mods and rockers?”

John standing by his shoulder, turned and quipped, “They should all be locked up.”

Unfazed and looking for a new sound bite, the TV man demanded, “Where do your hairdos come from?”

“We just found them,” George deadpanned.

Of course, while George’s efforts to share his honest feelings were commendable, I knew that badmouthing the media was not the kind of column that my London editor wanted. But it was a start.

George’s column improved dramatically in the next few days as a result of events in Cleveland on September 15 and in New Orleans the following day—or “The Battle of New Orleans 1964,” as I called it in my report, which carried the headline, “Beatles Sing On as Fans Charge.”

First, however, came Boston, a week earlier, when the local police were charged with brutally treating fans like bowling pins. They had ridden their horses through the crowd to try to disperse the charging fans, who then began screaming obscenities at them. It was a serious overreaction by the cops, but not an uncommon one, because no one had ever before dealt with the firestorm that was the Beatles.

It was like a bad dream from the beginning. Exhausted, we had landed droopy-eyed and heavy-limbed at three o’clock in the morning at Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts (instead of Boston’s main Logan International Airport), and before the engines were even switched off, the state police stomped onto the aircraft. With a heavy, “we’re-in-charge” almost militaristic force, they pushed the Beatles into a waiting car for the fifteen-mile ride to the downtown Hotel Madison, close to the Boston Garden. We followed in the second car to the hotel, then through a back service-entrance and onto a freight elevator to the eleventh-floor suites.

As we arrived, Mal shouted, “Where the fuck is Ringo?”We looked around and realized we were one Beatle short. No sign of Ringo. Apparently Ringo and Derek, in all the pushing and shoving, had been left at the airport. Ten minutes later they arrived at the hotel entrance and jumped out of a cab. Ringo raced into the elevator up to his room; Derek spotted me and said, “I need ten dollars to pay the driver, can you lend me some cash?”

“The police were truly awful,” Derek said—and the next day he got a stern rebuke from Brian, ever wary of upsetting municipal police forces. At the conclusion of the Boston concert, Brian made a point of calling the major press outlets to publicly thank law enforcement for its splendid efforts.

Then it was on to Baltimore, then Pittsburgh—and then Cleveland, where it was clear the police force had decided nothing was going to sully their reputations when the Beatles came to the Public Auditorium. The atmosphere was much more tense than I had seen at any of the other venues—the police, like vigilant headmasters, marched down the aisles, batons clenched in hand, yelling at concertgoers, “Stay in your seats.”

As soon as the warm-up acts were over, the Beatles bounded onto the stage—guitars on chests like they were bulletproof vests. They had hardly hit their stride in front of the crowd of 12,000 with “All My Loving,” when a wave of fans leapt to their feet and moved inexorably towards the stage.

A brass railing gave way as the kids pressed forward. The police pushed back as the fans swept on like an unstoppable tide. In charge of security and fearing that his men would be crushed, Deputy Inspector Carl Bare, in his military-style uniform and soft-peaked cap, marched onto the stage mid-song, waved furiously at John to stop playing and then pushed the surprised Beatle aside.

He confronted George—almost nose to nose—waved his arm menacingly and ordered, “Get off.” He grabbed the microphone, turned to the audience and bellowed, “Sit down. Sit now.”

The crowd booed, John looked furious, and then Bare’s colleague, Inspector Michael Blackwell, joined him on stage, authoritatively motioning to the group to leave. When the band didn’t move, he literally shoved George and Paul off stage.

Hopping mad, John spotted radio reporter Art Schreiber standing in the wings. “Come with me, Art,” the incensed Beatle said. “We went up to the green room,” remembered Schreiber. “I locked the door so no one could get in to interrupt.

“John was fit to burst. Then I phoned my radio station and put John on live to talk about the madhouse and what was happening. ‘The police are a bunch of bloody amateurs,’ John indignantly repeated. ‘This has never happened to us before.’”

Schreiber, frankly, was delighted with the unexpected turn of events. While his rival WHK was promoting the concert, his station, KYW, was getting the scoop.

Back in the auditorium Derek strode to center stage, stepped in front of Bare and Blackwell and took the microphone. “Please stay in your seats,” he urged the crowd. “The Beatles want to play for you, but you mustn’t stand up. If you don’t stay seated, you can all go home. The show is over.”

The fans booed heartily, but Derek’s words helped calm things down. As order was slowly restored, he turned to Mal, who was standing by Ringo’s drum set and was preparing to dismantle them. “Get them back quickly,” he urged Mal. After a seventeen-minute interruption, the Beatles walked back on stage to uproarious approval from the crowd. The band retrieved their guitars and seamlessly picked up where they had left off.

Blackwell gave his side of the story in the next day’s local paper: “I don’t blame the children. They’re young and they can’t be expected to behave like adults,” he said. “And I don’t blame the Beatles—there is nothing wrong with their act. But if we hadn’t stopped it there would have been serious injury. One little girl was knocked down in the charge, and there were 300 other youngsters about to trample her.”

The following day, still smarting from the Cleveland disruption, we arrived in New Orleans at three o’clock in the morning to the kind of sticky tropical weather that soaked your clothing through to your skin just walking from car to hotel lobby. Events had taken an unexpected Keystone Kops turn before we had even gotten to the Congress Inn.

First, the helicopter that was to whisk the band to the hotel had a flat tire, so an emergency call had to go out for limousines. Mistakenly, the limos raced to the wrong airport—showing up at New Orleans International Airport instead of Lakefront Airport. When the Beatles were finally picked up at the right airport and sped to the hotel with red lights flashing and sirens wailing, their limo took a wrong turn, tried to reverse and hit a police car. Fortunately, the only damage was the limo driver’s bruised ego.

At show time that evening, things went seriously wrong. To avoid the chaos that had gone down in Cleveland the night before, the police officers who were dispatched to City Park Stadium for security created a “safety zone” between the stage and the seating. They designated an empty stretch of grass that ran some 35 yards from the front row to the stage as a no-man’s-land. The idea was to keep the spectators sitting on the grass well away from the band so there was no way they could invade the stage. What’s more, a makeshift, three-foot temporary fence was hastily erected to further deter anyone from daring to move closer in.

It looked sensible at first, but just moments after the Beatles launched into “Can’t Buy Me Love,” fans sitting on the grass in the first five rows suddenly—and almost in unison—jumped up, trampled over the barrier and surged forward to the foot of the stage. The police, caught unaware, reacted hastily. Helmeted cops on foot and dozens on horseback galloped into the sea of bodies as they tried to block the tide of onrushing kids.

It was utter chaos. Every few minutes, a new wave of shrieking teenagers tried to storm to the front of the stage, and some even managed to clamber onto the stage to touch the Beatles. Mal and Neil, accustomed to coping with these juvenile onslaughts, tried to gently pry them off the lip of the stage, but the fans attached themselves like leeches.

I watched in disbelief. The cops were swearing, and at times the situation seemed totally out of control. Hooves were flying about. I saw two girls, trampled by a horse, writhing in agony. The faces of several hysterical girls were masked in blood, others lay crumpled in heaps, crying and moaning like wounded soldiers on a field of war.

As the Beatles played on, stretcher-bearers lined up to carry the wounded behind the stage, where red lights were flashing nonstop as the ambulances roared back and forth between stadium and hospital. “Police were playing football with the kids,” George later observed, “and we just kept playing.”

My eyewitness story that ran in the Daily Express got the biggest headlines of the entire tour. “Screaming girls and youths charged the stage during the Beatles show last night and turned it into the Battle of New Orleans 1964,” read my report. “More than twenty youngsters were treated for broken noses, legs, arms, and cuts and bruises, after the wildest scene of the whole Beatles American tour.”

The upside was that after all that unexpected drama, George’s column started to show more teeth. His version, penned by me, kicked off with a rather light-hearted comment about the way the gentler British bobbies handle things, compared to the heavy-handed tactics of their American colleagues: “It will be nice to see the friendly English copper again. American cops take some living with.”

Then the column took off:

“In Cleveland, without asking us, two senior police officers marched on stage and stopped our show completely because they said the crowd was getting out of hand. The safety curtain was pulled down, and we were ordered to our cars. With the cops shouting, ‘The show’s over, fellows, this is where we take over.’ It’s never happened to us before.

“But that’s the trouble with American cops—they’re over-enthusiastic, whether it’s for stopping shows, hurling us into cars, baton charging the crowd or just asking for 30 autographs at a time.

“Anyway, we didn’t go to the cars because we had only done two numbers and the kids had paid nearly two pounds apiece to hear ten songs. We were hustled offstage much against our wills, and we went to the dressing rooms.

“When our press officer Derek Taylor walked on the stage to protest, the police told him ‘Don’t bug us or we will arrest you.’ The scene backstage, onstage and among the audience was complete confusion.

“Then the police allowed Derek to make an announcement. He said: ‘The Beatles have come thousands of miles to sing to you and they are bitterly disappointed that they are not allowed to. Do you want them back?’

“‘Yesssss,’ roared the crowd of over 12,000.

“‘One girl has been trampled,’ Derek announced.

“‘And two more have fainted. We don’t want this to go on do we?’

“‘No,’ the crowd yelled back as if as one.

“Derek told them that if they behaved themselves we’d come back and finish the show. The rest of the show was one of the mildest ever. The fans stayed in their seats, frightened that if they got excited the show would be stopped for good and all.”

Then George’s column switched to more mundane tourist glibness:

“I had always imagined Basin Street and Bourbon Street—where Louis Armstrong and people like Pete Fountain started playing for their supper—would be roads you could walk down late at night and hear the echoes of jazz coming from the clubs. But Ringo told me that the Jazz Quarter is fading away. There are many clubs, but most of them have gone commercial, and have tried to attract tourists.

“There are still a few real jazz clubs going, and maybe after the show tonight well get a chance to see one or two. If we don’t get spotted too quickly, that is. But that’s the story of the tour. So many American cities, but not much chance to see them very closely.

“I’m not complaining. It’s our working way of life.”

After New Orleans, George and I began talking every day, though I knew if he ever wrote his memoirs, I wouldn’t be tapped as his ghostwriter.

A year later when I mentioned to Derek that I had found George hard going, he explained, “George hated the whole fame thing. He’s still quite a private fellow, and for a long time he just wanted to step out from under the Beatles’ shadow and show everyone he could make it on his own terms.”

In his 1980 autobiography, I, Me, Mine, which was written with Derek, George said: “There was more good than evil in being a Beatle, but it was awful being on the front page of everyone’s life every day.”

And when George talked about that 1964 tour—on a trip to California to promote his album Dark Horse in 1974—he put it this way: “The best thing about touring was that nobody could ever find you. You were always somewhere else and have good reasons to be somewhere else and ignore people like your accountants.”

6: JOHN LENNON IN HIS OWN WRITE

“Lennon was the most interesting of them: imperious, unpredictable, indolent, disorganized, childish, vague, arrogant and very good at answering back.”—Maureen Cleave in The Daily Telegraph

Even though I was George’s ghostwriter, of the four Beatles, I got to know and appreciate John the best. It would have been a lot easier to write a column for John—he was blunt, caustic, mercurial and eminently more quotable. At twenty-three years old, he was already an unmerciful cynic with a black sense of humor.

In 1964, John’s first book, In His Own Write, became an instant bestseller; it was full of zany comments and observations, puns and cockeyed wordplay, inspired by the wacky BBC radio series, The Goon Show, which starred comedian Spike Milligan, a popular writer of comic verse. His second book, A Spaniard in the Works, followed in 1965.

John liked to practice this nonsensical wordplay whenever he had the chance. At one of his first press conferences in California, when asked if he was writing a new book, he responded straight-faced: “I’ve just written it: Snore Wife and the Seventy Warts.”

On the Beatles’ trip earlier that year for the Sullivan appearance, John had been accompanied by his wife Cynthia, whom he had quietly married in August, 1962, after she told him she was pregnant. (On his wedding night, John played a concert in Chester, and when Cynthia gave birth to their son Julian in April, 1963, John didn’t show up to see the new baby until three days after his birth.) His marital status was not played up, despite the captioning on that first nationwide Sullivan segment.

But Brian had decreed that no wives or girlfriends were to be allowed on this tour, and Derek was forbidden to mention any of the Beatles’ female connections or, in John’s case, children. Brian did not want to tarnish the boys’ image or distract from their wholesomeness. In 1963, Judith Simons, my London-based Daily Express showbiz-writer colleague, sat down to interview John and opened by saying, “We still can’t mention your marriage, can we John?”

When John’s marriage did come up from time to time, he cleverly skirted the question—or one of his bandmates helped him out.

“Do you miss your wife?” he was asked.

Ringo jumps in: “No…but I do.”

John’s sarcastic one-liners were often misunderstood by the U.S. press corps, who didn’t appreciate either his dark sense of humor or deadpan delivery.

“Do you ever get fed up with the same old questions?” he was asked.

“We just ad lib and take the rough with the smooth,” he cracked back.

“There have been recent anti-smoking reports. Are you trying to give up smoking?”

John: “No, I’ve never even thought of it, you know. When you gotta go, you gotta go.”

When questions got a little more complex, John was never hesitant to hit back, and damn the consequences. Privately, Brian would rebuke him for being too sharp-tongued, but usually to no avail.

Guaranteed to incur the Wrath of Lennon were the rubbishy souvenirs being peddled at concert venues. He viewed them all as get-rich-quick scams to fill the pockets of local sellers. And not only were concertgoers being ripped off, so were the Beatles. One afternoon I showed John a Beatles wig I had picked up at the stadium the night before for 75 cents. He looked aghast, grabbed it out of my hand, walked to the hotel room window and threw it out.

Halfway through the tour, when the feeding frenzy had begun to wear the band down and the media shrinks had started analyzing possible complex reasons behind all the Beatlemania, a Cleveland reporter shouted, “What do you think of the psychiatrist in today’s paper who says Beatles hysteria is just like Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies?”

“Tell him to shut up,” snapped John, “He’s off his rocker.”

And one afternoon, as we were sitting around the hotel a bit bored by the screaming from the fans in the street, he took a peek at the bedlam below and suddenly launched into an odd comic act. He stuck a finger from his left hand above his upper lip like a mustache, turned his right hand into a Nazi salute and began goose-stepping around the suite. “Achtung, you rotten dirty swine,” he bellowed in what I recognized as the idiotic voice of one of radio’s Goon Show characters.

In fact, the Heil Hitler! salute was a favorite Lennon bit. In June, 1964, he performed it on a balcony in Melbourne, Australia, repeating it the next month on the balcony of the Liverpool Town Hall, following the premiere of A Hard Day’s Night. Needless to say, it didn’t go down well with Brian.

John’s repertoire also included mimicking some of the disabled fans who attended the concerts in wheelchairs and often sat in the front row—a bit of Lennon shtick that carried over from the band’s early stage appearances in Hamburg. “He liked to stick a plastic bag on his foot, tie it on with a few elastic bands and then hop around, much to Brian’s distaste,” Paul told me.

Ringo, especially, was uncomfortable with John’s act, but not only about John’s part in it: “Cripples were being brought backstage to be touched by a Beatle. It was very strange. Also some sad thalidomide kids with little broken bodies and no arms, no legs and little feet.” Sometimes, he said, they would be deposited without warning in the band’s dressing room.

Long after, the word “cripple” became their Mayday signal to alert Mal or Neil to gently eject anyone who was no longer welcome in their dressing room—disabled or otherwise.

The whole exercise of bringing kids in wheelchairs to meet the Beatles, as though they had magical healing powers, disturbed John. “Those kids have come to hear us sing—and not to kiss our fookin’ feet,” he told me despairingly back at the hotel after one concert.

“Heal, heal,” he yelled, stomping around the room in a mock-preacher style. “Get up and walk,” he bellowed to no one in particular, stalking around the hotel suite in an Elmer-Gantry-miracle-worker laying-on-of-hands manner: “You are heeeeaalled.” It was John’s way of saying, “It’s bloody stupid. We can’t cure the sick with a song and a guitar.”

George’s take on John’s behavior was, “He was allergic to cripples. I think it was a fear of something…really, it was too much for him.”

“It was our own little world, black humor and nervousness at other people’s afflictions,” was the way Paul put it in The Beatles Anthology.

To counter some of this, Paul was usually the Beatle who would be asked to call kids in the hospital to wish them well. He did it in Kansas City to cheer up a ten-year-old girl whom the local paper said had been badly injured by a hit-and-run driver.

John struggled to keep his political opinions to himself, even when reporters attempted to force him to sound off about topics more serious than how often he washed his hair. He was skilled at dodging with a meaningless throwaway line and then moving on.

While Britain had given up the military draft and young Americans were still being called up and shipped off to fight the unpopular war in Vietnam, in Toronto he was asked, “How do you stand on the draft?”

“About five-foot-eleven inches,” he cracked back, but in private he was angry about the war, as he watched the nightly news and saw the climbing death toll of young Americans.

“That war is insanity,” he’d tell us. “Lucky for us the British government stopped National Service.” (Anyone born in England after October 1, 1939, was excused from mandatory military service. John was born in October, 1940.)

I told John I hadn’t been as lucky and had been stuck doing two years in the British Army, adding, “I put in for an overseas posting so I could be sent somewhere exotic like Hong Kong or Germany, and in typical fashion the Army sent me to work in a hospital just down the road from Buckingham Palace—which was about six miles from my family house in Hackney.”

He laughed. “There’s no way I’d have gone to war for some tin-pot prime minister, especially for something as insane as Vietnam. I’d plead ‘conchie,’ or I would have emigrated to Scotland, Ireland or Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh.” (Much-Binding was a fictional air force base made popular in the fifties radio program of the same name.)

I asked him if he thought the Beatles would be touring America if all four had been forced to join the army. “Nope,” he said. “I mean, look what happened to Elvis when he went off into the Army. They put him in a tank and sent him to fight the Narzis. [That, of course, was a slight Lennon comedic exaggeration, as Elvis did training in a tank battalion at Ford Hood, Texas, and then was posted to Germany in September, 1958.] It set him back five years, and it was a bloody big waste of time. If we’d gone into the Army we would have been separated and never played together again.”

In the privacy of his suite, he also sounded off about gun-happy Americans and the U.S. political system, which he said allowed any trigger-happy geezer to own a weapon. He complained to Art Schreiber that America was still the Wild West, because hardly a day went by “without me reading about some bloody idiot with a gun shooting somebody else after a fight over a pint of beer.”

“There’s too many loonies with guns,” he told Schreiber with eerie prescience.

He was also angry after seeing reports, in late August during the tour, of police turning fire hoses on blacks during the Philadelphia race riots. This time, though, he went public. Before their appearance at the Jacksonville, Florida, Gator Bowl, the band went to the extraordinary lengths of putting out a formal press release declaring, “We will not appear unless Negroes are allowed to sit anywhere.”

The edict drew a fierce editorial in the Florida Times Union, which called the Beatles “a passing fad, perfectly timed and fitted to the mores, morals and ideals of a fast-paced troubled time.”

But John prodded Brian to stand firm. “Watch it,” he warned Brian, “they may try to stick a few Negroes in the corner and say it’s integrated.” He told Brian to get a written commitment from the local promoter that the Gator Bowl audiences would be integrated and went on record that he would refuse to play in stadiums in the South if blacks were banned.

Ironically, though, I never noticed many blacks at any of the shows. Throughout the Beatles’ 1964 American tour, the venues were filled, overwhelmingly, with mostly white, middle-class, teenage girls.

After concerts, John liked to wind down with booze and board games—he was always looking for someone to play Monopoly, sometimes in all-night sessions. He had brought his own British version of the board game with him, and at all hours he would call our rooms to announce: “We’ve got a game going, are you coming over?”

Then, when we arrived in his suite, he would greet us with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in another, either in blue jeans and cowboy boots, or barefoot in striped, convict-like pajamas and a matching striped cap. And in the privacy of his room, the intensely nearsighted Beatle always wore his heavy-framed, Buddy Holly glasses, because he was blind as a bat without them. He was too vain to wear them in public, until years later when he began sporting his trademark granny glasses.

John played Monopoly with a rare passion and would get genuinely upset if he wasn’t able to snap up all the railway stations or posh Mayfair and Park Lane properties—or win, by means fair or foul. From time to time, tired of his blatant cheating, we’d suggest switching to poker—for money.

Conversations during these long games were mostly about the latest concert, but from time to time they turned serious as we chatted into the wee small hours. Talk switched to their recent Royal Command Performance in front of British royalty in London, where they met the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. I asked John what it was like up close and personal with the Queen Mother.

“She seemed like a nice granny lady,” he said with a smile, “but we think the British royals are a funny bunch. It’s pretty freaky—imagine being brought up for 2,000 years like that where you can’t go out to Woolworths or have a couple of pints in your local. It’s a bit like us—only worse.”

The most memorable time I spent with John was on the way to Jacksonville for the Gator Bowl appearance. Hurricane Dora was raging, and in mid-storm, our plane was bucking and bouncing so badly that our stomachs were in our throats the whole way.

To make matters worse, the high-profile psychic Jeane Dixon, who had foretold the Kennedy assassination, now was quoted as saying that the Beatles’ plane would crash, and three of the performers would perish. Her prediction was on all the front pages—and the radio guys were chomping at the bit to get the Beatles’ reaction.

It was the most nerve-wracking leg of our tour. During the bumpy flight, I walked down to where George was sitting. His face was, literally, gray green. Later, George told radio reporter Larry Kane how that disturbing Dixon prognostication had affected him.

“Normally I’d take it with a laugh and pinch of salt…thinking you know she’s off her head…But y’know, it’s not a nice thing to say, especially when you’re flying every day, but if you crash…you crash. When your number’s up, that’s it.”

Finally at around three o’clock in the morning, after more shaking, rattling and rolling, the captain ended our misery by announcing that we’d have to detour to a safer airport—at Key West, on the tip of Florida. When our Electra jet finally touched down in pitch darkness, everyone exploded into cheers and applause.

As we hastily deplaned in total darkness Ringo asked: “Where are we?”

“I haven’t a clue,” I said.

We were surrounded by a lot of palm trees, but no city lights. For all we knew we could have been in Neverland. But at least the Beatles suddenly found themselves with a rare day off.

I slept until almost noon, with rains thundering down intermittently, when Derek called to say everyone was hanging out in John’s bungalow. I ran the short distance, through a curtain of oppressive heat that felt like stepping into a sauna, to the relief of the air-conditioned bungalow number 24.

Mal was pulling a big room-service trolley laden with bottles of whiskey, soft drinks and the usual Beatles breakfast fare—a pile of toast, poached and fried eggs and a saucer full of tea bags, while outside the rain began hammering like machine-gun fire on the metal roof. No one was going anywhere, so we all relaxed, trapped by the downpour.

Each of the Beatles had been given a separate bungalow at the Key West Motel, set in a lush tropical landscape ninety miles off the coast of Cuba, and for the time being, because of the unexpected diversion, the whereabouts of the Beatles, in this makeshift, remote accommodation, were unknown to the public at large. It was a welcome relief.

John was sitting in front of a television set. On the screen a big guy with a black beard in what looked like military fatigues was talking to occasional ecstatic applause. It looked like a political rally. It was in Spanish. The bearded man was Fidel Castro, in full oratorical stride.

Castro went on and on, with no end in sight. Finally, John tired of the diatribe, turned the sound down and began doing a fairly good imitation of the bellowing Cuban leader, throwing out nonsensical, improvisational lines. “I am not a Marxisto. I am merely a simple government functionary. A Leninisto,” he said, mangling the English words with a fake, thick Spanish accent.

In a T-shirt and white jeans, John had been popping Preludin, which he kept in a little black bag tucked away in the bathroom. He called them “my belly warmers.” He and all the Beatles swallowed the “Prellies,” as they called the uppers, like jellybeans, ever since their days in Hamburg, where they needed them to sustain the ten-hour, seven-day-a-week sessions in the clubs.

The Beatles pharmacy also included a plentiful supply of Drinamyl, tiny blue heart-shaped tablets, a combined stimulant and depressant known in England as “mother’s little helpers,” which was eventually to make its way into a popular Rolling Stones song. I later learned that Neil was the keeper of the dispensary; in the event that they were discovered, the Beatles could claim ignorance, and Neil would have to fall on his sword.

John had center stage as we sat around on couches and wicker chairs and cracked open the whiskey, and he was in a critical, chatty mood talking about the tour so far. As Castro silently droned on in the background, he complained about the “shitty” sound at the concerts—a familiar refrain as the tour went on and the Beatles moved from one acoustically ravaged arena to the next. “We can’t hear a fookin’ thing—not even us farting,” he said. He mentioned that Brian had told him that they were being blackmailed into “coughing up a thousand quid” to join the American Guild of Variety Artists for the Jacksonville show, otherwise local union members would picket at the venue.

And there was the now-familiar refrain: He was fed up to the teeth with the “rubbish” line of Beatles gear that the concert promoters allowed to be peddled at venues: wigs, pens, lunch boxes, hats, bobble dolls, T-shirts and even women’s black stockings, with the Beatles getting a rotten deal from the merchandisers.

At first, Brian hadn’t really paid much attention to that end of the business. In the U.K. he had allowed some of his cousins to handle distribution of a small line of Beatles paraphernalia, including sweaters and badges—mostly sold cheaply to fan-club members. It wasn’t a big moneymaker, and Brian considered it small potatoes. As things grew, however, unlicensed companies began peddling tacky stuff.

In preparation for the Beatles’ assault on America, Brian passed the merchandising business to his London friend and lawyer David Jacobs. But Jacobs, who preferred spending his time hand-holding such celebrity clients as Judy Garland, Liberace, Marlene Dietrich and Laurence Harvey, considered the whole tawdry T-shirt–cheap-ballpoint-pen thing somewhat beneath his dignity. So, at a London cocktail party he offered the merchandising project to a friend, Douglas Anthony Nicholas Byrne, who was a race-car driver and peripherally involved in music publishing and clothes designing.

Byrne had no experience in the field, but was well connected socially. He reluctantly agreed to “give it a go,” bringing some old school chums in for the action and setting up a subdivision of NEMS, calling it Seltaeb—Beatles spelled backwards.

They wrote themselves a heck of a deal, tossing out ridiculous figures to Brian, expecting protracted negotiations. “How about,” Byrne suggested in a contract letter he calmly handed to Brian, “that the Beatles get ten percent of sales—and we keep the rest.”

To Byrne’s astonishment, Brian (who later claimed that Jacobs had told him, “Well ten percent is better than nothing”) barely gave the contract a reading and signed. Later Geoffrey Ellis, a director of NEMS, noted in an interview on the 1995 British television documentary, All You Need Is Ca$h: “Of course it should have been ninety percent for the Beatles.”

In the midst of the 1964 tour—after Byrne handed Brian the first check for $9,700 (“It’s your ten percent”), the Beatles manager realized he had made a monumental blunder and quickly renegotiated for a forty-nine percent chunk. Epstein invited rival companies to sell merchandise, Byrne sued for loss of earnings and the case dragged on in a New York court for three years. By the time it was resolved the Beatles merchandising craze was over.

Not surprisingly, John was still simmering. “All that stuff is shitty and overpriced,” he groused. “They ought to take all those programs and souvenirs along with the wankers who made the stuff and burn the bloody lot.”

It turns out wankers weren’t even necessary to produce rubbishy souvenirs. Anything the Beatles touched was deemed collectible. Even used bar soap left behind after a hotel stay had a price—and a pining purchaser.

I steered the conversation away from the incendiary topic of Beatles wigs and onto John’s book, In His Own Write, which had been published by Simon & Schuster in March of that year and had become an instant hit. “What’s in it?” I asked.

“Oh mostly rubbish,” he said, straight-faced. “Words and things with drawings. Something old, something new, something borrowed and something brown.”

He jumped up, went into the bedroom and emerged a moment later with a copy of his book in hand. “When I was a kid I loved Lewis Carroll—you know, Alice in Wonderland—James Thurber and the English cartoonist Ronald Searle.” He sat down on the bed, turned to a random page and began to read: “I attended various schools in Liddypool. And still didn’t pass—much to my Aunties supplies.”

I blinked, a bit confused by his reading, but he continued; “As a member of the most publified Beatles my records might seem funnier to some of you than this book, but as far as I’m conceived this correction of short writty is the most wonderfoul larf I’ve every ready. God help and breed you all.”

He flipped to another page, and then in deadly earnest began reading a few pages, as if delivering a serious piece of literature: “Once upon upon in a dizney far away—say three hundred year agoal if you like—there lived in a sneaky forest some several dwarts or cretins…”

He was enjoying himself. “It’s not Enid Blyton,” he noted. “You have to get used to it. My favorite in this book: scene three, act one—take a look when you get a chance.”

He closed the book and tossed it onto the floor. I smiled, still not quite comprehending what he had just read.

The rain had finally stopped and the sun was blazing outside. John was restless. He jumped off the bed and looked out the window. We still had ten days to go on the tour, but he was ready to move on and head home. “We’re like a bunch of fookin’ budgies,” he said, returning to the general topic of lousy stadium sound systems.

“We’ll all end up like performing fleas in suits,” he said, vanishing into the bathroom.

7: LET PAUL GET YOU A DRINK…

“It wouldn’t worry me if we flopped tomorrow. I would write songs for other people…or retire.”—Paul McCartney

At twenty-two years old, Paul was far and away the smoothest of all the Beatles. Cherubic almost, he had charm, was the ultimate schmoozer and knew how to work a room. He was very aware he had to maintain that image, and he was almost always in front of the mirror, combing and fussing with his mop top whenever I visited his suite. “He was a PR man from the day he was born—straight out of the womb,” was how former Beatles drummer Pete Best once put it.

He was the “cute Beatle,” and author Hunter Davies in his authorized biography of the Beatles noted that John would, cruelly at times, refer to Paul’s “puppy dog eagerness to please.” Fifty years on, Paul still smiles when anyone brings up that timeworn label: “I am cute,” he admits, well, cutely. “But I have more things to me.”

Certainly he has. For one so young he displayed a remarkable level of savoir faire. He was a polite, well-brought-up lad, I thought. On the plane, as soon as we took off he would stroll down the aisle like the captain of the ship, beaming and making small talk.

“How ya doin’, Ivor?” he would ask in a mock American accent. “Fancy a whiskey?” Then he would go to the galley and return with a drink in hand. He gave me the McCartney full-court charm offensive—not because he necessarily liked me, but as he told me, “You’re from the Express—we love the Express and get it every day. My dad loves the crossword. He read it from cover to cover when we were growing up. I like Rupert Bear (a comic strip) and those Giles cartoons.”

On that score, he wasn’t just flattering. In 1984, Paul lent his voice to the children’s short film, Rupert and the Frog Song, which he wrote and produced to share the bill with his feature film, Give My Regards to Broad Street. His short won a BAFTA award, beating out Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, narrated by Ringo.

One of the best chats I had with Paul was shortly before midnight, while we were flying from Philadelphia to Indianapolis. I’d had a bit of a cold the day before (actually it was a hangover headache), and he strolled down the aisle, stopped and inquired with genuine warmth, “Feelin’ better, are you?”

Then he slipped into the empty seat next to me. There was nothing of great urgency to discuss, so I asked why the Beatles always ended each concert with “Long Tall Sally,” a rocker made famous in 1956 by Little Richard. “I love it,” said Paul. “It’s one of the first pieces I ever learned. To be honest, I sang it as a dead copy of the way Little Richard did it. It was the first song I ever sang to an audience, and it was a pretty fair imitation of him, even if I say so myself.”

He said he had sung it long before his Cavern stints, when he was thirteen or fourteen years old and his parents had taken him and his brother Michael to Butlins holiday camp in Filey, Yorkshire, one of their first family holidays.

Butlins was the popular resort for the working classes, and they had camps all over the country. You paid your £10 (about $30) for the week—kids half price—and got to sleep in chilly chalets with wafer-thin walls, with three meals a day all taken in a huge, rather cold, communal, shed-like dining room. The weekly tariff also included free entertainment, amusement parks and clubs where parents could confidently dump their kids.

“A relative of mine worked at the camp as a Redcoat—they were called that because they wore bright red blazers—kind of a social person who made sure holidaymakers had a good time,” said Paul. “I think it was a talent contest of some kind because he asked Mike and me to come up and perform. I remember it because Mike had his busted arm in a sling after an accident. I’d brought along a cheap old guitar, and so we sang. But we didn’t win.”

I told Paul that I, too, had been to Butlins, in 1959, working as the camp’s PR man, sending out press releases to vacationers’ hometown papers if a holidaymaker happened to win any one of an assortment of contests.

We exchanged stories about our Butlins experiences. “It was fantastic for us,” he said. “All that free food, even though I remember the bread tasted like slabs of cardboard. We all slept together in a tiny chalet with walls so thin you could hear the people in the next chalet snoring or having sex. And we checked the girls out—especially the Redcoats, who were lovely and all looked like Marilyn Monroe.”

That aspect of it must have taken. On tour, Paul merited his reputation as a Lothario and took advantage of the plentiful sexual opportunities that came with touring. Usually he did so fairly discreetly, often leaving the actual “bird pulling” (in fact, they didn’t have to be pulled very hard) to Mal and Neil. All the boys had their coded looks and signals that indicated to the two roadies that they were interested in a particular female. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, and the deed was done.

But there were occasional missteps. On the Dallas leg, a troop of waitresses in scanty bunny costumes from an ersatz Playboy Club a few doors down from their hotel showed up to have their photos taken with the famous visitors. Paul took an instant shine to one young woman, but rather than overtly pursue her, he turned to Art Schreiber and, flashing his choirboy smile, asked: “Can you get her for me?”

“Get her yourself,” Art snapped back. “I’m no pimp.”

It was a bit of a blunder for the cool Beatle, but Schreiber said that at the end of the tour Paul made amusing amends. “In our last taped interview,” he told me, “I said ‘Goodbye Paul, it’s been fun to be with you,’ and added, ‘My wife Alice sends her love to you—can you send her a personal message?’ Paul barely blinked: ‘Hello, Alice me darling,’ he oozed in his sexiest voice. ‘Can we meet again tomorrow night…same time...same place?’”

We all knew Paul had a girlfriend back home and that the gentlemanly thing would be to refrain from romantic encounters—or at least appear to do so to those of us who were chronicling his every move. Indeed, his relationship with British actress Jane Asher was shaping up as a serious romance with possible wedding bells in the future. Paul had moved into the Asher’s luxurious eighteenth-century, five-story townhouse in London’s high-rent district on Wimpole Street, though he, for propriety’s sake, occupied an attic at the top of the house.

What we didn’t know at the time was that Paul was gaining an education at “Asher University” with his favorite teachers, Jane’s approving parents: Margaret, a musician, who taught oboe at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama (Beatles producer George Martin had been one of her pupils), and father Richard, a well-respected London psychiatrist.

Paul also befriended Jane’s older brother Peter, a child actor turned pop singer. Peter benefited from the McCartney link when Paul gave him his song, “A World Without Love,” and it became a hit in 1964 for Asher’s duo, Peter and Gordon. Peter went on to become a manager and record producer known for signing an unknown singer named James Taylor.

The Ashers kept company with a host of professorial and intellectual types—along with showbiz’s cutting-edge crowd—who gathered at the Wimpole Street dinner table with some regularity, exposing Paul to a wider knowledge and appreciation of the finer things in life.

Paul and Jane attended art gallery openings and theatrical first nights, hobnobbed and drank with theatrical lions like actress Maggie Smith and East London playwright Harold Pinter. At one fashionable soiree, Paul met the legendary British philosopher Bertrand Russell who, by then, was in his nineties.

And he and Jane enjoyed weekend getaways “in the country,” another upper-class habit, or short jaunts for afternoon tea served by a maid on the family silver in the home of an elderly aunt who lived within spitting distance of the Houses of Parliament. It was a lifestyle not yet in the reach of the other Beatles—or if it was, they weren’t much inclined to bother with it.

The working class lad from the Liverpool council housing estate was obviously enjoying life in the fast lane complete with the upper-class trappings.

Paul’s appetite for female companionship was no big secret. Cynthia Lennon once crudely described him as “the town bull,” and John labeled him “a sexual gladiator.” As such, he glided through the U.S. tour with consummate ease.

While the Beatles often complained that they were trapped in their hotels and unable to experience the kinds of things plain mortals might enjoy while visiting new cities, they—and particularly Paul—still enjoyed some of the fringe benefits that came with the territory. In every town, at every stop, women eager to socialize with the boys were ubiquitous. There was no lack of opportunity for human comforts.

Paul was careful to avoid public displays of affection, fearing any photographed indiscretion might wend its way back to London and upset Jane. But, still, there was always a steady stream of young women on the road who yearned for his company, even if it only amounted to a one-night stand.

The advent of the pill, Paul recounted later, led to an easy freedom when it came to sexual encounters. “All hell broke loose, or all heaven broke loose in our case,” he told author Barry Miles in his 1998 book, Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now. “When we went to America I remember being very European and liberal about sex, and of course with the phenomenal effect that the Beatles had on America anyway. We felt like trawlers, trawling for sex, everywhere we went it was on our minds.”

Paul claimed that in his teens his sexual pickings were slim, but “now they were throwing themselves at you, and this was very pleasing, nothing more and nothing less. I was a young bachelor. I didn’t feel ashamed of it. I felt good about it. It felt natural.”

Enter Peggy Lipton.

I met Lipton a day after the 1964 Hollywood Bowl show when the Beatles threw a party at the spacious Bel-Air home they had rented from English actor Reginald Owen.

Lipton was an eighteen-year-old actress and model from L.A., slender, with long, pressed blonde hair and a scrubbed, fresh face: a perfect vision of the outdoorsy, California surf girl. And she was completely besotted with Paul.

She had finally gotten to meet him, she told me, very briefly a few hours earlier at a garden party hosted for the band by Capitol Records boss Alan Livingston and his wife Nancy Olson. The Beatles were perched on bar stools under the patio trees as Hollywood celebrities, with their children in tow, obediently moved through the receiving line.

Paul was taken with Peggy the moment he set eyes on her and he asked Mal—who was stationed by his shoulder—to get her phone number. Mal must have worked quickly, because that same evening there she was, standing with me and Ron Joy, an L.A.-based photographer who had impeccable connections to Hollywood glitterati like Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack buddies, and was covering the tour.

Peggy enthused: “I’ve been dying to meet him for a year. I fell in love with him the moment I saw his picture. So I didn’t have to pretend I loved him.”

In her 2005 memoir Breathing Out, Lipton, who went on to star in the hit TV series The Mod Squad and to marry music producer Quincy Jones, said of that first encounter under the trees: “Paul shook my hand. ‘My God, you’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘You’re not so bad yourself,’ I replied like an idiot.”

She continued in her book that when she came to the Beatles’ party, “I arrived almost sick to my stomach. I had only lost my virginity six months earlier, and I’d been thinking about Paul for a year. He greeted me sweetly. He played the piano. The next thing I knew we were on our way upstairs. The fantasy was playing out a little too fast. He took me in his arms and kissed me. May I say that this was the kiss of my dreams?” She told herself, “I’m going to marry Paul. He has the most gorgeous bedroom eyes.”

According to Derek, the couple secretly got together again the next night, while the other Beatles were off on what turned into a wild night with Jayne Mansfield at the famed Whisky A Go Go on Sunset Boulevard.

In short time, Paul moved on, though they did meet again when he returned to L.A. during the 1965 U.S. tour. Lipton held on to hope a bit longer than did Paul; in 1966 she went to greet him at the Beverly Hills Hotel and encountered him with a woman who turned out to be Linda Eastman.

Not surprisingly, things never went much further for Ms. Lipton.

I never heard Paul and John actually writing songs together, but I knew they must have been penning some tunes on the road: in a hotel room, in the back of the Electra jet, a dressing room or anyplace they could find a quiet corner away from the craziness. Wherever Paul went, he carried with him a battered and scuffed fat brown briefcase.

Every time I went into their suite that old bag with bronze, rusting buckles was sitting there, on the bed, on a bedside table or on the floor. And if Paul didn’t have it, then Neil was the keeper of the case. Carrying it under his arm or wearing it on a strap over his shoulder.

Once—after we had arrived in Toronto—I walked into his room at the King Edward Hotel to scrounge a drink. The suite was already a mess, the television on, predictably without the sound, and there, shoeless, sitting cross-legged on the floor like a couple of kids at play, were Paul and John surrounded by a sea of notepaper. It looked like someone had emptied a wastebasket onto the carpet, with dozens of sheets scattered on the floor and other pages spilling out of the voluminous briefcase.

I could see the pages had been ripped carelessly from an old-fashioned, lined school exercise book and were full of scrawled, mostly indecipherable handwritten lines in ballpoint ink. Other pages showed bold, almost schoolboyish capitals or had lines heavily scored out. This was the Lennon–McCartney songwriting team in action, as they found time to meet the demands of their record contracts and compose songs whenever they could find the time.

“It was their moveable composing office,” noted journalist Anthony Delano, who was covering the tour for the London Daily Mirror. “Paul and that case were inseparable. Paul treated it like they were the crown jewels. It reminded me of the American president’s ‘football’—that emergency box that goes everywhere the president goes and contains all the secret codes that are needed to launch a nuclear attack.”

Covering that tour, the idea of scrutinizing or examining in microscopic detail the actual mechanics of how John and Paul wrote their songs never entered our heads. Back then their music and lyrics were pretty simple, and not in our wildest dreams did we ever imagine that one day Lennon and McCartney would find themselves mentioned in the same breath as Rodgers and Hammerstein or their prodigious output compared to the works of Beethoven.

In 1964, Paul confessed to writer Al Aronowitz: “None of us really knows how to read or write music. The way we work it is like we just whistle. John will whistle at me, and I whistle back at him.”

Ten years later, I went to interview Paul at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he’d come with Linda to talk about his Oscar-nominated 1973 title song for the James Bond film Live and Let Die. I asked Paul, “Do you still have your old briefcase from the American tour?”

“Yep,” he said, “It was our filing cabinet, a kind of good-luck charm. Most of the stuff we wrote we simply stuck into the bag, and we took it with us wherever we went.”

I asked whether it was hard work writing with John. “Brian had this crazy timetable: We were committed to writing a new album every six months. It was a bit like working down the coal mines, dig, dig, dig, and come up for air and food. Brian was a stickler for living up to our contracts. And he nagged. He fretted endlessly about his reputation and was a real worry-guts. He said it was important that whenever he gave people his word there was no going back.

“Though we were big, he was always worried silly about the record company dumping us. So there was the insane timetable he set: Christmas releases to cash in on all that gift-giving stuff. So on our first American tour, while we were rushing around like crazy, we had to find a quiet corner during all of the madness to put the songs down on paper. It wasn’t easy, but we did.”

Both Paul and John liked to perplex interviewers when they were asked who did what, how and why during their songwriting collaborations.

In a light-hearted BBC radio interview they did in August, 1966, at Paul’s London house, John said, “We didn’t need to work together, but it helps,” with Paul interjecting, “We think really alike and really differently at the same time.”

In a 1980 Playboy interview shortly before he died, Lennon talked about their partnership. He said that Paul provided a lightness of optimism, while he would go for the sadness, the discords and the bluesy notes.

“There was a period when I thought I didn’t write melodies, that Paul wrote those and I just wrote straight, shouting rock ’n’ roll. But, of course, when I think of some of my own songs—‘In My Life,’ or some of the early stuff such as ‘This Boy’—I was writing melody with the best of them.”

8: JUST ACT NATURALLY

“America discovered Ringo.”—Brian Epstein

Even after almost two years with the Beatles, it was obvious that Ringo was still the low man on the totem pole. There was John, Paul, George—and the woeful-eyed, pasty-faced relative newbie trailing in the rear on stage, practically invisible compared to the high wattage of the other three. British journalist Anthony Delano recalls that while George seldom said much, Ringo said even less.

“He grunted at us a few times,” Delano told me, “but he hardly uttered a word—he just perched up there behind the drums with that Pagliacci face of his. To be honest, audiences didn’t pay that much attention to the quality of the drumming. There were no other groups around at the time who had singing drummers, so Ringo was unique in that respect.” Of course, by the time it was all was over, he had evolved into a giant presence and one of the most iconic of the four.

The drummer of the hottest rock band in the world—who had famously replaced the highly popular and highly handsome, but not so highly talented, Pete Best on the drum kit in August, 1962—was unpretentious and never seemed to lose his temper, even when bombarded with the most inane media questions.

I must admit that at first I had a hard time getting a bead on Ringo. His influence appeared, well, not very influential. It was clear that John and Paul were the front men, the bosses who had the most say. George weighed in from time to time, and Ringo deferred to the other three. But he stood out in several ways. He had by far the strongest Liverpool accent—speaking more nasally and with a rougher, glottal intonation than the other three. So when he opened his mouth at press conferences, some attending were not able to understand what he was saying. His malapropisms, though, often worked to his advantage.

“He would say things slightly wrong, like people do, but his were always wonderful, very lyrical,” recalled Paul later in a BBC TV documentary. “They were sort of magic, even though he was just getting it wrong. After one concert, he said, ‘Phew, it’s been a hard day’s night.’” Thus a movie title was born.

What I noticed most was that Ringo presented a unified front and had the good sense not to badmouth his fellow musicians—unlike John, who had no such compunctions. John relentlessly poked fun at the drummer, and on one occasion called him “ugly”—but then backtracked, pointing out he meant a cartoon of Ringo and not his real flesh-and-blood companion. Another time, he poked again: “When I feel my head start to swell, I just look at Ringo and know we’re not supermen.”

Nor did John think much of Ringo’s singing. Author Ray Connolly, in his 1981 book quoted Lennon as saying, “Me and Paul would give the lousy songs we wrote to George and Ringo.” Indeed, during their less-than-thirty-minute concerts, Ringo seldom got more than one solo, usually “Boys,” the Shirelles hit and a song he also performed as a solo while with his previous band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes—and he was inclined to shout rather than sing it. (Other Ringo numbers included, “Honey Don’t,” “I Wanna Be Your Man” and “Act Naturally.”) In all of the Beatles discography, Ringo only recorded eleven songs as the lead vocal.

Daily Express photographer Harry Benson, who spent time with the Beatles in 1964 first in New York, then in Paris and Copenhagen, told me that Ringo was often the butt of the Beatles’ good-natured abuse: “John tossed a few verbal bricks at Ringo but never behind his back—always while Ringo was sitting on the couch next to him.”

Of course, while it was fine for John or George to verbally slam Ringo in front of Ringo, God help any outsider who dared to try. A Midwest radio reporter who had the temerity to proclaim, within earshot of John and Paul, that Ringo’s percussive skills were pitiful and he was expendable because he couldn’t even sing, found himself instantly locked out of the inner circle.

But none of the press during the course of the tour gave Ringo much consideration. No one bothered to ask questions about the high-profile, week-long hospital stay for severe tonsillitis that had caused him to miss part of the Beatles’ Australian tour just a few months earlier, to be replaced for the eight concerts by twenty-four-year-old session drummer Jimmy Nicol.

Britain’s gossipy dailies, looking ahead to the upcoming all-important American tour and predicting that Ringo would miss that too, claimed Ringo had retired, which aggravated the ailing drummer even more. Nicol’s few minutes of fame ended when a recovered Ringo, with Brian Epstein fussing at his side, flew thirty-four hours from London to Melbourne to rejoin the band.

The topic of Ringo’s delicate throat did come up from time to time, when Neil told us that the drummer, in urgent need of antibiotic shots to ease the soreness, had been seen by the hotel doctor. Some of the more cynical in the media often wondered whether those frequent penicillin injections might actually have been for treatment of infections in the more nether regions of his body. After all, Ringo didn’t exactly strain his voice on stage, and it was common knowledge that despite public restrictions, all four Beatles were leading active sex lives.

My first tenuous efforts to strike up some kind of relationship with Ringo fizzled out. I made an overture early on, during the two-and-a-half-hour flight from Las Vegas to Seattle, hoping to open some lines of communication.

I must confess I knew very little about him at that time because I had been thrust onto the Beatles scene with barely a few hours’ notice. So I approached the assignment with flimsy knowledge about the band in general.

I was a bit of an expert on the world of soccer however, and I decided to try to break the ice by talking about the glorious Liverpool Football Club. After all, I assumed, everyone in Liverpool had football coursing through their veins.

Not so. A glazed look came over Ringo’s eyes—it was as if I had brought up the price of Chicago pork bellies. Ringo—and, it turned out, the rest of the Beatles—were totally disinterested in football.

I went back to my seat.

A few days later, though, during our conversation about Butlins holiday camp, Paul mentioned that Ringo had been paid to play the drums in the camp’s summer seasons in Pwllheli, Wales, in 1960 and 1961, and then in Skegness in 1962. So around one in the morning, en route from Chicago to Detroit, I went at it again. “Paul says you used to work for Billy Butlin,” I told him. “Funny, so did I.”

For the first time I really got to hear Ringo’s voice. He began to talk freely about his time performing at the holiday camp as a member of Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.

“I got my education at Butlins,” he said with a grin. “It was a little paradise for us. Sixteen weeks’ work where we got twenty quid a week—although they took off five for our chalet. We were the big fish in the small pond. We were also kings of the castle as part of Rory’s band. All grub was free. ‘Course, we had to pay for our own booze, but it was my first taste of the joys of show business. I was rich. Even at that level, I lapped it up. All the girls on holiday wanted to play with us. And we wanted to play with them. So there were dolly birds all over the place looking for a good time.”

It was at Skegness that John and Paul, hoping they could convince Ringo to replace Pete Best in the band, dropped over. “They said Brian was willing to pay me £25 a week to join the Beatles. It was the biggest money I’d ever been offered, and I said yes. Then we went out and got completely pissed on rough cider.”

As he later told the Sunday Express, “If I hadn’t taken the chance and gone to Butlins and then joined the Beatles, I’d still be on the shop floor as a fitter.”

In further chats, mostly on the plane where the Beatles were able to relax, I also discovered that although Ringo and I had grown up in neighborhoods more than 200 miles apart, we had a lot more in common than I could ever have imagined.

We both survived Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombings of our dockland hometowns, and our experiences as children coping with the nightly blitzkrieg were scarring ones. Ringo had vivid memories of the blitz.

“I used to get up early in the morning with me mum when it was still dark and go out to the street and see those bombs in the sky. When we saw them, we’d scream up at them, ’Keep moving…keep moving,’ as if our voices could push them further away. Everyone knew that once those bombs ran out of petrol, there would be a terrible silence—and down they’d come smashing everything to smithereens. And there was nothing we could do about it.”

He told me he’d played in the rubble of bombed buildings. “I’d rush home and show me mum a big chunk of shrapnel I’d picked up among the bomb sites in the next street. Sometimes the shrapnel was still warm. Lots of nights we took cover in our coal cellar. If there was time, we rushed out to sleep in the bigger neighborhood bomb shelters because it was too dangerous to stay in your own bed.”

When the war ended, Ringo said, while he didn’t starve, money was tight, and his mother had to put long hours in pulling pints at the local Empress. He was able to escape the harsh climate by watching Hollywood movies—Doris Day musicals, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry westerns—and listening to American singers like Johnny Ray, Elvis and Frankie Laine. Escaping to the local Odeon cinema brought a touch of sunshine and normalcy back into bleak Britain.

“I spent hours at the pictures,” Ringo remembered. “Me and my mates used to sneak into the place through a back door without paying.”

As the tour continued, Ringo began to emerge from his self–imposed cocoon and find his own unique voice, so that by the time we got to New York on September 20, he was able to explain why he really didn’t have much to say for himself: “I don’t like talking,” he said. “It’s how I’m built. Some people yammer on all day—I don’t mind talking or smiling only I just don’t do it very much. I haven’t got a smiling face or a talking mouth.”

Yet that lack of smiling face and talking mouth certainly didn’t handicap him on the big screen. In A Hard Day’s Night, released in the U.S. a month before the start of the tour, Ringo stood out as a larger-than-life screen character. Comparing him to Charlie Chaplin, he was singled out by critics as a major face to watch, and as we crisscrossed America, his popularity grew exponentially, with banners declaring “Ringo for President” and “We Love Ringo” mushrooming. In the band’s second film, Help! Ringo became the plot’s centerpiece.

Accordingly, along the way, his sense of humor blossomed, picking up a lot of Lennon savvy almost by osmosis. In Vancouver a radio reporter asked him, “What do you think of Canadian girls?

“A lot,” said Ringo.

“What do you think of Beethoven?” inquired another.

“I love him—particularly his poetry.”

When asked why he wore so many rings on his fingers, he quipped, “It’s because I can’t get them all through my nose.”

In Dallas he was asked, “What do you think about running for President?

“Very nice. But I don’t think I’ll win.”

“What would you do if fans got past police lines,” asked another.

“Die laughing.”

In Dallas, he and the Beatles were given black Stetson hats, and taking a leaf out of John and Paul’s playbook, he answered questions in what he thought was a credible Texas accent.

“I watched a lot of cowboy films as a kid,” Ringo explained, “so I just drawled back at them the way they do it in those pictures.”

Arriving at one o’clock in the morning on September 3 into Indianapolis’ Weir-Cook Municipal Airport, we were told that security was even tighter than when President Kennedy had come to the city one year earlier. We were escorted to the Speedway Motel by state troopers who then led us to the lobby through a smallish crowd of not more than 150 fans who had camped out in hopes of catching a fleeting glimpse of the Beatles.

Settled into our rooms, we all thought it was going to be a quiet night for a change. But, minutes later, a relentless bombardment of pebbles began to crack against our windows, making sleep impossible. Finally, Ringo, in bare feet, appeared in the hotel lobby to uncharacteristically complain: “It’s impossible to sleep—can you get them to stop?” Within minutes, more than a dozen police units arrived to force fans back behind a perimeter out of throwing range.

By morning, the crowd had swollen to several hundred as word spread that the Beatles were in town. They were scheduled to do two concerts at the Indiana State Fair, one at 5 p.m. at the Fairground Coliseum, the second at 9:30 p.m. outdoors in the grandstand.

As we set off for the first concert, Ringo climbed into the limo’s front seat instead of in back with the other band members. We hadn’t been driving a minute when the lead limo made an unexpected turn. We followed and, suddenly, to my surprise we found ourselves on the course of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which was a stone’s throw from our motel. Ringo’s driver did one slow lap and then gunned the car to over seventy miles per hour. Our limo driver tried to keep up.

It was a scene straight out of a Hollywood slapstick movie: An empty racetrack except for two speeding limos with tinted windows, followed by half a dozen perplexed motorcycle cops and three police cars—all pacing around the famous speedway.

“Ringo likes fast cars,” Derek later explained, “so without asking anyone he told the driver to, ‘Put your foot down—and don’t spare the horses.’”

After the second concert, the boys returned to the motel. Remarkably, the shows in the Hoosier state had been tame compared to the carnage in other cities. A mere thirty or so fans were treated for cuts, a low casualty count for the tour. What happened next was not on the tightly planned schedule, and it was to shake up the Beatles’ inner circle like never before.

Four state troopers, who had been seconded as Beatles bodyguards and were also staying at the motel, had become quite friendly with Ringo. The tour was three weeks old, and the drummer was suffering from a severe case of cabin fever—the weather was sultry and sticky, and he was kept awake by a noisy air-conditioning unit. At around 2 a.m. he got up, wandered into the tightly guarded hotel corridor and got into conversation with Jack Marks, the trooper who had been assigned to protect him.

“Wanna ride around so I can show you our town?” Marks asked.

Without another word and without telling anyone he was leaving, Ringo followed Marks to the back parking lot, climbed into the front passenger seat of a patrol car and, along with another trooper, off they went.

Paul, who was rooming with Ringo, awoke at 4 a.m. and saw that the bed next to his had not been slept in. He woke Mal and Neil, who were next door. No one could explain Ringo’s disappearance. “Should we wake Brian and tell him Ringo is missing?” a nervous Mal asked. “Maybe he’s been kidnapped. People in America are nutters—they killed their president didn’t they?”

Paul said he knew Ringo was desperate for a touch of normalcy, but the drummer wasn’t in the habit of vanishing without telling anybody.

Two hours later, as the frantic, sleepless Beatles staffers discussed whether to sound the alarm and admit the unthinkable—that they had lost a Beatle—the patrol car arrived back at the hotel and a contrite and groggy looking Ringo stepped out.

“Where the fook have you been?” Neil shouted.

“No panic,” said Marks, “It’s okay. Nothing to worry about.”

Marks, who had finished his daily tour of duty, later related his version of what the traveling media called “The Vanishing Ringo.” Marks said he simply offered to give the restless drummer a tour of his town, so they drove around all night with a delighted Ringo grabbing the car radio and ten-four-ing the police department dispatcher as though he was a real American cop.

He even took the time to snap some photos with his own camera. They all ended up having coffee some twenty-five miles from the motel at Marks’ house, where they roused the trooper’s eleven-year-old daughter to meet the illustrious visitor.

Their long day’s journey into dawn ended with them all popping in for a hearty breakfast at an all-night coffee shop, before the errant Beatle was safely returned, none the worse for wear, but seriously sleep-deprived. “I’m Broderick Crawford,” said Ringo, who was a big fan of the American fifties television cop show Highway Patrol. “I’m Broderick Crawford. Ten-four and out,” he kept repeating.

Much later, Paul’s spin on the tale was somewhat different. He said Ringo told him the cops had taken him out to their favorite bar, where they had gotten terribly drunk together—and that Ringo (as was his wont after a night of heavy imbibing) had finally collapsed in an alcoholic stupor and slept it off in the state trooper’s home before being returned safely to the motel.

Whatever the true version, Ringo, by then fed up to the teeth by all the restrictions, had enjoyed himself and had not worried one iota about how his sudden disappearance might impact the anxious Beatles traveling team.

It was a mere five days later that history repeated itself, and Ringo was inadvertently left at Montreal’s Dorval Airport along with Derek Taylor—again with another happy ending.

Aside from those few moments of worry, Ringo was pretty sanguine. At that time in his career, he never thought further than his next gig or worried about what life might have in store for him. Once, on the Electra, I asked him what he wanted to do for the rest of his life if he became rich and famous. His answer was simple: “When I get to forty,” he said, “I’d like to open a hairdressing salon, and if I make a lot of money, open a chain of shops.”

And I’ll never forget the parting words he muttered to me when we were in New York on September 20 and the groundbreaking tour was history. It was the wee small hours of the morning at the Riviera Idlewild Motel and Ringo sat on a cushion on the floor, a drink in one hand and a glazed look on his soulful face. He could barely lift his head.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He slowly lifted his head from his slender shoulders, stood up, rising to his full five-foot-seven-inch height, and wailed: “Oh, my dick is so sore.”

9: THE BRIAN BEHIND THE BEATLES

“When he signed them up, when he had them in that office in Whitechapel, he told them: ‘I think I can help you.’ He actually believed he could. And he was prepared to sit it out with them, with all their cheek and impudence. In a way they had a lot in common—just the vernacular was different.”—Derek Taylor

In smart business suit and tie, arms folded, back stiffly upright, Brian Samuel Epstein—often called “Eppy” by his staff—stood in the wings at every concert and at all those interminable press conferences, his face an impassive mask. He was polite to us media types, but imperious and usually unapproachable. Not a people person.

He controlled every detail of the Beatles ship, and he resented anyone who didn’t toe the line. Often, he would explode if someone in the entourage was quoted in the media without his permission. But the explosions were mostly in private, public image being of prime concern to him.

“Piss elegant” was a term used by his cohorts to describe him. He was always fastidiously preened, with not a hair out of place, even when emerging from the plane after a long flight. He seldom appeared in shirtsleeves or sweaters or even open-necked collars. It was rare to see him at ease, and when he spoke publicly (and that, too, was rare) it was almost a different language from that of his famous charges: slow, languorous and in an upper-class accent, as though he had a mouthful of marbles.

When he said the word “actually,” it was drawn out as “aack-shoo-a-lly,” and when talking about himself, he preferred to use the royal we…or one. “One gets on well with people one likes,” he told me, blandly, after I’d asked him if he had any newspaper writers or publications he preferred.

Early on in the tour I saw him take John aside and reprimand him for the grievous offense of taking his tie off and stuffing it into his pocket shortly before a press conference. At the end of the tour, at a particularly irksome press conference in New York, John had the gall to put both his hands in his pockets and slouch away from the TV cameras. Brian rushed to his side and whispered in his ear to straighten up.

He was ever-mindful of creating and maintaining the band’s image: normal, likeable lads who were a bit irrepressible, cheeky, but deep down inside just-like-you-and-me chaps who were having a lovely time in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

It was, of course, a distinctly opposite image than the reality: that the Beatles were four street boys who had grown up in near-poverty in distressed post-war Liverpool, clad—in their pre-Epstein days—in black leather with heavily greased pompadours.

Savvy about PR, he pushed for media coverage with near obsession, approving special photo shoots and lining up endless radio interviews, even if it meant exhausting his boys. Art Schreiber recalls that when they first met, “Brian made a point of calling Derek into his suite and in his stentorian tones telling him, ‘Please make sure the boys are always available to Mr. Schreiber, he’s an important man.’ It was never Art, always Mister.”

To the observer, Brian was the epitome of composure. Mr. Success, the Beatles’ guiding light and inspiration. Later, of course, we were to discover that in reality Brian was a tortured soul, who lived dangerously close to unraveling. And eventually it was to wreak a terrible toll on him.

Brian was the oldest son of an affluent Jewish Liverpool family whose wealth had come from a large furniture dealership founded by his grandfather. The Beatles would say Brian grew up rich, but in his 1964 autobiography, Epstein put it this way: “We were a middle-class Liverpool family—slightly better off than middle-class, not upper-class by any means.”

However you put it, he was definitely a cut above the Beatles. His parents’ spacious five-bedroom, two-bath home was on the nicer side of the tracks than the Beatles’ own meaner, grittier streets.

Early on, Brian wanted to become a dress designer, then an actor, a course he pursued for a short time before his father put him in charge of the record department of the family’s newly opened North End Music Stores, or NEMS, the biggest shop in town, offering pianos and furniture on easy credit. Extremely easy. NEMS’ plan was known as the “never never” because monthly payments were so small they extended over extremely long periods of time.

NEMS thrived under Brian’s leadership, and when the family opened a second location, Brian was put in charge of the entire operation. In his post, he was able to focus on being the first to bring hot new American pop singles to Liverpool, though his own tastes ran to Mendelssohn, Mozart and Beethoven. Inside the store, customers could sit in private booths and listen to the latest artists—Elvis, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and Bill Haley.

So the legend goes, he first heard of the Beatles when a teenage customer came into NEMS to ask for a copy of “My Bonnie” by the “German group” the Beatles—a cut from an album the boys had made backing up then-popular club singer Tony Sheridan.

Brian discovered that although the Beatles were making a name for themselves in Hamburg, they were, in fact, local Merseyside lads who regularly played at a smelly old vegetable warehouse that had been converted to a basement club called the Cavern, just 150 yards from his shop.

So, in September, 1961, he and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, took the short walk to the Cavern to see the scruffy foursome play a boisterous set. Smitten, he went back several times, and less than four months later he asked the band if he could be their manager.

His mother Malka (known as Queenie) told author Hunter Davies about the time Brian talked to the elder Epsteins about his plans: “He told us, the group are four boys and I’d like to manage them. It won’t take any longer than two half days at a time, it’s just sort of a part-time occupation. And it will never interfere with business.”

Brian, of course, had no experience whatsoever in management. But neither did this young singing group. So in January, 1962, his courtship came to fruition, as he signed a five-year contract with his first clients: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison—and their drummer, Pete Best. He quickly insisted on a transformation. He told them to dump their greaser Hamburg leather for neat public-schoolboy-styled dark business suits, inspired by designer Pierre Cardin. He personally ordered the new togs, accompanying them for their fittings at Douglas Millings & Son tailor shop in London’s fashionable Soho district.

Theatrical advice was also dispensed: Don’t turn your backs on the audience, ditch those crude jokes about women, after each song try a kind of half bow on stage.

“Brian wanted to turn them into clean-cut fellows, middle-class boys,” Derek told me. “No longer rough and ready, he wanted them to come off as the kind of chaps he could take home to tea and proudly show to his mother. Surprisingly, the Beatles trusted him and went along with it.”

Early on—not unexpectedly—John argued long and hard against the transformation. “He’s selling us out,” he angrily proclaimed in a 1964 BBC radio interview, “and making us go all establishment.”

Paul remembered it differently in another BBC TV interview: “We didn’t mind it as much as the myths that said we hated it. None of us had suits before. So it was quite cool.”

Ringo, who came along later, replacing the fired Pete Best, was brutally blunt about the Epstein technique: “Brian didn’t know how to manage to save his life, but he decided to be a manager. So who knew?”

In reality, it was on-the-job training, and for years Brian whose forte, frankly, was selling furniture and records rather than guiding the careers of real-life pop singers, worried that someone eventually would reveal that he, like the Wizard of Oz, was just an ordinary bloke pushing all sorts of buttons while concealed behind a thin curtain.

Some of us traveling with the Beatles instinctively figured that Brian was gay, but it was never, ever discussed publicly, especially since homosexual behavior at that time in Britain was a criminal offense. Brian was also well aware of the savage British-media witch hunt that followed the 1954 high-profile tale of socialite Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, the youngest peer in the House of Lords, who was convicted along with two other men of “consensual homosexual offences.”

Montagu became one of the most notorious public figures of his generation, the butt of countless vicious jokes, as gays in Britain were publicly berated as “poofters” or “fags.” It wasn’t until 1967, the year of Brian’s death, that Parliament decriminalized homosexual acts in private between consenting adults.

Derek knew Brian’s personal life inside and out, and he knew that, as well as carrying a gigantic chip on his shoulder about being gay, Brian had hang-ups about his identity as a Jew. When Derek worked for the Daily Express, he interviewed Brian for a “Man Behind the Beatles” feature; Brian studiously avoided telling him where, precisely, in Liverpool he had grown up. A Liverpudlian himself, Derek said he finally got Brian to reveal his home was in Liverpool’s tony Jewish district. “But it was like pulling teeth,” Derek told me.

The two bonded over Derek’s coverage of the Beatles, and soon the journalist found himself leaving the Express and boarding the Beatles train. Once there, Brian asked Derek to ghost his autobiography. The boys discovered the arrangement in early summer, 1964, shortly before the tour. Brian was hashing things over with the band in his office over a late-night drink, when he mentioned that he had just finished his book.

“What’s it called?” John asked.

“A Cellarful of Noise,” said Brian.

“How about Cellarful of Boys?” John wickedly countered.

“Cellarful of Goys,” replied Brian, getting into the joshing spirit of things, and not sure whether the “goy” reference—the Yiddish term for a non-Jew that is sometimes used disparagingly—would be understood by the Beatles.

“No, No,” said John, “I’ve got the perfect title—Queer Jew.”

Not to be reported in the carefully written and briskly entertaining memoir, of course, was any of Brian’s sexual history—and most certainly not the brutal tales of Brian being beaten up by disenchanted rough-trade gay pick-ups, his drinking and drug binges and his futile efforts to meet someone who would remain true to him.

Also omitted was that in April, 1963, Brian took John on a nearly two-week drinking holiday in Spain—just days after Cynthia Lennon had given birth to their son Julian. “I wasn’t going to miss a holiday for a baby,” John later remembered in The Beatles Anthology: “What a bastard I was.”

There was little doubt that Brian was besotted with John, and NEMS insiders said John played that up so he could get whatever he wanted from their controlling manager. Much later, Paul offered his opinion about that vacation in The Beatles Anthology and addressed the same topic in an interview with radio personality Howard Stern.

“It was a free holiday. Who wouldn’t take it? I certainly would. John was always a pragmatist. He was also a political animal, and he knew if he had Brian’s ear he would be in charge and could wield the influence. I was on tour with John, slept in the same bed with him, got drunk with him but never once did I see any hint (of him being gay) at all.”

As for John, in a 1980 Playboy interview, he said: “Well, it was almost a love affair but not quite. It was never consummated.”

The topic was brought up in an updated version of Hunter Davies’ authorized biography of the band. Davies claimed that John told him he’d had a one-night stand with Epstein in Spain. “I didn’t believe him,” wrote Davies, who hedged his bet a bit by adding: “John was daft enough to try anything once.”

On the 1964 tour, even in the close confines of the chartered jet, Brian stayed close to the Beatles and seldom mixed with the media. While no one decreed, “Don’t talk to Brian,” the vibe he gave off was quite clear. Writer Anthony Delano, from the Daily Mirror, later told me, “I didn’t exchange one single word with Brian the whole trip.”

So it was with great surprise that one day, shortly after we arrived in New Orleans—four weeks into the tour, during which time Brian and I had barely exchanged a word—Derek called me and said, “Ivor, Brian wants to talk to you.”

At 2 p.m., I went to suite 100 in the Congress Inn, one of three suites the Beatles and Brian occupied. Brian opened the door and we shook hands. He had a drink in one hand, and on a coffee table was a tray with what looked like the leftovers of breakfast: grapefruit, egg shells, toast with marmalade and a teapot.

A stack of British newspapers were piled on the couch. He wore a crisp shirt with cufflinks and tie. His suit jacket hung on a hanger on one of the bedroom doors. His black shoes were highly polished, and he wore a slim gold watch on his wrist. He looked like a banker about to head off for work.

“I’m Brian,” he said, as if I might mistake him for a butler, or hotel management. “I wonder if you could help. It’s Yom Kippur tomorrow—I wonder if you know anyone who could arrange for me to pop in to the local synagogue?”

“I won’t be able to stay all day, of course,” he quickly added.

Brian began to open up. He told me he had been born on Yom Kippur in 1934 and had been brought up in an Orthodox Jewish home. They had two sets of cutlery and dishes, one set to use for milk products and one to use for meat products, as tradition commanded. In preparation for Passover each year, his parents followed strict centuries-old guidelines on how to prepare the Jewish home for the holiday. They deep-cleaned the house, discarded any food containing grains, and replaced all bread products with matzo.

It was a lifestyle I was familiar with, having also grown up in an Orthodox home in East London. Someone, most likely Derek, had told Brian I was Jewish.

The climate for Jews growing up in Britain in the mid-fifties was extremely uncomfortable, much more so than in America. Even though the war was ten years over, British Jews often concealed their religious affiliation to those outside their Jewish community.

The atrocities of the Holocaust were still not commonly discussed. There was an attitude at the time, as Paul recalled to me, that “Everyone knew Jewish people were good with money.” That, in fact, was one of the reasons the Beatles said yes to Brian’s management offer.

The Jewish connection between Brian and me became our common denominator. In that hotel room in the heart of New Orleans the conversation grew more animated as we became more comfortable with each other and began to swap “growing up Jewish in England” stories.

When I told him about the anti-Semitism I had faced during my time doing National Service, he relaxed even more, the cold melting slightly and the Epstein charm coming through: “I wanted to go into the Royal Air Force,” he told me, “but they turned me down, so I ended up clerking in the Royal Army Service Corps. My RSM (Regimental Sergeant Major) during training was a real anti-Semite.” Brian said that on the parade ground, the drill major would deliberately pick on the non-athletic Brian, bellowing “Epp-Steyne” as if it were two words.

He said he barely survived the ongoing mental assault. “Then they sent me to London, at the Regents Park barracks. I hated it. It was tedious. A complete waste. I couldn’t wait to get out. They let me out after less than a year on a medical discharge.”

I didn’t ask him what medical condition enabled him to escape the military early, but later learned that he had been referred to an Army shrink because of severe depression. When Brian revealed he was gay, the doctor recommended he be released from service early (mandatory National Service in Britain in the fifties was two years).

He offered me a gin and tonic and poured himself another drink. He said he was a late bloomer, grew up with few real friends and was shattered when his dreams of acting came to an abrupt end after one year at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He said he was dragged almost kicking and screaming into the family business but found a great deal of satisfaction when he opened the record division and it became the hottest music hangout for teenagers in the north of England.

When I left his suite some ninety minutes later, I telephoned a nearby synagogue, told them I was visiting New Orleans with a friend from England and wondered if they could provide us with two guest tickets for the Yom Kippur service. I gave them my name but did not tell them the second ticket was for the manager of the famous Beatles. They promised to leave my name at the door. Then I told Brian it was all set up.

But on Yom Kippur, before telephoning for a taxi to take us to the synagogue, I got no answer from Brian’s suite. I left several messages and even stuck an envelope under his hotel door, but I never heard from him all that day.

I didn’t go to the service myself, and when I mentioned it to Brian a couple of days later, he didn’t offer any explanation for being a no-show. I guessed that he was embarrassed by the fact that he had revealed such intimate details of his life, ones that he scrupulously concealed from most people.

A few days later I saw him backstage at Memorial Coliseum in Dallas; he explained, somewhat lamely, “Oh yes, sorry. I had a business meeting with the GAC people from New York.”

Much later Derek told me Brian had slept late, then gone to dinner with “friends” at the fashionable New Orleans French Quarter restaurant Antoine’s.

Brian’s doubly hidden life—as a Jew and as a homosexual—caused him great anguish. In a nineteen-page personal, handwritten document entitled “Background and History,” unearthed by the BBC in 1997, Brian wrote, “My life became a succession of mental illnesses and sordid, unhappy events bringing great sorrow to my family.”

While Brian’s Jewishness was never discussed on tour, there was one disturbing incident involving the Beatles that occurred while we were flying to Seattle. Miami pop station radio reporter Larry Kane, who is Jewish, described the incident in his 2003 memoir, Ticket to Ride.

He recalled he was sitting a couple of seats behind the band on the chartered jet when he distinctly heard somebody use the word “kike.” The voice, he said, undeniably came from the Beatles’ seats. Appalled to hear one of the band use this derogatory term for a Jew, he confronted Derek, .

Derek, he said, was sympathetic and tried to pacify Kane, telling him, “Nobody’s trying to insult you.” But Derek pointedly refused to reveal who among the quartet had used the offensive term and in what context. Kane says he was pretty sure it was Lennon, and knowing John’s shoot-from-the hip-and-damn-the-consequences style, it most likely was.

In 1967, when the Beatles were recording “Baby You’re a Rich Man” for the B-side of “All You Need Is Love,” John—who frequently enjoyed needling Brian—couldn’t resist taking another dig. Much to the annoyance of George Martin, he insisted on singing the line during the session as, “Baby you’re a rich Jew.” He also knew he could always get a rise out of Brian by calling him, to his face, “a rich fag Jew.”

Brian was always backstage during concerts, but then there were times he would vanish—he simply wasn’t around.

“Where’s Brian?” I’d ask Derek. “I haven’t seen him for days. Has he gone home?”

“He’s visiting friends,” Derek would always reply, somewhat cagily.

While Derek kept quiet about the fact that Brian was surreptitiously visiting gay clubs and bars during his time off, there was another escalating problem: Brian was becoming addicted to prescription pills, which may have exacerbated his infamous temper tantrums and also explained why such a strict arbiter of the Beatles’ public behavior had a much more laissez-faire attitude to their drug use.

Brian began taking amphetamines, introduced to him by the Beatles, along with lots of alcohol. He told friends they were a great stress reliever.

In 1967, as the expiration date of Brian’s five-year Beatles management contract was fast approaching, the British media began to run stories ringing the curtain down on the Beatles’ touring career and speculating that a Beatles break-up was inevitable.

As gossip mounted, Brian’s increasingly drug-addled brain, said friends, began trying to come to terms with the unthinkable: That his precious boys might look for someone else to guide them. “What am I going to do with my life?” a close friend said Brian mournfully asked him.

But what hurt Brian even more grievously were media reports focusing on his “sloppy” business dealings, reporting that he had virtually given away royalties to the Beatles’ songs from A Hard Day’s Night—agreeing to a pathetically low payout to the Beatles—and then compounding the blunder by committing them to a three-picture deal with United Artists.

In a television interview, Brian tried to downplay it all. “It may be a fault of mine,” he haltingly conceded, “that in business I am not ruthless enough. I have a reasonable business brain but I’m no genius.”

In a 1967 radio interview, Brian sounded like a different person. No longer crisp, confident and in control, he badly slurred his words. Much later, Paul, on a television documentary about the Beatles’ finances, offered a harsh appraisal of Epstein’s lackluster dealmaking skills.

“Brian did do some lousy deals, and he put us into long-term slave contracts, which I am still dealing with. For ‘Yesterday,’ which I wrote, I’m on for fifteen percent.”

Brian’s close friend and personal assistant Peter Brown noted that, eventually, Brian became totally dependent on constant medication to keep him functioning. He even asked his personal tailor to make him new suits with pill pockets sewn into his jacket lining.

He couldn’t sleep, so he took uppers and downers washed down with copious amounts of liquor. “He was taking so many drugs, amphetamines, which will really fuck you up and leave you deeply depressed,” remembered Derek. “The combo of amphetamines, LSD and hash…who knew what in fact was causing what.”

His depression deepened in July, 1967, when his sixty-two-year-old father died while holidaying in Bournemouth. Then, on August 26 of the same year, his mother became worried. She had not received his regular nightly call. Despite his addictions, Brian never missed phoning his mother. She telephoned his London apartment and spoke to his butler, who said Brian was sleeping. She told him not to disturb her son.

The next day, when she called again, she was told he was still sleeping. Worried, friends and aides finally broke through his locked bedroom doors and his secretary Joanne Newfield rushed in. He was in bed and she was unable to wake him up.

Brian was dead at thirty-two years old.

10: THE BOYS ON THE JET

“I believed that in the Beatles the world had found the truest folk heroes of the century or, indeed, of any other time. From that day, 30th May, 1963, I have never wavered in my certainty that they painted a new rainbow right across the world, with crocks of gold at each end and then some.”—Derek Taylor

While no one actually laid down ground rules or issued warnings to the “boys on the bus” (or, more precisely, the boys on the ninety-seat chartered jet), it was clear to those of us in the traveling media that being allowed to hobnob at such close quarters with the Fab Four came with a few unwritten stipulations.

Unlike the local media, who came and went as we buzzed from city to city and were mostly limited to press conferences or quick radio interviews, we were on the inside track, and if we reported anything negative there might no longer be room in the Beatles’ limo convoy, no space on the Beatles’ hotel floor, and our unfettered access to them might be withdrawn.

Along the way most of us developed a predictably Pavlovian response to matters that might reflect badly on the boys, especially noticeable with the usually abrasive British media. I spoke later to Anthony Delano of the Daily Mirror about this unwritten arrangement.

“The Beatles were goodwill ambassadors,” he told me. “So we weren’t about to sabotage them with negative stuff. They may have been earning stratospheric salaries—or at least Brian was with his twenty-five percent cut—but their image was that of working-class lads who had turned into the most liberating and inspiring thing to hit America since Winston Churchill’s wartime speeches.”

It’s hard to imagine, given the current cult environment of overprotected celebrities, but the Beatles had no firewalls or personal bodyguards or minders or grim-faced attendants with guns and walkie-talkies.

Yes, there were armies of local police and in-house hotel and stadium security guards, but that was to protect the band from overeager fans and exuberant concertgoers, and those personnel answered to the local concert promoters or to their own law-enforcement bosses.

The Beatles were not insulated from the public by legions of publicists who operate under the misapprehension that they’re working for the Secret Service. At the hotels, the whole entourage—media included—stayed on the same floor as the band and our access was simple: The doors to their suites were often kept unlocked and open so we could virtually wander in and out as we pleased.

From the start, we saw ourselves as part of Team Beatles, and all pretense of objectivity was thrown out the window as we adopted a them-against-us attitude. We shared the band’s frustrations about the wearisome shriekers, the lousy sound systems, the would-be hangers-on, even their acne.

On occasion, we pitied them, as one might exotic tigers caged in the zoo, these (we thought) cheeky innocents in their funny little schoolboy jackets, starched collars and ties and black Cuban-heeled boots.

It was an experience I could appreciate. I, like the Beatles, was a working-class grammar school lad—they came from Liverpool, me from the East End of London. And here was America spread at our feet, with our employers footing not only our salaries but all the bills—including the £400 fee (about $1,200) for my seat on the jet. (Can you imagine it: my ticket for the whole ride—from coast to coast—for a mere 400 quid?)

Our jet took off and landed at the Beatles’ whim. We answered to no airline schedules. The plane trips—except for the occasional turbulence—were nonstop aerial parties. There was endless hot and cold running booze and food, and when the consumption of alcohol reached excessive proportions, we would indulge in the occasional food or pillow fights that pitted the Beatles against whomever happened to be in their line of fire.

On two separate occasions I had to dodge flying omelets launched from the band’s section of the plane and rained down on my head without warning and for no discernible rhyme or reason.

So who went along on this remarkable ride?

First, there was Delano from the Daily Mirror and Iain Lindsay Smith, who wrote for my archrival paper, the Daily Mail, both much-traveled foreign correspondents. I met them both ten days into the tour after they motored down to Atlantic City from New York, where they were based. Iain, who served as an officer in a Scottish regiment during his National Service, and whose intense black eyes matched his slicked-back, shiny, jet-black hair, couldn’t understand why he was assigned to follow a bunch of rockers around the country when there were children starving in Asia, governments crumbling in war-torn far reaches, and communism arriving at our doorstep. He was a serious journalist, after all.

Iain, it turned out, had a few surprises up his sleeve for the Beatles. Before the second show in Indianapolis, we were hanging about in the changing rooms at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, when he strode in carrying a long brown sack. With great pomp and ceremony, he opened the bag and, like a magician, pulled out a funny looking contraption, which he slowly unfolded. It was a set of bagpipes.

Iain turned to John, “You couldn’t do this—play these?” he inquired.

“I wouldn’t bloody want to,” John snapped back.

“Now let me show you how to make real music,” said Iain.

Ringo’s eyes lit up. “Go ahead—blow us away,” he said.

Iain had his own playlist: He started with “Scotland the Brave.” Then, as he smoothly transitioned to “Amazing Grace,” John and George picked up their guitars and joined in. Ringo pulled off his shoes and used them as drumsticks, banging on the green metal door of the changing-room cabinets. The rest of us just hummed along.

“Can anyone else play the haggis?” asked John with a straight face, as Iain piped an encore: “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond.” Then he bowed in an exaggerated Beatles fashion, folded his pipes and stuffed them back into the bag.

Later, in Toronto, after knocking back a series of celebratory drinks with the band, John demanded a private concert from Iain, who ran back to his room and returned to play again—this time in the privacy of the Beatles suite, as we all downed tumblers of whiskey. Then John grabbed the pipes from Iain and decided to try for himself. He huffed and he puffed and, despite a bit of tutoring from Iain, succeeded only in becoming red in the face and producing a series of pathetic squeals and wails before handing the pipes back.

Aussie-born Delano, who swapped his Down Under accent for a cultured English one, was handsome, sartorially elegant, and possessed a cool demeanor. Like Iain, he felt the tour journalistically beneath him. “I had reported on wars and famines around the world,” he told me, “and so covering the antics of a pop group from Liverpool for me was a bit of a letdown.”

“But the funniest thing,” he recalled, “was that I was pretty nervous on the trip. I was never scared covering shooting wars but my greatest fear was being left behind—stranded—by the Beatles. And it could have happened so easily. Those lightning getaways from concerts or hotels to the airport late at night had to be organized with military-like precision. We worried that our limo might get separated from the Beatles. Nine times out of ten we never knew where we were going—or more specifically, which remote airstrip we were supposed to be leaving from and at what ungodly hour.”

Also with us for the duration was George Harrison—no, not that George Harrison. This one, who authored a popular Liverpool Echo column, “Over the Mersey Wall,” was an old Fleet Street journalist who told me he had moved to the smaller town for a quieter life. He liked his lager, and it showed. He was a plump, florid-faced balding fellow in his fifties but looked much older. He got a kick out of describing himself to inquiring Americans, confused by his name, as “George’s uncle.” Or even, “George’s father.”

Brian had a soft spot for the senior George and treated him like a kind of elder statesman of the tour. The Beatles had received plenty of coverage in Liverpool’s Mersey Beat music magazine, edited by Beatles expert Bill Harry, who in 1992 wrote The Ultimate Beatles Encyclopedia—but Brian yearned for more prestigious mentions in the mainstream, larger-circulation Echo.

Harrison, of course, was highly aware of the hometown boys. After first refusing to write about the burgeoning band, he relented as their success grew and eventually devoted many column inches to them, their appearances at the Cavern and their growing international acclaim. That resulted in the invitation to travel with the Beatles on the 1964 tour.

Despite the fact that he looked not a bit like his musical namesake, jovial George often caused bedlam when he checked into the hotel. Fans really did think he was a relative and hoped he might be their passport to the Beatles.

Late one night as we were checking into the Coach House Motor Inn in Milwaukee, six girls milling near the lobby spotted his name on his suitcase ID tag. With whoops of joy, and smelling Beatles souvenirs, they charged him and literally rugby-tackled him, sending his suitcase skipping across the lobby, its contents spilling out hither and yon.

The rotund George tumbled onto the carpet as hotel employees looked on in horror. The girls ignored the fallen George and leapt onto the scattered clothing as if they had discovered a treasure trove. By the time he got to his room George had lost most of his shirts, one shoe, a tie, several pairs of socks and some dirty underwear.

Curt Gunther was a German-born iconoclast, a saturnine, but lovable, photographer who used his grumpy demeanor as a positive. His ceaseless entreaties resulted in Derek and Brian agreeing to many more photo shoots than the Beatles would otherwise have agreed to. Curt had talked his way onto the tour in San Francisco, charming Derek and assuring him, “My agency in London will send Beatles pictures around the world.”

Curt’s photos were handled by London’s preeminent picture agency, Camera Press, and Curt was a friend of the owner, Tom Blau, a fellow European whose stable of star photographers included Yousuf Karsh of Ottawa, Princess Margaret’s husband Antony Armstrong-Jones and Cecil Beaton.

Curt had also worked out a deal to provide exclusive pictures to Delano and the Daily Mirror. His workaholic philosophy, by which he lived from the moment he rose each day, was: “I gotta make a picture.” So he pushed, and his persistence frequently paid off.

Curt was also a good poker player, and along the way he helped defray his freelance expenses by frequently relieving John of large amounts of cash during middle-of-the-night poker games held in John’s suite.

A canny fellow, always looking for exclusives, Curt quickly demonstrated his Fleet Street one-upmanship and shrewdness on that first night in San Francisco when Shirley Temple Black and family showed up. When the former actress requested a photo of her daughter Lori with the Beatles, her husband Charles produced his own camera and quickly snapped some shots of his wife and daughter with the band, Lori in a blue party dress perched on a smiling Ringo’s knee.

A few minutes later, when Derek told Curt what had happened, Curt had a fit. “We’ve got to have a picture,” he said testily. Derek spoke to Charles, who agreed to give Curt his roll of undeveloped film to be shared among all the photographers who had been left out. “But please give us the pictures back,” Derek told Curt.

Curt raced the undeveloped roll to the local Associated Press office, where there was a wire machine that could transmit the photos to all their clients.

The next morning, looking forlorn, Curt told Derek, “Sorry, the film all turned out blank.” But twenty-four hours later, the dressing-room shots appeared in the San Francisco papers. Derek confronted Curt.

“Oops. Sorry, Derek,” said Curt, not at all embarrassed, but fearful he might get kicked off the tour for the deception. “There were a few negatives we managed to salvage from the roll. Six came out—but as you can see the other eighteen are all blank.” And then he meekly handed the envelope with the negatives to Derek.

Also on board was photographer Ron Joy, who worked in partnership with Curt and also was a deft poker player. A freelancer with impeccable credentials when it came to showbiz heavyweights, he looked like a movie matinee idol, was smooth and personable and had worked with Elvis, Ray Charles and Sammy Davis Jr. He hobnobbed with Frank Sinatra and his daughter Nancy, and for a time was considered part of the intimate Sinatra clan and a favorite of Frank.

He quickly became a Beatles favorite, and it was Ron who, in August, 1964, was a familiar face to his friend Peggy Lipton who came to the Beatles’ house party to renew her acquaintance with Paul following the couple’s brief encounter at the Capitol Records garden event.

On tour, while local television stations depended primarily on press conferences to get their daily ration, the radio guys, who held sway over the Top 40 playlists, were treated like royalty, often joining the tour from time to time, and usually dropping out once they had arrived back in their hometowns.

The radio publicity drum beat day and night—in every town there was one station claiming to be the Beatles station, official or otherwise. And if that station was the sponsor of the concert in any individual city, it meant their reps had been blessed by John, Paul, George and Ringo. In Los Angeles, it was Bob Eubanks, then the Hollywood Bowl promoter who also worked for the powerful 50,000-megawatt radio station KRLA in Pasadena. (Eubanks later hosted the popular television show, The Newlywed Game.)

New York DJ “Murray the K” (for Kaufman), one of the most influential disc jockeys in New York in the sixties, labeled himself “The Fifth Beatle” after first connecting with them in February, 1964, when they arrived in New York for the first Sullivan show—and later persuaded Ronnie Spector, lead singer of the all-girl pop group the Ronettes, to smuggle him into the Beatles’ suite at the Plaza Hotel for an exclusive interview. (John rather fancied Ronnie, who took her stage name from her husband–manager Phil Spector.)

Now Murray was back, joining our tour in Cincinnati on August 27, touting his credentials—though they were mostly limited to the East Coast—and dogging the boys’ footsteps for more than a week. He later flew to London and introduced the Beatles at a Wembley Stadium concert, but when he showed up on the 1965 tour, his welcome had worn out. The Beatles tolerated him but complained, according to Derek who had kept in touch with them, that he was “just too damned pushy.”

Murray’s archrival, WABC’s “Cousin” Brucie Morrow, who introduced the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965, also had his moment in the Beatles spotlight. He, like Kaufman, had joined the tour shortly before it hit New York on August 28. Brucie liked to sign off his radio show, “This is W-A-Beatles-C.” Similarly, Hartford’s WDRC disc jockey Long John Wade joined on near the end of the tour and got along well with the quartet.

Wade wasn’t hard to miss: a tall, skinny guy around six feet five inches tall with a nice sense of humor who immediately bonded with John. “If you’re Long John, then that makes me Short John,” Lennon said when they first met.

Wade explained, “They call me Long John because I can reach the top shelf in any library without standing on my toes—and find a Beatles record.”

“Can you change light bulbs?” John retorted.

In 1964, no one talked much about airport security, so it seldom became a problem if some of the DJ crowd, who had gotten to know the Beatles in one town, decided they wanted to cadge a ride to the next stop. That happened in the case of Los Angeles’ KRLA disc jockey Dave Hull, and his partner Jim Steck, who wanted further Beatles fixes after the Hollywood Bowl performance.

“We were at L.A.’s more remote West Imperial Terminal where the Beatles’ plane was parked,” Dave told me. “We had taped our goodbye interviews and were about to head back to the station because the Beatles were flying to Denver. Suddenly Jim turned to me and said, ‘Why don’t we hitch a ride to the next stop?’”

Dave was reluctant at first, because they hadn’t been invited to board the plane and their names weren’t on the manifest. But he handed the tapes of his interviews to an assistant, ordered him to run them back to the station in Pasadena, “Then we calmly walked aboard as if we owned the plane. We didn’t need to show a ticket. Nothing.

“‘´Ullo mate,’ said Paul, when he recognized me from an earlier interview. ‘I thought they’d sent you home.’

“The stewardesses gave us a big welcoming smile,” Hull continued, “and suggested we take our seats because takeoff was imminent. I was a bit scared, but we slipped into a couple of empty seats—and within minutes were in the air heading for Denver. Just like that.

“Technically speaking, I was an illegal stowaway,” Hull admitted in his memoir, Hullabaloo!: The Life and (Mis) Adventures of L.A. Radio Legend Dave Hull.

Derek and Brian were not pleased when they learned that the disc jockeys had taken a free ride, Hull told me, “And they read us the riot act about how they could be in legal hot water because rules said our names had to be on the plane passenger list before the aircraft left any airport. But it didn’t last for long, and shortly after we landed, Brian got us front-row seats and backstage passes for Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheater, and we were soon doing new interviews with the Beatles.”

There were, however, radio reporters who were on the tour from start to finish, including Art Schreiber, who had covered major political conventions and presidential campaigns for the Westinghouse Radio network and who quickly endeared himself to the Beatles. He described this assignment, which called for him to file fresh reports almost every waking hour as, “The toughest story I ever covered.”

Miami radio reporter Larry Kane was only twenty-one years old, but managed to get his Top 40 radio station WFUN in Miami to bankroll the trip after sending a letter to Brian asking for an interview. He was stunned to get a reply inviting him to join the traveling corps for the entire tour. His tiny station signed up some forty-five other stations to help subsidize Kane’s on-the-road Beatles interviews and later he went on to chronicle his adventure in three books.

The radio guys used the Beatles—and the Beatles often used them whenever it suited them.

We had just arrived at the Hotel Delmonico in New York on August 28 when six girls blocked Ringo’s path to the elevator. One of them grabbed his shirt and hung on for dear life, ripping his shirt as he tried to get away.

Finally he squirmed free, leaving part of his shirt in the startled fan’s hand—but as he did, another teen snatched his St. Christopher medal, which had been given to him by his aunt as a twenty-first birthday present and was of great sentimental value.

Back in his room, the distraught drummer decided to make an appeal; his plea for the return of his precious medal was beamed first by Cousin Brucie on WABC, then to several other radio stations in the Big Apple.

Dozens of young women confessed to the larceny, but later in the day sixteen-year-old Angie McGowan called Brucie’s station and admitted she had tried to kiss Ringo’s ring, missed badly and ended up with his medal in her hand. Contrite, she (along with three pals) headed for the hotel with the DJ to return the necklace.

The four teens all got kisses from the grateful drummer. Still, all night long, with Ringo sound asleep in bed, the medal safely around his neck, local radio stations continued his plaintive plea for the return of his jewelry.

There were a handful of other writers who, while not part of the Boys on the Jet set, received special treatment and access to Brian and the Beatles. An up-and-coming magazine writer named Gloria Steinem cut her journalistic teeth with stories and interviews about the band. Author Tom Wolfe, then a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, went to the Beatles concerts in New York and later wrote about them and the Rolling Stones. He was to wryly observe: “The Beatles want to hold your hand. The Stones want to burn your town down.”

But in the forefront was Alfred Aronowitz, a music writer who had already paid his dues with a lengthy and positive cover story about the band that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on March 21, 1964, “THE SECRET OF THE BEATLES: An intimate account of their American tour and a probing analysis of their incredible power to evoke frenzied emotions among the young.”

A fantastic primer to help build up anticipation for the coming tour, the sub-heading read: “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Music’s Gold Bugs: The Beatles: They can’t read music, their beat is corny and their voices are faint, but England’s shaggy-maned exports manage to flip wigs on two continents.”

The same issue contained two companion articles:

“Original Beatle fiction by John, the married Beatle,” the cover announced—and inside were three pages of prose and drawings by the literary Lennon. “Beatalic Graphospasms—the original fiction and poetry by the brainiest Beatle of them all.” They were excerpts taken from Lennon’s In His Own Write.

Also in that issue was “Building the Beatle Image,” by guest columnist Vance Packard, the respected American social critic who authored the nationally acclaimed 1957 bestseller The Hidden Persuaders. His piece traced the history and planning that went into making the Beatles the rage of the pop world.

“The Beatles,” wrote Packard, “practice an amiable impudence and a generalized disrespect for just about everybody…they are rather lovable, cuddly imps.” He wound up, however, suggesting that they would become nothing more than a flash in the pan.

“Frankly, if I were in the business of manufacturing mop-head Beatle wigs I would worry. Crazes tend to die a horribly abrupt death,” he noted.

Aronowitz’s cover story was the most detailed account of the Beatles to run in a major American magazine, although it wasn’t particularly flattering when he first described them:

Ringo, he said, was, “short and thick lipped.”

“Handsome and peach-fuzzed,” was how he saw Paul, with John having “a heavy face and the hint of buck teeth.” As for George, “His face had the remnants of adolescent pimples noticeable.” (I noticed George had some crooked teeth on the right side of his mouth because at that time in England young men never paid all that much attention to dental work. That also might have explained why George seldom smiled in pictures.)

Ironically, those critical words earned Aronowitz the trust and friendship of the Beatles—they all liked his colorful prose and dry sense of humor, so unlike the schmaltz that often was part and parcel of Beatles media stories.

The Saturday Evening Post could not get enough of the Beatles. The March rave in the influential big-circulation magazine was followed with yet another glowing cover story on August 8, breaking perfectly on the eve of the tour. John, Paul, George and Ringo appeared on the eye-catching cover attired in sober, dark business suits, ties, umbrellas and bowler hats. They held folded up copies of the staid London Times in their gloved hands. It was entitled “The Summer Madness: The Beatles Are Back.”

For that story, Aronowitz had traveled to Liverpool, where the boys were given a huge civic reception. They were greeted by 150,000 fans along the ten-mile route to City Hall where another crowd of 20,000 waited for them. Following the reception, they drove to a local movie theater, which was surrounded by thousands more fans, for a screening of A Hard Day’s Night. There, the Lord Mayor read congratulatory telegrams from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

Although Aronowitz didn’t travel with us on the jet, he showed up several times during the New York stay and was given the red-carpet treatment by Brian. One night a bunch of us took him to Costello’s, a local journalist hangout, where we all got soundly drunk.

Aronowitz was a bit full of himself, bragging a lot because Brian had told him that the boys loved his first Post cover story—and every writer wants to be loved by his subjects. On that booze-soaked evening, however, he admitted that when he was assigned to cover the Beatles, his first thought was to torpedo these limey interlopers.

“New York writers don’t swallow the party line,” he said. “We’re all a bunch of cynics. I knew that their shit smells the same as ours. So we started out trying to come up with enough stuff to prick their balloon.” In the article, he wrote, “As far as I was concerned, that Mersey sound was just American rock—reheated, refried and served back to us.”

In 1996—as the self-styled “Godfather of Rock”—Aronowitz began a new blog, “The Blacklisted Journalist,” after he fell out of favor with the rock world, possibly over his reportedly excessive drug use. He recalled how he was converted to the Beatles.

“Immediately the Beatles had us eating out of their hands. Certainly, the Beatles charmed me. It wasn’t with music alone that they conquered the world. On a planet of which the axis is tipped too heavily in favor of heartache, the Beatles were F-U-N.”

And it was Aronowitz who showed up at the Beatles’ suite at the Hotel Delmonico in New York on August 29 and introduced the foursome to a hot new American folksinger whom they all admired: Bob Dylan.

11: TALKIN’ ‘BOUT GIRLS

“We tried to make sure…we couldn’t always be sure. But there was a definite no-no involved in underage kids. Hey, listen, we didn’t have to worry. There were plenty of over-sixteen-year-olds.”—Paul McCartney

The Beatles were fast learners, and they soon realized it was best that they stuck to their carefully cultivated image of lovable, almost innocent, comic rubes at large in the U.S. of A., when, of course, it was the American audiences who were the real innocents.

In the early sixties, the Fab Four had performed in places like the Indra (which doubled as a strip club) and the Kaiserkeller in Hamburg’s notorious red-light district, neighborhoods crowded with hookers, transvestites and controlled by local gangsters—a wild west compared to the nightlife of Liverpool. They played long and arduous gigs, once for ninety-eight consecutive nights, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., fueled by uppers.

At the conclusion of these music marathons, rather than return to their rented, primitive living quarters in the back of a local flea-ridden movie house, they often sought out the company of the local ladies of the night for some warmth and comfort.

There was very little their eyes hadn’t already seen or their bodies experienced by the time they hit the American shores. And, except for John, they were unattached and, likely, the most highly desired eligible bachelors on the planet.

Despite America’s puritanical backbone, wherever the Beatles went there were legions of women of every stripe willing to oblige the boys’ every desire. From San Francisco to New York, innumerable teenage girls and young women buzzed around the band like flies around a sweaty stallion.

It was not uncommon for the younger girls to recruit their mothers to help them accomplish their mission—and even the mothers were not above offering their favors to anyone they perceived might have influence in getting their kids a private audience with the Liverpool quartet.

Girls jammed hotel lobbies zeroing in on anyone who had an English accent. One woman, hearing me speak, brazenly cornered me as I booked into Seattle’s Edgewater Inn on the third day of the tour. There was no time for beating about the bush. “I need to meet the Beatles,” she said to me. “I just want to make my daughter happy. What can you do for me? What can I do to make you happy?” For once, words failed me.

Normally upstanding citizens were prepared to engage in any number of personal indignities if it would help their cause. One embarrassed mother was reduced to screaming for help after getting stuck in a hotel’s heating ducts in a misguided attempt to squeeze her way through to where she imagined the Beatles’ rooms might be.

Hotel security had to summon the fire department to extricate her. As she was being escorted to the front door, she still insisted she wanted to meet the Beatles and get their autographs.

After that mishap, the Beatles management made it a custom to call ahead and insist security do mandatory pre-searches. Yet intrepid fans still found a way to hide out—ready to pounce should a real flesh-and-blood Beatle come into range.

Countless young women were uncovered crouched in closets, hiding in bathrooms, behind the drapes or under beds. One time, six young women camped out in the boiler room of a hotel all night long, surviving on bananas, bottled water and hope. Alas for them, at dawn, the raiding party was ferreted out by hotel security.

One day, as I entered my room in the elite Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, three teenage girls startled me as they emerged from the bathroom, nearly knocking me to the floor. “Where are they?” yelled one of them as they vanished down the hallway without waiting for an answer.

Trapped in their rooms on every stop along the way, there was no way any of the band could have slipped quietly into the hotel bar or to a nearby restaurant to chat up women in the traditional way. As a result, it was left to Neil and Mal to screen and pull the girls. Derek told me that the pair developed foolproof “shit detectors,” adding, “they could spot trouble before trouble saw them.”

A brief word here about the two roadies. Neil Aspinall, who was born in North Wales but moved to Liverpool as a kid, had a fresh-faced, schoolboy innocence that led many to at first mistake him for a Beatle. He had met Paul at school in Liverpool—they went to art and English classes together when Neil was still in his teens. He was a lodger in Pete Best’s house when he was introduced to the group and began driving them to local gigs for £1 a night.

“Nell” was what the Beatles affectionately called him, and he served them in myriad ways: He was their personal assistant and right-hand man, fixer, chauffeur, roadie, equipment handyman, sound checker and concierge. In his authorized biography, journalist Hunter Davies described Neil as “a paid Beatles mate.”

Neil made sure room service didn’t deliver breakfast before noon and that the eggs, toast, tea and other morning eats were wheeled in after their eyes opened. He was familiar with their foods of choice and knew Ringo’s favored breakfast repast was baked beans on toast. He often packed cans of the English beans in his suitcase for those instances when the hotel couldn’t provide them.

It was Neil who checked to make sure their passports were up to date. He called hotel doctors when one or the other of the boys needed medical care, booked their flights and train trips and had a pocketful of keys ready when the band arrived at the countless hotels. He carried a reserve supply of uppers with him at all times.

And both roadies had long before mastered the art of forging their masters’ signatures. Those forgeries were frequently handed out as rewards to fans. (The best of the forgers, however, was Derek Taylor. I watched in awe one night as we sat in a hotel bar drinking and talking with Derek, a maestro of multitasking, scribbling all four of the Beatles’ autographs with a lightly tipped marking pen on a stack of official Beatles pictures. And he never broke a sweat or interrupted his conversation as he smoothly practiced his art.)

In 1968, after Brian’s death, Neil reluctantly took over management of Apple, running the operation through thick, thin and multiple lawsuits for forty years. In 2000, while at the Apple helm—of course with the full cooperation of Paul, George, Ringo and John’s widow Yoko Ono—he decided to put together what turned out to be the ultimate record of their history, the massive Beatles Anthology. Neil was credited as the book’s executive producer.

In 2008 he died of lung cancer while being treated at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He was sixty-six years old and had retired from Apple a year earlier.

Neil’s assistant, Malcolm “Big Mal” Evans, was six feet six inches tall and had held a solid job working for the post office for more than a decade while moonlighting as a bouncer at the Cavern in Liverpool before he was invited to join the Beatles. A dependable, friendly, likeable fellow, he wore unfashionable black-framed glasses and took over most of the heavy lifting from Neil. “I fetch and carry for the Beatles,” he said in describing his job, “I want to serve them.”

Tragically, Mal was shot dead by Los Angeles police in January, 1976. He had been mixing alcohol with Valium, and his worried girlfriend called for help. Police claimed that when they asked him to put down his air rifle, he refused; so they unleashed six shots at him—four of them killing him. Their actions were ruled justified, and no charges were filed against them as a result of the shooting.

Neil and Mal expertly scrutinized the droves of young women breathless for the chance to do more than simply hold the Beatles’ hands. They were adroit not only at identifying women who were likely to share chemistry with any particular band member, but also at vetting potential companions, with an aim to avoid embarrassing—not to mention dangerous—situations.

One such crisis, which threatened to sink the entire American trip, played out on the second stop of the tour, August 20, in Las Vegas. Heavy security measures were put in place at the Sahara Hotel, where the band camped out for two nights, and the main area of the hotel was made off-limits to the band.

“It would have been fantastic to have them walking through our casino or even hitting the craps tables,” Sahara entertainment director Stan Irwin told me at the time. “We’ve had some of the biggest names in the business come through. But I knew it would have been suicide to bring these guys out.”

A small army of security men in business suits stood guarding the elevator doors on the Beatles’ floor. Uniformed police patrolled the casino and the hotel grounds. Yet despite all these measures, in the wee small hours of the second night, after the Beatles had completed two triumphant concerts, two young women, twin sisters—believed to be under 16—were caught emerging from the Beatles’ floor.

In his book Ticket to Ride, Larry Kane reported that a loud hammering on the door of his hotel room woke him at 3 a.m. He opened up to see an anxious looking Mal, who said he urgently needed his help—an irate mother was causing an uproar.

It seemed that after a late night of gambling, the mother had walked to the elevator leading to the Beatles’ tower and demanded immediate access. She said she needed to retrieve her daughters who, she claimed, were partying with the band. When hotel security steadfastly refused to let her through, the angry and frustrated mother (possibly fueled by alcohol) called the Clark County Sheriff’s office, claiming that her young daughters were being held against their wills at a party in John’s suite.

Kane recounted that Mal asked him to get dressed, put on a jacket and tie to help him sort things out. “Why me?” he asked Mal and Derek, who had also been alerted and had joined the crisis management team. Mal replied, “Larry, you’re a reporter…you look more trustworthy.”

Kane, eager to prove his mettle, complied and, after hearing the story and receiving assurances from Derek and Mal that it was all an innocent mistake and nothing untoward had happened in John’s suite, introduced himself to the mother and assured her that her daughters were fine. Fortunately, at that very moment, the two girls stepped off the elevator into the arms of the relieved parent. No one knew how the girls had made their way to the Beatles’ floor.

Later that morning I was told that the mother had filed a formal complaint, forcing the Clark County vice squad to launch an investigation. Throughout the rest of the night, two detectives took statements from John and an irate Brian, who also had been roused from his bed, as well as from the Sahara’s security chief. By dawn, investigators determined that no laws had been broken and, therefore, no arrests could be made.

Derek insisted there was nothing clandestine about the girls’ visits to John, that in fact the girls’ mother—never very far away in the hotel’s casino—had given her full permission for the sisters to attend the party. It was Derek’s calm response to the mother and investigating officers that also helped ratchet down the problem, so when the Beatles moved on to Seattle and then Vancouver, the near-disaster had become ancient history.

And there the matter died, or so it seemed to us in the traveling press corps. Eighteen months later, while living in Los Angeles and no longer with the Beatles, Derek told me that at Brian’s behest, a payoff of $10,000 had secretly been made to the mother after she threatened to go to the media. She also threatened to press for a more thorough criminal investigation.

Derek told me later that blackmail threats had become part and parcel of the Beatles life as their popularity soared. With growing fame came a regular flood of allegations including “love-child” claimants in Britain and Germany, specifically targeting Paul.

Those stories stretched back to their early days in Hamburg, after a German woman who said she had dated Paul, claimed the Beatle was the father of her child. In most cases, according to Derek, it was simply an exploitative rip-off.

In The Beatles Anthology, George sounded off about the litigation that the boys attracted, claiming, “There were girls trying to get into our rooms so they could sue us for totally made-up things. There was always this very peculiar suing consciousness. I’d never heard about suing people until we went to America.”

Whatever the truth, the Las Vegas incident had been a dangerous wake-up call, and following that contretemps, greater care was taken to vet women who were ushered into the Beatles’ company.

As mentioned earlier, there were many derivative perks at hand for those of us who were part of the Beatles entourage. Female fans, looking to forge a Beatle connection, even a remote one, were not shy about offering sexual favors.

In Dallas, we stayed at the Cabana Motor Hotel, a ghastly inn that looked like a poor man’s Caesar’s Palace circa 1960. A few doors away was another replica—a nightclub thinly disguised as a Playboy Club, where young women in skimpy, bunny-like costumes served drinks and chatted up the customers.

Anyone staying at the Cabana was automatically given membership to the club, and the girls were not shy about offering favors to anyone who might be able to get them closer to the Beatles. I got into a conversation at the club with Lana, a particularly friendly and attractive brunette who described herself as the bunnies’ “den mother.” She inquired whether I had any suggestions about how some of her girls might have a close encounter of the Beatles kind.

I introduced Lana to Mal, who happily joined us for a drink and began to inspect the women as if they were cans of soup. He already had quite a bit of experience in pairing up the band members, who never seemed to tire of female companionship, with young women eager for, at the very least, a brush with fame, or, if they let their imaginations—or delusions—run wild, reciprocation of love from the objects of their fanatical desire. This exercise in “pulling” women was one that was to be repeated with regularity throughout the tour.

After being assured that some of her employees had been taken care of and were being given an audience with the pop stars, the appreciative Lana invited me to share my thoughts about my Beatles adventure with her over a bottle of decent French champagne.

I impressed her with stories of my closeness to the Fab Four, and she elaborated on the complications of running a bunny hutch in a nightclub.

In Atlantic City on September 1, after performing for a sold-out crowd of 18,000 packed into Convention Hall, local promoter George Hamid, a colorful and avuncular man who also owned the world-famous Steel Pier and some local movie houses, sought to reward the boys for filling the house.

The next morning they were to leave town on a rare bus trip to their next concert in Philadelphia, and after two tough weeks, they were in dire need of some serious relaxation.

Hamid offered to bring in a movie projector and a new movie to our hotel and hold a private screening that evening for the traveling tour group.

The whole top floor of the Lafayette Motor Inn near the boardwalk had been commandeered by our group. It was almost 11 p.m. when we finally gathered together for a lavish pre-movie dinner—more seafood delicacies than I had ever seen on one table—served buffet style. As we refilled our glasses and were about to tuck into the food, the door opened and about nine or ten heavily made-up women in tight sweaters, high heels and miniskirts sashayed into the room.

It took me only a moment to realize that this eye-catching parade had not been recruited to display the latest line of Atlantic City women’s wear. Neither were they your run-of-the-mill groupies. These ladies were all professionals. We all—Beatles included—looked somewhat astonished at this entirely unexpected parade.

Hamid got right to the point: He flashed a giant smile and said simply to the Beatles: “These gorgeous ladies are here for your pleasure and entertainment. Take your pick.”

John eyed a curvaceous blonde in a very short miniskirt, took her hand and said with a straight face, “You’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts.” Slowly, the others, as though standing before a candy store window, made their choices. Then, each of the selected girls took the arm of a Beatle, and headed off to more appropriate quarters.

As the lights went down, the handful of women who remained behind found seats next to us on the hard, fold-up chairs and stayed to watch the movie. It was A Hard Day’s Night.

The film, of course, was a carbon copy of what we had been witnessing first hand since the tour began: the Beatles being pursued at breakneck speed by adoring fans. I remember wondering if our guests who had decided to stay for dinner and a movie appreciated the irony and wry humor of the film.

When the lights came on, the Beatles were all back sitting in the rear row of seats. We all applauded politely, offered a friendly thumbs-up and went our separate ways.

While in Atlantic City, and at the suggestion of Paul, I went to see Sophie Tucker sing and tell ribald jokes at a nearby nightclub. Paul told me she was an act I shouldn’t miss. He had enjoyed her performance for the first time at London’s famous Talk of the Town nightclub, and when on the road, whenever he was asked to name his favorite pop group, he always responded with a straight face: “Sophie Tucker.”

As for the Atlantic City hooker parade, when Brian later learned that pandering to the Beatles sexual desires had turned into such a public exhibition, he was furious. He called the road agent Bob Bonis on the carpet for what he called “that filthy exhibition.” Of course, none of us ever wrote about it; we knew that if we had even hinted at it, we would immediately be sent packing.

It all started with a press conference in Los Angeles on August 23.

“Which movie star would you most like to meet?” Paul was asked

“Jayne Mansfield,” he replied.

Jayne was a statuesque actress who had originally been groomed by Twentieth Century-Fox chief Darryl Zanuck as a warning to the temperamental, increasingly unreliable Marilyn Monroe.

Zanuck featured Mansfield in B-movies like The Girl Can’t Help It in 1956 and in 1957, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? They were two films that had left the Beatles spellbound as boys, when they used to sneak in the back door of their local Liverpool movie house—the former even featuring a performance by Paul and John’s early idol, Little Richard, whose title tune was a top hit.

Mansfield, a former Playboy Playmate and singer, had been dubbed “The Working Man’s Monroe,” but her career stalled after Monroe died in 1962; so she kept a high profile by milking the publicity machine and was an early practitioner of the “wardrobe malfunction” school of Hollywood PR.

Just hours after Paul’s passing reference about his wish to meet Mansfield, the actress took matters into her own hands.

Very late on the night of their Hollywood Bowl concert, after the band had returned to their rented house in the hills, there was a knock at the front door. Standing there—like a vision out of a young man’s fantasy—was the platinum-blond Mansfield, a woman never shy about exhibiting her considerable assets. She wore red stilettos and a fur coat expertly thrown over a mauve cat suit.

Jayne wanted her picture taken with the boys, but Brian, who hated the idea of celebrities trying to ride their coattails, said no. However, John wanted to see more of Jayne, so without telling Brian, they arranged to meet two nights later—a day off for the boys—at Hollywood’s newest and hottest nightclub, the Whisky A Go Go on the Sunset Strip. Jayne told them her pal, singer Johnny Rivers, was performing and that he had a devoted following of some of the biggest names in the music business.

The next day, Derek alerted me to the rendezvous and invited me to go. The following evening, we got to the Whisky ahead of John, George and Ringo, and the place was jammed and noisy. Several tables were roped off for the Mansfield–Beatles party. We were led to a table fewer than eighteen feet from where the main action was to unfold. “You are guests of Miss Mansfield,” said a waiter, delivering a bottle of Moët & Chandon.

It was quite an odd scene: We were on floor level while Jayne and guests were perched a little higher—ensconced in a gigantic leather banquette surrounded, and at times snuggling up to, George on her right, wearing an open-necked cream dress shirt, and John on her left, in jacket, shirt and sunglasses. Ringo sat next to George looking a bit left out of it. The only Beatle not there was Paul, who Derek quietly told me was off with Peggy Lipton.

Mansfield was thirty-one years old and an “older woman” compared to the twenty-something Beatles, but that didn’t appear even to register with her table mates. She was stunning, with her braided hair piled high and held tight by a rhinestone-encrusted headband, and a fetching velvet dress with a hemline that reached mid-thigh.

Before I could take a sip of champagne, the paparazzi descended, having been tipped off by Jayne’s boyfriend–manager Matt Cimber, who found himself exiled to the outer perimeter of the booth. From the sidelines, we watched the chemistry at play.

Then there was another flurry of exploding flashbulbs—and in flounced Mamie Van Doren, a Mansfield rival who was more famous for the men she had dated (Clark Gable, James Dean, Rock Hudson) than the movies she made. She squeezed herself into an adjoining booth, heightening the drama. It was like watching a tennis match: the Mansfield–Beatles booth, then the Van Doren booth, then back to the Mansfield–Beatles booth. The photographers were having a field day.

At the Beatles table they had gone through almost two bottles of rum, smiling and even waving at the cameras, until all of the photographers had retreated—except for Bob Flora, a freelance photographer who worked for United Press International. He was relentless and continuously snapped Jayne and her captive Beatles.

Then he moved to within touching distance for even more pictures. In those days, press photographers used Speed Graphic cameras, which were bulky and had giant flashbulbs attached that nearly blinded their subjects when they were triggered. There were no telescopic lenses to reduce photographic intrusions, so the photogs had to get close to their subjects. George, who was uncomfortable about being part of the whole scene in the first place, was getting more than a bit tipsy, and the more he put away, the testier he became.

“Bugger off…let me breathe,” George finally shouted at Flora, as he angrily wagged a finger at him.

Flora fired off again.

“Fook off,” George yelled, but Flora didn’t appear to hear, instead moving even closer and firing off yet another flashbulb.

George decided he’d finally had enough. He jumped to his feet, picked up his glass of Coke and whiskey and tossed the entire contents in the direction of Flora, who just kept shooting. The ice and drink sprayed everywhere. Most of it missed its main target and, instead, doused Van Doren in the next booth. She screamed as if she had been stabbed.

Jayne grabbed George’s hand, “Let’s get the hell out,” she said, and, within seconds, club bouncers and Jayne’s bodyguards hoisted the actress out of the booth and lifted George and John out over the crowd. Ringo, looking alarmed, was pushed and pulled by a bodyguard in the direction of the rear exit. The dampened Van Doren dabbed her dress and décolletage with a napkin and waited for an apology. It never came.

By the time I squeezed my way out to the rear parking lot, the Beatles and Jayne were already in their chauffeured limousine making a quick getaway down Sunset Boulevard.

This time, the mini scandal—an angry Beatle dousing a pressman—could not be ignored. Flora’s photo of George tossing the drink was splashed across the front page of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner the next morning. From there, the photo made its way via UPI to all the editors in London.

Much later, in The Beatles Anthology, George offered his measured version of what took place. It was, he claimed, a “total set-up” by the publicity-hungry Mansfield. “John and I were sitting either side of her and she had her hands on our legs, by our groins—at least she did on mine,” he said. When a paparazzo tried to photograph them, George said, he threw a glass of water at him, but the contents of the glass accidentally hit Van Doren, who happened to be passing.

The slightly dampened Van Doren later weighed in with her own version—claiming that it was an entire bucket of ice that hit her in the face.

12: DANCING WITH THE STARS

Playboy magazine: “Is there any celebrity you’d like to meet?”

Paul: “I wouldn’t mind meeting Adolf Hitler.”

George: “You could have every room in your house papered.”

The Beatles were never starstruck. Nor were they snobs. Although they had been weaned on the Hollywood movies of the fifties, they preferred to make the 1964 tour a Beatles-Free Zone where most celebrities were concerned. They were extremely selective about whom to meet and hang out with.

Brian, their stern gatekeeper, was sensitive about so-called “celebrities” whose main agenda clearly appeared to be getting alongside—or hooking up with—the band members purely for their own self-aggrandizement. And the Beatles themselves had sensitive shit detectors, which were always on high alert.

“We quickly found out who was genuine,” John told me one afternoon when I brought up the subject of how they were able to separate the wheat from the chaff. “Everybody knew who the phonies were and in a sec we could tell who was natural and who was faking it.” (The shit detectors weren’t exactly foolproof. At one of the February Carnegie Hall concerts, the boys were unimpressed when Leonard Bernstein came backstage with his twelve-year-old daughter Nina and bored them to death with a conversation about himself and his close friendship with Jackie Kennedy. And in New York on the summer tour, they gave short shrift to Benny Goodman, who brought his daughter to meet the band. It was left to Derek to reprimand them—and give them an on-the-spot instructional about the history and importance of the famous bandleader.)

At the San Francisco concert, when Shirley Temple Black and family showed up backstage at the Cow Palace, George whined at the idea of taking a ride down memory lane on the Good Ship Lollipop. Still, they played nice with her.

And John took a particular shine to the fresh-faced twenty-three-year-old folksinger Joan Baez, who dropped in at their opening concert in San Francisco and then again at the Hollywood Bowl. Although John knew—as did everyone on the pop scene—that Joan was dating Bob Dylan, they invited her to the party at their Bel-Air rental. “They all liked her, and by the time they first came to America she was already a big star,” Derek told me in Los Angeles.

He recounted that the Beatles had thought she looked like a dorky folksinger with her guitar and slightly crooked teeth—yet she was also a bit exotic, with black hair and full lips and so pure a balladeer voice. John enjoyed her dry sense of humor, which he supposed she got from her Scottish mother. (She had a Mexican father.) Perhaps equally important, Derek told me, was that she was an unpretentious kindred soul who was genuinely immersed in the Vietnam War protest movement.

Not so lucky was Sammy Davis Jr. when he came to the Beatles’ Bel-Air digs and asked for Paul. He was turned away at the front door, with Mal clumsily telling the singer, “Paul has asked me to tell you he’s asleep.”

Davis took umbrage and stormed off. Paul later told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, “Everyone was in bed, I was cleaning my teeth and I thought it was just someone else trying to get in to see us.” When the tale made the local gossip columns, he rushed to apologize. “Sorry, it was all a terrible misunderstanding,” he said in a personal call to Davis at his home. “When can we get together?”

Four years later, Paul met Sammy at the trendy West Hollywood nightclub The Factory. According to Tony Bramwell, who worked for Brian and later Apple, the two chatted amiably. In 1985, Davis worked with Ringo in the movie Alice in Wonderland, with Ringo as the Mock Turtle and Sammy playing the Caterpillar.

Paul was clearly conflicted about the idea of meeting celebrities. In a Playboy interview conducted just after the Beatles’ 1964 North American tour (but published four months later), he said: “When we meet people we’ve seen on the telly or on film we still think, ‘Wow.’” Yet in the same interview, while George, John and Ringo had kind words for Jayne Mansfield, Paul—who had never met Mansfield—declared, “They (Playboy) think she’s a rave but she’s really an old bag.”

When the Beatles played the Las Vegas Convention Center, several of the legendary Vegas Strip headliners came to see what all the fuss was about. Liberace and soft-popster Pat Boone were among them, but their encounters were brief and perfunctory. The Beatles, perhaps revealing their latent schoolboy sensibilities, were more interested in getting a close look at the flamboyant piano player than in talking shop.

“Honestly,” John later admitted, “None of us recognized him. He came backstage in waistcoat and white tie looking like one of those bellboy geezers.”

More interesting to Paul was a musician he had idolized from his youth: Fats Domino. Paul admitted he was heavily influenced by the New Orleans musician and was shameless about turning Fats’ 1955 hit “Ain’t That a Shame” into an essential part of his early repertoire.

I accompanied Paul when he visited Fats at his very modest clapboard home in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. Paul and Fats chewed the fat in private, then Paul said a quick goodbye and suggested that Fats come to that evening’s concert to meet the band. He did; they joked around and posed for photos, while George and John strummed their guitars.

But they really found their thrills for three days in Los Angeles, where Burt Lancaster was the big catch. Who could forget Burt of the widescreen, those gleaming white teeth and smile, his charismatic preacher man in Elmer Gantry, his high-flying role in Trapeze and that iconic roll in the waves, inexorably locked to Deborah Kerr, in From Here to Eternity.

He was the genuine article, the guy they all wanted to meet. Burt, the perfect host, invited the Beatles for dinner in his Beverly Hills home following their Hollywood Bowl concert. The Beatles immediately marveled at the Lancaster pad. “Wow,” said Ringo, impressed with the chance to paddle in the first indoor–outdoor pool he had ever seen. “You can swim from the garden into the living room if you slipped under the glass curtain.”

A butler served early dinner, and then afterwards, at the push of a button, an oil painting disappeared into the ceiling and down came a movie screen, on which they viewed the Peter Sellers Pink Panther sequel, A Shot in the Dark.

Ringo insisted on mimicking a couple of fast gun draws with his movie idol. “This town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” the lad who had grown up on Hollywood’s cowboy movies kept saying to Burt in a fake western accent.

As they were leaving, Burt presented him with an antique gun, albeit one that no longer worked. Ringo carried it carefully back to England, though customs confiscated it, finally returning it to him a few months later. “He was the nicest fellow—real genuine,” Ringo declared later.

Ringo again became a starstruck schoolboy when, on the second day of the tour, he slipped out of the hotel to the Rickshaw, a bar in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and happened upon western actor Dale Robertson, star of the television series Tales of Wells Fargo.

“The instant camaraderie and elbow bending went on until two in the morning, which was closing time,” Derek recalled. “And then everyone left except us. We stayed on for another couple of hours.”

Exploitation or publicity involving the Beatles—however it was labeled—could work both ways, as it did in Miami on February 18, 1964. When the Beatles showed up at a seedy boxing gym, they found themselves playing second fiddle to a fast-talking athlete.

How it came to pass was told to me by Harry Benson, the Life magazine photographer who at the time was working for the Daily Express and had flown to New York with the Beatles for the first Sullivan appearance, then accompanied them to Florida for the taping of the second show.

“The Express picture desk was very demanding,” Harry told me. “I’d done lots of set-ups in Central Park, around Manhattan and on the Sullivan show, but they wanted more. New pictures every day. When I got to Miami with the Beatles, I switched on the TV in my hotel room, and there was this black guy shouting his guts out. It was Muhammad Ali—then still Cassius Clay—and he was about to fight Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship of the world.

“I thought it wouldn’t make a bad picture—the Beatles and the loudmouthed Clay. So I went along to their suite and suggested they go with me to the gym and have their pictures taken with Clay. John said, ‘He’s such a bigmouth, and he’s going to get killed by Liston. We want our photo taken with the champion—not the loser.’”

Benson said Lennon was right. “Clay at twenty-two years old was a pumped-up light heavyweight. He was the 7–1 underdog, and all the boxing writers said he didn’t have a chance in hell. Liston didn’t even bleed.” So Benson raced to the gym and pitched Liston about the photo. “He was tying his boots. He didn’t even look up at me. ‘I don’t want to see those bums,’ he said.

“So I rent a big limo go back and tell the Beatles, ‘It’s all set up.’ They think I’m going to take them to see Liston—but instead I deliver them to Clay.”

Author Robert Lipsyte, then a neophyte New York Times sportswriter who had never covered a boxing match before and had been sent to cover the fight between champion Liston and the mouthy young upstart, picks up the story:

“As I walked up the stairs to the gym there was a kind of hubbub behind me. There were these four little guys in terrycloth shirts who were being pushed up the stairs by two big security guards. I’m a little ahead of them. When we get to the top of the stairs, Clay’s not there. The leader of the group says, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ He turned around, but the cops pushed all five of us into a dressing room and locked the door.

“They were cursing. They were angry. They were absolutely furious. I introduced myself. John said, ‘Hi, I’m Ringo.’ Ringo said, ‘Hi, I’m George.’ I asked how they thought the fight was going to go. ‘Oh, he’s going to slaughter the little wanker,’ they said. Then they were cursing, stamping their feet, banging on the door. Suddenly the door bursts open, and there is the most beautiful creature any of us had ever seen. Cassius Clay. He glowed. He leaned in, looked at them and said, ‘C’mon, let’s go make some money.’

“And then—if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn it was choreographed—he turned and the Beatles followed him out to the ring, and they began capering around the room. They lined up, he tapped Ringo, they all went down like dominoes. It was a marvelous, antic set piece. And then it was over and they leave. Clay works out. At the end, he’s back in the dressing room being rubbed down after the workout. He beckons me over because he had seen me in the dressing room, and he says, ‘So, who were those little sissies?’”

Benson’s photos of the Clay–Beatles unrehearsed comedy skit—with Clay lifting up Ringo like he was a paper bag and holding him in his arms—flew around the world, much to the delight of Brian. But Benson said the Beatles—particularly John—were furious.

“Cassius embarrassed them,” remembered Harry. “He made them lie on their backs in the ring. He ruled them and bossed them around. And they took it. He had them eating out of his hand, playing second fiddle to him, pretending to be unconscious on the canvas. They became his sidekicks—the extras in the Cassius variety show. John was so pissed about being manipulated by a boxer, he told me: ‘He’s made a fool of us, and it’s all your fucking fault.’”

After the Beatles shoot, in his singularly refined manner of “talking smack,” Clay composed a verse: “When Liston reads about the Beatles visiting me/He’ll get so mad I’ll knock him out in three!” Clay won the title when Liston failed to answer the bell for the seventh round.

Only twice on this tour did the boys submit to the same kind of indignity of being trotted out for display as they had during the formal British embassy reception in the nation’s capital in February. It was there that the upper-crust guests inappropriately jostled for autographs, with one woman having the temerity to help herself to a snip of Ringo’s hair.

One occasion was on the evening of the day after their Hollywood Bowl performance at a big bash at the Bel-Air rental. It was a bit of a free-for-all, more for show than actually having a good time. We bumped into Steve Lawrence and his singing partner and wife Eydie Gormé, along with Bobby Darin and wife Sandra Dee. That was the night Paul hooked up with Peggy Lipton.

The other occasion, and the hottest ticket of the summer in Los Angeles, was the garden party earlier that afternoon, hosted by Capitol Records boss Alan Livingston. The label honcho persuaded his mother-in-law (his wife was Sunset Boulevard and Absent Minded Professor actress Nancy Olson) to loan them her house for the day because it was sheltered by giant oak trees, had a spacious patio and the grounds were more secure than at his own home.

Livingston—whose record label included not only the Beatles, but also Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Nat King Cole—wanted the boys to do something for his wife’s favorite charity, the Hemophilia Foundation of Southern California. The boys—or, more accurately, Brian—agreed to the afternoon meet-and-greet. An hour or so of drinks and chitchat—like a royal visit—would be much easier than a charity performance; then they could go have some fun.

Invitees were told they could come only if they brought their children or grandchildren along. Admission was twenty-five dollars—pretty cheap even then—and Livingston could afford to be magnanimous. The Beatles had become his biggest-selling artists.

As her guests swept in and prepared to cast their eyes upon the Fab Four in the flesh, Olson said, “We sent out only 500 invitations, but I got thousands of phone calls from people asking why they weren’t invited. And I feel real bad about this because when Alan first played ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ I looked at him and said, ‘Alan, that’s just the worst thing I’ve ever heard.’” (Livingston later elaborated: “I had great respect for Nancy because she had a good ear. She looked at me and said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And I said to her, ‘Oh my God, I’ve made a terrible mistake.’”)

It was a perfect summer afternoon. When I arrived, the police, fortified by a large contingent of Burns security guards, were out in full force, and several hundred screaming fans already were lining the streets outside the long, bungalow-style home. Local television stations had set up cameras, and reporters breathlessly waited to interview the arriving guests, as though they were covering the Oscars red carpet.

Then the nervous cops, hired for the afternoon, decided to close off the street for three hours—which led to a fracas with an angry neighbor who threatened to sue Livingston. She relented when she was invited to come and see for herself what all the fuss was about.

Some of the edgy police officers got a bit too carried away with their assignment. When Brian arrived alone in a taxicab, they refused to let him through. “No one gets in without an invitation” an officious cop told him. “Your name is not on our list.”

“I’m the Beatles manager,” Brian declared. “Yeah, and I’m the King of Siam,” the officer retorted. Just as Brian’s blood was about to boil over, the band arrived and Brian was spared the indignity of having to argue his case.

The Beatles were in their Sunday best, shoes polished and nattily attired in their narrow-lapel suits—except for Ringo, who wore a bright blue jacket and no tie, a transgression for which he was taken aside and quietly scolded by Brian. John sported wraparound sunglasses, and Paul and George reluctantly stubbed out their cigarettes and prepared to face the inevitable.

“Is there a drink about?” George asked. “Later,” Brian hissed. “This is a children’s charity.”

For more than an hour they perched patiently on high stools on the bricked patio under spreading oak trees, sharing space with Los Angeles’ PR-savvy Mayor Sam Yorty, flanked by his wife Elizabeth and their eighteen-year-old son Bill. The Beatles seemed perfectly content to make small talk with the celebs and their offspring, who dutifully lined up for a photo and the chance to rub elbows with a Beatle.

Although the Beatles grew up on a steady diet of Hollywood movies, I doubted they knew who most of the attending stars were, or even recognized them. The fact that no introductions were made as each guest glided by didn’t help matters. Ringo’s eyes did light up, however, at the sight of the seventy-one-year-old star of gangster movies, Edward G. Robinson, who brought along his nine-year-old granddaughter Francesca.

“You dirty rat,” said Paul, shaking Robinson’s hand warmly—and confusing him with James Cagney.

The boys recognized Lloyd Bridges (Ringo knew him from television series Sea Hunt) who had brought his fourteen-year-old son Jeff, as well as the granite-faced Jack Palance, who had daughter Holly, also fourteen, in tow. It was easy to spot comic Jerry Lewis, along with his eighteen-year-old son Gary, who had just formed his own pop group, Gary Lewis and the Playboys—inspired, he told John, by the Beatles.

Gary got into an animated conversation with Ringo as they swapped drumming stories. Lewis’ old comedy partner Dean Martin was absent, but Martin’s wife Jeanne showed up with their five kids.

The Beatles marveled at the ever-beautiful forty-six-year-old Lady From Shanghai star Rita Hayworth, who introduced her fourteen-year-old daughter Princess Yasmin Aga Khan. Patiently waiting in line was actress Barbara Rush and her son Christopher, and On the Waterfront actress Eva Marie Saint, with her son Darrel and daughter Laurie—although the Beatles hadn’t a clue who any of the women were.

As Rush came down the assembly line, her husband, publicist Warren Cowan, who had been standing behind the Beatles (he was handling PR for the party), jumped forward and announced to Paul, “Barbara is my wife.” Actor John Forsythe stood watching this unfold as he chatted with Groucho Marx, who lived nearby and had come to the party without a child as a voucher, explaining, “I love parties where the booze is free.”

Livingston had spared no cost. Elegant black-and-white striped party tents were set up in the garden under which uniformed staff were serving wine, champagne, hard drinks and finger foods for the adults, and lemonade, ice cream and cotton candy for the kids. There were donkey rides around the garden.

I wandered into the house and marveled at the extravagance of the resplendently spread buffet tables around which the showbiz greats mingled and offered mostly positive comments about the visitors from Liverpool. Rock Hudson, positively gleaming with good looks, attacked a plate of shrimp in glamorous fashion.

“Are they going to sing?” Donald O’Connor, who was with his son Freddy and daughter Alicia, asked Zsa Zsa Gabor.

“Do they sing?” Zsa Zsa asked.

A colorful character named Boots LeBaron, who had previously written for the Los Angeles Times but had just been appointed PR for Capitol Records, found himself cornered by screen tough guy George Raft. “I wanna meet those guys,” Raft muttered to Boots.

“Sorry, George,” Boots said. “You need a kid as your passport to meet them. Maybe you could borrow one.”

It all went down rather smoothly until John, his patience wearing a bit thin, had a close encounter with a woman in a very large hat decorated with about two dozen goose feathers who had entitlement written all over her face. “Who’s the old bag with the weird hat?” he asked, when the elderly woman—wielding an umbrella like a weapon—bumped into him and almost knocked the cigarette out of his hand.

Hollywood’s queen bee of columnists, Hedda Hopper, unfazed by his remark, asked, “Which one are you?”

John had faced this question before. “I’m Stanley,” he said in a posh English accent. Pointing to Paul, he added, “and he’s Livingston of Capitol Records.”

Hopper took it in her stride. And then she imperiously held up the waiting line for several minutes while she insisted that her personal photographer take four photos—with each of the Beatles individually.

Some $20,000 was raised at that party. As the Beatles left seventy minutes after their arrival, Paul shook hands with his host and said, “A concert would have been shorter and easier.”

Capitol Records president Alan Livingston’s garden party...

Photo: Express Newspapers

...and kisses for Beatles.

Photo: Express Newspapers

The Beatles meet Hollywood.

Photo: Express Newspapers

George with a fan in Seattle.

Photo: Ron Joy-Belle Schwartz Estate

Epstein in the saddle at his thirtieth birthday party.

Photo: Ron Joy-Belle Schwartz Estate

Don’t fence me in.

Photo: Curt Gunther-Steven Gunther estate

No Beatles fan.

Photo: Express Newspapers

Beatles hit the jackpot in Vegas.

Photo: Express Newspapers

Smile, please.

Photo: Express Newspapers

Lights! Camera! Action!

Photo: Scope Features

Ringo’s view.

Photo: Express Newspapers

Having a haircut on the set of A Hard Day’s Night.

Photo: United Artists Pictures

Post-Maharishi George Harrison.

Photo: Tim Boxer

Paul and Linda at the Beverly Hills Hotel in February, 1974.

Photo: Mark Sennet

All Together, in Chicago.

Back row (L to R): George Harrison (the writer-half face), me, Anthony Delano Arthur Schreiber, Jackie DeShannon, Bob Bonis, Mal Evans. Middle row: Curt Gunther (wearing camera), Bess Coleman, Brenda Reid and Herb Rooney (the Exciters), members of the Bill Black Combo, Carolyn Johnson and Lilliam Walker (the Exciters), Neil Aspinall, Bill Black Combo in blazers and ties, include Bob Tucker, Joe Lewis Hall, Reggie Young, Martin Willis and Jerry Arnold.

Front row: Derek Taylor (kneeling), Iain Smith, John, George, the Exciters road manager, Paul, Ringo, Brian Epstein.

Photo: Ivor Davis Collection

Lennon in Los Angeles, 1973.

Photo: Cyril Maitland

13: THE FIFTH BEATLE

“I first saw the Beatles at a concert on May 30, 1963, at the Odeon cinema in Manchester with my wife Joan, who had seen them earlier on TV and liked them very much.

“The show was quite astounding although as untrained as we then were, we could scarcely hear the music above the loudest screaming we had ever experienced. It was quite clear that something exceptional was happening.”—Derek Taylor

During the tour de force that was the Beatles’ 1964 North American invasion, if anyone earned the much overused but coveted title of the Fifth Beatle, it was Derek Taylor. Oh sure, over the decades there was their brilliant producer George Martin, who put his whole life and soul into taking them from unknowns in a Liverpool cellar to rock icons. But that summer, it was Derek who kept the press and the Beatles happy at the same time, and answered to Epstein’s mood swings and temper tantrums.

Derek was a cool and amiable troubleshooter—a lean, stovepipe of a man, with a trim moustache, who wore fashionable drainpipe trousers that accentuated an undernourished frame that bore not one ounce of fat. He favored colorful scarves and cravats worn with a kind of casual elegance, his hair was always neatly disheveled, and he was full of a bubbling, no-nonsense energy that was essential to deal with the demanding scribes and the whims of his stars and their manager.

Derek was born in Liverpool in 1932, yet he had the accent of a young British army officer, more upper-class than working-class Merseyside.

He was as funny and gifted with language as John, with the same savage and sardonic sense of humor. His conversation was sprinkled with original phrases.

“Aren’t we having a good time,” he would tell me in the midst of some wild party or unexpected disaster, “and don’t we deserve it?” I don’t think I ever saw him eat a full meal or be without a cigarette hanging from his lips. Frequently we breakfasted together, I devouring the more traditional eggs and toast, while Derek began the day with a double brandy and soda.

He was a pillar of support for the crew of journalists, and we wouldn’t have come through the experience without him. He tried to make sense of all the insanity that was part of our daily bread. He was at all places at all times, and I often wondered whether he actually slept. The public face of the Beatles, their eloquent spokesman, he tried to always tell the truth without ever spilling tales out of school.

On the tour he was our flexible go-between, who coordinated expertly and, without putting noses out of joint, set up all the interviews and kept the radio correspondents fed with their daily sustenance. In every city he valiantly ran the press conferences, which were usually classic examples of organized chaos. In hotel conference rooms, in chilly airport lounges and in makeshift spaces he was like a lion tamer controlling a room full of hungry beasts all wanting a slice of Beatles meat.

Indeed, those press get-togethers were a free-for-all, and not only with hungry journalists. Often I looked around to see young Beatles fans—thirteen-year-olds with braces and pigtails—ushered into the back of the room. They sported accredited press badges handed to them by the editors of teen magazines as prizes for readers—a chance to see the Beatles in the flesh and become a journalist for the afternoon, and even throw in a question or two. It was a heady drug for the young fans and much in demand.

When I asked Derek why these children were allowed to be part of the press conference, he good-naturedly brushed it off: “They’re nice kids. Real fans. A lot of the other real media are nasty buggers—loud and obnoxious.”

He was right.

Derek had to stay on his toes during this media malarkey. But he knew what to expect, and he conducted the questioning with aplomb and even-handedness. He was terse and no-nonsense when he needed to be. (“Madam,” he would say in headmasterly fashion pointing to a woman reporter, “you have a question for the Beatles?”) He was also outspoken (often to Brian’s chagrin), quotable, and he always had the ear of all of the Beatles.

From the outset he never claimed to be a music expert. He never went to college but jumped straight from school to newspapers as an apprentice reporter at the age of seventeen, when he joined his local weekly, the Hoylake and West Kirby Advertiser, for the princely sum of thirty shillings (about $4.50) per week. He impressed and leapt up the ladder to a job on the Liverpool Echo, in between, squeezing in his two-year mandatory National Service.

Then, in 1952, he landed a job as a showbiz writer in the Manchester office of the Daily Express. One day in May, 1963, his wife Joan persuaded him to accompany her to the Manchester Odeon, where Roy Orbison was heading a bill that included a young group called the Beatles. Joan said she had seen them on the “telly” and liked what she saw.

Derek was wowed from the moment the Beatles stepped on stage. His colorful review declared: “Popular music, after years of unspeakable rubbish, has become healthy and good again.”

He flew to Germany at the expense of the Express to research their Hamburg period and reported on them in a much-talked-about feature series. In one story he referred to them as “the gay quartet of Grammar-school boys.” (In that era, of course, the use of the word gay was not a homosexual reference.) He quickly became known as the “go-to Beatles expert.”

He suggested to his editor in Manchester that the newspaper sign George Harrison (“he seemed to be a quite decent chap”) under an exclusive, long-term contract to write a column for them. The Express offered £50 (about $150)—Epstein asked for £100 ($300) and got it. By the time George came to America, that fee had jumped to £150 ($450). So when the Beatles performed for eighteen days in Paris in January, 1964, Derek went along and ghosted the first of George’s columns. (Of course, in late August, I took over the task.)

He said he got the ghosting job by completely fictionalizing George’s first column and filling it full of colorful phrases, gross exaggerations and fake quotes. Then George asked him to read aloud the first column. “They all looked startled because I’d written about George’s dad driving a big green Liverpool bus, and they were confused.”

“What are you talking about?” asked a puzzled George. “The buses are not green.”

“I just made it up,” Derek admitted, “and then they all burst into laughter.”

Brian was greatly impressed by Derek’s droll wit. When Derek’s profile, “The Man Behind the Beatles” broke in the Express, Brian was immediately bombarded by dozens of calls from family and friends around the world, all of whom said they loved the article because it was simply the best they’d ever read about him.

A short time later, Derek was summoned to Brian’s office. Brian said that he’d been offered a nice sum of money to write his memoirs.

“Do you know a good author?” he asked.

“Sure I do,” replied the cheeky Derek. “Me.”

So Derek became Brian’s ghostwriter, and the pair drove from London to the seaside resort town of Torquay in Brian’s two-tone blue Ford Zodiac, checked into a lavish suite with a grand balcony overlooking the sea and over a long weekend, rarely leaving the room and surviving on a steady supply of whiskey, brandy and a cavalcade of room service food, Derek gently grilled Brian about his life to date. Every day a messenger picked up the tapes and delivered them to Brian’s two secretaries in London for transcription.

When Derek returned to London, he waded into the stack of transcripts, worked feverishly without sleep, and cobbled them together into readable form realizing that in just a few weeks the Beatles and their traveling company, including Derek—who after completion of the book had been hired as their new full-time press manager and personal assistant to Brian—would be leaving Britain to invade America.

Aided and abetted by a steady diet of pills to keep him awake, he had managed to finish the book in barely two months. Chapters were literally thrown together, said Derek, who admitted that he didn’t have time to do research or a single interview, so he ruthlessly cribbed most of what he wrote from The Daily Telegraph. “I regret it wasn’t done better,” Derek told me later. “But there was just no time.”

Derek had begun research for the book in April, 1964—and by June they were shipping a finished manuscript, A Cellarful of Noise, out to the anxious publisher, as well as to London-based overseas newspaper editors who had paid handsomely for serialization rights without seeing a word of the book.

Of course, when it came to dishing up the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about Brian, Derek played it safe. Although Epstein spoke very frankly to Derek about his homosexuality, his assorted partners and particularly his oft-bitter dealings with some of the more unscrupulous people in the music world as he pushed for the Beatles’ recognition, Derek virtually eradicated all of the more sordid confessions, along with the savage appraisals of some of the folks Brian had met on the way up.

“Everybody had to be lovely in those days,” Derek noted in comments for a 1995 E! documentary, “so the book was pretty tepid. No skeletons retrieved from the cupboard, which is what Brian wanted at that time in his life.”

Once the book was completed, Derek leapt into his role as the Beatles’ new PR man, replacing Brian Sommerville, who had originally been hired to concentrate on the Beatles and accompany them to New York for the Sullivan shows, as well as the Miami and Washington visits.

While he had experience in PR, Sommerville was on a different planet than the Beatles and his brusque, no-nonsense personality and haughty voice did not sit well with the four personalities who had been placed under his care.

John disdainfully referred to him as “Old Baldie,” and Sommerville told Philip Norman, author of the 1981 book Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation, that, “He (George) never regarded me with anything but muffled dislike.” When he got into a near fistfight in Paris with George, who tossed a glass of orange juice at him over an incident for which neither man could give a reason, the atmosphere grew even tenser.

Sommerville then fell afoul of Epstein when the PR man’s name appeared in print in a story in one of the big-circulation British daily papers. It got worse when they landed in New York in February, 1964, and at the Beatles’ very first American press conference he grabbed a microphone and rudely bellowed, “Shut up” to the assembled press.

Not an impressive start. Nor could Brian forget that it was Sommerville, according to Shout! author Norman, who had committed the Beatles to the embarrassing British embassy reception in Washington, reportedly set up as a favor to an old Navy chum.

“I wasn’t cut out for the job,” he later told Norman, “I was a round peg in a square hole.”

On the other hand, Derek was manna from heaven to the Beatles—someone born and bred in the milieu they knew—and, as such, was accepted like a family member. The downside was that Brian sometimes viewed Derek’s take-charge attitude as challenge to his power.

On the 1964 Australian tour, Derek arranged for John to do a television interview about In His Own Write. It was a trivial issue, but Brian publicly excoriated Derek in front of several journalists in the hotel bar.

“Nobody books the Beatles for interviews except me, Derek. How dare you.”

An hour later Brian apologized.

For reporters, having someone in the camp who could see and even resolve virtually all your problems was a huge asset; Derek understood our wants and needs and often bent over backwards to make things happen for us. But serving two masters was a delicate balance—particularly as paymaster Brian was a rigid, stern, patriarchal disciplinarian when it came to all matters Beatles. And Brian never let him forget it.

“Brian was a dreadful employer,” Derek said long after he quit the band’s employ. “He expected you to give him the same kind of round-the-clock devotion he gave to the Beatles. And he couldn’t quite get his mind around the fact that when I left the office, I went home to my family and was not at his beck and call twenty-four hours a day.”

Yet their closeness continued long after he left the Beatles organization in the mid sixties, when he moved to Los Angeles where he started his own PR firm, handling a bright new group called the Byrds.

“Derek probably saw us as the American version of the Beatles,” Chris Hillman of that group told me. “We wanted to be the Beatles, they inspired us, although our manager Jim Dickson—our Epstein—warned that we should avoid becoming some kind of second-rate Beatles band, with clothing, hair and all the accoutrements.”

Other Taylor clients included the Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield and Paul Revere and the Raiders—and the legendary Mae West, who at seventy-two hired him to do publicity on her first rock album, Way Out West.

In the summer of 1967, Brian invited Derek to a party at his new, country estate in Heathfield, Sussex, to celebrate the release of the Sgt. Pepper album. Along with the invite, Derek told me, came two first-class round-trip tickets from Los Angeles to London for Derek and Joan. In the winter of 1967, when the couple came to my wedding in Los Angeles, he said that he had enjoyed a wild party with his old pals, sampling LSD for the first time.

In 1968, Derek returned to London to take over as press officer in the Beatles’ newly created Apple Corps. He later left, only to return yet again in the mid-eighties to help organize the group’s Live at the BBC project and the heavyweight The Beatles Anthology. Alas, he died in September, 1997 and never lived to see the enormous, encyclopedic tome that was published in 2000.

Through it all, he always remained devoted to the cause: He had drunk the Beatles Kool-Aid, and like a quintuplet separated at birth, he could never completely kick the family habit.

Not that he wanted to. The Taylor loyalty was pure, although he was later to admit in a treatise penned for a website set up in memory of Brian: “I soon realized I didn’t really have tact or diplomacy for the job because Brian had grown up in a completely different world. He had been trained in retail in a pretty strict Jewish hierarchical retail environment where everyone touched their forelock and said, ‘Yes, Mr. Brian.’ He knew where the lines were to be drawn. I knew no such thing. Never did.”

14: BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND

The Beatles on Bob Dylan:

Ringo: “He’s an idol…our hero.”

George: “When we heard his album it gave us a real buzz.”

John: “We loved Bob Dylan.”

Paul (on their pot party): “I thought I’d found the meaning of life.”

Bob Dylan on the Beatles:

“We were driving through Colorado, we had the radio on, and eight of the Top Ten songs were the Beatles. They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid.”

The Beatles were blown away when they first listened to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the folksinger’s breakthrough second album. While Elvis was pure rock ’n’ roll with his strangulated, staccato, gargling, Southern-accented vocals, the lyrics weren’t much to write home about. But while the twenty-two-year-old Dylan sounded like a toothless old coot from deep in the Ozarks, the Beatles were smitten by the poetry of the words coming out of his mouth, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” to “Masters of War.”

The boys had been introduced to Dylan early in 1964, while holed up in grand style at the Olympia Hotel in Paris. Paul pulled out a fresh copy of Freewheelin’, they played it again and again and again. “It was the highlight of our trip to Paris,” recalled George. “Fookin’ poetic,” was the Lennon review, John greatly enthused by Dylan’s piercing prose.

So while the Beatles had little interest in the usual sort of Hollywood celebrities, the kid from Duluth was on their “must meet” shortlist. What they could never have predicted was that unlike their meeting with Elvis (more on that later), when they did get together, it would change their songwriting—especially John’s—and their lives forever.

Much has been written about their summit in New York. But some of the popular myths that have taken hold over almost half a century differ greatly from what I personally saw play out.

As has been correctly reported, Mr. Tambourine Man was driven by his road manager, Victor Maymudes, from his home in Woodstock, New York, to meet the Beatles at Hotel Delmonico on the evening of August 28. Joining them was Saturday Evening Post writer Al Aronowitz.

As legend has it, the meeting at the Delmonico was a landmark event—where a member of Dylan’s entourage brought out a stash of marijuana and the Beatles (and Brian) climbed aboard the THC train.

Not so. In fact, the Delmonico was little more than a brief encounter for Dylan and the Beatles, a swapping of stories, a mutual admiration society, without the aid of any altered states. The real bonding actually occurred three weeks later, in the less auspicious surroundings of the Riviera Idlewild Motel, on the edge of John F. Kennedy International Airport in Jamaica, New York.

What about the Delmonico? The blame for the confusion most likely falls on the immodest Aronowitz, who enjoyed placing himself center stage in sixties rock history. Perhaps he wanted to take matchmaking credit, or maybe the writer, who had quite the reputation for imbibing, had one too many of something that tainted his memory. Whichever, the facts got tangled.

Among other things, it is most unlikely that Dylan and crew would have risked bringing pot into a five-star hotel under the vigilant eye of not only upwards of one hundred of New York’s finest, but also the intense scrutiny of a beefed-up army of security guards. Additionally, smoking it, even in the privacy of their suite, certainly would have been hazardous to their legal status at a time when arrests for possession of marijuana were frequent and could lead to sentences slightly less than life without possibility of parole.

Then there was Brian—a constant nervous Nellie forever worrying that any bad publicity might capsize not only the spitting-clean image of his boys, but the whole tour. The Beatles were barely a third of the way into a long tour; they had a concert to perform in less than a day, and while uppers and downers were part of their daily diet, any further experimentation could have been considered a tad too reckless.

Here’s how it really went down. When the Dylan entourage arrived at the Delmonico, Brian, the Beatles, Mal and Neil were still having dinner in their suite. They chatted for a bit, and then Dylan and his manager, Albert Grossman, and the Beatles and Brian arranged for a longer liaison at a more opportune time: at the end of the tour, when they were to return to New York.

Thus it came to pass. The Beatles were back in the Big Apple on September 21 for a final charity performance at the Paramount Theatre benefitting Retarded Infants Services and United Cerebral Palsy of New York. The band performed for a celebrity-packed sellout crowd of 3,700, commanding one hundred dollars per ticket.

After the show, Dylan came backstage—and it was there they agreed to rendezvous in a somewhat more private setting: in the off-the-beaten-track motel where the Beatles were to spend the night before jetting home the next day.

After the Paramount show, we all jumped into the limos and with only a couple of siren-blaring motorcycles for escorts, headed out in the direction of the unpretentious Riviera Idlewild Motel. We were deposited in the forecourt of our less than salubrious lodgings, to the incessant sound of jet aircraft taking off and landing nearby.

The tour finally over, Brian could stop worrying. He had booked the entire top floor for the entourage, and it was finally time to let our hair down.

Several radio reporters and DJs appeared on the top floor because Derek had foolishly promised some last-minute interviews. Included in the parade of journalists was Gloria Steinem, who needed a wrap-up interview with John for her six-page Cosmopolitan cover story (“The Beatle with a Future”), which ran in December, 1964. She was quickly whisked in and out. Notably missing was Al Aronowitz.

Thrilled with the tour’s success, Brian gave the hotel the green light to serve unlimited food and drink in an expansive conference room suite, which had been turned into a lavish hospitality room.

An open bar and abundant buffet were laid out for the farewell bash—this uncharacteristic bit of goodwill coming on the heels of Brian’s frequent complaints to the boys about their extravagant room-service bills. After mingling with the press and other guests for half an hour, the Beatles retreated inconspicuously to their own suite. There was much speculation about the identity of the guests they were holed up with.

I didn’t need to speculate. I knew.

Moments earlier, as I walked down the corridor on the Beatles’ floor, I had seen a scrawny, baby-faced young man with a prominent nose and looking as though he had forgotten to shave, exit the top-floor elevator carrying a backpack. I gave him the once-over because he looked out of place with his tall shock of unruly dark hair, scruffy black jeans and a long-sleeved black sweater that looked like it was picked up at a thrift store.

Derek suddenly appeared and whispered to me: “Dylan’s here.”

He promised he would brief us about what took place between the Beatles and their iconic visitor, so we all waited, gossiping and rehashing memories of the tour, sad that it was all over and that the Beatles were heading home. A couple of radio guys who were promised a final interview with the boys also waited.

Around 2:30 a.m. the wet towel that had been stuffed under the door—a tested method to prevent fumes from one room entering another—was removed. (Remarkably, fifty years later, souvenir hunters can still purchase online what are allegedly three-by-four-inch pieces of that towel in a plastic case for twenty-five dollars.) And when the door was unlocked, a certain pungent aroma wafted into the outer suite where we were sitting.

Derek came out and told the patiently waiting DJs that the Beatles were now soundly asleep and, “terribly sorry,” but there would be no more interviews. He promised them phoners from London; so they glumly packed up and left. But the boys were not tucked up in bed soundly snoozing. Though Dylan had slipped away unnoticed, the lethargic lads stuck their heads out of the door, and we tried to start a conversation with them.

Their answers were…somewhat vague.

Ringo looked the worse for wear. He could barely stand up straight. He was bleary-eyed and, with great effort, tried to string a few words together. He would start, then stop in mid-sentence, grappling for the right words as if he had lost his way completely. But try as he might, he could never quite finish what he had started out to say.

And he giggled a lot.

Much later, explaining his inability to communicate on that night, he recounted that John had handed him a cigarette, declaring to the room, “My official taster.” He was later to report in several Beatles books in the eighties that he had studied the skinny cigarette that Dylan had rolled and, unfamiliar with weed ritual (one puff, or two, then pass it along), he had toked furiously, finishing the entire joint himself.

Brian looked even more wasted. Also much later, an intriguing report from someone on the inside, according to Paul McCartney biographer Barry Miles, was that halfway through, Brian, no tie and sleeves rolled up, stood up, looked at himself in a wall mirror and said—to no one in particular—“I’m high on the ceiling.” Then, staring at himself for a few seconds, he intoned: “Jew…Jew.” Finally, he flopped down on a chair and appeared to doze, which was completely out of character for Brian, whose public front was that of a man in complete control.

Paul recollected that he was stunned by Brian’s unexpected outburst. “It may not seem the least bit significant to anyone else, but in our circle, (for Brian) it was very liberating,” Paul said, according to Beatles author Bob Spitz.

John admitted he was fuzzy about what was said, simply because they were all smoking pot and drinking wine, having a laugh and behaving in typical rocker fashion.

A possibly apocryphal, much-told story that followed that famous night supposedly had Dylan expressing surprise that John was such a stranger to pot.

“What about your song lyric, When I touch you I get high, I get high?”

John looked at him puzzled for a moment: “Don’t be such a dope,” he said. “That’s, I can’t hide.”

Pot smoking aside, it had been a particularly tough night for Brian. By rights he should have been basking in the glory—he had magnificently pulled it off. Yet when he first arrived at the motel, before the Dylan meet-and-greet, he was, for some reason, hopping mad. One person described him as “looking like Bela Lugosi.”

Derek explained it to me, saying that he too was furious: “I don’t work for the Beatles anymore.”

“Why? What’s happened?” I asked, stunned. He said he had been fired after getting into a screaming match with Brian. “I am now an ex-Beatle.”

Clearly upset, he told me that when Brian got back to the motel from the Paramount, “he was literally frothing at the mouth. All he kept yelling again and again was, ‘You took my fucking limo.’” Brian claimed he had been shamed because Derek had left the manager of the most famous pop group in the world stranded and forced to scrounge a ride back to his hotel.

“Get out of my sight,” Brian told him. “Get out of our lives.”

“I’m fed up with your shit,” Derek shot back.

“We did a lot of screaming,” Derek confided. Then he pulled an envelope from his pocket and waved it in front of me: “Here’s my letter of resignation, and I’m going to stick it under Brian’s door right now.”

A few weeks later, when Derek was back in England, I spoke to him on the phone. He was no longer an ex-Beatle. On the plane ride home, he said, a contrite Brian called him up to the first-class section of the jet and, looking distraught and near to tears, handed him a glass of champagne and asked him to withdraw his resignation.

Derek, of course, was familiar with Brian’s tempestuous rants and uncontrollable temper. “He does that a lot,” Derek told me. “It’s glandular or something. He’s a real prima donna.”

As for Dylan, that night in New York had been the start of a beautiful friendship. He continued his relationship with the Beatles, showing up on their 1965 American tour at their New York concert—standing on a chair the entire time so he could get a better view.

He remained closest to Lennon and was a houseguest of John and Cynthia’s in Hampstead, London, and then at Kenwood, Lennon’s twenty-seven-room mock-Tudor mansion in Weybridge, Surrey.

It was at Kenwood that John liked to serve LSD with coffee and after-dinner drinks, a little habit he had picked up when a dentist friend of George’s had spiked the Beatles’ drinks with the hallucinogenic drug.

In 1967, John and Paul wrote “With a Little Help from My Friends,” and by then the drug reference (“I get high…”) was out there for all to hear.

Lennon described the following years of his songwriting career as “my Dylan period.” He observed that it was Dylan’s music that influenced his later compositions. Particularly “Norwegian Wood.” Dylan later observed that piece reminded him of himself.

15: ELVIS, WE HARDLY KNEW YE

“I always wanted to be this tough James Dean type, but Elvis was bigger than religion in my life. When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ it was so great I couldn’t speak, I didn’t want to say anything against Elvis, not even in my mind.”—John Lennon

Other than Dylan, there was only one other celebrity the Beatles had a real interest in meeting face-to-face. Elvis. And though it didn’t happen on the 1964 tour, they did make their way to his home the following year, during their second attack on America.

Their paths famously crossed when the Beatles returned to Los Angeles for two performances at the Hollywood Bowl. From what I witnessed, it was not to go down in the annals of great pop-history encounters.

For the Beatles, Elvis had been their idol—particularly John’s. In the mid-fifties, when schoolboys Lennon and McCartney were scrambling around as complete unknowns in the streets of Liverpool, it was Elvis’ songs that turned them on to rock ’n’ roll. John, particularly, was blown away by the young singer from Tupelo, Mississippi, whose first major hit, “Heartbreak Hotel,” had knocked his socks off.

In 1956, John spent all of his birthday money on two new 78 rpm singles: Elvis’ two-side monster hit “Hound Dog/Don’t Be Cruel” and the Goons’ “The Ying Tong Song.” (As mentioned earlier, The Goon Show was the surreal fifties BBC series starring Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers that greatly appealed to John’s somewhat warped sense of humor.) John waited impatiently for each of the latest in Elvis’ string of U.S. singles, which usually made their way to England after a year’s delay.

The first time I heard from John about his early crush on Elvis was in Las Vegas, just a couple of days into the 1964 tour. He was killing time before the first concert and reluctantly posing for photos with a slot machine that had been dragged into his suite at the Sahara Hotel.

“Gambling is evil,” he kept muttering as the Beatles played with the fruit machine and the hotel’s publicist grimaced.

When I asked him what impressed him as a kid growing up in Liverpool, he said that “Heartbreak Hotel” was forever etched in his memory and that he would never forget listening to Elvis late at night in bed.

“Winters were always bloody freezin’,” he told me. “No one back then had central heating, so every night I’d climb into bed in my freezin’ room and get deep under the blanket with my portable radio at my ear along with a hot brick. We didn’t have hot-water bottles, so we’d heat a brick in the fireplace, wrap it in a heavy towel and take it to bed to try to keep our feet warm. And there was always Radio Luxembourg to keep my brain warm, specially when they played Elvis every night.”

John was enthralled. He did tell me, with only some exaggeration, that he had to listen to Elvis’ songs hundreds of times to decipher the lyrics his idol was singing. But the music resonated. “We idolized him. There was only one person in the United States that we really wanted to meet, although I don’t think he was crazy about meeting us.”

When the Beatles appeared on Sullivan, Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’ manager, had already sent Brian a rather formal telegram that Sullivan insisted on reading out loud before the performance:

“Congratulations on your appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and your visit to America. We hope your engagement will be a successful one and your visit pleasant. Give our best to Mr. Sullivan. Sincerely, Elvis and the Colonel.”

The subtext of that stiff welcome was this: If the Beatles had Elvis and the Colonel’s imprimatur, then the lads from Liverpool must be okay. Parker was going through the motions, of course—never in his wildest imagination did he realize what an utterly smashing success the Beatles’ appearance would turn out to be.

Parker still considered himself the elder statesman of the pop-star world: the benighted emissary to the King. At the same time, though, he was wise enough to realize that a benefactor’s link with the new group from England would reflect honorably on both his own star and himself.

But the 1964 tour came and went without a Presley powwow, due mostly to the fact that Elvis and the Beatles really did have frantic, overloaded timetables.

The Beatles returned in 1965 for a much shorter tour, beginning on August 14 with another triumphant Sullivan appearance, followed the next day with a sellout crowd of 55,000—the largest Beatles audience ever—at New York’s Shea Stadium. The tour then moved to Toronto, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, Bloomington, Portland and San Diego, with two performances at the Hollywood Bowl in late August. The tour closed at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, where they had launched their North American invasion the year before.

For the two Hollywood Bowl appearances, the Beatles rented Zsa Zsa Gabor’s elegant French country home on Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills.

With five bedrooms, a swimming pool, a game room, and a mini gym, renting made more sense than staying in a hotel, which promised screaming fans and a multitude of security challenges. (In fact, Brian said many of the hotels they first approached were reluctant to accommodate the band, so the house was a nice compromise.) Of course it didn’t take long for word to get out. Within hours, hundreds of fans arrived at the gated estate, camping there day and night for the remainder of the Beatles’ stay.

Notably, the home was a short drive from both the Playboy Mansion and Elvis’ Southern California base.

There are various versions of how the great meeting finally came off.

In a 2011 interview, Tony Barrow, who had taken over as Beatles press officer after the 1964 tour, claimed some credit. He told BBC News, “When I put the idea of meeting Elvis to John, Paul, George and Ringo, they were initially put off by the fact that the press might be involved. I remember George saying, ‘If this is going to be another dirty big publicity circus, let’s forget it.’ They did want to meet their rock ’n’ roll idol, but not with a gang of reporters and photographers around to hassle them.”

Then there was Chris Hutchins, a writer for New Musical Express, a preeminent British weekly pop music publication. Hutchins told me—much later, when he was working as press agent for Gordon Mills, the manager of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck—that he had developed a close relationship with Parker, although I’m not sure anyone on earth had a close personal relationship with Parker, not even Elvis. I never doubted, though, that Chris did have considerable clout and that Parker knew it was important to court writers who worked for influential publications in the U.K.

Hutchins and Barrow may have had some effect, but Derek later insisted to me that when push came to shove, it was Epstein who made it happen.

“He and Parker had been circling each other for some time,” he told me. “They agreed it should happen, but they continued doing a diplomatic dance during many phone conversations and even lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, all spread out over more than a year.

“There was so much bamboozle and lots of smoke and mirrors, not to mention telegrams and more phone calls before it happened,” he recalled. “First, Elvis was too busy working on his movies, and then the Beatles didn’t have time because of their tight schedule. Then Elvis was in Memphis or Hawaii or in Timbuktu or somewhere else. Each time, Parker made it clear that Elvis was never going to England, so the Beatles had to come to him.”

Parker had met the Beatles in 1964, but ever so briefly. He had played the role of a summer Santa by showing up at their Bel-Air rental in his beat-up station wagon and unloading a trunk full of gifts: five sets (the fifth for Brian) of rhinestone-studded leather belts and holsters, each belt embroidered with the recipient’s name. Along with the belts, he handed them five sets of the complete Elvis record collection, along with a note that read, “From Elvis and the Colonel.”

A few days later, a grateful Epstein invited Parker for lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s legendary Polo Lounge where, for his stay, Brian had staked claim to his very own booth. Parker was cautious at first when it came to setting up the summit and kept putting it off, but Brian stroked his ego and repeatedly called him to thank him for those marvelous gun belts. “The boys would love to meet Elvis,” he kept saying.

Parker preferred a home-field advantage. “Can you come to Memphis?” he replied every time. “Elvis is swamped with movies.”

Parker and Epstein. Their personalities could not have been more different, or their backgrounds more disparate. One, a brash, ex-carnival barker who liked to play up his totally phony, Southern cracker-barrel persona and whose lone meal ticket was Elvis. The other, an urbane, cautious manager whose cool façade and posh English accent concealed an insecurity streak a mile wide.

Yet they hit it off immediately and discovered they had a lot more in common than either had realized. They both liked good cigars and good liquor. They were both heavy gamblers. When they first met, Parker was still the Presley powerhouse and, at fifty-six years old, almost a father figure to Epstein, who had just turned thirty.

The two men handled two of the most excitingly brilliant musical acts in the world, and yet all of their public lives both men nervously guarded what they considered terrible secrets they felt, if made public, might destroy them. Epstein was gay and Jewish. And Parker had a shadowy past that didn’t come out until much, much later.

Parker had been born in the Netherlands, as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, the seventh child in a family of eleven. He had come to America illegally, jumping off a boat in Tampa Bay, Florida, and then adopted an American name and told everyone he was born in West Virginia. He joined the army in the thirties, deserted and was arrested and placed in solitary confinement. Along the way, he was treated for some kind of mental illness.

In the late forties, he persuaded a pal, Jimmie Davis, whom he had helped get elected governor of Louisiana, to appoint him an honorary colonel in the state militia. Parker was to milk that phony moniker for all it was worth. It gave him a kind of “military” status that he felt he needed as he handled Presley’s career.

He had begun his show-business career working in fairgrounds, then signed his first music client, country singer Hank Snow, who later became so disillusioned with Parker that in referring to his former manager, he declared, “Tom Parker was the most egotistical, obnoxious human being I have ever had dealings with.”

Elvis biographers theorize that Parker’s illegal status was his Achilles heel and may have been the real reason he never allowed Elvis to travel overseas, terrified that his citizenship status would be revealed. It was likely that he did not even possess a passport. For both Parker and Epstein, image was something they both treasured and guarded.

What none of us in the Beatles entourage knew was that Parker had been getting serious flack from Elvis, who was upset because he was no longer at the top of the charts. He was, in fact, trailing far behind the Beatles in record sales and desperate for a fresh hit.

He saw how the Beatles’ appearances with Sullivan had completely overshadowed his own—in 1965 Sullivan had welcomed them back on his show like Caesar’s victorious legionaries returning to Rome—and he had been overwhelmed when he saw the avalanche of publicity in newspapers and on television that the Beatles had garnered in their few short weeks in America.

What further exacerbated Elvis’ irritation was his simmering anger over his Hollywood career. He felt stuck in bland, formulaic musicals like Girl Happy and Harem Scarem. “Same story, different location,” Elvis complained to his Memphis cohorts about his lackluster films. “I beat up the bad guys, get the girls and sing ten lousy songs.”

The Beatles, on the other hand, had made A Hard Day’s Night, with the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther calling it, “a wonderfully lively and altogether good natured spoof of the juvenile madness called Beatlemania…This is going to surprise you—it may knock you right out of your chair, but the new film with those incredible chaps, the Beatles, is a whale of a comedy.”

Shortly before six o’clock on the evening of August 27, 1965, I got a call at home from Mal. “Ivor, get over to the house in an hour—we’re all going to see Elvis.”

August had been a crazy month for me. I was keeping a close eye on the Beatles, but earlier in the month I had spent six insane days covering the Watts riots, dodging sniper bullets with Daily Express photographer Harry Benson who had flown to L.A. on day two of the disaster. But the rioting was over now, and getting a front-row seat for a meet-up of Elvis and the Beatles sounded a lot less dangerous, even though you could still smell the smoke from the devastation at the boys’ rented house in Beverly Hills.

The historic visit was to take place at Elvis’ one-story mansion at 565 Perugia Way in Bel-Air. Mal sounded more excited than he had been anytime on the 1964 tour, but then he added the disappointing kicker: “Brian says no photographers or tape recorders. Everything is off the record.”

In a personal note to his assistant, penned on Beverly Hills Hotel notepaper, Brian stressed how important it was not to turn the visit into a press event.

He scrawled: 1. I do not think they should meet Elvis through the efforts of any newspaper rep. If (the meeting) can only be arranged (if they’re that keen) then, in my view, it must be entirely private and unpublished. 2. In my view it is absolutely inadvisable to allow any pressman or photographer to interview or take pictures whilst they are at the house.

That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but within half an hour, I was at Zsa Zsa’s house. It was a perfect summer evening; the eighty-degree daytime heat had cooled to the mid-sixties. Elvis and the Beatles would be a big story. I asked Tony Barrow, and anyone else who would listen, “Why can’t we bring our photographers?”

“Brian says the Colonel doesn’t want it,” Tony said. “It’s a private meeting. If any press shows up, he’ll cancel.”

We all hung around nervously killing time for a couple of hours, eagerly anticipating the call. Was it really going to happen? Was it a false alarm? What made matters worse was that from time to time Brian came out saying, “The Colonel says Elvis is a bit skittish about this. He may change his mind and cancel.”

George was very pessimistic and kept muttering plaintively, “It’s not gonna happen.”

But then Brian came into the living room looking relieved but trying to sound casual. “We’re going now,” he said, a huge smile on his face. “Elvis is waiting.”

We ran to the limos. As soon as they caught sight of the Beatles, the fans keeping vigil outside the house began to shriek. The boys scampered into their car, waving at the fans as Brian, Mal, Neil, Tony, the driver Alf Bicknell, two other writers and I headed towards our car. None of the radio guys were invited.

Then, as the electric gates swung open, we moved off like a coordinated military operation. We brushed past the girls standing outside in the roadway. There were no sidewalks, so we moved at funereal pace until we cleared the screamers.

Much later, John remembered that the band had fortified itself in the car with “sips of tea,” which was code for either popping a few pills (Drinamyl was their favorite) or taking hits of marijuana, which had become part of their daily lives since Dylan had introduced them to weed a year earlier.

It was a nearly moonless night, but we knew we’d come to the right place because outside the low-slung gray house surrounded by a ten-foot wrought-iron fence stood a surging troop of screaming teenagers—apparently Parker had tipped them off.

Bicknell sounded the limo’s horn several times and the waiting fans slowly parted. They became even more hysterical as the gates swung open and we drove into a courtyard and parked by the unpretentious house surrounded by heavy foliage and blossoming red bougainvillea bushes.

The boys, giggling a bit by now, slid out of their car, with John taking the lead as he and the other three strode across the courtyard, carefully moving around a gleaming Silver Cloud Rolls Royce and half a dozen motorcycles parked in the driveway.

“We’re here to see Elvis,” John announced in a jovial voice as we approached the front door, which opened before we could ring the bell.

The Beatles were invited in, and we stayed close on their heels. Just inside the door was a spacious, round foyer. To the left of the foyer was a palatial living room with a television that, to a Brit at that time, seemed enormous but probably had a screen of no more than twenty-three inches. The television was turned on but no sound was coming from it.

The living room was furnished in what I would describe as Vegas Overdone—heavy, overstuffed chairs and faux antique tables that would have looked at home in a medieval castle. The windows were covered with heavy, satin drapes, and the lighting emanated from a series of red and blue wall sconces and an elaborate glass chandelier that was almost as big as a refrigerator. The textured walls were salmon pink.

There was too much furniture for the room. The television console, in sharp contrast to the antique chairs and tables, seemed oddly out of place. At one end of the expansive room, which had the feel of a small ballroom, was a pool table; at the other end, a white grand piano sat incongruously next to a multicolored jukebox that was playing an Elvis record at full volume.

The carpet was garish: a pale tangerine color. An imposing fireplace stood at the midpoint of the room, but it was not lit. The decor struck me as gaudy, not surprisingly, more Old South than New California.

As I entered further into the room, I saw Elvis lounging on a long, crescent-shaped, off-white sofa covered with brightly colored pillows. There he was: the King himself.

As one might expect, Elvis had his own entourage of handlers, friends and hangers-on surrounding him. One might also expect that the Presley camp would be blasé, perhaps even lukewarm, about receiving other celebrities into the inner sanctum.

Not so. The arrival of the Beatles entourage caused a bit of a stir among the Presley entourage.

Elvis stood up at the commotion to greet his guests. He looked just like you’d expect.

His mass of dyed black hair was brilliantined and combed back into his signature pompadour. His sideburns ran thick and deep down both sides of his face as though they had been carefully glued to his cheeks. He wore a stiff jacket with a high collar over a bright red cowboy shirt and tight blue jeans.

It was shortly after eleven o’clock at night, but Elvis was wearing wraparound sunglasses, which at the time I mused he might need to mitigate the blinking lights, bright walls and loud carpeting. I later learned he had glaucoma. He removed the glasses moments after we entered the room. In his other hand he held a television remote control.

I wish I could report that great dialogue instantly flowed between the musical superstars, that there was witty repartee and instant bonding as Elvis and the Beatles swapped rock ’n’ roll war stories and exchanged intimate details about coping with life at the top.

That just didn’t happen.

The two camps of icons were positively awkward at first. Elvis’ Memphis Mafia—Joe Esposito, Marty Lacker, Billy Smith, Jerry Schilling, Alan Fortas and Sonny West—looked decidedly more excited to meet the Beatles than did Elvis.

Finally, after a few moments of awkward silence, Paul (ever the smooth operator) walked straight up to Elvis and shook his hand. “Paul,” he said simply. “Good to meetcha.” Then the other three followed his lead, giving their first names only. Elvis kind of clicked his heels as he greeted each Beatle.

Then Brian stepped forward, greeted Elvis, and shook hands with Tom Parker and formally introduced his boys to Parker even though they’d met him a year earlier.

I thought it all played out a bit like a comedy sketch. The two managers were more at ease with each other than their stars were, stepping back to give their boys the spotlight and the oxygen they needed.

I noticed that Elvis looked slightly annoyed, surly even: It is possible he was surprised, and likely ticked off, by the small army of strangers who had filed into his house without an invitation.

He had been expecting the four Beatles and, surely, a small entourage, but certainly not us gentlemen of the press—although he had no way of knowing that the outliers in his house were members of the media. He didn’t bother to acknowledge any of us, and, truth to tell, we felt too twitchy about intruding or stepping out of line to even bother with the usual social niceties that any guest might be expected to offer. None of us wanted to be responsible for sabotaging what was about to unfold.

We knew the laws of physics were intact and all was right in the universe because half a dozen young women were soon hovering around the Fab Four and Elvis. The women wore the forward fashions just emerging that would later define the iconic mod look and sexual freedom of the late sixties and early seventies: short shorts, miniskirts, blouses that exposed midriffs.

As the early tension slowly dissipated, I discreetly said hello to and shook hands with a guy who said his name was Joe and told me he worked for Elvis in security.

“I’m from London,” I told him sotto voce, “I’m traveling with the Beatles.”

He nodded, but I could have said I was an alien from Mars for all the response I got.

There were no further introductions. As the night wore on, I saw a beautiful young woman with raven hair piled high and a great deal of black eye liner. She was never formally introduced to any of us, but we all knew this was Elvis’ girlfriend Priscilla, just twenty years old at the time. When she moved territorially closer to Elvis, he put his arm protectively around her narrow waist and included her in some of the chitchat with John and Paul. Then she withdrew.

Neil recalled that he was fixated on Priscilla. “She looked a bit like a Barbie doll,” he said. “Black hair stacked high in the beehive fashion…and some kind of tiara.”

While the Beatles didn’t seem to object to our prying eyes, Elvis—who, except for his concerts, was a virtual recluse and never met with the press at this stage of his career—showed his displeasure by displaying an alarming absence of enthusiasm. I would imagine that he was not pleased with the idea of being turned into a museum exhibit in his own home.

So far, this long-awaited summit was a lot like being at the theater with the actors in costume at center stage, but no one could remember their lines or even wanted the show to begin.

For the first twenty minutes or so, the boys from Liverpool sat with their host on that long white sofa in front of the flickering, soundless television, making half-hearted small talk. It was pretty painful until George decided to get comfortable and plopped himself cross-legged on the floor, dragging an ashtray with him. The Beatles were served drinks (and refills) of rum and Coke as they surveyed the strange scene and waited, unsure of the protocol.

Finally, Paul took the television remote and began changing channels. He was astonished by this amazing gadget that he could hold in one hand and switch stations from his seat without having to touch anything on the television itself. But Elvis looked increasingly irritated at the cursory small talk. At last he stood up, took the remote out of Paul’s hand, and drawled with mock severity, “If you guys are gonna just sit around. I’m goin’ to bed.”

Everyone laughed, and Elvis’ demeanor visibly eased: “Didn’t you guys show up to jam?” he asked.

That was the signal the Beatles had been waiting for. They jumped to their feet and, as if by magic, guitars appeared. Elvis pulled off his jacket and tossed it to an aide, who handed him his guitar. Suddenly he looked animated and much more comfortable.

Someone pushed a large amplifier into place next to Elvis and he plugged in. They all began tuning and strumming like members of an orchestra warming up. No conversation, just Elvis taking over. Wordlessly, with Elvis in the lead, they moved into “Blue Suede Shoes.” Next, Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven.”

After that, Paul moved to the piano and the impromptu concert continued with more Berry: “Maybellene,” a staple of the King’s early live shows, and “Promised Land,” which he would record ten years later in the famous Stax sessions.

It was all music and almost no conversation. I watched, mesmerized. Right here in the living room, the hottest pop musical talents in the world were jamming like a garage band. Stripped down to guitars and amps, these cultural icons were not performing. They were doing what they loved most—playing music. I knew I was witnessing something remarkable.

Ringo, looking a bit left out, stubbed out his cigarette, stood up and offered, “Anyone fancy a game of snooker?” He and Mal strode over to the pool table, followed by two women who selected pool cues, carefully chalked the tips and then handed them to Mal and Ringo. Elvis’ longtime Memphis pal Jerry Schilling and Elvis’ cousin Billy Smith picked up cues and the four began playing.

When the other three Beatles and Elvis finally put their session on pause, Elvis asked, “Any of you guys want popcorn?”

“I’d much prefer a whiskey with a shot of Tizer (a popular English soft drink),” John said with a straight face. “With a cheese and pickle sandwich.”

I stuck close, not wanting to miss anything playing out, although up until then, as far as I could see, there was nothing going on for the history books—and, thanks to Parker’s rules of the game, no photos. I followed the Colonel, who had taken Epstein’s elbow and edged him into another room.

The two men talked in a near whisper. Then Parker reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small, brown leather humidor. He opened it and gestured to Brian, “Have a Guerrero.”

Epstein helped himself to one of the three Cuban cigars that lay in the humidor. Parker took a cigar, put the humidor back into his jacket and pulled a double-guillotine cigar cutter out of another pocket. He ceremoniously cut the cap off Epstein’s cigar and then did the same for himself. One of the Presley minions sprang forward with a lighter.

Both of the managers lit up and began puffing furiously as they walked into the anteroom. An elaborate buffet had been laid with seafood platters, pizzas, cheeses, various canapes and cakes, complemented by a generous selection of soft drinks and spirits. A silver tray stacked with an assortment of doughnuts seemed out of place juxtaposed against the urbanity of the spread.

Parker passed the buffet and walked over to a coffee table that sat next to a pinball machine. With one sweep of his arm, cigar clenched in his teeth, he deposited everything from the table onto the floor. He lifted the tabletop and—presto!—it turned into a roulette wheel.

“Pour Mr. Epstein a bourbon,” he told one of Elvis’ sidekicks.

“No, thank you,” said Brian, “just a whiskey and a touch of soda.” Parker handed a stack of gambling chips to Epstein. Without a word, one of the Memphis Mafia stepped behind the wheel and began to spin it.

“That’s pretty fantastic,” Epstein said to Parker, referring to the table transformation. “Where do you get those things?” Parker, who preferred losing his money on slot machines, knew Brian had a weakness for gambling and often dropped thousands of pounds a night at casinos around the world.

Back in the main room, Elvis and the Beatles had stopped playing and their conversation was flowing more freely. Paul seemed to drive the chat and instinctively gave Elvis the kudos Paul thought he deserved.

“We grew up with you” he told Elvis. “We’re all crazy about your early stuff, it’s our favorite. I wish you’d do more songs like we listened to in Liverpool.”

Elvis nodded, though perhaps a little peeved at Paul’s suggestion that his best days were past. “Yeah, they’ve got me doin’ a new movie every week, only I play the same guy each time singing the same songs,” he lamented.

After a time, Paul and George wandered into the makeshift casino and, each with a stack of chips, played roulette in a somewhat desultory fashion with Brian who was still at it.

Around midnight, Epstein, with a fresh cigar tucked into his top pocket, and holding a wad of dollars in one hand, left the roulette wheel, strolled back into the main room, found John and whispered into his ear.

It was time to go. But before we left, Parker signaled to two men who left the room and returned a few moments later with five large shopping bags heavy with what turned out to be complete collections of Elvis’ records.

As John walked out the front door and into the courtyard, he told Jerry Schilling, who recounted it in his memoir Me and a Guy Named Elvis, “I know Elvis can’t get out, but we’re just up the road and we’ll be there for another couple of days. Maybe you can bring Elvis over to our place.”

“Sure, John,” Schilling said he responded, “but I knew it was never gonna happen.”

It was close to one o’clock in the morning by the time we climbed back into our limos and headed home. The girls chorus shrieked their farewells.

“A night of superficial bonhomie” was how someone later described the gathering. But while John had seemed impressed at first with the idea of strumming with his boyhood idol, he later ragged about the evening. “It was just like meeting Engelbert Humperdinck,” he said, referring to Britain’s middle-of-the-road, white bread, romantic singer of the period.

And that was probably a fair way to describe it. There were no, “I’ll come to your gig if you come to mine” exchanges as they left, although John said to Elvis, “See you in Memphis.” There was no instant bonding, as there had been with Dylan and Fats Domino.

We wrote very little about the meeting—bizarrely, in retrospect, none of us thought there was much to write about. I mean, what could you say: five guys sitting around, warily looking at each other, strumming guitars—not exactly page-one headlines, we thought. And without pictures (not even a pool photographer to record the meeting), my editor in London ruled that they wouldn’t need my story.

But barely twenty-four hours later, radio reporter Larry Kane, who had not been invited to witness the actual get-together and needed fresh feeds for his radio stations, asked the Beatles for their assessment of the summit. They were honest: “We were all a bit nervous…It’s embarrassing meeting people for the first time—especially when you want to meet them,” said John.

“He’s a very nice fella,” Paul told Kane. “We had a good time, just what I expected. It was rock and rolling, a bit of billiards and gambling. I lost. We tried to persuade him to make new records like the old, wilder records, which are our favorites. He hasn’t made any as good as that for a long time. He tended to agree and said he might go into some of those old songs he recorded years ago. If he does, I’ll be down at the record store with me shilling in me hand.”

“Elvis was great,” said George. “More than I anticipated. I didn’t expect him to be half as nice as he was. We asked him for his very early albums...so he gave us a parcel each. I expected him to be quiet and not have any noise in his house. But when we walked in, it was, like, TV, electric guitars, drinks. We played some pool and roulette.”

Said Ringo, “We didn’t talk much about business. We talked about other people and their records. Not our records. I loved it. We talked music and records. He liked ours. We liked his. We were nervous, he was nervous, too. All in the same boat.”

Later that week, bits and pieces of versions of what took place continued to appear. One journalist who was there revealed that John got more and more drunk as the evening went on, finally lapsing into a mock Peter-Sellers-as-Inspector-Clouseau French accent while talking to Elvis and kept tossing out silly lines like, “Zanks for zee music” and “Come wiz me to zee Casbah.” Elvis didn’t get the jokey references and thought John was drunk or off his rocker. Or both.

Someone else who was closer to the action said that amidst all the posturing and noise, a genuine conversation with serious overtones had actually taken place. It touched on the perils, and fear, of flying. Elvis, who detested flying, had vivid memories of an engine failure while he was over Atlanta on the way back to Memphis.

Just two days earlier, one of the engines on the Beatles’ Electra had caught fire. Paul said he was terrified and was convinced that they were going to crash, but the plane landed safely in Portland onto a foam path that had been spread on the runway. That was all very fresh in the minds of the Beatles, who realized that flying was a necessary evil of touring.

With the passage of time, there were to be mounting numbers of conflicting recollections of that night, as more of those who were in attendance weighed in with their own revised—and increasingly elaborate—versions.

John admitted in The Beatles Anthology that they were all “nervous as hell.” He said that Elvis was surrounded by a lot of guys, just as the Beatles were in Liverpool, and he talked about Elvis’ sense of humor.

“He seemed normal to us, and we were asking about his making movies and not doing personal appearances or TV. I asked him if he had any new ideas for the next film, and he drawled, ‘Aaah sure haave. Aaah play a country boy with a guitar who meets a few gals along the way and sings a few songs.’”

Later, John would say: “It was Elvis’ sense of humor that stuck in my mind. He liked to laugh and make others laugh, too. Which was why I put on a Peter Sellers voice again as we walked out of the door and said, ‘Tanks for zee music, Elvis—and long live zee King.”

Paul acknowledged years later that he believed Elvis and the Colonel considered the Beatles a threat to him—which indeed they were. He said in The Beatles Anthology that they’d tried to meet the King for years, but all they got from the Colonel was souvenirs. But he added that he didn’t take it personally. “After all, he was Elvis, and who were we to dare to want to meet him?”

In his book, I, Me, Mine, George revealed that meeting their hero was one of the highlights of the 1965 tour. He also recalled that the Beatles had imbibed quite a bit during the short ride to Elvis’ house. By the time they got there, they had almost forgotten where they were going. When one of them remembered “Oh, yeah, we’re going to see Elvis” they broke into laughter at the giddy realization that they were actually going to meet the King.

In his 2005 memoir, the Beatles PR man Barrow, who was able to avoid taking mind-altering stimulants, said simply, “The Beatles found Elvis boring.”

Not so many years later, the Beatles, especially John, became disillusioned with Elvis. A precipitating factor was reading an FBI transcript of what they perceived as a self-serving and damning statement that Elvis, casting himself in the unlikely role of social commentator, made in 1970 when he went to the White House to visit President Richard Nixon.

“The Beatles,” the transcript quotes Elvis as saying, “laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music while entertaining in this country during the early and middle 1960s.” Elvis was cozying up to the thirty-seventh President of the United States.

“He tried to have us banished,” Ringo complained when told of Elvis’ words. “He felt threatened.” But if Ringo had examined that “quote” closely, he would have realized that, most likely, it was not composed by Elvis, because Elvis just didn’t talk that way. More than likely, it was handed to Elvis by the PR-conscious Parker.

The conversation went on to refer to America’s “disaffected youth” and also threw the Smothers Brothers and Jane Fonda into the hopper, blaming them (also in very un-Presley-like prose) for being responsible for “poisoning young minds by disparaging the United States in their public statements and unsavory activities.”

As for me, I had met Elvis once before, a year earlier, when he was feeling a little cockier. His latest musical, Viva Las Vegas, in which he starred opposite the singular, top-of-her-game Ann-Margret, had done better than most of his other pictures.

Although the New York Times called the film “about as pleasant and unimportant as a banana split,” it climbed to fourteenth place on the Top 20 Movies of the Week list, and was the biggest hit of his uneven movie career, even though some critics suggested that Ann-Margret—who had a brief affair with Elvis while the shoot was going on—had stolen the picture from him.

I was invited to interview Elvis to help keep the Presley publicity wagon moving. Roustabout, with Barbara Stanwyck, was the film about to be released, and Elvis was already shooting Frankie and Johnny, another variation on a theme that had already seen several incarnations.

I met Elvis on the Paramount lot and found him quite charming, gentlemanly, in fact, and strangely shy for someone who was the most famous rock star in the world. I was in my twenties, and he was just three years older but kept calling me “sir.” Maybe it was my English accent.

But he had absolutely nothing original to say for himself. He didn’t complain about his movie straitjacket and the watertight contract that had already seen him churn out eighteen films, many of them unremarkable, despite his desire to be not just an actor but one in the mold of James Dean.

His more memorable comments were reserved for his leading lady, Donna Douglas, who hailed from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and who had been hired because she was a hot Hollywood property—and cover girl—as a result of her running role as Elly May Clampett in the hit television series The Beverly Hillbillies.

Elvis had a reputation for romancing his leading ladies, much to the chagrin of his then-girlfriend, Priscilla, but the two stars said their relationship during the shooting was spiritual…with them sharing a passion for meditation. And nothing more.

After a chat that lasted no longer than fifteen minutes, the unit publicist stuck his head into the trailer dressing room. “El, they need you on the set.” This brought the interview to an abrupt end. When I asked if I could watch filming, the publicist quickly said, “Elvis doesn’t like people watching him in front of the camera. It distracts him.”

So I said my goodbye and chatted with the film’s publicist for a moment. As I was leaving, I looked out at the parking lot next to the soundstage where the film was being shot. There was much yelling and whooping. And there was Elvis, enthusiastically tossing a football around on the concrete with his Memphis Mafia.

I saw Elvis one more time, in 1976, when he was performing at the Las Vegas Hilton, which had become his concert headquarters. Amazingly, he had done more than 600 performances—often two a day—at the Hilton, where he was signed to sing for seven years. I had gone to the early dinner show, where frantic waitresses were serving drinks two per patron at a time.

We had barely gotten the plate of steak and baked potato dropped in front of us when the lights dimmed and Elvis bounded on stage. He was looking a lot chubbier than he had when he met the Beatles and almost spilled out of his trademark jumpsuit and billowing, blue shirt, brocade waistcoat and wide belt.

Colin Dangaard, an Australian freelance writer, was sitting next to me. As soon as Elvis began singing, Colin tried to surreptitiously snap a photo of this plump Elvis. Within seconds, two security guards, alerted by the ever-vigilant Colonel Parker, grabbed his camera, took him by the shoulders, lifted him out of his chair like a sack of coal and ejected him from the showroom. The show finished without further interruptions.

But before the midnight show, Elvis suddenly appeared in the casino in full stage regalia and surrounded by his Memphis guys. Everyone was amazed to see him. As he walked to the middle of the floor, he suddenly broke out of the protective ring and stepped behind a blackjack table, where he gently pushed the dealer aside and began dealing cards.

A huge crowd quickly gathered. Elvis dealt with great speed. It didn’t matter whether a player busted or not—at every hand, Elvis barked, “Pay him—he’s a winner.”

This went on for several minutes before a nervous casino manager edged closer to the King, touched his elbow, patted him on the back and gently eased him away from behind the table. By that time, Elvis had paid out several thousand dollars to the bemused delight of the gamblers.

It was one of Elvis’ last stands. A year later, he would be dead.

16: GOING HOME

“In 1964 I asked Brian Epstein how long it would last and he said, ‘The children of the 21st century will be listening to the Beatles.’ He was right.”—Larry Kane

Early on the morning of September 21, feeling droopy and horribly hung over after Dylan’s visit the night before, we dragged ourselves out of our beds at the Riviera Idlewild Motel and headed the short distance to JFK for the final goodbye. The Beatles’ BOAC Flight 510 was scheduled to leave at 10:15 a.m., and the boys had to be dragged out of bed by Mal and Neil.

As we followed the band to the airport, I remembered what Paul had said six months earlier as he flew to America for the first Sullivan appearance: “They’ve got their own groups. What are we going to give them that they don’t already have?”

What indeed? In fact, the tour had been a rip-roaring success, netting the band more than one million dollars, mind-boggling for the era.

Departure was to be a final, unspectacular act of the trip, so just a handful of us leftovers from the traveling press corps followed. We were greeted at 9 a.m. by about one hundred die-hard fans outside the terminal, screaming and carrying signs that said, “We Love You, Ringo” and “Beatles—Come Back Soon.” The limos turned down a private road into a fenced area and deposited their famous cargo at the back of the departure terminal.

We were all allowed to follow the boys through customs and into a private lounge—airport security not even remotely resembling what we see today. We sat with the band thirty feet from the tunnel that led to the steps of the waiting aircraft as airport staff and baggage handlers spilled into the lounge seeking autographs.

The boys signed with weary smiles, then collapsed like deflated balloons on couches and gratefully accepted the little pills Mal handed them—plain old aspirin this time. No one really said much—they were worn out and not in the mood for fond farewells.

Brian, dapper as day one, was the first to board—ignoring most of us.

Ringo went next, looking especially forlorn, like a little boy whose toys had suddenly been taken from him.

John pulled on a pair of sunglasses and said simply: “Give my regards to Broadway.”

Even Paul was too tired to play the usual diplomat, although as he climbed the stairs to the plane, he turned, smiled and offered us a royal wave.

But just before he boarded the Boeing 707 for what was, in those days, a six-and-a-half-hour journey to Heathrow, George turned to me: “I want to come back again and see everything I didn’t see,” he said. “We made a bit of money.” (Indeed they did. In addition to the million-dollar take from ticket sales, their “paltry” share of the merchandising would turn out to be a fortune. In 2014, CNBC reported that in that one year—1964—the Beatles earned twenty-five million dollars—almost $188 million in today’s dollars.)

“What will you remember most about America?” I asked. He pondered. “The telly. The color telly,” he replied. “We don’t have it in England. It’s all black and white.”

George and I shook hands. “Nice doing business with you,” I offered.

I suspect the irony was perceptible only to me.

After the Beatles headed home, I took an afternoon flight to Los Angeles. Until that point, adrenaline had kept me going, but now I felt utterly wiped out. There were no more concerts, no more midnight runs to the airport, no more eerie choruses of worshipping wailers outside my hotel window. No more dodging jellybeans.

Back in my apartment, I unpacked my bags and wondered if any of my friends would want the autographed photos I had collected during the tour. Or whether any of them even cared about the Beatles.

Then in my mid-twenties, I was single and no visionary. The Beatles were history, I thought—fun history. They were loud with tons of energy, but still unformed and very raw. The idea that they were to become legends in their lifetimes—well, it just didn’t enter my mind. I had, I thought, witnessed some kind of musical aberration, what one writer described as “idolatry and fanaticism bordering on religious ecstasy” as I took this bizarre journey with them across America.

In my front-row seat I had seen a nation going absolutely bonkers over four nice chaps who sang and played musical instruments. It was martial law set to music. It had nothing whatsoever to do with real life.

Alas, none of my editors suggested I sit down and do a think piece analyzing the happy confluence of the Beatles and America. That was the terrain of the pundits and the essayists. I didn’t, but they did weigh in, with much amateur psychology—ponderous pieces examining the Beatles’ effect on America, suggestions that the band came to that continent at just the right time: their happy-go-lucky music helped heal the wounds of President Kennedy’s assassination.

I laughed at the absurdity when one writer in London’s top-selling Sunday newspaper, News of the World, stated: “The girls are subconsciously preparing for motherhood. Their frenzied screams are a rehearsal for that moment. Even the jelly babies (tossed at the Beatles) are symbolic.”

Current Chicago Tribune pop music critic Greg Kot got closer to the target than most, when he wrote recently: “John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were startled when America embraced them so voraciously from the start. All they were doing, Lennon explained, was crossing the ocean to sell America’s homegrown music—Chuck Berry’s rock ’n’ roll, Little Richard’s twist and shout—back to it.”

But for me, there was more than enough happening in America to concern myself any further with four boys from Liverpool. Just days after the Beatles fled, the Warren Commission released its report on the Kennedy assassination: Lee Harvey Oswald, it insisted, had acted alone, and so did Jack Ruby, who gunned down Oswald in the bowels of the Dallas Police department before our eyes on live television.

Then Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater to keep his job in the White House, comic Lenny Bruce was arrested and convicted for saying naughty words during his nightclub act and the James Bond movie Goldfinger opened to a huge box office.

My life was back to normal.

17: BACK IN THE U.S.A.

“Hollywood Bowl exploded, filled with 17,000 screaming virgins whose energy washed over the amphitheater until everyone was hysterical. It was the first time I felt the overwhelming power of sex, though I had no idea at the time what it was. So I just screamed.”—Kathleen Sexton Kaiser, Yeah Beatles fan club president, 1963–1965, San Diego, California

Almost exactly one year after the Beatles had conquered North America, they were back for more, beginning with the record-breaking concert on August 15 in front of 56,000 fans at New York’s Shea Stadium. During that year, much had changed for what was now the world’s most famous pop band.

Brian had moved to London and become a true taskmaster with one simple goal: to continue to cash in on the band’s popularity, which required constant recharging. That meant a breakneck schedule of concerts worldwide (at one point he contracted for them to do fifty shows in under five weeks), along with a steady stream of new single and album releases.

In February, 1965, Northern Songs (the music publishing company he cofounded with John, Paul, and Dick James in 1963) went public on the London stock exchange. Profits depended on a continual output.

Derek had left the Beatles organization and was replaced for the 1965 tour by the in-house Tony Barrow, a former liner-notes writer for Decca Records.

Meanwhile, my newspaper, the Daily Express, while not exactly ho-hum about the second U.S. tour, felt it was something of a repeat, so coverage need not be so intense. The paper had also dropped George’s column (and thus my ghostwriting chores), feeling it had worn a bit thin.

David English said it wasn’t as if the paper had gone cold on the band—the Beatles were, in fact, bigger than ever. They were the clear leaders of the record-selling pack, and their second film, Help!, although it didn’t garner the critical raves of A Hard Day’s Night, drew a crowd of more than 10,000 fans outside the London Pavilion for its July 29 Royal Premiere, attended by Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones.

The Beatles had truly become a royal success. In June, 1965, Prime Minister Harold Wilson had proposed they be awarded the title of MBE (Member of the British Empire) for their remarkable contribution to the kingdom’s economy.

Both John and George later said that they were apprehensive when they received the official-looking gray government envelope notifying them of the honor—they feared it might contain a letter informing them that they had been called up for National Service.

Still, the wisdom in my London newspaper office was that day-to-day saturation coverage on the Beatles’ second tour was not warranted. “The New York bureau will keep an eye on them when they’re on the East Coast,” English decreed, “and you make sure to cover them on the West Coast in case something goes terribly wrong.”

Fresh from a series of BBC TV appearances and U.K. stage gigs, the Beatles arrived in New York on August 13. The first chore was to film a new Sullivan appearance for broadcast a week later, then it was on to Shea Stadium, where the concert was to be filmed by Sullivan’s company for a documentary.

Sullivan himself couldn’t resist lingering in the limelight when he stepped in front of the microphone in the packed stadium. “Honored by their country,” boomed Sullivan, waving his normally static arms as though directing traffic, “decorated by their queen and loved in America—here they are, the Beatles!”

It was the biggest live audience the Beatles had ever played in front of—in fact, the biggest for any rock act. The band had been helicoptered from the Downtown Manhattan Heliport to the roof of the World’s Fair building in Queens after local authorities deemed it too dangerous to land in the stadium.

From there, they were driven the one mile to Shea Stadium in a Wells Fargo armored truck. More than 2,000 security personnel were hired to keep the peace and to keep exuberant fans at bay. A long, five-foot-high wire fence had been set up to mark a “no-go” area in the grass field between the seats and stage, but just as it had been in Boston and New Orleans the previous year, the barrier turned out to be not much of a challenge for the scores of fans determined to get closer to the action. Perhaps the security detail were hoping the kids would read the signs: “For Safety Sake Please Stay in Your Seats.”

After the warm-up acts had been dispensed with—bluesman King Curtis, Cannibal and the Headhunters (with their hit “Land of a Thousand Dances”), Motown singer Brenda Holloway (“Every Little Bit Hurts”) and the London group Sounds Incorporated, who were managed by Brian Epstein’s NEMS company and had befriended the Beatles in the Hamburg days—the Beatles trotted onto the makeshift stage at second base. Fans immediately leapt out of their seats and crawled under or scaled the fence. (And the fans weren’t only teenagers from Teaneck. Among the attendees were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, whose own stars were reaching their zenith that summer with the Rolling Stones.)

In the torrid summer heat, John, Paul, George and Ringo—wearing shaggy coifs, navy slacks and Wells Fargo Agent badges pinned to their tan Nehru jackets—launched into the by-now standard thirty-minute, twelve-song routine.

The new hundred-watt amplifiers specially designed for the Beatles failed to work, so the band had to fall back on the stadium’s horrid in-house public address system. As on the first tour, it hardly mattered. Screaming drowned out the music from beginning to end.

Near the end of the show, for the first time during an American performance, John put aside his guitar and hammered away on an electronic keyboard—sometimes, like a latter-day Jerry Lee Lewis, using his elbow. It brought fresh roars from the crowd.

Ringo was allowed his one solo—“Act Naturally”—evidencing that his voice hadn’t improved much since 1964. Brian bounced to their beat, shuffling nervously at the side of the stage and sweating profusely. Despite the oppressive heat, he still wore his working uniform: a dark gray business suit, white shirt and tie, refusing to concede an inch to the wilting humidity.

Then the sweat-drenched Beatles ducked into their getaway car to make their escape. The Beatles earned $160,000 that night—from a box-office gross of more than $300,000. A nice chunk of change for half an hour’s work.

Although Shea was a monumental landmark, the fortnight-long tour that followed was more of the same old routine: The crowds still screamed, teenage girls fainted like tumbling bowling pins, and phalanxes of kids appeared wherever the band was—or was rumored to be. The cops were ruthlessly overprotective and the Beatles remained prisoners in their hotel rooms. Even the press conferences were the same, with the same questions and, for the most part, the same irreverent answers.

Again, the Beatles delivered their music at warp speed, unable to hear themselves, unable to be heard by the fans. When they stopped playing, no one noticed. The noise was so deafening that even Ringo said he got lost, having to guess what song they were playing by some creative lip reading. “You went on—and got off,” was how he described the routine in a BBC TV interview later. “I never felt people came to hear our show. I felt they just came to see us.”

“People will like us a lot more when we’re older—you watch,” Paul told a press conference in Chicago. Interjected John, referring to the whistle-stop nature of touring which allowed them no outside excursions: “We’ll come back at forty and take a look at the places that look interesting.”

From New York, the boys played Toronto, then slowly wound their way south and west, to Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, Bloomington (Minnesota), and on to Portland.

It was on the way to Portland, in their chartered Electra, that the Beatles’ worst nightmare almost came to pass.

Miami radio reporter Larry Kane recalled in his book Ticket to Ride, that he was dozing on the flight when he was abruptly awakened. “I couldn’t believe what I saw. I thought it was a bad dream. Smoke was pouring from the right engine. I ran to the pilot’s cabin, but the captain and co-pilot were at the back of the plane chatting to John and Paul. They had the plane on automatic pilot. ‘There’s a fire in the engine,’ I yelled at the captain.”

Back in the cockpit, the captain got on the speaker and tried to calm the passengers: “Nothing to worry about; this is a four-engine plane, and we can still operate if one engine malfunctions.” Then he alerted the Portland control tower that they might have to make an emergency landing.

John was the most panicked of the Beatles and rushed towards the emergency exit door.

“Half an hour later, smoke still pouring from the engine, the plane landed in a sea of foam and a waiting army of firefighters standing by,” wrote Kane. “When our wheels hit the tarmac, everyone aboard yelled, ‘Oh, my God’—then every passenger, led by the Beatles, erupted into wild applause.”

A day later in a Portland television interview, Cannibal and the Headhunters’ Richard “Scar” Lopez offered his own version on what could have been a disaster of epic proportions: “I sat with Paul, and as we headed closer to Portland we noticed one of the starboard engines was smoking—a lot of black smoke billowing out. I actually saw flames coming out of the engine. It terrified me, and it terrified everybody on the plane. But nobody panicked. The Beatles were cool, their jolly funny selves. Ringo told some jokes to try to calm everybody down. When you are up in the air and see your engine on fire, it’s pretty scary.”

After the crippled jet landed, everyone walked off calmly, as if it had been a routine flight, he said. But he added: “Joe ‘Yoyo’ Jaramillo, a member of our group, couldn’t wait to get off the plane. He fell to his knees and kissed the tarmac he was so relieved.”

Despite the alarm, the Beatles looked totally unfazed as they finally walked off the aircraft. Waiting fans, kept a long distance from the arrival runway, knew nothing about the emergency landing.

The next day George gave Kane his funny-fearful version of what had happened: “When I looked out and saw (the smoke) we all ran to the back where we were far away from the flames—cowards we are, you know. As we all stood around the emergency door, ready to jump out, I said, ‘Beatles, women and children first.’”

Emergency landing now history, the Beatles, decked out in the same Nehru outfits they had worn at Shea, played two Portland shows on August 22 in front of 20,000 fans at the Memorial Coliseum. Between concerts they even found time to socialize.

Portland KISN disc jockey Steve Brown said the Beach Boys had called him the night before and begged him to use whatever influence he had to get them backstage. Brown made it happen, introducing the Beatles to Mike Love, Bruce Johnston and Carl Wilson—Brian Wilson was well into his agoraphobic period and was too frightened to make the trip from California.

Then they returned to the airport for the flight to Los Angeles. With some trepidation, the Beatles climbed aboard a new Constellation jet, which had replaced the fire-damaged Electra. Kane said the tension was palpable, and when they finally lifted off, “There was loud cheering and applause from all the passengers as we headed south for the short flight to Los Angeles.”

I picked up the tour coverage in Los Angeles, the nightmare of the Portland landing never mentioned as the Beatles immersed themselves in the summer sunshine. There were two Hollywood Bowl appearances, on August 29 and 30, again promoted by Bob Eubanks, and it was almost a carnival atmosphere on the balmy Southern California nights as 17,000 fans crammed in for each performance. Dozens more, unable to get tickets, hung perilously like monkeys from the limbs of trees surrounding the amphitheater.

Paul improvised between songs declaring, “Ladies and gentleman—and all the rest, if you feel like joining in, okay. Do it. Then clap or stamp or anything—except swim,” he added, referring to the fountain in front of the venue’s stage. One girl did dive into the fountain but was quickly pulled out by security.

The concerts were being recorded by Capitol Records—the label’s second try, after a Hollywood Bowl attempt in 1964 had been plagued by inferior sound. But again, there were electronic glitches galore. Someone accidently unplugged the wire leading to Paul and George’s microphone and the recording equipment. The blunder botched the first four numbers, and all we could hear were John’s introductions.

John’s frustration was palpable; he suffered through those pieces with his own mic sputtering on again and off again until it was fixed. Meanwhile he tried to play for time, watching, whistling—and even barking once.

Finally so frustrated, John yelled, like a drowning man desperately seeking help, “Hello, hello, hello…are you gonna keep them on or off? Hello, can you hear me?”

Ringo did his solo—“I Wanna Be Your Man”—with the Beatles all playing terribly off-key. Sitting in a box seat three rows back it sounded to me like Ringo was shouting. Yet the audience seemed totally untroubled by any of the sound mishaps. The boys could have recited from the Yellow Pages for all anyone cared.

In the seventies, George Martin, along with studio engineer Geoff Emerick, was able to clean up the recordings and salvage some of the songs from the three Hollywood Bowl concerts. They included, “Long Tall Sally,” “Twist and Shout,” “She’s a Woman,” “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” They were eventually released as The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl.

Before the Beatles flew to San Francisco for their final concert at the Cow Palace, I had the opportunity to renew acquaintances at a poolside party at the Beverly Hills estate the band had rented from Zsa Zsa Gabor (who wasn’t in residence at the time).

Zsa Zsa had been at Alan Livingston’s garden party the year before, and the Beatles had also met her in July, 1964, when she was one of the stars, including Laurence Olivier and Judy Garland, who shared the bill with them for a theatrical charity event called “Night of 100 Stars” at the London Palladium.

The Beatles were remarkably mellow, thanks to a steady supply of overly sweet J & B and Cokes and generous amounts of weed. Although I didn’t know it at the time, they were also combining the booze and pot with LSD-laced sugar cubes. Those sugar cubes, George later revealed, had been acquired in New York, wrapped in tin foil and hand-carried to California.

Now that George no longer needed to provide me with his personal observations for a column, he was much more talkative, especially about the nearly doomed flight to Portland. “Bloody nightmare,” he said. “I thought we were all for the knacker’s yard.”

The party grew bigger by the hour. In addition to the half dozen Playboy “models” sent to the party by Hugh Hefner, attendees at the standing-room-only bash included Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds, who had been introduced to the Beatles in London earlier that year by Derek.

Hillman told me, “We were in awe of them, and they treated us like equals.” He remembered that at the party they talked to George about the music of a sitar player named Ravi Shankar. Harrison collaborated closely with Shankar and had taken sitar lessons from him. George’s sitar playing would debut on “Norwegian Wood,” recorded six weeks later, and released in December, 1965.

“My only other vivid memory of that night,” Hillman said, “was Ringo walking into the room eating a sandwich. He said, ‘Hello, just eating,’ and then walked out. That was probably the most worthwhile statement of the day.”

“We all adored the Beatles,” he said. “I think Crosby and McGuinn tried their best to impress them by bringing over some pot and smoking with them. Me? I was just watching it all, being so shy at the time.”

Wandering from bricked poolside patio to ornate living room were Joan Baez and actor Peter Fonda, who the Beatles remembered seemed somewhat zonked. “He kept opening his shirt and showing us a big scar on his chest,” George recounted in The Beatles Anthology. “He told us he’d accidentally shot himself when he was cleaning his dad’s gun when was eleven. He wore it like a medal and said the bullet grazed his heart. He told everyone who would listen that he had died three times on the operating table after being rushed to the hospital. We all liked him, although we thought he was a bit goofy.”

Earlier in the day, the Beatles had watched a private screening of Cat Ballou, which starred Fonda’s older sister Jane and a grizzled Lee Marvin as a drunken cowboy. The movie didn’t impress them. “I don’t like Lee Marvin—never did,” George declared, although Marvin went on to win a Best Actor Oscar for his role, beating out Richard Burton, Rod Steiger and Laurence Olivier.

We lounged on the wraparound patio by the pool as the Beatles switched to rum and Cokes, smoked furiously and occasionally disappeared with one of the Playboy “guests,” only to reappear and pick up the conversation as if there had been no interruption.

“You’d think they could get it right by now,” complained John, settling back on a cushioned chaise longue after his brief intermission and returning to the subject of the poor sound system at the Hollywood Bowl. “It was like fookin’ amateur night at the pub, only worse. This whole thing is a pest. A real cock-up. We’re playing the same old stuff…”

While it had been a successful tour, John was rapidly tiring of the screaming fans, as well as the same-old, same-old music sets that had become standard stuff. “It’s a real drag,” he told me that night in what turned out to be a harbinger of their growing dislike for the whole touring process. “We’re getting into a rut—a shitty rut.” He was later to observe somewhat bitterly, “It’s less about the music and more about all the bloody tribal rites.”

Then it was on to their final 1965 American concert—San Francisco’s Cow Palace on August 31—the same venue where they had begun just a year earlier.

Brian Epstein was determined to maintain momentum and hedge the staying power of his boys. He set up yet another transatlantic trip, their third in as many years. But by 1966, tour fatigue had firmly set in, according to Tony Barrow. The press agent called the year “a disaster-strewn watershed in the history of the Beatles.”

In his memoir, John, Paul, George, Ringo and Me, Barrow observed that Epstein’s power was dwindling as the Beatles were realizing they had their own individual interests they wished to pursue. Decisions in the past, he said, had been made only with the approval of all four; now the “one for all and all for one” philosophy was unraveling.

They were beginning to fully understand that, at long last, the proverbial bubble might actually be ready to burst, and they no longer worried about what would become of them if they became ex-Beatles. They had lots of money. “John wanted to give up more than the others. He said he had had enough,” Ringo recalled in The Beatles Anthology.

Importantly for the present, at least, “they had decided for some time to stop touring,” wrote Hunter Davies in his 1968 Beatles biography, “but it was difficult, because of contractual arrangements, to say so straight away. They hated what they were doing. They disliked dragging around the world, appearing publicly in a glass box like a peep show. They disliked performing on stage in the same old way. They thought it was a farce, a mockery.”

“We got worse as musicians playing the same old junk every day,” moaned George in a BBC TV interview. “There was no satisfaction at all.”

But perhaps the straw that finally broke the touring camel’s back was a horrendous July 4, 1966, experience in the Philippines, which left them firmly convinced that the touring end was near. Days before they arrived in Manila, they had received death threats in Tokyo while they performed five concerts in Japan. Many locals said it was sacrilegious for them to sing at the Nippon Budokan, a national shrine to Japan’s war dead. But there was no trouble at the concerts or in Japan.

In the Philippines, they played twice, to enthusiastic audiences in excess of 30,000 and 50,000, but things turned ugly after they failed to appear at a lunch organized by the powerful first lady Imelda Marcos.

She had arranged the lunch for them at the presidential palace and had invited dozens of children—except no one told the Beatles about it. Or if they did, the summons came a few hours after the Beatles had awakened.

A fuming Mrs. Marcos waited and waited. There were rumors they had preferred a riverboat trip instead, and that didn’t help soothe things. Barrow blamed Brian, saying the manager received the invitation but decided not to wake the boys; so he just ignored it.

Epstein went on local television to apologize, insisting it was all a terrible mistake and there had been no intent to insult, but his efforts fell on deaf ears. Locals saw it as a personal affront, and they wanted revenge for the Beatles “spitting in the eye” of the first family.

Hotel workers retaliated by cutting off room service and making the Beatles carry their own suitcases when they checked out. Security details suddenly vanished, and alarmed British embassy officials reported receiving death threats.

As the Beatles were about to board their KLM flight matters turned violent. “We were being pushed and banged around from one corner to another,” Paul recalled after arriving back in London. “When they started knocking over our road managers, everyone was falling all over the place. I swear there were at least thirty of them surrounding us.”

George had the final word when asked at Heathrow Airport what was next on group’s agenda. With only the merest hint of a smile he said: “We’re going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans.”

That was closer to the truth than he could have ever imagined.

On August 12, 1966, the Beatles alighted in Chicago to start their third U.S. tour. They were as nervous and apprehensive as they had been for their first appearance with Ed Sullivan, but this time for a very different reason: The trip came on the heels of John’s infamous remark to the London Evening Standard’s Maureen Cleave about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus.

Those words had triggered resentment and protests from Bible-Belt Americans, who called for public burnings of Beatles records and a ban on their concerts. The Beatles, it seemed, had jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

They had two shows booked in the Windy City and a further twelve appearances, including a trip to Memphis, in the heart of the South. Before leaving England, they’d had a brainstorming session to plot strategy about how to defuse the controversy and had even considered cancelling the tour, Barrow recalled. “We were concerned that John might be assassinated,” he told the BBC.

Brian weighed in with a preemptive strike: “John is deeply concerned and regrets that people with certain religious beliefs should have been offended in any way whatsoever.” It didn’t cool things off.

Within hours of landing in Chicago, the Beatles faced a hostile press in an overcrowded suite on the twenty-seventh floor of the Astor Tower Hotel, with John taking center stage. “I wasn’t saying the Beatles are better than Jesus or God or Christianity,” he declared at a somewhat rambling and agitated press conference. “I’m not saying we’re better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person, or God as a thing or whatever it is. I just said what I said and was wrong, or it was taken wrong, and now it’s all this.”

He continued: “If I’d have said television is more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it. But I used the Beatles because I know more about them.”

Despite John’s explanation, he was peppered with the same questions at virtually every stop, replying at times, somewhat wearily, “I’ve explained it eight hundred times—you tell me what I said. I’m sorry I said it, really,” and adding, “I never meant it to be a lousy, anti-religious thing.”

The tour had hardly started, and right away all the Beatles were on the defensive. “How are you, John?” Barry Tashian, a singer–guitarist in the Remains, one of the Beatles’ opening acts during the 1966 tour, asked Lennon as they were about to land in Memphis on August 19.

“Ask me after Memphis,” replied John, according to Tashian’s account in his 1996 book, Ticket to Ride: The Extraordinary Diary of the Beatles’ Last Tour.

Paul interjected: “It’s John they want—send him out first.”

Added John, “You may as well paint a target on me.”

Paul later told BBC radio that he looked out of the window of the Beatles’ bus, which had brought them from the airport to the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis. “It was pretty scary, there was this little kid about ten or eleven attacking our bus, with a fervent holy-roller passion in his eyes. And as we drove in picketers hit our bus with their ‘Beatles Go Home’ signs.”

In their hotel room, the boys sat silently watching news footage of the Ku Klux Klan burning their records in oil drums. Later they were to say that even their chartered jet took some punishment—bullet holes were found on the plane’s fuselage.

“Someone let off a firecracker during our second concert in Memphis,” Tony Bramwell, who worked for NEMS and was on the tour, told BBC radio. “All of us turned our heads, and the other three Beatles looked at John, half expecting to see him sinking down with a bullet wound.”

Tashian told a local television interviewer soon after that all the Beatles were edgy. “On the plane I felt like talking to George. He had become a pal, but this time he was very cranky and said he didn’t want to talk to me.

“Later, another member of our band sat next to George and said, ‘I feel sorry for you guys.’ George turned to him and said, ‘We put ourselves in this position on purpose. We planned and plotted to be big, and this is what we’ve got. So don’t feel sorry for us. We got what we wanted.’”

The tour wound up on August 29, a cold night in windswept Candlestick Park, the home stadium of the San Francisco Giants. The stadium held 42,500, but only 25,000 tickets sold. The Beatles sang eleven songs, finishing with the predictable “Long Tall Sally.” With great relief the foursome headed home.

“1966 showed a violent change,” Barrow told BBC radio. “By 1966 all the bad things, the nasty side of being famous and celebrities had begun to come out.”

On the trip home, Barrow recalled, a relieved George sank deeply into his seat. “That’s it then. I’m not a Beatle anymore.”

It was to be the last time that the Beatles ever sang together before a paying audience.

18: WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM THEIR FRIENDS

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is one of the most important steps in our career. It had to be just right.—John Lennon

On their American tours, with a few exceptions—mostly heroes of theirs like Dylan, Elvis, Joan Baez and Fats Domino—the Beatles were ambivalent about hobnobbing with their showbiz counterparts, clearly unimpressed with celebrity for celebrity’s sake. But in 1967, their feet were put firmly to the fire when they were asked by pop artist Peter Blake and his then-wife American artist Jann Haworth to provide them with a list of famous people they admired.

Behind the request: Blake and Haworth had been hired to create the album cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which would become the most iconic cover in music history. The record itself was of vital importance to the Beatles. They were now at an important crossroads in their meteoric rise to the top.

Their previous two albums, Rubber Soul in 1965 and Revolver a year later, had been huge hits. Having set a towering watermark, their next effort had to knock it out of the park. No detail could be overlooked.

There is more than one version of the story of how the Sgt. Pepper cover was born, but the most favored tale is that with live tours a distant history, Paul believed it was time for the band to dump the tailored, skinny-lapelled touring suits that had become its trademark and climb into something a bit more colorful.

Perhaps, he mused, they should don the kind of military-style uniforms preferred by musicians who used to play in municipal parks at the turn of the century.

“Sgt. Pepper eventually came out, basically, from the idea that I had about this band,” he said in a five-part documentary on The South Bank Show, a British television arts magazine, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the album’s release. “It was going to be an album of another band that wasn’t us. We were going to call ourselves something else and just imagine all the time that it wasn’t us playing this album.”

He drew some basic sketches of the Beatles in military band uniforms receiving the keys to the city by the mayor, surrounded by an audience of famous onlookers, all played out in front of a floral clock.

No one doubted the boys needed a dazzling cover to match the music they had started to record, including songs like “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and the album’s rousing title tune.

Brian approved hiring Blake and Haworth. Peter was a trendy pop artist of the time; Jann had grown up in a world of art and movies. Her father Ted was the Oscar-winning art director of the 1957 Marlon Brando film Sayonara, her mother Miriam an accomplished artist. Eager to spread her own artistic wings, Jann had moved to London with her mother in 1961; she and Blake met and married in 1963, when she was twenty-one years old and Blake ten years her senior.

They first met the Beatles in 1963 and became very friendly with Paul and Jane, introducing the couple to art dealer Robert Fraser, a flamboyant figure who ran one of the most popular galleries in London and went on to sell Paul and Jane a lot of pricey art. Fraser was the darling of the likes of the Stones, Brando, Tony Curtis and a slew of Hollywood stars who were friends of Jann’s art-director father.

Blake and Haworth embraced Paul’s concept for Sgt. Pepper and felt that if it was to be a performance in the park, it was up to the Beatles to decide which famous faces they would like to have in attendance. They first thought of using cardboard cutouts but instead opted for a collage, a wall of famous faces to surround the real-life Beatles.

Peter recalled in a television interview, “In my mind I was making a piece of art rather than an album cover. It was almost a piece of theater design.” Recalled Jann: “Our brief to the Beatles was this: ‘Pick your hero.’ It was as simple as that.”

The idea was fine; give the fans an idea of whom the band members thought of as their heroes. But as it turned out, the Beatles gave only cursory consideration to the famous-faces idea, Jann recently told me. “They ended up choosing about a third of the faces; Peter and I chose the rest. Maybe they were just too busy working on the album,” she said.

“George,” she said, “chose all his gurus, like the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and other Indian holy men. John wanted Edgar Allen Poe, Jesus and Hitler—the last two we took out because Paul didn’t want Hitler.” (Not to mention that Jesus was a sensitive figure following John’s controversial 1966 Jesus–Beatles showdown comments.) However, John’s writing inspiration—Lewis Carroll—made the cut. So did British illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, “although I wasn’t quite certain whether he was a Lennon favorite or nominated by Peter.”

Paul’s choices were, she added, “more eclectic: literary figures like Aldous Huxley, who was also a favorite of John’s, and showbiz greats like Fred Astaire. Paul liked the name of the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.” And Ringo, she said, “didn’t come up with much.”

Strangely, none of the Beatles bothered to include any of the black singers of the fifties who had so greatly influenced them, like Little Richard, Chuck Berry or Fats Domino. Nor did they list the obvious—Elvis. The feeling was that the King would have considered it something of an insult to be included as just another image nestled among the sea of faces.

But what amazed Jann the most, was that the Beatles chose not one single woman; so she took it upon herself to right this omission. “The women that made it were our choices and those—Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Temple—are pretty piss-poor, with the exception of Mae West, who was a very bright lady.” Marlene Dietrich was squeezed in; Jann said her husband was enamored of the actress, even hanging out at a London theater just to get her autograph.

The artists also added some less familiar characters. “Issy Bonn, the English vaudevillian comic, because my husband was a great music-hall fan,” Jann told me. “And then British radio legend Tommy Handley, best known for his hit post-war radio show ITMA, which stood for, ‘It’s That Man Again.’”

Ironically, neither of Paul’s original suggestions—Groucho and footballer Dixie Dean—made the list; the only Marx in attendance was Karl. There were a few other surprising inclusions: Laurel and Hardy in colorful hats, Scottish explorer David Livingstone, but no sign of missionary Henry Morton Stanley, the journalist who tracked him down in Africa. The inclusion of the Liverpool footballer of the forties, Albert Stubbins, Jann said, “came from one of the Beatles, but I don’t recall which one.”

There were six life-sized wax models: the four Beatles, along with Sonny Liston, former heavyweight champion of the world, and British sex symbol Diana Dors. Liston and Dors put in their appearances simply because the artists were able to borrow them from the famous Madame Tussauds wax museum in London, thanks to Peter’s friendship with the waxworks’ managing director Peter Gatacre.

Liston certainly wasn’t on any of the Beatles’ “hero” lists—especially after he had refused to meet them in Florida in February, 1964—but his addition gave the cover some needed racial diversity.

Although she was unaware of Shirley Temple Black’s meeting with the Beatles backstage at their San Francisco concert, Jann said she inserted the actress three times into the crowd, including her face and a Temple doll wearing a red, white and blue sweater embossed with: “Welcome the Rolling Stones.” “I was enamored by all the silliness,” she said. “I thought it was just kitsch—all that Good Ship Lollipop stuff.”

Jann recalled getting a frantic call from Brian shortly before they were to shoot the historic cover. “He was worried and wanted to know if we had received approval from all the famous faces we planned to put on the album cover.”

“Most of the people should involve very little risk since they are dead,” noted a letter from the Epstein office, which pointed out that in America some personalities whose likeness had been used for commercial enterprises had sued and won compensation. It was feared some of those included might be resentful at being inserted in a group whose sole purpose was to advertise a Beatles record.

As a result, notification was swiftly sent to several of the still-living personalities. “When we contacted Leo Gorcey of the Bowery Boys,” recalled Jann, “he said he wanted a fee of £150 (about $450)—so he was airbrushed out. Mae West wrote back to say, “What on earth would someone like me be doing in a lonely hearts club?” Said Jann: “The Beatles penned a personal note informing her that the title had nothing whatsoever to do with anyone lonely or looking for love and that it just happened to be the name of the band. She quickly approved.”

Another last-minute excision was Gandhi, who was simply replaced by a carefully positioned palm tree frond. Brian worried that using his likeness might offend the entire nation of India—as well as upset EMI’s record-buying customers in India and China.

For design ideas, Jann went to her art-designer father, who at that time was working on the London set of the Tommy Steele movie Half a Sixpence. “I had a small role in that film, playing a young bride,” she said. “So I ran to my father to get his advice, and he suggested we use a full-color, transparent backlit blow-up for the sky, complete with photographs of trees—just as he did for the movie. We didn’t have a budget for that kind of extravaganza, so we ended up cutting out a bunch of heads from assorted magazines—and when the final selection was made, I hand-tinted those faces.”

On March 30, 1967, once the “set” was finally fixed in photographer Michael Cooper’s Chelsea studio and the six wax figures had been carefully placed and given a fresh coat of makeup so they were ready for their close ups, it was show time.

The touched-up photos of the other famous guests were glued to the boards, and Jann’s grandmother’s doll was whimsically inserted into the picture. Fairground artist Joe Ephgrave, hired specially for the shoot, then propped his painted Sgt. Pepper drum in the front row. (The drum was sold at Christie’s in 2008 for $1.07 million.)

The only thing that remained was for the flesh-and-blood Beatles to put in their appearance. And they did, in dazzling style—wearing moustaches and decked out in satin, Day-Glo–dyed puce, magenta, blue, and red military-band get-ups rented from Bermans, London’s best-known theatrical costumers.

George and Paul wore their MBE medals, and John opted to borrow some World War II medals from Mona Best, the mother of ex-Beatles drummer Pete Best. (Best didn’t make the collage, although the late original Beatles bassist Stuart Sutcliffe, a close pal of John’s, did.) Then Cooper shot the remarkable assemblage.

EMI had a fit when the photo and bill finally arrived: It was £2,867 (about $8,601)—a “massive” £200 of which went to Blake and Haworth. The thirteen Sgt. Pepper tracks alone had taken five months to record at a cost of £40,000 ($120,000.) By comparison, the Beatles’ very first album, the fourteen-track Please Please Me, which released in March, 1963, was completed in thirteen hours flat.

But it was worth it. Not only did the Sgt. Pepper cover win the 1968 Grammy Award for Best Album Cover (Graphic Arts), it remains one of the most iconic images in rock and roll history.

19: BEATLES REDUX

“No other group mixed talent and ambition, curiosity and opportunity, elegance and approachability, ease and urgency, to such a degree, or so attractively. As a group they contained all the tensions that would ultimately break them apart; but while they held together, the mix was powerful”—Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times

1. JOHN

I met John again in early October, 1973. He had come to Los Angeles ostensibly to promote Mind Games, his fourth solo album, due to be released the following month, and, he hoped, to kick-start what he felt was a flagging career.

Aside from a tremendous amount of imbibing with musician pal and booze buddy Harry Nilsson (which was later to get him ejected from the Troubadour nightclub for drunken behavior), another of his projects was to work with the highly eccentric Phil Spector on an album of oldies.

The Daily Express entertainment desk had asked me to interview John, assuming that, because we had crossed the country together in 1964, he would be more likely to open up with me. They also said there were rumors that he had split up with Yoko.

I drove over to a one-story Spanish house opposite the fashionable Hotel Bel-Air, a popular hideaway for stars visiting town. Lennon had been loaned the house by record producer Lou Adler, who had moved to his Malibu beach pad with his girlfriend, actress Britt Ekland, widow of Peter Sellers. Small world department: I later learned that Adler had also lived in that very house with Peggy Lipton, once the apple of Paul’s eye.

When I rang the bell, a woman I knew to be May Pang, John and Yoko’s assistant, opened the door. “I’m John’s secretary,” she said as she ushered me in. John came up and gave me a surprisingly warm welcome after I reminded him that I had been part of the press corps on the 1964 tour. “You’ve already met Fung Yee?” he asked, using May’s Chinese name.

On that warm, fall afternoon we sat by the pool catching up and having a languid conversation about touring America and Lennon’s life now. John, in his granny sunglasses, was openly puffing a joint, and he seemed gaunt and worn around the edges.

He had not shaved, his hair was long though meticulously styled, and he had sideburns so thick that they looked as though they’d been borrowed from Elvis. Much thinner than I remembered, when he took his shirt off his body was almost skeletal, his rib cage clearly visible.

He happily posed by the pool for my photographer, Cyril Maitland, first in a yoga position and then for some rather ordinary pictures; sitting on the diving board and about to jump off the board. He stayed dry, and May stayed out of camera range. Then, when Cyril left, we sat down to chat.

“Is Yoko joining you here?” I asked tentatively. He said simply. “She’s in New York, but we speak every day.” I didn’t pursue that avenue any further, assuming the break-up rumors were not true.

According to Yoko at the time, John had gone to the West Coast, accompanied by May, to finish some albums while she stayed in New York to take care of business. What was unpalatable to her were the rumors that John had left her—she wanted to protect her image and avoid the gossip that even hinted he had replaced her with another woman.

Sometime later, another version of the John–Yoko–May arrangement emerged. “May was a goody-goody who regarded Yoko as her mother and had never exhibited the slightest romantic interest in John,” Albert Goldman wrote in his 1988 book, The Lives of John Lennon. “May,” he wrote, “had slaved for the Lennons and had been put through every test for obedience and loyalty. She had sacrificed her whole life to her employers and she was eager to please. So May Pang was the perfect choice for a concubine.”

Pang much later confirmed that Yoko had confronted her in New York, told her she and John were arguing and growing apart and that John found May sexually attractive. Then, according to May, Yoko, astonishingly, had given the couple her stamp of approval: She was comfortable with the idea that May would become her husband’s mistress.

While John chatted at the poolside, May sat quietly listening but not saying a word. I reminded him of the hours we had spent in Key West, watching and listening to Fidel Castro bellowing on in Spanish.

“Yeah, he’s a weirdo,” John said. “But he’s still there in the land of the living.”

Brian Epstein had been dead six years, and I asked how he had coped with the Sturm und Drang that had divided the Beatles: Allen Klein—whom John favored—took over from Brian, much to the dissatisfaction of Paul, who had teamed up with wife Linda’s lawyer father Lee Eastman (who, ironically, had changed his name from Epstein) and her brother John. During the Beatles’ breakup, John had angrily claimed that Brian had robbed the band and lined his own pockets.

John said he was not in the mood to talk about Brian or the high profile bust-up. “I miss the rain,” he said, apropos of nothing and with more than a touch of mockery in his voice, “Does it ever rain here? What else do you want to know? Do you work for the CIA?”

Then he turned serious: “It’s all history. Living here is a new chapter—my American life, New York and hooray for Hollywood.”

May opened an umbrella to shelter herself from the harsh afternoon sun and handed John an open bottle of vodka.

John said that although he had seen virtually nothing of L.A. during the Beatles tours, he was finally getting to know the city pretty well and that he had also lived here for several months in 1970 while he and Yoko went to family therapy.

I was familiar with their family therapy, known better as primal therapy, which they studied with Dr. Arthur Janov. As a result of his 1970 book, The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy, The Cure for Neurosis, Janov had become something of a hot ticket in Hollywood circles. His technique was to have patients recreate their own births, complete with screaming and crying like a baby. Thus, claimed Janov, they were able to dump all their deep-seated neuroses and hang-ups that had dogged them throughout their adult lives and start fresh.

“Art’s book blew me away,” said John, who along with Yoko, in April, 1970, moved to a rented house on Nimes Road in Bel-Air so they could attend the sessions two or three times a week over a three-month period.

After completing the course of treatments, John recorded The Plastic Ono Band, which he described as the most personal album he had ever done. It included full-out Janovian screaming and songs like “Mother,” “My Mummy’s Dead” and “Isolation.”

I told John that after spending time watching Janov and his patients, I was not impressed with what I had seen and that I believed it to be exploitative. We discussed this for about an hour or more, and while he filled his vodka glass several times, I described in more detail what I had seen when Janov invited me to the clinic’s control booth to watch patients in treatment rolling around in the nursery, screaming and behaving like petulant children. Janov and his wife and assistant Vivian told me that the patients we were watching live on the television monitor were “having a Christmas party.”

“I always remember that vivid scene,” I told John. “Grown men were sucking their thumbs and clutching security blankets. One girl was beating her head on the padded wall; someone else was ripping up a teddy bear and screaming, ‘Daddy, don’t hit me.’ A paunchy fellow sat on the floor looking at a photo of his mother and crying bitterly.”

“It was all a bit sick,” I said.

“That’s the way it works,” said John, who recalled that at first he was thrilled with the treatment, then he, Yoko and Janov had gotten into an argument when the doctor suggested filming their therapy. When the couple objected, John said, Janov told them not to act like spoiled children.

Later, Yoko said that she didn’t feel the treatment was beneficial to her in the long run, though she conceded it did help John. The ex-Beatle, she said, needed to learn to cry because he, like most men, wasn’t able to show his true emotions.

I asked John about the 1969 Charles Manson murders, since Manson family members had told investigators that the motive for their killing spree was an interpretation of the lyrics of several Beatles songs in what had become known as their White Album—most specifically “Helter Skelter,” which Manson felt was a call for a race war.

I told him I had written the first book about the Manson murders, which had come out before the trial began, and that I also had attended the seven month, circus-like murder trial. Manson, I told him, was forcibly removed from the court because of his wild behavior during the long months of testimony. The three Manson women also facing murder charges mimicked his behavior and were also ejected from the court.

“It’s bizarre,” I told John, “Manson’s demented testimony to the jury was that he shouldn’t be blamed for the killings because he didn’t write the music. He still has control over them,” I added, “even though they are all locked up in different cells and different jails.”

“He must be a total looney,” John said.

I asked if he thought Manson was insane to even suggest that there were secret coded messages in those lyrics to songs like “Helter Skelter,” “Piggies” and “Revolution.”

“He’s stark-raving bonkers,” said John, who oddly showed little interest in learning more about the man who had gone on a killing spree inspired, he claimed, by the Beatles’ writing. “Lots of twisted loonies see whatever they want to see in whatever we write,” he said.

Then, my interview over, John gave me a hug and said I was welcome to visit him at the recording studio in L.A.

I left, never to see him again.

2. PAUL

The next time I saw Paul, he had become vilified as the man who had wielded the axe that led to the fall of the House of Beatles. It was in early February, 1974, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he had come with Linda on a promotional tour to tout his and Linda’s co-written title tune for the new James Bond movie, Live and Let Die, which introduced Roger Moore as the new 007. The song was nominated for an Oscar, though it lost out to Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were.”

Paul also looked a little thinner than in the tour days; he wore tight blue jeans and bright blue tennis shoes. He had a mustache, well-coiffed hair, and a neatly trimmed soul patch below his lower lip. His long dark hair flowed over the collar of an embroidered open-necked gypsy shirt.

He opened the door to a spacious bungalow and led me into the large living area. Every table was covered with elaborate flower arrangements. Paul removed a stack of records piled high on an ornate brocade couch, invited me to take a seat and then sat down opposite me on a bench in front of a grand piano.

“Have you seen the film?” he asked. I had not, so he thumped out several chords of his Oscar-nominated song—then closed the piano lid. “Not bad for a quickie,” he said.

His new band, Wings, had sprung to life in September, 1971, and had begun touring early in 1972 under the scrutiny of mostly severe music critics, who scoffed at the idea that Paul had the temerity to hire his wife—a photographer, for God’s sake—to sing and play keyboards. (One radio station in Los Angeles mercilessly played, over and over, a tape of Wings live that isolated out Linda’s weak vocals.) I asked him what it was like to be back on the tour trail.

“It’s like starting all over again,” he said. “We’re new, a bit of a raggle-taggle group. So we took a beat-up old van on the road, drove onto the M1 (a north–south motorway linking London to Leeds) and headed to university towns like Hull, York, Sheffield and Newcastle. And when we got there we told them, ‘We’re here to play for you.’ And that’s where we cut our teeth.”

Modest European tours followed, he said, and he and Linda often took their daughters along: Heather, from her previous marriage, who was legally adopted by McCartney, and the couple’s tiny tot daughters Mary Anna and Stella.

“This time we toured to suit us—and not someone else. We made our own timetable. No cops or security. Just us, the kids, the dogs and the bus loaded with equipment. It was easier, no police or heavy security.”

“How did you handle the flak you got for putting Linda in the band?” I asked him.

“I expected it. Linda was the first to admit she didn’t know much in the beginning, but she was a fast learner when we put her on keyboards. She was very gutsy.”

I changed the subject and asked him about Manson and “Helter Skelter.” Paul told Barry Miles, author of the biography Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, that he had written the song in Scotland as the most raucous vocal he could come up with, using the idea of “helter skelter” as a ride from top to bottom—like the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

“You could have thought of it as rather a cute title, but it’s since taken on all sorts of ominous overtones because Manson picked it up as an anthem,” he said in the book.

He told me he had followed the case in the newspapers from time to time but not that closely—and, like John, he didn’t express much interest in learning much about Manson the man, even after I told him I had covered the trial.

“It was all so bloody weird,” he said. “There’s this sensational murder case, and they keep bringing the Beatles into it. You wake up one morning and hear that some nutter in America says we told him to take knives and kill innocent people. I mean it’s bloody stupid isn’t it? In fact, it’s a load of old shite.”

In May 2010, he told the Daily Telegraph: “When I write things, I think of them quite general—even love songs. People say: ‘Who’s that about?’ And for me it might be just about the spirit of love, the idea, the dream of love, rather than aimed at a specific person.”

I next saw Paul in the summer of 2011, when he appeared live via satellite at a television critics’ session. Writers from assorted publications gathered at the Beverly Hilton Hotel to interview Paul, who was touring in Cincinnati. The session was to promote McCartney’s documentary, The Love We Make, which chronicles his activities planning The Concert for New York City in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. The documentary was set to be screened on the tenth anniversary of the attacks.

The film was directed by legendary filmmaker Albert Maysles who, along with his late brother David, had made a documentary about the Beatles’ arrival in New York in February, 1964.

Paul spoke briefly about where he was on September 11: On a plane, sitting on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport waiting to take off for England. He looked out the window. “You could see one plume of smoke. Then you could see two, shortly thereafter. And I said, ‘That’s just an optical illusion.’”

I asked him about his very first visit to America. “Those memories are etched into my mind,” he said.

“We didn’t actually know who Ed Sullivan was. We’d say, ‘Who’s he?’ ‘He’s very famous in America.’

“The guy who was holding the curtain for me as I was about to go on and sing ‘Yesterday’ solo with a string quartet said, ‘Are you nervous?’ I said, ‘No,’ slightly bluffing. He said, ‘Well, you should be—there’s seventy-three million people watching.’ It evoked such hysteria, and we couldn’t believe that we couldn’t hear ourselves or hear anything. It was like a billion seagulls screaming, and we just looked at each other.” (Even Paul was a bit confused about when it was that he first sang “Yesterday.” The actual date that he performed his solo—complete with lush strings—was a year and a half later, on a Sullivan show taped on August 14, 1965, for airing on September 12 of that year.)

He also talked about the huge 1965 concert at Shea Stadium and the footage he had seen of it, part of a fifty-minute documentary co-produced by Sullivan and Brian Epstein’s NEMS and broadcast in 1966 by the BBC.

“We’re just in hysterics. John ends up doing a solo with his elbow. It is a long time ago, and we’ve looked at the film. At the time, you think it was very modern, but it’s ancient history. I love it anyway and have very fond memories.”

“Memory,” he admitted, “is sort of a funny thing. I tell stories many times, but it’s not necessarily the truth anymore. We met Elvis Presley, which was a big event in my life and in the other Beatles’ lives, but when we came to recount the story, we all had different versions. I said, ‘Elvis met us at the front door and greeted us.’ Ringo said, ‘No, he met us on the couch.’”

Paul said that the Concert for New York City project showed “that music can be healing,” and he was lucky to be in a job “where I can actually help heal, let people get in touch with their emotions,” while he too, at the same time, could get in touch with his own feelings.

After decades of performing he admitted that people might expect him to feel jaded, but “it actually seems new every time I do it.”

3. GEORGE

The last time I saw George was on an overcast September day in 1997. He was sitting in an impossibly picturesque church in the Suffolk countryside at the funeral of his longtime friend, publicist Derek Taylor, who had died of esophageal cancer.

George had driven the eighty miles from his massive Henley-on-Thames Victorian Gothic estate to the small community of Sudbury, where Derek lived with his wife Joan and their six children in a converted mill house.

George was the only Beatle to show up at Derek’s funeral, and he did so quietly, accompanied by Eric Idle, the Monty Python alumnus whom George had befriended after the Beatles’ breakup.

The funeral was low-key, held in a picture-postcard church not far from the Taylor house. There were no paparazzi, just family and friends of Derek. George didn’t speak, but someone read a letter sent from Derek’s post-Beatles client Beach Boy Brian Wilson. And back at the house after the service, George and Eric stood unobtrusively in the corner with drinks in hand. The three of us talked—not about that 1964 tour, but of Derek’s loyalty to George.

George remembered that I had ghosted his column on the 1964 tour. “Yeah, that was a bit of a fiddle,” he said. “I couldn’t write my way out of a paper bag. I still can’t. It was money for old rope and Derek took care of all that. He did my book as well.”

He said Derek had been a real rock for him after the Beatles’ breakup, when he was confused and wasn’t sure how to cope as a solo act. “I always wanted to do something on my own, but it was easier said than done,” he said. “Derek had more faith in me than I did. He, Joan and the kids often visited us at Friar Park (Sudbury) where we got merry together; I liked to show him how I made my garden grow. He was always telling me I could make it on my own if I wanted to.”

In November, 1970, George finally brought out his first solo project, All Things Must Pass, a three-record collection produced by Phil Spector. Critics noted that while Spector’s production was, as one said, “murky,” George, they all agreed, shone.

Unfortunately, a month later John trumped him with the edgy, post-primal therapy, viscerally personal Plastic Ono Band—and then the shit really hit the fan. In February, 1971, George was hit with a copyright lawsuit from Bright Records, who claimed that his album’s hit song, “My Sweet Lord,” was a rip-off of their “He’s So Fine,” written by Ronnie Mack in 1963 and recorded by the Chiffons.

The case dragged on for years with George’s fragile ego the target of copycat media bashing. The suit finally was settled in February, 1976, with George found guilty of “unconscious plagiarism” and ordered to pay almost $1.6 million from “My Sweet Lord” royalties.

At the funeral, George said the suit took a bruising toll on him and his confidence. “There were times when I thought it was all over, but Derek kept me sane…It went on forever, all the going back and forth in court when people were calling me a fraud and a cheat.

“He wrote my book (I, Me, Mine) and was my memory and my companion. And I also had Eric (Idle), who filled the empty spaces in my life and kept me laughing.”

Idle, standing by, smiled then spoke for the first time: “George and I have the same sense of humor. Shortly after we met he told me, ‘if we’d known we were going to be Beatles we would have tried harder.’”

Idle had first caught George’s eye in 1975 with his British television sketch series and Beatles parody, The Rutles—The Prefab Four. George was so impressed with the spoof that in one episode of the show he ironically appeared on camera, looking surprisingly gaunt, as a nosy reporter grilling the boss of the Rutles about whether they were bankrupt and breaking up.

In 1978, when financing for Monty Python’s The Life of Brian fell through, George stepped in as the movie’s savior. He and business partner Dennis O’Brien formed HandMade Films, and in order to finance the picture, which was finally shot in 1979, he used his palatial 120-room Henley residence as collateral.

After several drinks and sandwiches at Derek’s house, George quietly slipped out of the house, got into his car and vanished down a winding road into the mist of the early evening rain.

4. RINGO

I met Ringo again in January, 1989—no more the skinny, reticent drummer. I was writing a weekly entertainment column for the New York Times Syndicate, and he had come to the Sheraton Universal in Los Angeles to promote his latest project: Playing Mr. Conductor on Shining Time Station for the New York PBS station, WNET.

He was no stranger to kids’ programming, having done a successful stint from 1984 to 1989 as the narrator for Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, a role that would later be taken by George Carlin and then Alec Baldwin. (He left the spot, he said, to “focus on my solo career.”)

Now, at forty-eight years old, he was back in kiddyland, sporting long, graying hair and a rich black beard. The network publicist looked horrified and stood by unable to change the course of the conversation when Ringo switched from Mr. Conductor to talking about Mr. Starr—alcoholic.

He said both he and his wife, actress Barbara Bach, had just completed a five-week rehab course in Tucson, Arizona, to cope with their addiction to booze. Bach, a teen model in the seventies, had made her screen impact as KGB spy Anya Amasova, James Bond’s love interest in the 1977 Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. In 1981 she starred opposite Ringo in the comedy Caveman and their romance blossomed. In 1984 they appeared alongside Paul and Linda in Paul’s movie Give My Regards to Broad Street.

Ringo went on to repeat his alcoholic mea culpa to British television interviewers and to several British newspapers. His addiction wasn’t a surprise to most of us.

I remember watching him on a television talk show in 1980 hosted by John Davidson; he was full-out sozzled and made little sense as Davidson tried without much success to get some straight answers out of him. Davidson finally walked out on his inebriated guest.

“Yeah, I had an alcohol problem,” Ringo admitted to me. “I still have the problem, of course, but I don’t drink anymore. I’ve had the problem for a long time. It’s been three months to yesterday that I haven’t had a drink—ninety days. I had to get help, and I got help, and I’m feeling better. It was just getting on top of me.”

As the publicist listened, unable to stem the flow, Ringo continued like a religious convert: “I’m pulling myself together. I’m sort of starting the year off now, and we’ll do what we’re going to do. There’s really nothing laying around. ‘Oh, I’ve got this in the pipeline, and I’m reading these scripts.’ There’s nothing like that at all. We’re startin’ the year clean. So, be interesting if you come and see me in December, and you’ll see what happened or say, ‘Oh, he didn’t do a thing…eh?’”

Of course, on the 1964 tour, Ringo (and all the other Beatles) did their share of alcohol—and occasionally Ringo collapsed in an unconscious heap after bouts of heavy drinking. But he was much younger then, and much more resilient, and no one dared label the drummer of the hottest band in the world, who was enjoying himself in America, an alcoholic.

In a 1987 interview for the American television magazine program West 57th, Philip Norman, Shout! author, who did not travel with the Beatles on the 1964 tour, claimed that Ringo was completely out of it while touring: “He drank the drink, smoked the joints, had the girls and drummed the drums.”

Later, in a 1989 interview with the New York Times, Ringo remembered the Davidson talk-show appearance: “While they were convincing him (Davidson) to come back,’’ Ringo recalled, “I was in my dressing room having a few more cognacs.”

And in an interview for the Daily Express, Ringo admitted he didn’t like to go to parties too far away from home, “because you’d have to be in the car for forty minutes without a drink.”

His heavy drinking, he said, began in the mid-seventies, when he replaced cognac with Brandy Alexanders. He then turned to wine, often sinking, he said seriously, sixteen bottles a day. “I got involved with a lot of different medications, and you can listen to my records go downhill as the amount of medication went up,” he said. “I’ve got photographs of me playing all over the world, but I’ve absolutely no memory of it. I played Washington with the Beach Boys—or so they tell me. But there’s only a photo to prove it.”

In that Express interview, he said that he once beat his wife up so badly during one binge that he thought he had killed her. Treatment, he said, helped him to turn his life around, and six months after he dried out he began forming his new group, Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band.

“I’m a drummer, a singer and an entertainer. I’m not just a Beatles personality. And I’m learning to look after myself,” he added.

Fast forward to 2013; I saw Ringo twice. He looked lean, at least ten years younger, wore a jacket and sparkly T-shirt and sported a trim black beard, his hair thinner, obviously getting a little help from the dye jar. In June of that year he made an appearance at the Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles for the opening of the Ringo: Peace & Love exhibit, which displays several drum kits and personal mementos he had donated. We met again in October at a Hollywood recording studio, when he met the press to talk about his upcoming South American tour with the All-Starr Band, which was to finish up in Las Vegas.

He was more than happy to take a walk down memory lane. Although he has never been given a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth, as McCartney had (and some other lesser musicians in Britain), he said being overlooked didn’t bother him.

He was thrilled to bits to get his very own museum exhibition and talked proudly and with great emotion about how he had uncovered a vast collection of early Beatles relics, which his late mother Elsie—who died in 1986—had stored in her attic.

“It was like an Aladdin’s cave—a treasure trove of memories. Mum was a bit of a hoarder, and she collected all this amazing stuff from my life. There were baby pictures, ones of me when I was in hospital with TB aged fourteen, the receipt for my first drum kit, my report card from technical college where I was studying to be an apprentice engineer, stuff like that.”

During his peak Beatles years, he said, “she must have emptied my bag or my pockets when I came home and put random things away. I’d never have saved that stuff. There were notes and memos from Brian—‘Make sure you look smart tonight, lads, it’s a big show.’”

At the Hollywood recording studio Ringo introduced the media to his new limited-edition photo book Act Naturally, which contains 240 photos taken by the drummer going back to the Beatles’ early days, particularly the American tours. “If you look at the shots of Beatles,” he said, “we always had a camera or a cigarette in our hand.”

He sang a few songs and tried to get the attending media to also pay attention to his backup band, but they only had eyes for Ringo, who bounced around with the kind of confidence he had never displayed as a young touring drummer. The only negative: “I don’t sign autographs anymore,” he told me, “because people just take them and get lots of money by selling them on eBay. I don’t like that.”

At the Grammy event, Steve Appleford of Rolling Stone magazine asked him when he realized that the interest in the Beatles would never fade. “Some days you wish it did, in all honesty,” he replied. “You live with it. It’s gone on a long time. The music’s gone on, which is more important, because the music is great...John said it would last four years. Paul thought he’d be writing, George was going to open a garage, and I thought I would open a hairdresser salon.”

20: ABOUT THE AUTHOR

It has taken me too long a while to get here.

Part of the problem has been that when I was first assigned the job of traveling with the Beatles back in 1964, it wasn’t such a big deal. I mean what were they? At a time when rock music in the U.S. was somewhat dormant, here was a new band from a place not exactly known for rock ’n’ roll—not only England, but Liverpool?

I guess I never got past that feeling, even over the years as the Beatles became legendary, even though whenever their name is brought up (and, honestly, not by me) and I mention that I had tagged along on their first American tour, the reaction is utter fascination.

So I figured it was finally time. Even though the Beatles are the single most dissected band in music history, I’ll be honest; I still have not seen the story of the 1964 North American tour related by someone who actually went along for the full ride. (Though a couple of crafty authors apparently found enough material to fill two books solely about the band’s visits to Cleveland and Minnesota.)

Forests of spruce and pine continue to be felled for the reams necessary to accommodate all the Beatles books written. It seems the only person who hasn’t weighed in is Jane Asher. Or the Beatles’ hairdresser. And I’m not sure about the hairdresser, who may be toiling over a laptop as we speak.

Anyway, here’s more back story to this book:

In 1964, like the Beatles, I was an unformed character. Ambitious, a bit cocky and dripping with inexperience, I was the new Cockney kid on the Beverly Hills block playing at foreign correspondent, just like in the movies. I had been hired to chronicle the bigger stories on the West Coast (an earthquake here or a juicy murder trial there) and to hobnob with the big names of that era: Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Peter Sellers, Sean Connery or Alfred Hitchcock, particularly the British contingent living, working or cavorting in Hollywood.

I had come a long way for my California assignment —6,000 miles—all the way from Hackney in the East End of London. I grew up in a working-class neighborhood that was flattened in World War II by V-2 “buzz” bombs designed by the Nazi rocket engineer Wernher Von Braun who, after the war, was recruited by the U.S. government to help NASA propel men to the moon.

As a youngster I had become familiar with daily air-raid sirens, nights sleeping in our backyard bomb shelter stocked with paraffin lamps, with gas masks in boxes at our feet. Even after surviving six years of war, we still relied upon ration books that enabled us to breakfast on tasteless powdered eggs, spoonfuls of cod-liver oil and a rare luxury—an orange or a banana.

I was the oldest of four children, and cost prohibited me from attending college after graduating from the local Hackney Downs Grammar School, which produced Harold Pinter and a handful of boys who ended up in the House of Lords. My father was a £10-a-week (thirty dollars) baker, my mother a stay-at-home mum who suffered from depression and had a hard time coping with a houseful of exuberant kids. I joked to friends that we were so poor my parents couldn’t even afford to give me a middle name.

As an eleven-year-old, I had wanted to be a detective, but when the time came, it turned out I was not tall enough to join the London police force with its height standard of five feet nine inches. So I reckoned newspaper reporting would be second best: It gave me the chance to ask perfect strangers personal questions and not get punched in the face.

As soon as I was able, I jumped into the trenches as a junior reporter on the Stratford Express in East London, covering crime, sports and the religion beat, which included weddings and bar mitzvahs, and a sprinkling of local show business. Football was my salvation and my leisure: playing the game three times per week, as well as covering local professional clubs like West Ham United and Leyton Orient.

It was 1956 and my paycheck was forty shillings—about six dollars—per week. The paper’s editor, Tom Bailey, imperiously informed me when he hired me, “Davis, you should be paying us!”

After two years I was called up to do my mandatory National Service. Two years in the Royal Army Medical Corps. I applied for an exotic overseas posting—Hong Kong or Germany—hoping to travel the world at the Army’s expense. Not surprisingly, I was stationed a few miles from my home at Queen Alexandra’s Military Hospital in Millbank. Views from my office window looked out on the Thames with the houses of Parliament on one side and the Tate Gallery right next door.

It was a cushy posting. Because there were no barracks at the hospital, the Army gave me a living-out allowance, which permitted me to bicycle home every night. I even got paid a little extra for living at home.

Surprisingly, the Army helped fuel my burgeoning appetite for show business. The NAAFI, (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes, the British military’s equivalent of the USO) handed out unsold tickets to those in service for some of the best shows in London’s West End. I received freebies to see Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, and I often scored the best seats in the house to watch actors like Peter Sellers, Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney and Alec Guinness cut their teeth in the London Theater.

At the military hospital, my reportorial shorthand and typing skills served me well. I landed a job as secretary for a young lieutenant who also had been reluctantly drafted, Roger Bannister. Bannister was an international sporting hero—he had been the first man to break the four-minute mile barrier in 1954.

The twenty-eight-year-old Bannister, who became a prominent neurologist, was extremely full of himself. He treated me with the same disdain that most officers showed to a low-ranking private. However, he was a brilliant doctor, treating British soldiers suffering from leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma—cancers born as a result of exposure to the British H-bomb tests at Christmas Island and Malden Island in the Pacific Ocean between 1957 and 1958.

When at last I was discharged, I was aching for a new adventure, to escape life in East London and explore the world. I left journalism for a stint as a public relations director at Butlins Holiday Camp in the seaside town of Clacton. Butlins, a chain of working-class resorts around Britain, provided an affordable vacation: For ten quid per week, guests got a chalet to sleep in, all meals and free entertainment, including dancing and variety shows.

My job was to spread the word about what a wonderful time everyone was having. I spent a good deal of time writing press releases targeted to small-town newspapers around the country, excitedly informing them that their local lad or lass had won the camp’s ballroom dance competition, or interviewing the proud parents of a child who had won the Bonnie Baby contest.

The job was good fun, there was plenty of booze to be had and no shortage of women looking for a good time. But the best thing about Butlins for me was that it was there I met a gorgeous student from Northern Ireland named Sally Ogle, who many years later agreed to marry me.

Still, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere professionally at Butlins, so when the season ended, I decided to strike out for America. With one hundred dollars in my pocket and a bucketful of optimism, I headed for a place where they said it seldom rained or snowed and was sunny every day of the year: Southern California. It was November, 1960, when I arrived in New York, just a couple days after John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon to become the thirty-fifth president of the United States. Then, by train and plane I journeyed from east coast to west.

I knew not a soul in the Golden State, but I chose Los Angeles, naively confident that I would be quickly bombarded with offers to write for the Los Angeles Times. Or maybe I would sit on a stool at the soda fountain of Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard, seeking the same fame and fortune that every wannabe actor who stepped off a Greyhound bus in Hollywood yearned for.

The Los Angeles Times didn’t want me, but I landed a job as crime reporter on the Oceanside Blade Tribune in Oceanside, California, then moved back to L.A. as stringer for Reuters news agency. There, I caught the eye of David English, who was to become foreign editor of the mass-circulation London Daily Express; he asked me to open a West Coast bureau for the newspaper.

And then came a pop band called the Beatles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

As a newspaper and magazine writer all my life, I know the importance of crediting my sources. I have striven to do that here whenever possible. (And my editor Lew Harris has quite rightly nagged me to do so.) This book—and my memory of the time I spent on the 1964 tour—has been enhanced by many books about the Beatles.

And believe me, there are many. I gave away all my forged autographs (mostly created before my very eyes by the band’s PR man extraordinaire, Derek Taylor) and other paraphernalia collected on the tour. But I did amass Beatles books. My kids scoffed at my growing collection (now at around 300) and worried that their inheritance was being squandered on it.

Mark Lewisohn spent a decade writing Tune In (Crown Archetype, 2013), the first volume in his encyclopedic biography of the Beatles, and plans to bring out two more volumes. Hang in there Mark, there will be lots more gray in your beard by the time you finish. Bob Spitz also took lots of time for his entertaining and well-researched The Beatles: The Biography (Little, Brown, 2005).

Hunter Davies, the one and only authorized Beatles biographer, may have censored stuff in his original The Beatles (Norton, 1968), but most of what he got came straight from the horses’ mouths.

And who could overlook the entertainingly heavyweight must-read, The Beatles Anthology (Chronicle Books, 2000). Spitz in his own end notes, suggested that Anthology should be renamed Mythology, because roadies “Big” Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall answered phone questions posing as John and Paul, and that some of the material should be taken with a pinch of salt. My own personal experiences with Derek indicated that lots of salt was liberally sprinkled around the band’s history.

What I write about in this book happened fifty years ago. I was able to dig up my own newspaper clippings, speak to journalists who traveled with me—including Art Schreiber and Anthony Delano and photographer Harry Benson—as well as listen to unsullied whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth sound clips in a disc tucked into radio reporter Larry Kane’s book Ticket to Ride (Running Press, 2003). Radio interviews tell it like it is. Larry went on to spin his adventures with the Beatles into two other books.

Thanks are also due to the written words and accumulated wisdom of Beatles author and record expert Bruce Spizer, Derek Taylor, Philip Norman, Barry Miles, Jonathan Gould, Tony Barrow, Curt Gunther and A.J.S. Rayl, Ray Coleman, Ray Connolly, Albert Goldman, Tony Bramwell, Geoffrey Giuliano, Chet Flippo and Alan Clayson. Al Aronowitz wrote some of the liveliest stuff in his sixties-era Saturday Evening Post articles.

Bill Harry’s Ultimate Beatles Encyclopedia (MJF Books, 1992) makes him one of the most reliable Beatles sources around; Debbie Geller’s fascinating look into the life of Brian Epstein (The Life of Brian Epstein, Faber and Faber, 2000); and All About the Beatles, a little-known, slender paperback by Edward De Blasio first published in April, 1964, (McFadden-Bartel) offered lots of little gems.

And how valuable it was to travel back in time and once again find myself in the noisy room at many of those entertaining and oft-inane sixties press conferences thanks to good old YouTube.

Thanks for the memories.

PHOTO CREDITS

Harry Benson

Hotel room pillow fight.

A PR stunt with Muhammad Ali.

Ahoy in Miami.

Tim Boxer

Post-Maharishi George Harrison.

Ivor Davis Collection

All Together in Chicago.

Express Newspapers

Ringo’s view.

With Ed Sullivan.

Brits invade America.

One lucky fan joins a respite in Central Park.

John’s wife Cynthia.

Hello Goodbye.

Seattle sellout.

Protection in Las Vegas.

Gone fishing...from their Seattle hotel window.

Capitol Records president Alan Livingston’s garden party...

...and kisses for Beatles.

Express Newspapers (continued)

The Beatles meet Hollywood.

No Beatles fan.

Beatles hit the jackpot in Vegas.

Smile, please.

Jerry Feingold

Ivor Davis

Curt Gunther-Steven Gunter Estate

Curtain crashes down on the Beatles in Cleveland.

They’ve got a limo to ride.

Relaxing at Reed Pigman’s Missouri ranch.

Serenading the Indiana State Fair.

A twenty-seven-minute one-night stand.

Don’t fence me in.

Brian Epstein tries out a birthday gift.

George backs up a solo by Paul.

Ron Joy-Belle Schwartz Estate

George with a fan in Seattle.

Epstein in the saddle at his birthday party.

The reticent George with his ghostwriter: me.

Cyril Maitland

Lennon in Los Angeles, 1973.

Scope Features

Lights! Camera! Action!

Mark Sennet

Paul and Linda at the Beverly Hills Hotel, 1974.

United Artists Pictures

Having a haircut on the set of A Hard Day’s Night.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

DIARY OF A 1964 TOUR

INTRODUCTION

1: MY TICKET TO RIDE

2: I’M WITH THE BEATLES

3: I LEFT MY HEARING IN SAN FRANCISCO

4: IT’S A MAD, MAD, MONEYED BEATLES WORLD

5: I WAS GEORGE HARRISON’S GHOST

6: JOHN LENNON IN HIS OWN WRITE

7: LET PAUL GET YOU A DRINK…

8: JUST ACT NATURALLY

9: THE BRIAN BEHIND THE BEATLES

10: THE BOYS ON THE JET

11: TALKIN’ ‘BOUT GIRLS

12: DANCING WITH THE STARS

13: THE FIFTH BEATLE

14: BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND

15: ELVIS, WE HARDLY KNEW YE

16: GOING HOME

17: BACK IN THE U.S.A.

18: WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM THEIR FRIENDS

19: BEATLES REDUX

20: ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PHOTO CREDITS

INDEX

INDEX

A

Adler, Lou 276

A Hard Day’s Night

the movie viii, xi, 25, 83, 107, 112, 131, 147, 160, 225, 250

the song 24, 257

Ali, Muhammed 35, 171

Andrews, Julie 297

Animals, The 7

Ann-Margret 240

Appleford, Steve 293

Armstrong-Jones, Anthony 139, 250

Aronowitz, Alfred 104, 145–149, 210–213, 301

Asher

Jane 67, 98, 269, 295

Margaret 99

Peter 99

Richard 99

Aspinall, Neil 12, 21, 152, 193, 301

Astaire, Fred 270

Astor, Bob 33

Autry, Gene 112

B

Bach, Barbara 289

Baez, Joan 167, 259, 267

Bailey, Tom 296

Bannister, Roger 297

Barrow, Tony 221–223, 226, 239, 250, 260–263, 265, 301

Bart, Lionel 7

Beach Boys 207, 255, 291

Bear, Carl 73

Beardsley, Aubrey 270

Beatles Anthology 32, 61, 84, 124, 154, 157, 165, 207, 238, 259–260, 301

Beaton, Cecil 139

Bennett, Tony 9

Benson, Harry 34–36, 41, 108, 171–173, 226, 301

Bermans 273

Bernstein

Leonard 5, 167

Sid 5–6

Berry, Chuck 233, 247, 270

Best

Mona 273

Peter 95, 106, 110, 122, 153, 273

Bicknell, Alfred 227–228

Bill Black Combo 22, 193

Black, Charles 22

Blackwell, Michael 73–74

Blake, Peter 267–269

Blau, Tom 139

Blyton, Enid 93

Bond, James 104, 248, 281, 289

Bonn, Issy 270

Boone, Pat 169

Bramwell, Tony 168, 265, 301

Brando, Marlon xvii, 269–270

Bridges

Jeff 176

Lloyd 176

Brill, Charlie 7

Brown

Georgia 7

Peter 131

Steve 255

Bruce, Lenny 248

Buffalo Springfield 207

Burton, Richard 14, 259

Butlin’s Holiday Camp 97, 110, 298

Byrne, Douglas Anthony Nicholas 91–92

C

Cagney, James 176

Caldwell, Gordon 67

Cannibal and the Headhunters 252–253

Cardin, Pierre 122

Carnegie Hall 5–6, 167

Castro, Fidel xiii, 89–90, 278

Chaplin, Charlie 112

Chiffons 287

Clampett, Elly Mae 241

Cleave, Maureen 80, 263

Clifton, Robert 25–26

Coleman, Bess 20, 193

Cole, Nat King 174

Connery, Sean 295

Connolly, Ray 107–108, 301

Cooper, Michael 273

Cowan, Warren 177

Cox, Maureen 67

Cronkite, Walter 3

Crosby, David 258–259

Curtis

King 252

Tony 269

D

Daily Express xvii, xx, 11, 76, 81, 108, 123, 171, 202, 226, 250, 275, 290–291, 299

Dangaard, Colin 242

Darin, Bobby 174

Davidson, John 289–290

Davies, Hunter 10, 95, 121, 125, 153, 261, 300

Davis Jr., Sammy 141

Day, Doris 111

Dean

Dixie 271

James 163, 218, 241

Dee, Sandra 174

Delano, Anthony 103, 106, 125, 134, 135–137, 139, 301

Delmonico Hotel xxi, 144, 148, 210

DeShannon, Jackie 22, 193

Dietrich, Marlene 91, 270

Dixon, Jeane 88

Domino, Fats xiv, 121, 169, 236, 267, 270

Dors, Diana 271

Douglas, Donna 241

Dylan, Bob xv, xix, 149, 167, 209–217, 218, 227, 236, 244, 267

E

Eastman

John 278

Lee 278

Linda 102, 104, 278, 281–283, 289

Ekland, Britt xvii, 276

Elizabeth, Queen xxii, 87, 148, 251, 292

Emerick, Geoff 257

English, David xvii, xx, 8–9, 250–251, 299

Ephgrave, Joe 273

Epstein, Brian viii, xv, xviii, xxi–7, 9–10, 33–34, 53–54, 106, 109, 118–132, 199, 202–207, 222–225, 234–235, 252–253, 260, 262, 278, 285, 302

Epstein, Queenie 121

Esposito, Joe 230

Eubanks, Bob 141, 256

Evans, Mal 12, 21, 154, 301

Exciters 22, 193

F

Faith, Adam 2

Finley, Charles Oscar xv, 53–56

Finney, Albert 297

Flora, Bob 164–166

Fonda

Jane 240, 259

Peter 259

Forsyth, John 177

Fortas, Alan 230

Four Vests 68

Fraser, Robert 269

G

Gable, Clark 163

Gabor, Zsa Zsa 178, 258

Gandhi, Mahatma 272

Garland, Judy 9, 54, 91, 258

Goldman, Albert 277, 301

Goldwater, Barry 18, 248

Goodman, Benny 167

Gorcey, Leo 272

Gormé, Eydie 174

Gorshin, Frank 7

Grant, Cary xvii, 295

Grossman, Albert 212

Guinness, Alec 297

Gunther, Curt 45–49, 60, 139–141, 184, 301

H

Haley, Bill 121

Hamid, George 159–160

Handley, Tommy 271–272

Harrison

George ix, xviii, 8, 13, 15, 18, 22, 24, 25, 27, 30–32, 43, 49, 61–71, 73, 76–78, 84, 88, 108, 122, 136–138, 147, 157, 163–167, 172, 176, 182, 191, 202–203, 205, 209–210, 221, 227, 232, 237, 239–240, 245, 247, 250, 255, 258–259, 261–262, 265, 269, 273, 286–288, 293

Louise 27, 67

Peter 67

Rex 297

Harry, Bill 138, 301

Harvey, Lawrence 91

Hatfield, Bobby 22

Haworth

Jann 268–269

Miriam 269

Ted 268

Hayworth, Rita 177

Hefner, Hugh 258

Help! 112, 250

Henry, Clarence xi, 33

Hillman, Chris 207, 258

Hitchcock, Alfred 295

Hitler, Adolf 82–83, 111, 166, 270–271

Holloway, Brenda 252

Holly, Buddy 61, 87, 121

Hudson, Rock 163, 177

Hull, Dave 143

Humperdinck, Engelbert 222, 236

Hutchins, Chris 222

Huxley, Aldous 270

I

Idle, Eric 286, 287

Indra Nightclub 150

In His Own Write 80, 92, 146, 206

Inspector Clouseau 238

J

Jacobs, David 91–92

Jagger, Mick 252

James, Carroll 2

Janov

Arthur 278–281

Vivian 279

Jaramillo, Joe 255

Jesus Christ 264

Johnson, Lyndon xi, xiii, 248

Johnston, Bruce 256

Jones

Davey 7

Quincy 102

Tom 222

Joy, Ron 43, 101, 140, 182–183

K

Kaiserkeller nightclub 150

Kane, Larry 88, 129, 144, 155–156, 237, 244, 254–256, 301

Karsh of Ottowa 139

Kaufman, Murray 141–142

Kennedy

Jackie 167

John F. xxi, 3, 7, 58, 88, 113, 247–248, 298

Kerr, Deborah 169

Khan, Princess Yasmin 177

Klein, Allen 278

Kramer, Billy J. xxi

L

Lacker, Marty 230

Laine, Frankie 112

Lancaster, Burt ix, 169–170

Laurel, Stan 12, 271

Lawrence, Steve 174

LeBaron, Boots 178

Leiber, Jerry 55

Lennon

Cynthia 40, 67, 81, 100, 124, 217

John ix, xix, xx, xxi, 1, 6, 13–15, 20, 24–26, 30–31, 40, 54, 57–59, 67, 69–71, 73, 80–93, 95, 100, 103–105, 107–108, 119, 122, 124–125, 129, 136–137, 142, 146, 151, 156, 160, 162–167, 169, 171–173, 178, 205–206, 209–210, 213–215, 217, 218–220, 227–228, 234, 236–240, 245–247, 250, 252–254, 257, 260–261, 263–264, 267, 270, 273, 275–281, 285, 287, 293

Julian 81, 124

Lewis

Gary 176

Jerry 176

Jerry Lee 121, 252

Victor 9

Liberace

Lee viii, 91, 169

Life of Brian Epstein

book 302

Life of Brian, The

movie 288

Lipsyte, Robert 172–173

Lipton, Peggy 101–102, 141, 163, 174, 276

Liston, Sonny 171–173, 271

Livingston, Alan ix, 1, 101, 174–175, 177–179, 258

Livingstone, David 271

Lopez

Richard 255

Trini 9

Love, Mike 256

M

Mack, Ronnie 287

MacMillan, Harold xxii

Madame Tussauds 271

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi 191, 269

Maitland, Cyril 195, 276

Mansfield, Jayne ix, 102, 161–165, 168

Manson, Charles 280–281, 283

Marcos, Imelda 262–263

Margaret, Princess 87, 139, 250

Margret, Ann 240

Marks, Jack 115–116

Martin

Dean 174, 177

George 1, 99, 130, 199, 257

Jeanne 177

Marx

Groucho ix, 177

Karl 271

Maymudes, Victor 210

Maysles, Albert and David 5, 284

McCall, Mitzi 7

McCartney

Heather 282

Linda 104, 278, 281–283, 289

Paul ix, xxi, 13–16, 19, 23, 25, 27, 31–32, 49, 55, 62, 67, 70, 83–84, 95–105, 107–108, 115–116, 122, 125–126, 127–128, 131, 141, 143, 150, 153, 157, 160–162, 166, 168–169, 174, 176, 209–210, 215, 230–238, 244, 247, 253, 255, 262, 264, 268–271, 276, 278, 281–286, 289, 293, 301

Stella 282–285

McGowan, Angie 145

McGuinn, Roger 258–259

Medley, Bill 22, 33

Millings, Douglas 122

Mills, Gordon 222

Monroe, Marilyn 98, 161, 270

Montagu, Lord 123

Monty Python 286, 288

Moore, Roger 281–282

Morrow, Brucie 142, 145

Murrow, Edward R. xvii

N

Nead, Jack 55

NEMS 91–92, 120–121

Newfield, Joanne 132

Nicol, Jimmy 108–109

Nilsson, Harry 275

Nixon, Richard 240, 299

Norman, Phillip 205–206, 290, 301

O

Olivier, Lawrence 258, 259

Olson, Nancy 101, 174

Ono, Yoko 154, 276–277

Orbison, Roy 202

Ormsby-Gore, David 57

O’Shea, Tessie 7

Oswald, Lee Harvey 59, 247

O’Toole, Peter 297

P

Paar, Jack 3

Packard, Vance 146

Pang, May 276–277

Parker, Tom 220, 222–235, 240, 243

Paul Revere and the Raiders 207

Peter and Gordon 99

Pigman, Reed xv, 48, 60–62

Pinter, Harold 99, 296

Poe, Edgar Allen 270

Precht, Bob xxii

Presley, Elvis xix, xxi–xxii, 3, 85, 121, 209–210, 218–243, 220, 223, 267, 270, 285

Presley, Priscilla 231, 241

Primal Therapy 278–279, 287

Q

Quarrymen 13

R

Raft, George 178

Raubach, Marcia 67

Ray, Johnny 112

Richard, Cliff 2

Richard, Little 96, 121, 162, 247, 270

Richards, Keith 252

Ringo and His All-Starr Band 291

Rivers, Johnny 162

Robertson, Dale 170

Robinson, Edward G. 176

Rockefeller

Happy 5

Nelson 5, 18

Rogers, Roy 112

Rolling Stones 7, 90, 145, 271

Ronettes 142

Ruby, Jack 248

Rush, Barbara 177–178

Russell, Bertrand 99

S

Saint, Eva Marie 177

Schilling, Jerry 230, 233, 236

Schreiber, Arthur 58, 73, 85–86, 98, 120, 144, 301

Searle, Ronald 93

Sellers, Peter xvii, 170, 219, 238–239, 276, 295, 297

Seltaeb 91

Shankar, Ravi 258

Sheridan, Tony 121

Shirelles 108

Simons, Judith 81

Sinatra, Frank 9, 54, 101, 141, 174

Smith

Billy 230, 233

Iain 135–136

Maggie 99

Snow, Hank 224

Sommerville, Brian 205

Sounds Incorporated 252

Spector

Phillip 142, 275, 287

Ronnie 141

Spitz, Bob 215, 300–301

Stanley, Henry Morton 271

Stanwyck, Barbara 241

Starr, Ringo ix–x, xi–xiv, 13–14, 22, 26, 28, 30, 57, 59, 67, 72, 81, 83, 88, 96, 106–117, 122, 136, 144–145, 147, 163–164, 170–173, 175–176, 189, 209, 214, 233, 237, 240, 245, 247, 252–253, 255, 257–258, 261, 270, 285, 288–293

Steck, Jim 143

Steele, Tommy 2, 272

Steiger, Rod 259

Steinem, Gloria 145, 213

Stern, Howard 125

Stockhausen, Karlheinz 270

Stoller, Mike 55

Storm, Rory 108, 110

Stratford Express 296

Stubbins, Albert 271

Sullivan, Ed xviii, xx–xxii, 3–4, 5–7, 9, 18, 37, 57, 81, 141, 171, 205, 220–221, 225, 244, 251, 263, 284–285

Sutcliffe, Stuart 273

T

Tashian, Barry 264–265

Taylor

Alistair 121

Derek xviii, xx, 11–14, 18–20, 31, 53, 58–60, 62–63, 69, 72–74, 77–78, 81, 89, 102, 114, 117–118, 120, 122–125, 129–132, 133, 139–140, 142–143, 152–154, 156–157, 162–163, 167–168, 170, 199–207, 212–213, 216–217, 222, 249–250, 258, 286–288, 300–301

Elizabeth xvii, 14, 295

Joan 199, 202, 207, 286–287

Ticket to Ride

the book 129, 155, 254, 301

Tucker

Sophie 161–162

V

Van Doren, Mamie 163–165

Vaughan, Ivan 13

Von Braun, Wernher 295

W

Wade, Long John 142

Waller, Gordon 99

Weiss, Norman 9–10, 53

West

Mae 207, 270, 272

Sonny 230

Whisky A Go Go ix, 102, 162

Wilson

Brian 256–257, 286

Carl 256

Harold 250

Wolfe, Tom 145

Y

Yorty, Sam 176

Z

Zanuck, Darryl 161