Shout! (40 page)

UA had already hired Walter Shenson, an independent American producer based in London with some reputation for making successful low-budget comedy films. Shenson agreed to meet Brian, together with Bud Orenstein, UA’s office head in London, to discuss the terms under which the Beatles would be allowed to appear.

“I knew Bud Orenstein well,” Walter Shenson said. “So I went over to his flat before Brian arrived to talk over the deal that we’d be prepared to make. I knew nothing about pop music or managers. I said: ‘What do you think he’s going to ask for?’ The film was low budget, with not much to pay in advances. Bud and I agreed it would be fair to offer Brian and the Beatles 25 percent of the picture.

“Then Brian came in. He seemed very nice. We put to him the fee we’d thought of—the Beatles would get a salary of twenty-five thousand pounds to work on the picture—and he agreed to that. Then we asked him, ‘Mr. Epstein, what would you consider a fair percentage of the picture?’ Brian thought for a minute, then he said, ‘I couldn’t accept anything less than seven-and-a-half percent.’”

Uproar spilled over into the Beatles’ first European tour—a series of concerts in Sweden from October 24–29. Self-possessed Swedish girls now jigged and shrieked as wildly as any Cavernite, and sensible Swedish boys wore their hair in what Scandinavian newspapers called the Hamlet style. At a concert in Stockholm fans rushed the stage, breaking through a forty-strong police cordon and trampling George Harrison momentarily underfoot. Between concerts, Paul wore a disguise so effective that not even the other Beatles could recognize him.

Their return to London on October 29 showed them for the first time the full extent of their British following. At Heathrow airport, as their aircraft taxied to a stop, a concerted scream broke out from hundreds of girls massed along the terminal’s terraced roof. The invasion had thrown the whole airport into a chaos in which such other celebrities as Britain’s prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home, and the newly elected Miss World passed by, totally unnoticed.

The Royal Command Variety Peformance is an institution dating back to Queen Victoria, whose little dour face masked a fondness for theatrical glamour and who would “command” all the latest entertainers, like Buffalo Bill Cody, to give private performances for her and her family at Windsor. From this had evolved an annual royal charity gala
featuring a marathon bill of top entertainers that gave the West End its most glamorous night of the year and was later seen by the rest of the nation on TV. In 1963, the Queen could not attend, being heavily pregnant with her fourth child, the future Prince Edward, and her place in the royal box was to be jointly filled by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret. The Beatles were placed seventh on a nineteen-act program that included Marlene Dietrich; comedians Charlie Drake, Harry Secombe, and Eric Sykes; the self-styled Red-Hot Mama Sophie Tucker; and the dancing pig puppets Pinky and Perky.

But there was no question as to the night’s real draw. Long before dusk, on that raw afternoon, five hundred policemen had been drafted to duty outside the Prince of Wales theater, off Leicester Square, where the usual crowd, assembled to glimpse the royals, was swollen by several thousand girls, screaming and chanting, “We want the Beatles.” Marlene Dietrich, a legend of thirty years’ standing, was able to enter the stage door, unrecognized. But when the Queen Mother herself appeared, waving and smiling, followed by Princess Margaret and her photographer husband, Lord Snowdon, a basic British instinct asserted itself: the screaming and chanting changed to applause and cheers.

Brian Epstein, in all the hurry and excitement, very nearly found himself without the evening clothes that are de rigueur at a royal performance: His dinner jacket, he remembered, too late, was hanging in the wardrobe at home in Liverpool. To add to the tension he was due to fly to America the next morning. His parents, Harry and Queenie, sitting in the audience, had almost resigned themselves to not seeing him when, just before curtain up, in his hastily fetched tuxedo, he lowered himself into the empty seat next to theirs.

The Beatles, cooped up with Neil and Mal Evans in a dressing room no more munificent than usual, were also evincing signs of strain. Their spot in the show was brief—four songs near the end, surrounded by carefully rehearsed bows. What Brian feared more than musical slipups was that, despite his entreaties for decorum, some ad-lib would be made, offensive to royal ears. John had already threatened one ghastly ad-lib if the audience proved unresponsive: “I’ll just tell ’em to rattle their fuckin’ jewelry.”

Brian’s fears proved groundless. The audience of stiff-shirted showbiz notables and their wives could not have been more susceptible to the Beatles’ insouciant charm and the cheekiness that by instinct they measured
out in precisely the right amount. Paul struck the exact note at once, surveying the dignified dark and saying, “How are yer—all right?” A joke between songs, about “Sophie Tucker, our favorite American group,” produced a ripple of confirming laughter. Then it was John’s turn, to announce the final number, “Twist and Shout.” The line that had jangled Brian’s nerves in the dressing room came out as a perfect mingling of impudence and deference: “Will people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry…”

The next day’s papers were unanimous. “Beatles Rock the Royals,” said the
Daily Express
. “Night of Triumph for Four Young Men,” said the
Daily Mail
, roguishly adding, “Yes—the Royal Box was stomping.” It was reported that the Queen Mother had listened to “Twist and Shout” with every appearance of enjoyment and that Princess Margaret had definitely leaned forward, “clapping on the off-beat.” John’s little joke was quoted everywhere, as was the banter overheard later when the Beatles stood in the royal receiving line. Asked by the Queen Mother where they were appearing next, they had together murmured “Slough.” “Oh… that’s near us,” Her Majesty replied with such warmth as to suggest she might seriously consider popping over from nearby Windsor Castle to catch the gig.

The
Daily Mirror
’s coverage of scenes outside and inside the Prince of Wales theater bore the simple headline “Beatlemania!” The
Mirror
simultaneously gave the epidemic a name and offered its six million readers this deeply infected diagnosis:

Y
EAH
! Y
EAH
! Y
EAH
!

You have to be a real sour square not to love the nutty, noisy, happy, handsome Beatles.

If they don’t sweep your blues away—brother, you’re a lost cause. If they don’t put a beat in your feet—sister, you’re not living.

How refreshing to see these rumbustious young Beatles take a middle-aged Royal Variety performance by the scruff of their necks and have them Beatling like teenagers.

Fact is that Beatle People are everywhere. From Wapping to Windsor. Aged seven to seventy. And it’s plain to see why these four cheeky,
energetic lads from Liverpool go down so big.

They’re young, new. They’re high-spirited, cheerful. What a change from the self-pitying moaners, crooning their lovelorn tunes from the tortured shallows of lukewarm hearts.

The Beatles are whacky. They wear their hair like a mop—but it’s
WASHED,
it’s super clean. So is their fresh young act. They don’t have to rely on off-colour jokes about homos for their fun.

To say that Britain, in November 1963, succumbed to an all-excluding obsession with a four-man pop group—even one that had made royalty smile—would be palpably absurd. The mania was Fleet Street’s; it therefore appeared to blanket the land. In a single week after the royal variety performance, the
Daily Express
ran five front-page stories indicative of Beatlemania at every compass point. Its chief rival, the
Daily Mail
, soon afterward ceased bothering even to use the name “Beatles” in headlines. A small cartoon logo of four fringed heads gave all the identification that was needed.

Naturally, the press soon winkled out the fact which Brian had striven so to conceal—that John Lennon was married, with a baby son. The fans, however, far from resenting Cynthia, seemed to regard her as part of John’s inexhaustible originality. She continued, nonetheless, to exist in the deepest hinterland, at the top of the Emperor’s Gate flat or some sternly defined public corral, fenced off by a road manager’s shoulder.

The scope of Fleet Street coverage was widening from theater sieges and screaming and the cheeky things they said. On November 10, the first school headmaster sent the first teenage boy into public martyrdom for sporting a Beatle haircut. On November 18, the first vicar invoked their name, requesting them to provide a tape of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful, Yeah Yeah Yeah” for his Christmas congregation. Two days later occurred the first parliamentary mention. A Labor MP in the House of Commons demanded that police protection for the Beatles should end. On the
Express
editorial page there appeared a prophetic cartoon. The prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home, genuflecting before the Beatles, asked: “Gentlemen—could we persuade you to become Conservative candidates?”

The quality papers, traditionally aloof from such proletarian topics, now weighed in with purportedly scientific analyses of the Beatles’ effect on teenage girls. The
Observer
published a picture of a Cycladic fertility goddess that, it was maintained, “dates the potency of the guitar as a sex symbol to about 4,800 years before the Beatle era.” The livelier-minded
Sunday Times
commended the Beatles for enriching the English language with words from their private slang—like “gear” and “fab”—that were now in fashionable use. The
Sunday Times
went on to examine Beatlemania in a style and vocabulary that were to be widely imitated. “‘You don’t have to be a genius,’ says a consultant at a London hospital, ‘to see the parallels between sexual excitement and the mounting crescendo of delighted screams through a stimulating number like “Twist and Shout,” but at the level it is taken, I think it is the bubbling, uninhibited gaiety of the group that generates enthusiasm.’”

The habit quickly spread of consulting the medical profession, especially its psychiatric branch, for opinions that would lend scientific weight to the orgies of chortling prose. And doctors and psychiatrists, sensing regular fees, were careful to pronounce nothing unfavorable. Not even the
News of the World
could find anything in Beatlemania against which to caution its credulous readership. Psychologists, the
NotW
said, in its usual comfortably inexplicit way, had been trying to discover why the Beatles sent teenage girls into hysteria. One of them had come up with this explanation:

This is one way of flinging off childhood restraints and letting themselves go.… The fact that thousands of others are screaming along with her makes the girl feel she is living life to the full with people of her own age.… [T]his emotional outlook is very necessary at her age. It is also innocent and harmless.

The girls are subconsciously preparing for motherhood. Their frenzied screams are a rehearsal for that moment. Even the jelly babies are symbolic.

EMI hastened to release the second Beatles LP, recorded by George Martin in mid-July and incubated through autumn until sales of the first
album, and its spin-off singles, should finally subside. This second album,
With the Beatles
, appeared on November 22. Never before had a pop LP been released not to cash in on a Top Ten single but on the strength of its overall content. Advance orders alone totalled 250,000 copies—more than for Elvis Presley’s biggest-selling album,
Blue Hawaii
.

By far the most striking thing about
With the Beatles
was its cover. Brian had for months been showing his proof copy to friends and asking anxiously what they thought. Gone was the look of the
Please Please Me
album—the cheap, cheeky faces, looking down from high-rise flats. A top London fashion photographer, Robert Freeman, had shot the Beatles, heads and shoulders only, in black and white. Faces halved by shadow, hemmed in by their bangs and high polo necks, they could have been a quartet of young actors or art students. It was the same technique Astrid had used to photograph Stu Sutcliffe three years before in Hamburg, in her black-and-silver room.

A week later came their fifth single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” that advance orders of one million copies placed instantly at number one. The pre-Christmas air seemed to transmit little other than that loping, hand-clapping beat. The album, meanwhile, had its independent existence in the stunning combination of Lennon-McCartney songs like “All My Loving” and “It Won’t Be Long,” with Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” Berry Gordy’s “Money,” and other R&B songs so little known to the general pop audience, it was thought the Beatles must have written those also.

Never again would pop music be considered the prerogative only of working-class boys and girls.
With the Beatles
was played not only in the projects but in West London flats, in young ladies’ finishing schools, and in the blow-heated barns where country squires’ daughters held their Christmas dances.

On November 5, the day after the Royal Command show, Brian Epstein flew to New York, accompanied by Billy J. Kramer, that handsome but awkward young man. Landing at the airport still called Idlewilde, they drove in a yellow cab toward the magic skyline that reveals itself at first in miniature like the crest on a souvenir ashtray. Brian, on the drive, was full of what Broadway plays they would see in between his several very important business meetings. These meetings, Billy J. gathered, were the merest preliminary to the Beatles’ instant subjugation of the North
American continent. Even if Brian himself ever believed this, he ceased to do so as the cab entered Manhattan and the streets became sheer glass on every side.