Shout! (47 page)

The song was “I Wanna Be Your Man,” a tongue-in-cheek blast of R&B destined to be sung by Ringo on the
With the Beatles
album. With an obligingness Oldham still marvels at to this day, John and Paul turned their taxi around, accompanied him back to the Stones’ rehearsal room, and finished off the song so that the Stones could record it with minimum delay. One can read it as kindliness or as hard-hearted opportunism, since John and Paul at this point both saw their ultimate destiny as songwriters rather than performers. Like so many early Lennon-McCartney songs, “I Wanna Be Your Man” proved wonderfully adaptable to non-Beatles treatment, in this case providing a perfect frame for Mick Jagger’s sneery punk voice and Brian Jones’s palpitant slide guitar. By December 1963, it was headed for the U.K. Top Ten and the Stones were off the launchpad at last.

This huge glut of pop had long ago proved too much for the British Broadcasting Corporation, whose music radio output remained limited to a few strictly controlled slots on what it still rather condescendingly called the Light Programme. Now, that hitherto impregnable bastion of the Establishment was also to be challenged. The challenger was a young Irish entrepreneur named Ronan O’Rahilly, a colorful figure around the London scene well known to Brian Epstein and the Beatles. On Easter Day 1964, O’Rahilly’s pirate station, Radio Caroline, began transmitting continuous pop, with slick American-style disk jockeys and jingles, from a small ship anchored outside Britain’s territorial limits, beyond the jurisdiction of the Wireless Telegraphy Act that enshrined the BBC’s radio monopoly. The public’s response to getting what it, rather than the Light Programme, wanted was instantaneous. Radio Caroline won a huge listenership and gave the signal for a whole armada of rival pirate stations to begin operation from various offshore moorings as far north as the mouth of the River Clyde.

On pirate wavelengths, as everywhere, the Beatles were preeminent. Their new single, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” had become the first record ever to go to number one simultaneously in Britain and America, and that before a note of it had been heard. Advance orders from America alone exceeded three million copies.

Their first film had been shot during the six weeks between their return from America and their departure on a tour of Europe and the Far
East. Rather than confecting an artificial plot, their scriptwriter Alun Owen had sensibly opted to show them just as they were, four astonished lads perpetually on the run, with seasoned British comedy actors in supporting roles like Norman Rossington as Norm, their manager, and Wilfred Brambell, from television’s top sitcom
Steptoe and Son
, as Paul’s grandfather. Owen’s script largely reproduced the four’s own private badinage, with an unacknowledged steal from W. S. Gilbert in the running joke about Brambell being “a clean old gentleman.” Location filming took place in north London, in installments rarely lasting longer than about ten minutes. “Wherever we set up, the word would instantly get out that the Beatles were there,” director Richard Lester remembers. “After about three takes, we’d all have to run for our lives.”

Within this simple formula Lester managed to give the film both the gritty honesty of working-class dramas like
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
and the surreal artiness of something French or Italian. In its most memorable sequence, aboard an old-fashioned British Railways corridor train, the Beatles played “I Should Have Known Better” inside the guard’s van’s metal cage—first to an audience of glamorous gym-slipped schoolgirls, then as a soundtrack to their own private card game. Lester’s history with the Goons’
Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film
also came to the fore in a speeded-up comedy sequence recalling Mack Sennett’s silent-movie
Keystone Kops
. Escaping their pent-up life, the Beatles gamboled onto an open sports field and began to hold imaginary running and sack races. Not even Cliff Richard had presented so pure an image of pop-star innocence.

The film was supposed to have been called
Beatlemania
. Then, at the last minute, a far better and more Beatle-like title offered itself in a favorite phrase of Ringo Starr’s. Whenever a round of performing, recording, partying, and fleeing from fans had been particularly crazy, Ringo, in an unconscious paraphrase of Eugene O’Neill, would say it had been “a hard day’s night.” The eponymous album that came with the film was the first to consist entirely of Lennon-McCartney compositions, including “If I Fell,” “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You,” “I Should Have Known Better” (with “yeah yeah yeah” mutating into “hey hey hey”) and the title track with its gloriously long and irrelevant guitar coda. The material had mostly been written months earlier, between
crêpes flambées
at the George V. Yet the album evoked the film, just as the film caught Beatlemania at its maddest and happiest.

The film received a West End premiere in July, attended by Princess Margaret and her photographer husband, Lord Snowdon. “There was a big party afterward,” Walter Shenson says. “Nobody thought that Princess Margaret would agree to come to it, so no one invited her. I said we should at least
ask
. It turned out that she and Lord Snowdon had an engagement for dinner but that they’d love to be asked to stop in for a drink first.

“We were all in the anteroom, having drinks before going in to the food. George Harrison gave me a look and whispered: When do we eat? I told him, We can’t until Princess Margaret leaves.” She and Lord Snowdon had this other engagement but they stayed longer and longer at the Beatles’ party, having drinks, chatting. Finally George went across to Princess Margaret and said, ‘Ma’am—we’re starved, and Walter says we can’t eat until you leave.’ Princess Margaret just burst out laughing. ‘Come on, Tony,’ she called out. ‘We’re in the way.’”

A second premiere took place in Liverpool, accompanied by a civic welcome from the lord mayor. “The Beatles were nervous wrecks about that,” Walter Shenson says. “Even though they’d just come back from a world tour, they were scared about that appearance in Liverpool. “Ah,” they kept saying, “you don’t know what people are like up there.”

They drove in from Speke Airport, along the same Woolton avenues where Paul used to cycle with his guitar on his back, and where John would struggle along with the Quarry Men, carrying a tea chest. All the way, between bus stops, crowds stood waving and cheering. Paul, to his particular pleasure, recognized Dusty Durband, his English teacher from the Institute. And there, beyond what used to be Uncle George’s dairy, was the red sandstone tower of St. Peter’s, where the annual fete would soon be held.

There was a civic reception at the Town Hall, then the four former black-leather troglodytes from Mathew Street emerged onto the balcony with the lord mayor and other dignitaries to wave to the cheering throng below. Unbeknown to them, and the adoring media, the crowd was not composed entirely of well-wishers. A few hours earlier Brian Epstein had heard that leaflets were circulating throughout Liverpool naming a Beatle as the father of a young child recently born to one of their Cavern Club seraglio. Helped by his brother, Clive, Brian had tracked down the claimants and managed to buy their silence.

• • •

It was the year they conquered the world, but did not see it. For them the world shrank to a single dressing room, buried under continents of screaming. More than once, on their zigzag flight down back alleys between the hemispheres, they would ask which country this was. “It all looked the same to them,” Tony Bramwell says. “One more stage, one more limo, one more run for your life.”

In June they toured Scandinavia, Holland, the Far East, and Australasia. Ringo Starr was having his tonsils out and missed three-quarters of the journey; in his place sat Jimmy Nicol, a session drummer small and obscure enough to scotch any rumor of permanent change. Nicol drummed with them until Melbourne, where Ringo rejoined. History from then on relates nothing further of Jimmy Nicol.

Among the entourage for the tour’s Far East and Australian segment was John’s aunt Mimi. In Hong Kong, the police cleared a path for her, crying, “John Mama, John Mama.” The sight of Adelaide and three hundred thousand fans, the largest Beatles crowd ever, proved too much for Mimi’s nerves: After glimpsing New Zealand she flew home to Woolton. “I got into trouble,” Mimi said, “for telling an Australian TV man that John used to be bad at arithmetic when he was at school. So, on TV, this man said to him, ‘If you’re bad at maths, how do you count all that money you’re earning?’ ‘I don’t count it,’ John said. ‘I weigh it.’”

In August, they returned to America to find Beatlemania so rampant as to make the British and European variety seem muted by comparison. At one point in April the first five places in
Billboard
magazine’s Top 100 records were Beatles records.
A Hard Day’s Night
, opening in five hundred cinemas across the country, had earned $1.3 million in its first week. Cinema showings were accompanied by as much screaming as a live concert.

The Beatles, traveling in their own private Lockheed Electra, performed in twenty-three cities, crossing and recrossing American air space on a journey totalling 22,441 miles, or more than 600 miles per day. At times they did not know if they were in Jacksonville, Baltimore, Denver, Cincinnati, Detroit, or Atlantic City. Everywhere, there were mayors and senators and senators’ wives and sheriffs and deputies; there were the town’s most exclusive call girls; there were handicapped children, lined up in wheelchairs near the stage, and later brought into the Beatles’ dressing room as if to see or touch them might work a Lourdes-like miracle. The sight always filled John with horror, awakening the fear
of disability and disfigurement he had always tried to sublimate by pulling village-idiot faces and shambling around like the hunchback of Notre Dame. In the four’s private language, long before political correctness outlawed such words, “cripple” came to mean anyone in the dressing room who was making themself unwelcome. A murmur of “Cripples, Neil” to their roadie would be the signal for the room to be unceremoniously cleared, to their own seeming regret.

In San Francisco, at the Hilton Hotel, a woman guest was robbed and pistol-whipped, her cries unheard in the noise greeting the Beatles’ motorcade. At Love Field, Dallas, fans broke through the police barrier, climbed onto the aircraft wings, and belabored the windows with Coke bottles. Later at the hotel a chambermaid was kidnapped and threatened with a knife unless she revealed the location of the Beatles’ suite; other girls had to be rescued from the air-conditioning shaft. In Los Angeles, the postconcert escape plan featured an armored truck, all four tires of which proved to be flat. In Seattle, as the Beatles left the stage, a girl fell from an overhead girder, landing at Ringo’s feet. In Cleveland, they were physically dragged offstage while mounted police charged the arena, lassoing two hundred fans together in a giant net. In New York, the whole of Riverside Drive was cordoned off for their passing; in Toronto, they came in from the airport at 3:00
A.M.
, past seventeen miles of continuous parked cars. Each day the madness differed yet remained the same. It was cops and sweat and jelly beans hailing in dreamlike noise; it was faces uglied by shrieking and biting fists; it was huge amphitheaters left littered with flashbulbs and hair rollers and buttons and badges and hundreds of pairs of knickers, wringing wet.

Out of the itinerary of chaos, a single figure came to personify that ’64 American tour. His name was Charles O. Finley; he owned a baseball team, the Kansas City Athletics. He first approached Brian Epstein in San Francisco, offering one hundred thousand dollars if the Beatles would give an additional concert at his baseball stadium in Kansas City. He said he had promised Kansas City they would have the Beatles. Brian replied that the tour could not be extended.

Charles O. Finley did not give up. He reappeared in various other cities, increasing his offer by degrees to $150,000 if the Beatles would let him keep his promise to Kansas City. At length, in Seattle, as it became clear to Brian and Norman Weiss that the tour might not quite cover its gigantic overheads, Charles O. Finley and Kansas City took on a new
significance. It was up to the Beatles, Brian said, and whether they were willing to sacrifice one of their few rest days. The Beatles, playing cards with George Harrison of the
Liverpool Echo
, said they would leave it up to Brian. So, at the rate of £1,785 per minute, Charles O. Finley and Kansas City were not disappointed.

In New York, a brisk sale was reported in canned Beatles’ breath. In Denver, the bed linen they had used at two stopover hotels was bought by a business consortium and placed, unlaundered, in a maximum security bank vault. The sheets were cut into three-inch squares and sold at ten dollars per square, each one mounted on parchment and accompanied by a legal affadavit swearing it to have once formed part of a Beatle’s bed.

John Lennon started to put on weight. The face, under the Beatles fringe and the mocking, shortsighted eyes, grew rounder—more contented, so Cynthia hopefully thought. Cyn did not know what happened on tour, nor did she want to know. When she read the letters John received from girls, she laughed them off as he did, doing her best to mean it. She hoped that between tours he would settle down to his unenforced obligations as husband and father. And for a time, that did seem to please him—just staying in at night after Julian was asleep, smoking, reading, doodling, endlessly playing the same Bob Dylan records.

Paul McCartney was more and more often to be seen escorting Jane Asher to Belgravia parties and West End first nights. It clearly gave him huge satisfaction that Jane was not only a classy bird but also now becoming a celebrity in her own right as a stage and film actress and a panelist on television’s
Juke Box Jury
. With her tumbling red hair and his cheeky Beatles grin, they made a perfect couple and seemed totally wrapped up in each other—unless some big star appeared on the horizon to divert Paul’s attention. “Paul and Jane came out to a dinner party with my wife and me one night,” Walter Shenson said. “Joan Sutherland, the opera singer, just happened to be there. Paul zeroed in on her at once. He left Jane with me and my wife and stayed talking to Joan for the rest of the evening.”