John Lennon: The Life (44 page)

Despite the relentless pressure to be commercial and formulaic, they were also managing to write songs that had nothing to do with the feverish ebb and flow of the charts, songs that on very first hearing seemed like old favorites—instant standards. There was, for instance, nothing else around remotely like John’s “This Boy,” the slow ballad on the B-side of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Nothing like its economy and neat antithesis—this boy loves you; that boy will hurt you. Nothing like the harmonizing of John, Paul, and George—as close as only three could be who’d kept each other warm in the back of a freezing van. Nothing like John’s bravura solo vocal—the heart-on-sleeve passion and tenderness that so impressed William Mann in the
Times
, and made Vernons Girl Maureen’s fingernails dig so agonizingly into her friend’s palm.

Indeed, as 1963 moved to a close, both John and Paul began hinting that songwriting would be their safety net once Beatlemania had blown over. Giving “I Wanna Be Your Man” to the Rolling Stones was not only a typically openhearted gesture; it also looked like insurance for the future, even if John did always dismiss the song as “a throwaway.”

With the New Year, all those wise predictions seemed to be coming true rather sooner than expected. A three-week stint of concerts at the Olympia theater in Paris received a muted reception, suggesting that Beatlemania had not even crossed the Channel. Back in Britain, meanwhile, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was pushed from the number one spot by a London group, the Dave Clark Five, and their so-called Tottenham Sound. The
Daily Mail
published a cartoon of a teenage girl being regarded with pity by her friends. “She must be really old-fashioned,” the caption said. “She remembers the Beatles.” Having built them up, Fleet Street seemed to be preparing, in time-honored fashion, to knock them down again.

Then America fell.

O
n the cold, snow-flecked afternoon of February 7, 1964, the Beatles’ Pan Am jet touched down in New York before a crowd of ecstatic humanity such as had never greeted any foreigner setting foot on American soil. It was an airport scene as jubilant, in its way as epoch-making, as Charles Lindbergh’s arrival in Le Bourget after the first solo Atlantic flight or Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” return from Munich. For millions of young Americans, it would be the moment when the Sixties finally got going in earnest. What tends to be forgotten is how dumbfounded the Beatles themselves were by their reception.

A few days before departure, yet another plummy-voiced television reporter had asked John how he rated their chances of success where so many other British pop acts had failed. His obvious unease came out in a tone of heavy sarcasm. “Well, I can’t really say, can I? I mean, is it up to me? No!” Then, with a hasty backpedal to Beatle niceness: “I mean, I just hope we go all right.”

Much later he was to admit, “We didn’t think we stood a chance. Cliff [Richard] went to America and died. He was fourteenth on the bill with Frankie Avalon. We knew Brian had plans…but we thought at least we could hear the sounds [new music] when we came over. That’s the truth…. We just went over to buy LPs.”

The visit originally set up by Brian in late 1963 had been no more than a low-key promotional exercise. Capitol Records, having passed up the first four Beatles singles, had, rather grudgingly, agreed to release “I Want to Hold Your Hand” early in January. The four were booked to appear on NBC-TV’s
Ed Sullivan Show
—which had famously introduced Elvis Presley to America—and to give two performances at New York’s illustrious Carnegie Hall. Though all undoubtedly feathers in Brian’s managerial cap, none of these was a guarantee of cracking the record charts.

But fate once again seemed to be working as their press agent. In the national gloom following President Kennedy’s death, American news organizations cast around for some light relief and lit upon the four funny-haired Liverpudlians who were apparently sending Britain barmy. By Christmas, both
Time
and
Newsweek
and just about every American paper with a European bureau had published extensive accounts of Beatlemania. Even the parochial
New Yorker
interviewed Brian and quoted his prophecy that “the Beatles…will hit this country for six….” On December 31, all-powerful
Life
magazine gave them a seventeen-page cover story; four days later, they made their first American television appearance via a film clip on CBS’s
Jack Paar Show
.

In the face of this surprise publicity gusher, Capitol hastily multiplied its pressing of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by five, to one million copies. The company also printed whole rain forests’ worth of promotional matter, ordered its strategists to make 1964 the Year of the Beatles, and readied its sales force for a mass wearing of Beatle wigs. Strangely, the Beatles themselves knew nothing of the gathering storm until late on January 25, when they returned to their suite at the George V Hotel in Paris, disgruntled with their performance at the Olympia and fearing annihilation by the Dave Clark Five’s Tottenham Sound. Then came the transatlantic call to Brian, saying
that in
Cash Box
magazine’s Top 100, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had jumped from nowhere straight to number one.

When the four left London-Heathrow on February 7, they were regarded not as pop musicians out to make a quick dollar but as ambassadors at the level of senior politicians or Test cricket teams. Even the least pop-friendly of their countrymen and-women shared a sense that they were batting for Britain, that national pride as well as private ambition demanded they should return victorious.

The situation in the American record charts by now verged on the farcical. Not only was “I Want to Hold Your Hand” still number one and selling ten thousand copies per day in New York alone, but Capitol’s former rejects “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You” had been remarketed by their respective pickup labels, and both instantly shot into the Top 10. The Polydor label had looked into its vaults, found the tracks the Beatles had recorded pseudonymously long ago in Hamburg with Tony Sheridan, and issued their version of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” which, as George said bitterly, was “a laff.” Even that was surfing up the Hot 100, not far behind “From Me to You” and the album track “I Saw Her Standing There.”

In addition to four thousand screaming, finger-crossing fans, the media pack who saw them off received an unexpected bonus story. Among the Beatles’ party was a shy-looking young woman, dressed up for traveling after the northern manner in a coffee-colored PVC coat and a white hat with a brim, clearly meant as a companion to John’s Lenin cap. It was, indeed, Cynthia Lennon, released from purdah at long last. Why he chose this moment to bring her into the limelight, violating the rock-’n’-roller’s first principle of “no wives on the road,” puzzled everyone in his circle. Tony Barrow thinks he did so purely on impulse, to make a power point with Brian. “None of the others was allowed to bring a female companion, so John said, ‘Fuck it, I’m having Cyn.’ But it was a decision he came to regret—and so did she.”

Less sought after by photographers, though not from choice, was a sharp-faced young American who, even on this bleak winter’s day, wore sunglasses both outside and indoors and displayed all the showy furtiveness of some master criminal on the run. Twenty-three-year-
old Phil Spector was the prototype of an entirely new species, the boy pop tycoon. As a songwriter, his hits had begun with John’s old Cavern standby “To Know Her Is to Love Her”; as a producer, he had created the tumultuous Wall of Sound, resembling a hundred car crashes in harmony, behind chart-topping girl groups like the Crystals and the Ronettes.

Spector was returning to America, after watching the Ronettes on a British tour with the Rolling Stones. Through the Stones and their own would-be boy tycoon, Andrew Oldham, Spector had gotten to know the Beatles, thus connecting John with a mighty influence on his music, past and to come. Spector then brought the Beatles and Ronettes together at a party given by promotion man Tony Hall. “My girls,” as their producer jealously called them, were two sisters, Ronnie and Estelle Bennett, and their cousin Nedra Talley, all three stunning stick insects with piled-up hair and Cleopatra eyes. John and an equally besotted George lost no time in asking the trio to join the flight to New York. Spector, however, insisted that his girls should return home on an earlier plane, while only he traveled with the Beatles. Already legendarily neurotic, he believed that no aircraft carrying such a lucky quartet could possibly crash.

The other passengers were mostly favored journalists like Maureen Cleave (whose
Evening Standard
editors remained far from convinced that her trip would be worthwhile) and British businessmen hoping to do merchandise deals with Brian in the relative privacy of midair. The Beatles’ nonstop in-flight clowning masked inner trepidation, even superconfident Paul reflecting, “They’ve got everything over there. What do they want us for?” While the “monk” side of John was in heartfelt agreement, the “performing flea” felt an illogical optimism. “On the plane…I was thinking, ‘Oh, no, we won’t make it,’ but that’s that side of me,” he later told an American interviewer. “We knew we would wipe you out if we could just get a grip.”

Many pioneers in the black art of hype would later claim credit for the spectacle at JFK Airport—the tiers of banner-waving girls who made British Beatlemania a silent movie by comparison, the screaming that multiplied Spector’s Wall of Sound to infinity. It’s certainly
true that by the time the Beatles hit New York, seventeen different promotion men were involved in pumping up the event to maximum volume. But the pandemonium that broke loose as the aircraft nosed to a final stop and its door opened was way beyond any PR artifice or manipulation. It remains perhaps our happiest image of John as he pauses on the stairs, airline bag on shoulder, black leather cap pushed back, as laughingly lost for words as everyone else.

They were not quite home free. At Kennedy Airport they faced a hard-boiled New York media corps, most of whom had come with the avowed intention of slaughtering them. They triumphed with what was perhaps the earliest known deployment of the sound bite, John’s the most biting of all. Would they play something? “We need money first.” What was it about them that excited young girls so much? “If we knew, we’d form a group ourselves and be managers.” Were they really wig-wearing baldies? “Oh, we’re all bald, yeah—and deaf and dumb.” America was more sensitive than Britain about physical disability, and that final little flourish might have been expected to offend somebody among the packed newspeople, if not among those who watched it or read it. But no one even seemed to hear.

Among the lens-leveling hordes were the brothers Albert and David Maysles, two soft-spoken Bostonians already noted for the distinctive cinema and TV documentaries they produced in partnership. Only hours before the Beatles’ touchdown, British Granada Television had contacted the Maysles brothers, requesting footage of New York’s welcome, or otherwise, for rush transmission on the home network. In the end, they tagged along with the Beatles’ media retinue for the whole visit. Dispensing with any crew but themselves, using the latest small handheld cameras, they achieved a degree of invisibility and intimacy with their subjects that even the most favored of British chroniclers could not. The resultant black-and-white film shows Sixties pop life at its simplest and most innocent, just as a later Maysles production,
Gimme Shelter
, would show it at its ugliest.

The Maysleses’ narrative begins in earnest inside the Beatles’ suite at the Plaza Hotel, as crowds even wilder than at the airport heave against chains of blue-coated police twelve floors below. We can see John and the others, still crumpled and dazed from their flight,
absorbing the special atmosphere of a New York grand hotel, the Versailles-splendid brocades and chandeliers, the gleaming, towel-stuffed bathrooms, the flesh-colored telephones that ring with a single polite purr, the gold-crested pens, ashtrays, notepads, coasters, and matchbooks, the outsize tumblers of ice water, the real-life voices uttering phrases heard a thousand times from the cinema screen: “Room service,” “Valet,” “You’re welcome,” “Aw-righty!” “Have a nice day.”

We share their wide-eyed amazement at the sumptuous choice of New York entertainment media in comparison with Britain’s miserly one: the six or seven television channels and scores of radio stations—almost all of the latter playing their music virtually nonstop. Children on Christmas morning could not be more thrilled as they discover it is possible to call up a radio show in midbroadcast, then hear themselves on air via the transistor radios shaped like Pepsi Cola vending machines that have been artfully product-placemented into the suite. We see John on the line to
Saturday Club
’s Brian Matthew back in London, evidently concerned lest British Beatles fans’ ardor should cool even in this short absence. “Tell ’em not to forget…. We’re only away for ten days…We’re thinking of ’em.”

We join the first outdoor photo op, across the road in Central Park: just John, Paul, and Ringo (George was confined to bed with a sore throat) doing “Hello, New York” poses for a gaggle of tabloid lensmen in short overcoats and Cossack hats, who address them as “You…the fellow on the right” or “Hey…Beatle!” Hindsight gives this routine scene a horrible irony. Just across the park lies a craggy Gothic pile known as the Dakota Building where, it so happens, the elder Maysles brother, Albert, has an apartment. Mugging dutifully for the cameras in the icy-fingered cold, John has no inkling of the place where he will one day live, and die.

In contrast with the crowds on the street and the deejays on the air, the Plaza reacted in horror to its twelfth-floor VIPs, lodging an almost immediate demand for them to settle their account, even making radio appeals for any other Manhattan hotel to take them over. During the endless photo sessions up in their suite, one cameraman requested John to lie on a bed, the better to show off what
Americans termed his “pixie boots.” A hovering Plaza official protested this was not the image the hotel wished to project, and besides, the coverlet might be damaged. “It’s all right,” John reassured him, “we’ll buy the bed.”

One essential ground rule imposed on the Maysles brothers’ documentary was that Cynthia Lennon must be kept out of frame. Although John’s British fans might know he was married, his new American ones were to have their illusions preserved for as long as possible. Now and then, a sequence of him on the phone to some radio show accidentally includes Cynthia, wearing a neat white blouse and dark glasses, never saying a word or having one addressed to her, pretending stoic indifference to the “beautiful, willowy girls” (including Ronnie of the Ronettes) who had surrounded John and the other three from the moment they arrived.

Apart from hotel suites and television studios, John saw almost nothing of the city that had towered over his imagination since childhood. Capitol Records laid on a brief limo trip of major uptown landmarks, which, at the Beatles’ request, was extended to the safer part of Harlem. Their disc jockey–guardian, Murray the K, organized a night at the Peppermint Lounge, home of the New York twist and Joey Dee and the Starliters, where the house band had already switched to Beatle mimicry. Returning to their Plaza suite in the small hours, John and Cynthia were ambushed by photographers, whom they thwarted by putting John’s coat over both their heads and scuttling round a corner. For those few moments, giggling under cover together as of old, Cyn had fun.

The Beatles’ appearance on the
Ed Sullivan Show
of February 9 was to place them in American history in a way that never quite happened back in Britain. Effectively, it signaled the end of mourning for Jack Kennedy, through an event as hugely harmless as the one of November 22 had been hugely horrible—a heartening reminder to the whole nation of its unique ability to give its whole heart; living proof there could be happier ways of always henceforth recalling exactly where one was at a particular moment.