Shout! (38 page)

Months passed, the summer worsened, the Profumo affair ran on, and on. Christine Keeler disappeared, then reappeared. Profumo resigned in disgrace. Stephen Ward was arrested for living off immoral earnings. Every newspaper front page, day after day, steamed with the torrid, frequently horrid, doings of Christine Keeler and her associate, Mandy Rice-Davies. And gradually the surfeit of sex and scandal passed the limit that even the British public could absorb. Attention moved away from Profumo and on to the prime minister who had so indolently accepted the lie of his fellow aristocrat. Harold Macmillan, after eleven years in office, was reexamined in a new and searching light. What it revealed was scarcely credible as a twentieth-century politician. A dusty old man in a walrus moustache hummed and hawed in the accent that had ruled Britain for a thousand years, but which now signified only complacency, crassness, and the natural conspiracy between men who shared the same private school and club.

No newspaper will ever admit to there being too much news. But to Fleet Street, in the summer of 1963, that condition was perilously close. Stephen Ward committed suicide on the eve of his trial; then, five days later, a second colossal story broke. A mail train on its way from Scotland to London was waylaid and robbed of 2 million pounds, the largest haul in criminal history. The search for the gang was then pushed off the front pages by Macmillan’s belated resignation and the struggle within the Tory party to choose his successor. By the end of September every editor in Fleet Street was longing for a diversion from this incessant heavy news—something light; something unconnected with the aristocratic classes; something harmless, blameless, and above all, cheerful.

The
Daily Mirror
found the answer first. The
Mirror
in those days belonged to the same publishing group as
Melody Maker
, Britain’s oldest
established music newspaper. On September 11,
Melody Maker
announced the results of a poll among its readers to find the year’s most popular record artists. The Beatles—who had barely scraped into the 1962 poll—came out as top British group. Billy J. Kramer was named in the same poll as “Brightest Hope for 1964.”

As well as a fraternal story about the poll, the
Mirror
ran a two-page profile of the Beatles by its acerbic show-business columnist, Donald Zec. Under the headline “Four Frenzied Little Lord Fauntleroys Who Are Earning £5,000 a Week” Zec described the scenes he had witnessed among young girls at a Beatles concert in Luton, Bedfordshire. He afterward had the Beatles to tea at his flat, an ordeal that they survived with high spirits enough to drain all vitriol from the columnist’s pen. They were, Donald Zec said, “as nice a group of well-mannered music makers as you’ll find perforating the eardrum anywhere.”

Other papers, too, were awakening to the existence of a population whose chief interest was not oversexed cabinet ministers but a pop record whose wild “yeah, yeah, yeah” chorus kept piercing the summer static. For “She Loves You,” having gone straight to number one on advance orders of half a million copies, was still there, almost two months after its release. Radio disk jockeys such as Brian Matthew no longer even bothered to announce it. “Do you realize,” Matthew frequently enquired of his listeners, “how many songs in the current Top Ten are written by, if not sung by, the Beatles?”

To Brian Epstein, this was still no more than a facet of success on every front. Brian’s big autumn project was the launch of NEMS Enterprises’ first female artist. Priscilla White, the Cavern Club’s gawky cloakroom girl, now renamed Cilla Black, was to be, not a discovery like the Beatles and Gerry but a
creation
, wrought by Brian’s own feminine taste. For weeks, he had lavished attention on Cilla; on her clothes, her hair, her makeup. He had taken her to George Martin, and Martin—privately thinking her a “Cavern screamer”—had recorded her singing the Lennon-McCartney song “Love of the Loved.” Tony Barrow, in Monmouth Street, was producing the usual stylish NEMS press release, describing Cilla’s recherché taste for wearing men’s jeans, and relaying Cavern Club slang such as “gear,” “fab,” and “endsville.”

On October 13, the Beatles were due to appear on British television’s top-rated variety program,
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
. The
show went out live on Sunday nights from the famous old, gilt-encrusted theater, in Argyll Street, just off Oxford Circus. In form it was straight music hall, with jugglers, trampolinists, a “Beat the Clock” interlude in which members of the audience underwent ritual self-humiliation, and finally a top-of-the-bill act that was quite likely to be the pop singing sensation of the moment. At the end, the entire cast stood on a revolving platform among chorus girls and giant letters spelling out
SUNDAY NIGHT AT THE LONDON PALLADIUM
.

News of the engagement had circulated among Beatles fans and there were girls waiting on Argyll Street that Sunday morning when the Beatles arrived at the Palladium to rehearse. The photographer Dezo Hoffman, who accompanied them, counted “about eight girls. The car drew up—we went inside, no trouble.” Since rehearsals lasted all day the Beatles were provided with a roast lamb lunch in their dressing room. While they were eating it a group of girls ran into the auditorium and had to be ejected.

The show that night broke all precedent by putting on its top-of-the-bill act first, for a few seconds only. Bruce Forsyth, the emcee, then appeared and stuck out his long chin. “If you want to see them again,” Forsyth taunted, “they’ll be back in forty-two minutes.” That final, short, inaudible performance, before they hurried aboard the revolving stage, was watched by an audience of 15 million.

Next morning, every mass-circulation British newspaper carried a front-page picture and story of riots by Beatles fans outside the London Palladium. “Police fought to hold back 1,000 squealing teenagers,” the
Daily Mirror
said, “as the Beatles made their getaway after their Palladium TV show.” Both the
Daily Mail
and
Daily Express
had pictures of the four Beatles peeping out in supposed dread of a mob, this time said to number five hundred. “A Police motorcade stood by,” the
Mirror
continued, “as the four pop idols dashed for their car. Then the fans went wild, breaking through a cordon of more than 60 Policemen” (20, the
Express
said). “With engines racing, the cavalcade roared down Argyll Street and turned into Oxford Circus, heading for a celebration party at the Grosvenor House hotel.”

This official outbreak of Beatlemania in Britain has certain puzzling aspects. In every case, the published photograph of those “1,000 squealing teenagers” was cropped in so close that only three or four could be seen. The
Daily Mail
alone published a wide-angle shot—Paul McCartney
and Neil Aspinall emerging from the Palladium, watched by one policeman and two girls.

“There were
no
riots,” Dezo Hoffman says. “I was there. Eight girls we saw—even less than eight. Later on, the road managers were sent out to find the Beatles a girl each, and there were
none
.”

ELEVEN

“EVEN THE JELLY BABIES ARE SYMBOLIC”

I
n 1963, the simple fact was, Britain’s population had become unbalanced by a vast surplus of people under eighteen. The decline in infant mortality, together with the mysterious nonappearance of a third world war, had allowed an entire generation to grow up virtually intact. They were the babies born after 1945 and raised in a Britain struggling to transform itself from postwar drabness to the material well-being so long observed and envied in America. Cars, radios, washing machines, all the luxuries still cherished by their parents were, to these young people, simply the mundane furniture of life. Television spread the whole world before them, to be casually viewed and judged. In 1960, the kindly Macmillan government abolished the two-year period of compulsory military service that had shaped young men’s lives since the end of World War II. For those between sixteen and twenty-one no obligation remained save that of spending their ever-increasing pocket money on the amusements demanded by their ever-quickening glands.

Pop music was the most obvious sign of youth’s growing economic power. What had begun in 1956 as a laughable, disreputable adolescent outburst was now an industry turning over 100 million pounds each year. The attitude toward teenagers remained largely unchanged: They were, as in 1956, a puzzling, fractious element of the population, endlessly deplored and advised by politicians, headmasters, and clergymen. They were also a market, undreamed of in size and potential, to be wooed and cajoled by the retail trade at every level.

The British teenage girl of early 1963 faithfully reflected the numerous boom industries who battled for her weekly pay packet. Her hair, teased up into a huge hollow bouffant, or “beehive,” represented hours spent at the hairdressing salon and in arduous private back-combing and curling with heated rollers. Her face was deathly white but for two coal-black eyes embellished with false lashes like those popularized by the singer Dusty Springfield. She wore trousers, or “trews,” with loops
under each foot, but more usually a formal dress with a wasp-tight waist and a full skirt ballooned by starch-stiffened petticoats into the semblance of an outsized tea cosy. Her shoes, invariably matching her handbag, were white or beige with winklepicker points and the stiletto heels that had wrought destruction on polished dance floors across the land.

Her boyfriend was an even more interesting sight, for young males were gradually reviving the conventions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in dressing as colorfully as females. He might be a mod, a faction of which went in for ostentatiously neat Italian suits and trilby hats and rode about on Vespa or Lambretta motor scooters. He might, on the other hand, be a rocker, the heirs of the fifties Teds, who favored the macho look of early Elvis rock ’n’ roll, draped themselves in black leather, decorated themselves with tattoos, and aspired only to do a “ton” (100 mph) on their thunderous motorcycles. The mods and rockers had sprung up in 1963, simultaneously and with an instant mutual loathing of one another. All that summer, in innocent seaside resorts like Clacton and Margate, their set-piece battles had surged back and forth, trampling day-trippers, deck chairs, and children’s sand castles.

In autumn, the mod–rocker war was eclipsed by a new kind of teenage excess that was not new but was louder and wilder than Britain had ever known it before. Television and cinema newsreels added live pictures to those appearing daily in all the national papers. The pictures showed girls in their hollow-spun bouffants and spectral make-up, their black eye make-up running in rivulets down their faces. The sound was of incessant screaming.

Girls had screamed for pop stars before, but never quite like this. Never—as they did at the Beatles’ Cambridge concert—hunched into a fetal position, alternately punching their sides, covering their eyes, and stuffing handkerchiefs and fists into their mouths. Later, when the curtain had fallen and the last dazed girl had been led through the exits, a further difference from the screams that greeted Valentino became manifest. Hundreds of the cinema seats were wringing wet. Many had puddles of urine beneath them.

Such scenes had been commonplace for six months already: The difference now was that newspapers reported them. Fleet Street had realized that the Beatles were more than a momentary diversion—they were
a running story of guaranteed reader interest. The riots faked on Argyll Street were to be seen, ten times more spectacularly, along the route of their current package tour. On October 26 in Carlisle—the small border town they had last seen as nobodies with Helen Shapiro—six hundred fans stood in line for thirty-six hours to buy tickets. When the box office opened, the line moved forward with such ardor that nine people were crushed and had to receive hospital treatment.

Fleet Street’s initial line was simply reporting on the girls’ hysteria. It changed the moment someone took the trouble to visit the Beatles’ dressing room. There, in the tiny space hemmed in by teacups and stage-suit bags, the hacks found what every journalist craves and what he will distort the plainest fact to manufacture—good quotes. For when John and Paul got going no one had to invent the dialogue.

“How long do you think the group will last, John?”

“About five years.”

“Are those wigs you’re wearing?”

“If they are, they must be the only wigs with dandruff.”

“What kind of guitar is that, Paul?”

“It’s a Hofner violin bass. Here, take a look.” The bass—now widely copied by other groups—would be tossed into the startled questioner’s lap.

“Are they expensive?”

“Fifty-six guineas. I could afford a better one but I’m a skinflint.”

Ringo, still unsure of himself, would be coaxed forward to say a mordant word or two. If asked why he wore so many rings on his fingers, he replied it was because he couldn’t get them all through his nose. “I don’t like talking,” he explained. “Some people gab all day and some people play it smogo. I haven’t got a smiling face or a talking mouth.”

George, unless specially asked for, would remain apart, his hollow face cupped in a high black turtle neck, his eyes under the Beatle bangs not happy. He would tune guitars assiduously, John’s as well as his own, despite knowing they had not the remotest chance of being heard. Even at this early stage, the fan uproar, the flailing screams and toys and jelly babies, were a source of detestation to him.

Certain journalists, on the strength of past favors, were exempt from the moments when Neil Aspinall, at a secret signal, would clear the Beatles’ dressing room of the press. Maureen Cleave from the
Evening Standard
was one such: John Lennon called her “the Just William woman.”
Another was Ray Coleman, from
Melody Maker
. The Beatles liked
MM
because it troubled to discuss their musicianship as well as the riots. Coleman, a quiet, clerkly figure, would stand in the wings, telling John the words of songs that, even though John himself had written them, he could barely remember from day to day. Usually, when he ran on stage, the words would be written on the back of his hand.