The Beatles (105 page)

They’d already been through this with the cripples. At the outset of Beatlemania, handicapped or deformed children were wheeled into the theaters and placed along the front, at the foot of the stage, before each performance as a goodwill measure. “
We were only trying to play
rock ’n roll and they’d be wheeling them in, not just in wheelchairs but sometimes in oxygen tents,” recalled George. “We’d come out of the bandroom to go to the stage and we’d be fighting our way through all these poor unfortunate people.” To make matters worse, they were the only part of the audience the Beatles could see from the stage, and the distraction was unimaginable. John would gaze down at a child whose drool hung in a solid string from mouth to lap, and he’d pfumpf a line. Spastics trying to clap would accidentally smack themselves in the face. Epileptics would have seizures in the middle of songs. “You felt like you were at
the shrine at Lourdes
,” says Nat Weiss. Even after the shows, it never let up. “
Crippled people were constantly
being brought backstage to be touched by a Beatle,” remembered Ringo. Parents would traipse into the dressing room with terribly deformed children who had no idea where they were or who they were looking at, and then
the parents would leave.
“They’d go off for tea or whatever, and they would leave [the kids] behind.”

Fed up with the continued imposition, John took to doing “spastic impersonations” while onstage. According to Paul, “
he had a habit of putting
a clear plastic bag on his foot with a couple of rubber bands” and stumbling around in a circle, until Brian had seen enough. “Finally, he took it upon himself to say ‘no’ to every request by the parents of these kids and even to the hospital wards,” says Nat Weiss. “It was depressing the Beatles, and he couldn’t expose them to it any longer.”

Nada. Non. Nein.

Early in July, after looking over their schedule, Brian announced to the press that contrary to the group’s usual practice, the Beatles would not be doing any radio or TV appearances to promote their new record. He was imposing a media blackout, although he didn’t call it that, and to underscore his point, he canceled their appearances on
Ready, Steady, Go!,
on
Top of the Pops,
and on
Thank Your Lucky Stars,
substituting, in lieu of the boys, a rather feeble clip of the Beatles lip-syncing to “Help!”

The very next day, predictably, the tabloids made headlines out of the announcement, overshadowing an Australian initiative in Vietnam, and fans across Great Britain reached for their pens and fired off angry letters to local editors, damning the Beatles as insensitive prima donnas. “
These lads have become
far too big for their boots,” wrote Anne Laury of Harrogate, “and it’s time the fans paid them back and quit forking out their hard-earned pocket money to buy their records.” Another disappointed teenager complained, “
I used to be
one of the Beatles’ biggest fans… BUT I’m beginning to wonder….” An
NME
poll of its readers revealed that a majority of fans felt cheated, accusing the Beatles of “taking a leaf from Mr. Presley’s book.” Still, Brian stood firm, and just in case that wasn’t crystal-clear, NEMS dashed off a press release emphasizing that the Beatles would “
definitely not tour Britain
” for the remainder of the year.

The strategy behind this maneuver was entirely pragmatic. Brian had no intention of alienating anyone; he had argued with the Beatles for years about staying accessible to the fans. But John’s second book of nonsense,
A Spaniard in the Works,
was published in early July, earning mostly puzzled, if not outright negative, reviews, and soon after that
Help!
took a beating from the once-adoring critics, with
NME
calling it “
100 minutes of nonsense
” and, worse, “
unfunny
.” Part of the backlash, Brian was convinced, arose from the Beatles’ being everywhere at once—in print, on record, in the news, on the telly, in the movies. “It was saturation point,” John agreed. “You couldn’t walk down a street without having us staring at you.” It stood to reason that when the press finally got good and bored with singing the band’s praise, they’d amuse themselves by taking potshots.
Making the Beatles scarce took them out of the critical crosshairs. It would offset the constant glare of exposure, giving them distance and creating demand. “
We need less exposure
, not more,” George said. “It’s been Beatles, Beatles, Beatles.”

Whether George realized it or not, the audience wasn’t tired of the Beatles as much as grown weary of the Beatles’ glossy personae. While “
the Beatles had inspired
an upheaval in pop music, mores, fashion, hairstyles, and manners,” as Robert Shelton wrote, a new attitude was developing among rock ’n roll partisans that had no musical antecedent and distanced itself from the tame protopop that, up to now, had sustained the form. Its enthusiasts, who defined themselves culturally instead of by age, offered a tough, toothier alternative—
rock,
as opposed to rock ’n roll—steeped in gritty urban blues, art school romanticism, and folk music’s outsider intellectualism. A trend emerged, inspiring songs with more meaningful lyrics intent on saying something about reality, conformity, and injustice.

The spectacle of four irrepressible woolly-jumpered lads shaking their hair and trilling,
“Oooooooooo,”
was inadequate for the emerging rock culture, and the Beatles knew it. “
Things were changing
,” Paul realized. “The direction was moving away from the poppy stuff, like ‘Thank You Girl,’ ‘From Me to You,’ and ‘She Loves You.’ ” Shrewdly, the Beatles anticipated the need to move with it.

All of that, however, took a backseat to the upcoming American tour.

By the end of the first week in August, the preparations were all but complete. The bags were packed, the wives and girlfriends provided for. John and Paul spent one of their last days in London producing a cover of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” for the Silkie, a quartet of long-faced Hull University students that Brian had signed to NEMS; otherwise, most of the last-minute arrangements focused not on music but on real estate. Ringo and Maureen closed a deal on a small but graceful estate, Sunny Heights, literally around the corner from John and Cynthia’s place in Weybridge. With a baby on the way and the ongoing harassment from fans, they felt it was easier to live in the suburbs. Paul didn’t share their concerns and was about to be ensconced in his handsome, newly renovated three-story Regency house on Cavendish Avenue, near Abbey Road. George had already moved into a modest California-style bungalow in Esher, about twenty miles south of the city. And in one final and overdue act of generosity, John bought Aunt Mimi an ivy-covered cottage in Poole, set in a
loose cluster of houses just off the dunes, with a long front porch and a bay window that gave a huge, breathtaking view of the English Channel.

Finally, on the morning of August 13, as a heat wave swept in and scorched the streets with ribbons of heat, the Beatles and their entourage piled into the first-class cabin of a Pan Am Clipper and took off into the desolate white sky, leaving the last traces of innocence behind.

No sooner had the Beatles touched down in New York than the shift in the scene was evident. Music was everywhere; it seemed to have taken over the streets. They not only heard the new groove on the radio but could
see
it in the styles as well as the manner in which the kids carried themselves. Everywhere they turned there was a residue of the cultural fallout. The airwaves were awash in popular records by the Byrds, Sonny and Cher, Jody Miller, the Turtles, the Dixie Cups, and Bob Dylan. “The Eve of Destruction” belabored the stinging social message by whining, “This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’.” Even the Righteous Brothers, their throwaway opening act from the last U.S. tour, had hijacked the Top Ten with the symphonic tearjearker “Unchained Melody,” and as the Beatles’ caravan of limos plodded like circus elephants into the city, everyone inside remarked how cool and sexy the Brothers’ last hit, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” had turned out.
Little did they know
that, at that very moment, Mick Jagger was aboard the luxury yacht
Princess
moored in the Hudson River, dancing on deck to a test pressing he’d been given of the new Bob Dylan single, “Like a Rolling Stone.”

The scene had shifted slightly downtown and farther west, to the Warwick Hotel at Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, but gone was the “
happy hysteria
” evident during the Beatles’ previous visits. This crowd was determined—ferocious. About fifteen hundred strong, they confounded the more than one hundred “tense and red-faced” cops who were brought in to provide security at the hotel, breaking through barricades and storming police lines. Everywhere one looked there were scuffles, aggression, and discord, not only between female fans and the police but also with malevolent construction workers who egged on the violence from atop nearby scaffolding.

Gone was the innocence that had accompanied the previous tour. There was no official greeting at the airport, no prearranged waving to the
fans; despite a heavy turnout at Kennedy Airport, the boys remained completely out of sight throughout the arrival process. Later, at the requisite press conference, they showed none of the staccato wit that paced earlier performances. Their answers came fast, to be sure, but were strained and with a contemptuous edge, indicating how bored they had become with the “
farcical affairs
.” Even the hotel situation grew strange. Outside of a few scheduled appearances, the Beatles remained locked in the
Governor’s Suite
on the thirty-third floor. There was no sneaking off to a restaurant or club, none of the easy socializing with deejays and the press. Part of this turnabout might be ascribed to drugs; the Beatles didn’t mind drinking scotch and Cokes or cursing in front of journalists, but smoking dope was too dicey. Or they’d simply had it with the barrage of inane questions.

The only visitors to the suite were other performers, some old friends reasserting old claims, with new acquaintances scrambling for a place in the entourage. Frank Sinatra, who once derided the Beatles as “
unfit to sing in public
,” sent a valet bearing an invitation to a private party. (The Beatles politely declined.) Bob Dylan and Del Shannon arrived early, to much hurrahs, followed by the Supremes, who were treated to “the coolest reception [they’d] ever received.” The girls showed up alone, without their handlers, looking like porcelain figurines, outfitted in precious day dresses accented with hats, gloves, costume jewelry, and little fur wraps. One can only imagine the impression this made on the Beatles, considering they were stoned and behaving in an excessively silly manner. “We felt we had interrupted something,” recalled Mary Wilson, who couldn’t fathom what the boys kept laughing about and left in a flash with Florence and Diana.

Ronnie Spector wasn’t “so square,” like the Supremes, but even she “
sensed that something strange
was in the air” since the Ronettes’ last visit in 1964. Sometime after she arrived, Spector recalled, John steered her into one of the bedrooms, where a handpicked audience was packed along the walls watching a young girl have “sex every which way” with “one of the guys in the Beatles entourage.” Then, in another bedroom, with liquor and a magnificent view to embolden him, John tried to talk her into a more intimate scene.

The atmosphere surrounding the Beatles was turning cruel and pitiless. Instead of reshaping their image, they were sharpening it in ways that offered no identifiable quality. Most everyone who came into contact with them could feel it. Larry Kane, the young Miami newscaster who had accompanied the previous tour, rejoined them in New York and was startled by the edge of detachment that had crept over the entourage. “
It was alarming how hard-shelled
everyone had become,” Kane says. “There was a kind of Us and Them mentality to protect against the outside world.” The Beatles had always been circumspect, even distrustful, toward outsiders. “Now, there was an ambiguousness about everything, a way in which they kept you off balance. One moment they could be playful or attentive; if they were in a bad mood, however, they might try to intimidate you—or simply freeze you out. You never knew what to expect. And I got the sense that they liked it that way.”