The Beatles (90 page)

The world of film, however, was alien and precarious.

The Beatles began production on their as-yet-untitled movie on Monday, March 2, in London. Early that morning, a good-size crowd had gathered along Platform Five at Paddington Station, from where the cast and crew were scheduled to depart for six days of shooting aboard a slow-moving British Rail car that would shuttle between various locations in the West Country.

Awkward introductions were made in haste. The Beatles met several of their costars, including Wilfrid Brambell, John Junkin, and Norman Rossington, then joined Actors’ Equity at the behest of a union official who painstakingly wrote out four membership cards amid the pushing and shoving on the platform. Director Richard Lester, who stood on the periphery, held his breath as he watched the scene unfold. The first day of a movie was always a bit ticklish, but this one was riddled with uncertainty. The Beatles seemed perfectly comfortable performing onstage, but as Lester realized, film was an altogether different medium, requiring a different
set of skills. He had no idea if they could deliver lines without appearing and sounding foolish. Those Scouse accents were nothing to sneeze at. Should they consider a dialogue coach? Or subtitles? Damned if he knew.
The plan was to keep everything simple
—no tricky monologues, no long-winded speeches. The way the script was constructed, “they spoke in sentences of five or six words each,” recalled Alun Owen, who scaled down his original talky screenplay to a collage of manageable sound bites. “
The director knew we couldn’t act
, and we knew,” John admitted. “So he had to try almost to catch us off guard.” It was a gamble from the start. But, as Walter Shenson notes, “
the Beatles fell right into it
, they were naturals. And the script was so good, it sounded like they were making it up as they went along.”

Owen had done his homework. As promised, he kept the story achingly simple. The Beatles would play the Beatles and do what Beatles normally did—minus the smoking, drinking, swearing, and sex. Geoffrey Stokes, in the essential history
Rock of Ages,
summarizes the movie as a “
high-speed pseudodocumentary
posing the sole question: will the lads make it through a typical day of press conferences, fan pursuit, encounters with disapproving elders, manic playfulness and occasional self-doubt in time to play a concert for their adoring fans?” From spending only two days with them in Dublin, Owen had managed to pin down the nature of the Beatles’ camaraderie, all the nuances and the special give-and-take that insiders found so “
disarming and refreshing
.” It was all there, Paul recalled, the “
little jokes, the sarcasm
, the humor, John’s wit, Ringo’s laconic manner; each of our different ways. The film manages to capture our characters quite well.” But the goal was not accuracy. “
We
were
like that
,” John explained—when it was advantageous to be cute and lovable. But overall, he saw it as “a comic-strip version of what was going on” in their lives. The few scenes that dramatize the constant scrutiny they were under are but a shadow of the real thing; according to John, “the pressure was far heavier than that.”

The work itself was more demanding than they’d expected. For one thing, they had to report for costume and makeup at six o’clock in the morning, which meant getting up at five—
an ungodly hour
for most people but especially for a Beatle. Moreover, they were seriously out of their element. Learning lines was an uphill battle on top of everything else that was going on in their lives. Victor Spinetti, another of their costars, observed how “
the lads never touched the script
.” In fact, they “
frantically
” gave it a once-over in the car each morning on their way to the studio, then
simply winged it. “
You never knew
what they were going to say or do.” “
We’d make things up
because of our being so comfortable with each other,” recalled Ringo. Some real gems came out of their mouths, the same kind of spontaneous witty stuff that dazzled at their press conferences, but for a seasoned film crew it was a hair-raising way to work. To counteract the Beatles’ lack of preparation, Dick Lester kept five cameras running, even after a scene technically ended. “
Dick just went on shooting
,” Spinetti recalled, “shooting everything…. [H]e just pointed the cameras at them and let them go…. And I just used to keep going…. [W]hen he caught them actually talking amongst themselves, it was just magical.”

The magic was everywhere, it seemed. Yet the Beatles were still skeptical, still unsure of how long it would last. They remained convinced, to a man, that it might all end suddenly tomorrow, so despite the grind of making a movie, to say nothing of its potential upside, they turned up the heat, working simultaneously on a slew of other projects, pushing harder, persevering, to keep the fantasy alive.

The most dependable resource, the one that offered the most immediate response, was music. During the last week in February, Columbia Records released “A World Without Love,” by Peter and Gordon,
most of which Paul had written
when he was sixteen and recently salvaged for a Billy J. Kramer session. True to form, Billy J. rejected it as being “
too soft
.” A few weeks later Paul made a few minor changes to the lyric and gave the song instead to Peter Asher, Jane’s brother, as a favor to help launch his singing career. “A World Without Love”
was
soft, a delicate harmonic soufflé in the style of “I’ll Follow the Sun,” lacking the more wiry sophistication of the Beatles’ recent releases. It would have never made the cut for their current session, but Peter and his boarding-school mate, Gordon Waller, sang it with a pleasant laid-back yearning that transformed the song into a perfectly acceptable pop hit.

At the Ashers’, Paul and Peter had grown accustomed to hanging out when the Beatles were in town. Though entirely different in nature—unlike Paul, Peter was serious and self-involved, with rust-red hair, black horn-rimmed glasses, and an imperiously arched eyebrow that made him look slightly peevish—they established a comfortable, unforced rapport, the perfect antidote to the Beatles’ incestuous relationship. “
I could talk to him
about anything,” Paul recalled, pointing to the merits of their unique living arrangement. The boys had an almost comic claim on the house’s attic floor: it was an obstacle course littered with guitars, records, books, tape recorders, phonographs, suitcases, and other “bric-a-brac in a jumble” that resembled a typical college dorm. “
Their bedrooms were next door
to each other,” John Dunbar recalls, “so it was kind of a boy’s scene upstairs. They would sit there for hours, discussing art and music, endlessly playing the latest records. It was where the rest of us went to hear new music—and to groove.”

The place always seemed filled with inherently restless young men who fancied themselves amateur intellectuals, smoking, discussing poetry and politics, paging through magazines, and trading harsh criticism of the establishment. Often Paul would just listen, amazed by the ideas flying around that room. The cool, intellectual agility, while raw and shapeless, was still formidable, providing a glimpse of the future. Many students who congregated at the Ashers’ house were refugees from universities and art schools, “
the laboratories
” for the emerging sixties culture, where being hip and aggressively clever were as crucial to success as pure artistry. And many, though in denial, were patently upper-class. But if Paul felt the wide gap in their background and education, he was never made to feel inadequate. “
Somehow it wasn’t to do
with which area you were from,” Paul realized, “it was more just a level of thinking.” To that extent, Paul was learning to hold his own. Besides, he was a Beatle, and they envied his enormous success, to say nothing of his talent, along with the freedom it brought him.

While Peter and Gordon promoted “A World Without Love,” the Beatles prepared to release their own new single, which had already attracted an inordinate amount of buzz. EMI had wasted no time—or expense—beating the drums for “Can’t Buy Me Love,” which the label fully expected to break all existing sales records. In the United States, Capitol already had advance orders for
1.7 million copies
, allowing it to be issued as a gold record, an unprecedented feat. The British trades were giddy with excitement. “
Well, here it is!
” Derek Johnson panted in his windy
NME
review. “A pounding, vibrating, fast-medium twister in the r-and-b mould, with a fascinating trembling effect in
the middle eight
”—he’s referring to the instrumental break, actually, in which George’s double-tracked guitar solo produces a riveting echo—“it’s not so strong melodically as their last two discs—but there’s rather more accent on beat.”

Though the review made no strides in the advancement of rock criticism, it gave the record a commendable launch. It also helped distract from
the pack of would-be marauders who were pecking at the kingdom walls. Competitors were flooding the market with anything that might capitalize on the Beatles’ success. All along, there had been
scores of singles
that made no pretensions as to their agenda: “My Boyfriend Got a Beatle Haircut,” “Yes, You Can Hold My Hand,” “Beatle Fever,” “The Beatle Dance,” “The Boy with the Beatle Hair,” “Beatle Mania in the U.S.A.” (by the Liverpools, no less), “We Love You Beatles”—there were too many to keep track of.
A start-up label, Top Six
, announced that its debut album would provide a full menu of Beatles covers, coincidentally entitled
Beatlemania.
Another new label, Dial, was banking on a group called the Grasshoppers.
Even Decca, at the behest
of onetime Beatles producer Mike Smith, recognized the value of ancestry by signing a band called the All-Stars to be led by Pete Best. To their credit, the Beatles wasted not so much as a glance on any of these coattail surfers, their evil eyes trained on more unbenign targets that threatened to cut into their royalties.

Vee-Jay Records had become an irksome problem. The bankrupt Chicago label had revived itself on the back of its two monster Beatles smashes. As far as the boys cared, that was fair and square. Vee-Jay had licensed “Please Please Me” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret” in good faith and were entitled to the windfall they eventually produced. But the label had gotten greedy.
The original demo tape
submitted two years earlier had other material on it, and despite repeated requests by Roland Rennie for its return, Vee-Jay, under new leadership, claimed that it was nowhere to be found. But Vee-Jay promptly issued the extraneous songs on an album titled
Introducing the Beatles
that sprinted up the charts at a remarkable pace.
^*
Brian pleaded with EMI
to protect the Beatles’ position, and in February a New York federal court awarded Capitol a temporary injunction against Vee-Jay to halt distribution of the album. But that only succeeded in sidetracking the renegade label.

The sessions in Hamburg also continued to haunt them. Polydor Records had licensed the masters for “My Bonnie” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” to MGM in the States. Now, attempting to parlay that success, the labels were releasing “Cry for a Shadow,” the instrumental George had patched together in 1961, to coincide with the release of “Can’t Buy Me Love.” And Sheridan, who had since joined Bobby Patrick’s Big
Six, announced that they intended to record a song called “
Tell Me If You Can
” that he’d cowritten with Paul in Germany.

“
Brian didn’t get very good deals
on anything,” George argued later, with the benefit of hindsight, but at the time the abundance and grandeur of the deals themselves kept the Beatles from articulating their fears. Anyone who wanted a pound of their flesh, John joked, should get in line; with four of them in the picture, there was plenty to go around. Even if John could bring himself to laugh about it, there was a growing suspicion among them that Brian “
wasn’t astute enough
” to handle the heavy traffic. The EMI record royalty, the Dick James publishing deal, the Seltaeb merchandising agreement, the UA movie contract, even their road shows with promoter Arthur Howes—Paul took to calling them “
long-term slave contracts
”—were grotesquely inadequate.

No sooner had Brian returned to London than his New York agent, GAC, cabled with news that offers—“spectacular offers”—were pouring in from American promoters, requiring an immediate answer from the Beatles. “
We had fifty times as many offers
as we could handle,” Norman Weiss, their U.S. agent, revealed, and he urged Brian to immediately set aside dates for a major U.S. tour. And the money was staggering for a pop group:
a minimum guarantee of $20,000
up front against as much as 80 percent of the gate. Absolutely no one received that much for a single performance, not even Frank Sinatra. The handful of entertainers who could even get close to that amount had been icons for fifteen or twenty years—Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Judy Garland.

This was completely new territory. The string of eligible arenas in America, those with seating capacities of 7,000 to 20,000, had never presented rock ’n roll shows before. They were primarily sports facilities or convention halls, deviating from the schedule once a year when the circus came to town. Among the cast of possible promoters, few had experience staging any type of show. Five years later a network of rock impresarios would establish itself, with a dominant promoter in almost every major city, but in 1964 none existed. Presenting the Beatles required that a local promoter handle tickets, publicity, staging, security (“
no fewer than one hundred
uniformed police officers”), sound (including “a hi-fidelity sound system… and a first-class sound engineer”), and hospitality (“clean and adequate dressing room facilities… [and] two seven-passenger Cadillac limousines, air-conditioned if possible”). Who knew how to pull that all together?

There were already ominous signs. It was inevitable that competition
would eventually loosen their vise grip on the charts, and, sure enough, groups such as the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals, and Freddy and the Dreamers edged above them periodically in swings that were treated as certain downfall. When the Beatles toppled out of the number one spot, however briefly, it was
front-page news.
The dailies suggested that their popularity had peaked. “Are the Beatles finished?” a tabloid wondered. Rumors circulated that John was leaving the band, and even though he dismissed it as “foolish gossip,” the speculation persisted. Harder to dismiss was the cold reception given to the closed-circuit film of the Beatles’ Washington, D.C., concert. Not only was the turnout conspicuously flat, but the deal structure was such a mess that determining what royalties were owed the Beatles became next to impossible.