The Love You Make (15 page)

On a rainy and gray August 24, Cynthia Powell and John Winston Lennon were married by a magistrate in a short civil ceremony, much of which could not be heard because of the rat-tat-tat of a jackhammer digging up the pavement outside the window of the magistrate’s office. Cynthia wore her best clothing, a purple and black two-piece checkered suit with a frilly shirt that Astrid had sent her from Hamburg as a hand-me-down. Cynthia’s brother Tony gave the bride away, and her sister-in-law, Margery, was her bridesmaid. Paul and George also attended, stuffed into constraining suits with white shirts and ties, looking on sad-eyed and somber. In a sweet irony, Brian was John’s best man.

After the ceremony the wedding party dashed through the streets in the pouring rain to a local lunchtime joint called Reece’s Cafe. Brian had chosen this spot for the wedding meal because he thought no one would recognize them there. There were no seats, and the wedding party had to wait on line twenty minutes for a table. Soup and chicken were served, and Brian toasted the young marrieds with a glass of water. He also paid the check, noting to himself that the wedding reception had only cost him fifteen shillings per person. As a final gesture of largesse, he gave Cynthia and John the permanent use of his “secret” flat on Faulkner Street. With John married, what use was it to him now anyway?

There was only one condition: Brian felt strongly that John’s marriage and impending fatherhood would have a disastrous effect on the Beatles’ image and ruin their chances for success. A pregnant wife would cause a scandal with female fans. How would it look for Cynthia to be seen waiting for him backstage with her big belly or walking around with him in the street? If Cynthia was to be John’s wife, she was to be a secret wife. She was to be totally anonymous. The marriage was never to be talked about, much less admitted to. Cynthia was baffled and more than a little hurt by this request, but she didn’t know or understand much about rock groups or image or fancy managers. She knew only that she loved John and was having his child, so she agreed to the terms. She was put in the house on Faulkner Street and hidden away. She waited there, patiently, for her husband to come home.

It turned out that she didn’t see John very much during her pregnancy anyway. The group was by now always out on tour or camped in cheap London hotels. Occasionally, John would show up at Faulkner Street to pick up his clean shirts and drop off the dirty ones. On one of these rare visits, Cynthia convinced John that it was time for a truce between him and Mimi and that it would be nice for her to have Mimi’s support during her pregnancy. One afternoon they arrived at Mendips unannounced and rang the bell. When Mimi opened the door and found them standing there, a big smile cracked her dour face, and she threw her arms around John and invited them in. That night she cooked them a big meal, and Mimi was so happy to have John back in the fold that she asked Cynthia to move back into Mendips for a second time, so that she could help care for her until the baby was born. Once again, Cynthia moved back into Mimi’s domain, but still keeping to Brian’s dictum, she tried to pretend she was not John’s wife at all but an unmarried pregnant student just boarding in.

chapter Four

What’s a scruff like me doing with all this lot?

—Ringo Starr

The sacking of Pete Best
caused a local storm that included protests by loyal fans who slept on the doorstep of Pete’s mother’s house and girls who picketed NEMS and the Cavern Club with placards saying, “Pete is Best” and “Pete Forever.” There were even pushing and shoving matches at the Cavern when the Beatles turned up, and Brian helped dramatize the event by insisting the owner of the Cavern Club provide a bodyguard to protect him from irate fans. But the worst wrath of all came from Mona Best herself, who attributed Pete’s firing to the jealousy of the three other members of the group. She was justifiably angry at the way Pete was fired, particularly in light of the contract George Martin had offered them. Brian’s most pressing problem, however, wasn’t Pete Best, but that the group was in desperate need of a replacement drummer. George Martin had already scheduled a recording session for them in early September, only weeks away. Naturally, they would have preferred to hire the best drummer possible, but any drummer would do as long as he was good enough to record.

At the age of twenty-two, when he was asked to join the Beatles, Ringo Starr was an unlikely candidate to sign on as a character player in the greatest bit part ever written. He was short, skinny, and unassuming, with a homely countenance and sad blue eyes. Up until this point, his life had been a gothic horror story of misfortune.

He was born Richard Starkey, Jr., on July 7, 1940, the son of bakery workers Elsie Gleave and Richard Starkey, Sr. He was brought up in the great, gray section of Liverpool called the Dingle, a dockside slum of tenements known as the Cast Iron Shore. Richard Sr. deserted when Ritchie was only three years old, and the child was to see his father only three more times in the rest of his life. Although Starkey Sr. sent thirty shillings a week support payments in the beginning, after a few months the money stopped coming, and Elsie was unable to pay the rent on the flat in which they lived. She took a job as a barmaid to support herself, and the little boy was left alone most of the evening.

At the age of six, only a year after starting St. Silas’s Junior School, Ritchie developed what was thought to be a simple stomachache. But when the pain lasted through the night he was finally taken to the hospital in an ambulance. It was too late; his appendix had already burst and peritonitis had set in. He remained in a coma for ten weeks, and with various complications, including falling out of his hospital bed on his seventh birthday, he spent a solid year in the hospital. By the time he was back in school he was so far behind the other children he couldn’t read or write, and what little he learned from that point on was taught to him by a sympathetic neighborhood girl.

The year in the hospital had left him sickly and weak but miraculously did not destroy his spirit. He was a happy, satisfied child, and when his mother met and married a Liverpool corporation house painter named Harry Greaves, Ritchie took the man to his heart. Greaves was the closest thing he ever knew to a father. For a time life seemed placid enough. Then, at the age of thirteen, a cold developed into pleurisy and weakened his lungs. One rainy morning a big black car came to fetch him in the Dingle and took him away to the Heswall Children’s Hospital, a huge, gray children’s sanitorium in the Wirral. There he was put to bed, where he remained for the next two years. He never went back to school. When he got out of the hospital, still only partially recovered, he was fifteen years old and fit only for a job as a messenger. When he finally secured a job at British Railways, he was fired after six weeks for failing the medical exam. Out of pity, Harry Greaves found him a job as a joiner’s apprentice at a local engineering firm.

It was 1956 and the beginning of the skiffle craze. Ritchie had played the drums in a hospital ward band, and skiffle was a logical next step for him. Like so many other youngsters in Liverpool, he formed a group with a friend, another apprentice joiner named Eddie Clayton, and they hit the same neighborhood circuit as the Quarrymen. Skiffle died out, but Ritchie’s percussion only got better. By 1959 he was drumming professionally, now with the biggest of all the Liverpool groups, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. It was during Rory Storm’s popularity that Ritchie became “Ringo,” because he wore so many rings on his fingers, and “Starr” instead of Starkey, so that his drum solo could be announced as “Starr Time.”

The Beatles knew Ringo well, not only from the Liverpool circuit but from Hamburg, where they had spent months observing him with Rory Storm. He was fun-loving and uncomplicated and got along well with everyone in the group—much better than Pete Best had. In recent months Rory Storm’s popularity had been on the wane, and the Hurricanes were stuck playing a grueling summer booking at Butlin’s Holiday Camp. It was at Butlin’s that George Harrison finally reached him by phone to tell him that he was wanted to fill the open drumming spot with the Beatles. He would be on salary at first, £25 a week, during a probationary period. Then if things worked out he would be made a full-fledged member. He immediately cut his hair like one of them.

It was quite a surprise
to George Martin when on September 12, 1962, the Beatles arrived at the studio with Ringo Starr. Not only had Brian not told him that Pete Best had been fired, but Martin had already hired his own drummer for the recording, a respected session drummer named Andy White. Martin asked to audition Ringo and, after hearing him play, decided to go right ahead and use Andy White on the drums, much to Ringo’s mortification. Ringo was handed a tambourine and told when to use it. Later in the session, because George Martin thought he looked so miserable, he allowed Ringo to record on a few of the drum tracks.
³
Only two songs were recorded that first day, in any event. Between the time of their audition and the recording session, George Martin had relented and decided to allow them to record two of their own songs, both, as it turned out, Paul McCartney compositions. The side chosen for the A side was called “Love Me Do,” the one with the banal lyrics that Paul had written when he was sixteen. It was greatly enhanced by a catchy harmonica riff played by John on the harmonica he had shoplifted in Arnhem. The B side was another simple love song called “P.S. I Love You,” with lyrics only slightly more sophisticated but which George Martin arranged to feature what was to become the Beatles’ trademark harmonies.

Again, the Beatles were very lucky; their alchemy with George Martin synthesized real gold. Although Martin’s role in the production of their records changed over the years, he was always their primary conduit, the intermediary who transposed their inarticulate ideas into music. None of the Beatles could read or write music, although Paul was later to teach himself. They had no knowledge or command of any instruments except those they already played, and they knew nothing whatsoever about how records were made or the capabilities of the recording studio; albeit, the recording studio was prehistoric in terms of the capabilities available today. The Beatles’ first songs were recorded on four-track recorders in monaural, compared with the sixteen- and thirty-two-track overdubbings of later years. In any event, Martin was to become the interpretive vessel through which they were presented to the world.

When “Love Me Do” was released on October 4,1962, Brian expected the record company to offer publicity and support. He got none at all. When George Martin first announced the impending release of a record by the Beatles at a meeting of EMI executives, the other executives laughed, thinking it was a joke perpetrated by Spike Milligan whom Martin also produced. Besides, at the moment in England only American acts like Bobby Vee and Del Shannon were making it. In America the craze called the Twist was sweeping the nation, and that’s what was expected to be big in England. It was generally agreed in the music business that guitar groups were finished and “Love Me Do” was released and forgotten.

Putting a record out on the market without any support is akin to not feeding a newborn child. Brian organized a fierce assault to nourish his baby. He unblinkingly ordered 10,000 copies of “Love Me Do” for NEMS, a magic number he thought would automatically land it a place on the British charts. Then he mustered his forces and started a letter-writing campaign to Radio Luxembourg and the BBC. All the Beatles’ relatives and their friends were enlisted to write letters requesting the Beatles’ new song. NEMS employees wrote, as did their families. After every personal appearance the Beatles’ fans were urged to write or phone radio stations and demand “Love Me Do” to be played. Queenie enlisted herself to walk all over Liverpool, from store to store, asking if they had “Love Me Do” by the Beatles. When she and Harry went off to Majorca on vacation, she wrote letters to the radio stations saying she was a housewife on holiday who wanted to hear the song when she returned home. In the interim Brian began to organize and promote his own concerts, all of which headlined the Beatles. NEMS quickly became one of the busiest concert promoters in the North. One day, when a friend ran into Paul McCartney on the street in Liverpool, Paul confessed that he hadn’t had anything to eat all day. “Somebody,” Paul joked, “had to pay for those ten thousand records Brian bought.”

After hundreds of requests, Radio Luxembourg played it. The BBC followed with one or two playings and then, like a tiny spark that at a single moment kindles into flames, “Love Me Do” appeared at forty-nine on the
New Record Mirror
charts. When it climbed to number twenty-one on the
Melody Maker
charts, the entire northern city of Liverpool was talking about the Beatles. By mid-December, “Love Me Do” had managed to battle its way up to number seventeen on the hit parade. They were dazzled. “Could anything be more important than this?” Brian asked proudly.

That February George Martin rushed the Beatles back into the EMI studios to record a follow-up song, this one called “Please Please Me,” another upbeat love song that John had written years before, sitting on the pink eyelet of Aunt Mimi’s bed. George Martin was so delighted with the recording session that when it was done he announced over the intercom from the control booth, “Gentlemen, you have just recorded your first number one.” In the meantime, Brian kept them working the road, this time opening the bill for Helen Shapiro, the teenage singing star now riding the downward crest of her popularity. It was a second-rate tour, but it took them up the backbone of England, introducing them to the hinterlands in an almost methodical fashion. They spent the rest of the icy winter piled in the back of Neil Aspinall’s van, the snowy towns and cities melting into a white blur: Wakefield, Carlisle, Peterborough, Mansfield, Coventry, Taunton, Gloucester, Romford, Exeter, Lewisham, Croydon, and Sheffield. Each week Brian called them on the road to tell them the progress of “Please Please Me” on the record charts. Slowly, as they worked their way around the country, the song began to gnaw its way up the charts like a mole burrowing up from under a tremendous weight. It appeared in
Melody Maker
first at an impressive number forty-seven, then the next week at thirty-nine, and then made a breathtaking jump to twenty-one. Its fourth week it was number nine, and, finally, on March 2, 1963, the Beatles had their first number-one hit.