The Beatles Are Here! (10 page)

When they appeared on
The
Ed Sullivan Show
we had to have more pictures. We filled our little Brownie cameras with black and white film, shut the lights and took pictures of the TV. This was Joann’s idea. We didn’t know if it would work but it did, they turned out great. (BTW . . . she’s quite a photographer today.)

The Beatles were coming to Forest Hills. The problem was, How do we get there? It was an evening concert. We were young and couldn’t travel the subways alone at night. We felt so isolated in the Bronx. I pleaded with my parents for days. “You have to take us! You have to take us!” Finally, they said “Okay, okay, we’ll take you!” We ended up in the top row crying and screaming our heads off. We couldn’t hear a word they sang. After their helicopter takeoff, we looked at each other. We hadn’t heard anything. We left hoarse but ecstatic. My parents picked us up. We rode home in a daze.

Our next chance to see them was at the hotel where they stayed after the Forest Hills concert; we heard they would be staying there at the Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue and 59th Street. Joann’s cousin Linda joined us. We met at Joann’s house and that’s when Linda rolled out this huge sign that read
BEATLES PLEASE STAY HERE 4-EVER
. I remember being embarrassed by it. I thought it was childish. I was, like, what are we doing with this big sign! But she had made the sign and we took it and the number 2 train down to Manhattan. We stood in front of the hotel and every time someone opened a window we would start screaming even if only the blinds moved.

We were crazy and that’s how you and I met. We both loved George. We connected over that. You said you had also gone to Forest Hills and had been high up like we were in the stands. I remember you were very energetic and you had curly blond hair. I remember very distinctly talking to you all afternoon. I really liked you and remember saying to myself, “I could be her friend.” I was kind of sad thinking I wouldn’t see you anymore. It sounds crazy but it’s true.

And then came the man with the camera. I remember he just crouched in front of us, clicked, and walked away. I had no idea he was with a newspaper, because he just had a little Pentax or something. Later, I discovered his name was Jack Manning and was on staff at the
New York Times
and that was just how he worked, with very little equipment and very few shots. He didn’t take many, but he took this one! If it wasn’t for that sign, he would not have taken our picture. You and I are sitting here because of the sign.

By the way, the picture wasn’t taken at the Paramount, as noted in the
Times
’s caption. Our photo was taken in daylight and the theater event was in the evening of the same day.

YEARS LATER I
saw Paul McCartney on the street in Manhattan. That was
really
wild. I was nineteen at the time. I was on Fifth Avenue. I worked on Sixth Avenue at Lowenstein Fabrics; I was on my lunch break. I was crossing Fifth and he was approaching the same corner that I was coming to. My heart was pounding! He had married Linda and they were with her daughter Heather. I was very shy at the time but I knew I had to say something. There was no way I was not saying something.

When we met at the corner, we made eye contact and I said, “Congratulations,” because they had just gotten married. He said, “Thank you ‘veddy’ much,” just the way he does. And the little girl looked up and said, “Do we know her?” She was looking at me like . . . who are you? He said, “Yes, don’t you remember?” He was making up a little story. It was so sweet. It was something like, “Don’t you remember when we . . .”

I stayed back to see people’s reactions as they walked by. People were asking each other, “Was that Paul McCartney? Was that Paul McCartney?” It was really quite a thrill. I immediately went to a phone booth and called my boyfriend. It was exciting, really wild, but it could have been George. If it had been, I don’t know what I would have done.

EACH TIME I
tell the story of how I found you and the famous photo, I’m amazed at the whole thing again. It’s so surreal to me, the way it happened. The odds were so against it. I don’t subscribe to
Vogue
. Sometimes my cousin will say, “Take this,” and give me a copy, but that didn’t happen all the time. And I’m not like a fashionista, although I did study fashion illustration many moons ago at the High School of Art & Design. I can’t afford
Vogue
-wear.

I look at the magazine just to see what I will
not
be wearing. I always look at it from the back. I read it from back to front. I don’t get into it that far. Once the editorials and ads start, I just leave it, I throw it away. I don’t waste time on it.

After I saw the picture that night, that story went viral with people around here. My son called me for some other reason, I said, “David, I’m in
Vogue
magazine.” He said, “I’ll be right home.” All of a sudden I was kinda cool. When I showed it to my cousin, who had given me the magazine, she was angry that she hadn’t noticed it first. She was disappointed that she couldn’t see my reaction to it. She said, “I used to see that picture all the time (in the
New York Times
and elsewhere) and I never even looked at it closely.”

My long lost friend Joann was living in Arizona. I found her number, called her, and told her to get the magazine. I told her not to open it but to call me when she got it. I wanted to hear her scream. (She opened it anyway.) Then I wrote you a letter in care of
Vogue
but there was no reply. They obviously didn’t forward it. About two years later, it clicked in my head to try to find you. I searched for you on Facebook and there you were.

By the way, you, Joann, Linda, and I are in the Scorsese film about George. We’re right there in the street. You can see the sign,
BEATLES PLEASE STAY HERE 4-EVER
. I’m fiddling with my camera, scrooched down so you can’t see my face. You and Joann are both facing the camera.

I had a suitcase full of memorabilia: ticket stubs, buttons, magazines, pieces of towels from the Plaza Hotel (guaranteed to have been used by them . . . LOL), things like that, all kinds of things. Many years later I asked my mother for the suitcase but she had thrown it away. . . . A suitcase full of memorable treasures, gone! I would love to see that stuff now.

It was when I saw
A Hard Day’s Night
in 1964 that I really saw their “true” personalities come alive. It was then that I felt a stronger connection to George. It was something in his eyes. I felt as though I knew him, really knew him, as no one else could.

After watching the Scorsese film, I realized that, to this day, I still feel a connection, a certain affinity, with George, and I think I know why. He was a searcher. George was searching for God, and so was I.

America’s Beatlemania Hangover

by Debbie Geller

AMERICA WAS STILL
in mourning after the assassination of John Kennedy in November 1963. The nation was desperate for something entertaining and something light to replace the unrelenting presence of loss and grief. Then along came the Beatles, this breath of British fresh air and merriment, to charm and divert America back to mental health again. So the story goes.

I was much too young to know anything about national moods or historical trends when I sat down with my sisters to watch
The
Ed Sullivan Show
that Sunday night. All I knew was that we were excited beyond reason and couldn’t wait to see what
they
were really like. Apart from a few photographs, for most Americans, John, Paul, George and Ringo were pretty mysterious. So when they arrived in New York on February 7, there was pandemonium. It was a feeding-frenzy media circus—even if those were clichés yet to be invented.

In the few weeks leading up to the Beatles’ arrival in New York, they had already transformed my life. And I’ll always be grateful. We lived in Levittown, Long Island [New York], the archetype of American suburbia—the first step on the ladder for second-generation Americans on their way out of the decaying cities. Conformity and upward mobility were the most obvious features in the town. And it was no place for a left-wing, atheist, divorced family like ours. We were outcasts, treated more with suspicion than curiosity.

Within days of moving to our new home, I was asked by some of the neighborhood kids what religion we were. I had no idea of what they were talking about. I had never even heard the word before. This show of ignorance was greeted by hilarity and frustration. One girl finally begged me to just say anything. It didn’t matter what we were, we just had to be
something
. But I wasn’t able to indulge even that simple request. The role of local freak was given to us as a freehold. I wasn’t so much bullied as barely tolerated.

But then a girlish democracy was created with the arrival of the Beatles. The old nasty prejudices suddenly melted away. Girls who had once teased and mocked me for everything from bad hair to reading too much were suddenly curious to know which Beatle I liked best. Life was getting easier. So when the curtain came up on
The
Ed Sullivan Show
and the unusually animated host introduced “these youngsters from Liverpool” to a cacophony of screams, I already loved them. They were my ticket to acceptance and all the normal pleasures of being young.

It is hard to describe how fresh and delightful they looked that night—so eager to please and so pleased with themselves in a way that was completely guileless. When they sang “Till There Was You,” the boys were introduced by name. White captions appeared under each face to distinguish Paul from George and George from Ringo.

John was identified with the immortal tag line: “Sorry, girls, he’s married,” a phrase that’s still popular today.

That’s how I learned that the one I liked best was George. It wasn’t Paul after all—what a revelation! During the postmortem at school the next morning, I announced my discovery with confidence. Although Paul was the undisputed favorite, my choice was accepted with respect. And no one ever made fun of me again.

THERE CAN NEVER
be another television moment like that one again—not in this hundred-channel-plus world. Forty percent of this country will never watch the same program at the same time. That’s what made this event so unusual and so memorable. Most shared national moments are bizarre, at their most benign. Usually they are tragic and traumatic. But the Beatles’ first appearance on
Ed Sullivan
is the rare, probably unique exception. It is the one shining occasion when 73 million people enjoyed the same thing at the same time.

THIS HAS BEEN
a freezing winter. It obviously wasn’t this cold in the winter of 1964—you can tell by the photographs. No one then looks as cold as they have in New York these days. There is also a freeze in the air that wasn’t there forty years ago. Candidates for president are talking about hope and promising to “take the country back.” I would like more than anything to believe them, but cynicism and distrust seem like the only realistic responses to politicians’ words.

And there are no artists to capture the imagination either, no one whose vitality and talent transform the world around them. That’s what the Beatles did on that unforgettable night. The old black-and-white familiar images of four English boys on a cheap-looking stage go beyond nostalgia. Instead, they’re a heartbreaking reminder of how hard it will be to ever feel so optimistic again.

“Cousin Brucie” Morrow, disc jockey