The Beatles Are Here! (12 page)

It was an amazing time and I’m glad that I went through it. There are not actually too many people left who actually felt this amazing energy like I did, and I’m very appreciative.

I was very lucky. I consider myself lucky that I was here at the right time and at the right place because that’s what this is all about. The Beatles were also at the right time and at the right place. And the audience? Well, they were, too. So we’re all very lucky.

There’ll never be another group that gains so much in so little time—by the way, it was only seven, eight years. They had such a huge, international audience! It was just one of those things. We needed it and they had it and they gave it.

Sister Mary Paul McCartney

by Mary Norris

“HEY,
MARY!” MY
brother Miles hollered from the living room. “Get in here and watch this. These guys are going to be big.” This group called the Beatles was on
Ed Sullivan.
I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV. It was a big old cabinet model with a nick in the Bakelite rim from the time I crashed into it and chipped my tooth while trying to keep a balloon up in the air. I was twelve years old, and in sixth grade at St. Thomas More School.

Miles, who was five years older than me, was always trying to propel me to the next level. “You’re still playing with paper dolls?” he had said, catching me in the garage with my girlfriends. “You should be listening to the radio and buying singles.”

I was skeptical, but the next day at school every girl in the class had metamorphosed overnight into a full-blown Beatles fan. Even my dorkiest classmates had buttons—“I love Ringo” or “I love George”—pinned to the bibs of their uniforms. Irene, the most precocious girl in the class, had a Beatles button so big that it covered her entire chest, like a shield. I came home from school an avowed Beatles fan. My favorite was Paul.

Miles said that John was the obvious genius, but I stuck with Paul. I soon knew everything about him that it was possible to know. He was sweet and innocent-looking, and had the best voice, and was left-handed and motherless. There was a problem, though. Well, maybe a few problems. There was the age difference: he was ten years older than me, and I couldn’t get married until I was at least eighteen. Meanwhile, he had a girlfriend, a red-haired actress named Jane Asher. (I knew all about her, too. She had played Lady Jane Grey in
The Prince and the Pauper
.) More worrisome was his religion. I had heard on the radio, in an interview with George’s sister, that Paul was Church of England. I was steeped in Catholicism, and couldn’t imagine a future with Paul unless he converted. So I folded my obsession with Paul McCartney into the liturgical year.

My mother had given me a five-year diary, a small brown volume with a fleur-de-lis motif on the cover, noticeably absent a lock and key. (Was she trying to keep tabs on me?) Digging it out recently, I was impressed not so much by the prose quality (“Lousy day. It rained and ruined the first snow”), or even by the enterprise and diligence that marked my early teens (I have never been as busy as I was when I was in eighth grade), as by the sheer fact that I wrote in it faithfully, four lines a day for five years.

I had no idea what an oddball I was. While I thought I was going forward as a wholesome teenager of my generation—black-and-white houndstooth skirt, green fake-leather jacket—I was actually backpedalling furiously into something like a perpetual girlhood.

January 18, 1965—I made it to Mass and I’m glad, because this is supposed to be an octave of prayer, ending with the Conversion of St. Paul! Y’know what that means! I hope I can convert Paul! This is a perfect chance!

January 25, 1965—(Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul) Nothing happened yet. Testa wrote in my math book, “Roses are red ‘vilets’ are blue sugar is sweet so I love you. stuff that in your Pipe and smoke it.” Wow! He’s okay but I prefer Paul McCartney.

Paul Testa was the ugliest, baddest kid in class—fat, gap-toothed, crazy eyes, greasy hair—but if he really liked me I would be tempted to reciprocate. I was fat and self-conscious, but hopeful that someone would see my inner beauty. Every night, after kneeling beside my bed to write in my diary (naturally, I kept it under the mattress), I would will myself to dream about Paul McCartney. The closest I came to an erotic fantasy was picturing Paul behind me in line at the Dairy Queen.

I truly believed that God heard my prayers. I had lavished on my mother a spiritual bouquet—the promise of hundreds of rosaries and dozens of Masses—and I was deep in spiritual debt. The very day after I switched back to praying for her instead of Paul, a potential buyer appeared for our old house, a family property that my father had been trying to unload for years. Now I could concentrate on Paul with a clean conscience. I scoured the meager resources available to me—the Cleveland papers,
Time
,
16 Magazine
—looking for some item about Paul McCartney, some sign from God that He would advance my special intention. A year later, I was still at it:

January 24, 1966—Mon. Tomorrow’s the conversion of St. Paul. Gosh, but I’m gonna pray!

The high-water mark of my twin obsessions came in the summer of 1966. I was in eighth grade, verging on fourteen, and the Sisters of the Incarnate Word were doing their best to funnel us girls into Catholic high schools. Sister Andrew had chosen my best friend, Mary Jo, and me to be on a panel about vocations. “Religious, that is!” I wrote (February 1, 1966). “Sister thinks I’m interested in a religious vocation.” The thing that appealed to me most about being a nun was getting to change my name. The main thing that worried me was having to get up early in the morning. But I had an idea that I might be popular in the convent. In the outside world, or at a public high school, I would have to dress up and try to attract boys, but in the convent, or for the next four years at an all-girls school, I could avoid all that.

“If I’m ever a nun I’ll be named after St. Paul,” I wrote. “I’ll only be a nun if I don’t marry Paul.” I liked the name Sister Mary St. Paul. My father’s middle name was Paul, so no one would suspect that I was actually taking the name of Paul McCartney, the guardianship of whose soul would occupy me for eternity. (It wasn’t until decades later that I began to suspect that Paul and the convent were smokescreens. The man I was really dedicated to, and didn’t know how to let go of, was my father.)

That spring I was engaged in a protracted battle with Dad to let me go to Lourdes Academy, a Catholic girls’ school where all my friends were going: Mary Jo, Patsy, Connie, and even Irene, in her coveted John Lennon cap. Dad didn’t want to pay tuition if he could send me to school for free, and he didn’t want his daughter to be a churchy girl. He had refused to let me study Latin in a special Saturday class when I was in fifth grade, and when my piano teacher suggested I train to be a church organist, he said, “No dice.”

On a spring day in 1966, secular and religious events converged to lift my spirits:

March 17, 1966—Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! We went to Mass at the Cathedral & Bishop Elwell gave me Communion. That ring! . . . The parade was great. Dad said hi to us. [We were Irish, of course. Dad marched with the fire department.] And Locher lifted the Beatle ban!

Ralph Locher, the mayor of Cleveland, had banned the Beatles after their first tour, in 1964, when fans had stormed the stage at Public Auditorium. I didn’t go—even if I had been able to scrape up $7.50 for a ticket, my father would never have let me go downtown alone at night. Irene had gone, but her father was dead.

On Tuesday, May 3, 1966, it was announced that the Beatles were coming back to Cleveland and would play at the stadium on August 14. That the concert fell on a Sunday was auspicious: maybe Paul would come to the eleven-fifteen Mass at Thomas More!

As graduation approached, my father relented and said I could go to Lourdes. The nuns had given me a scholarship, which demolished his argument about the tuition.

My diary reflects my excitement as both of my projects shifted into high gear:

May 4, 1966—Weds. Sister thinks I’m gonna be a nun. How am I supposed to know?! Two nuns congratulated me on the scholarship. Me, Connie, & Mary Jo finally talked to Sister tonight. She’s great!

May 8, 1966—Sun. We went for a ride & that was fun. I’m trying to win Beatle tickets. I’ve got to go! I’m really gonna go on a diet & get pretty & meet Paul this summer.

The tickets were going on sale at the stadium at nine o’clock in the morning on Saturday, May 21. My best friend, Patsy, was going to stay overnight at my house the Friday before, and we would get up early and take the bus downtown. My parents didn’t encourage us to invite friends to stay overnight, or let us stay overnight at our friends’ houses, a policy I never understood. Anyway, I finagled it—caught Dad in a good mood and framed it so it made financial sense.

That Friday night, Dad took us all out to dinner at the Flat Iron Café, in the Flats. The special was a fish fry. I hated fish (it would be a year before Catholics were no longer compelled to eat fish on Friday) and was relieved that I could have macaroni-and-cheese. My mother said, “I had to tee-hee when I thought of that Patsy telling her father we took her to a beer joint.” My father was at his most gracious. After dinner, he gave us a tour of the bridges over the Cuyahoga River.

May 21, 1966—Sat. I’m dead tired. Stood out in the pouring rain for over 5 hours. Got a ticket, though. I think I’ll be on Paul’s side.

Patsy and I got seats in the lower deck: Section 27, Row 10, Seats 16 and 17. I was familiar with the stadium, because I was a baseball fan—the old stadium was huge, and the Cleveland Indians, those perennial losers, could never fill it up; the Cleveland
Press
gave free tickets to anyone who got straight A’s—so I knew that our seats were on the left-field side.

Irene was way ahead of us in line—she had been there all night. (She called herself Rinny now, and she had given a British name to her dog, Geoff, which we all, Irene included, pronounced in what we thought was the British way: GEE-off.) Her seat was probably down on the field.

Thus began the long vigil:

May 22, 1966—Sun. . . . Can’t wait till Aug. 14!

June 5, 1966—Sun. The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. They were OK, but they should’ve changed the order of songs & should’ve not worn those dopey glasses. Paul looked sweet but like he chipped his tooth.

June 17, 1966—It’s Paul’s birthday right now & I heard that he bought himself (as a birthday present, the dope!) a farm in Scotland. Man, would I love that!

July 3, 1966—Sun. . . . Finished a letter to Paul which is pretty good.

July 9, 1966—Sat. Took a bath & the works & I’m gonna be different tomorrow. Skinny! We’ve been sorta mad at Connie lately, but who cares. I’ve got to get a job. And I’ve got to meet the Beatles.

July 19, 1966—Tues. Jinxed the Indians. They lost. . . . Race riots on the east side. Civil War II on the way.

World events rarely intruded into my diary (I allotted half a line to the death of Winston Churchill), but my father’s fire station was on the East Side, and that summer, when his company responded to an alarm in the Hough district, rioters threw bricks and stones at the firemen.

Dad was already a bigot, and now he was mad. Downtown Cleveland was about halfway between where we lived—on the West Side, near the zoo—and the slums. Downtown was black. I knew that Dad would give me a hard time about being there at night after the concert.

Then an earth-shattering revelation:

July 20, 1966—Wed. Paul really did chip his tooth! What’d I tell you! I love him more than ever! And I’m gonna write him a letter & tell him so! He flipped off his motorbike & had to get stitches in the mouth! Sweet.

July 21, 1966—Thurs. . . . Wrote Paul a letter. I keep thinking about his tooth!

The chipped tooth was a big deal to me. I had been devastated when I chipped my own tooth against the TV that time. I’d never seen a Miss America contestant with a chipped tooth, so there went that fantasy. My mother took me to our ancient dentist, but he declined to cap it or do anything cosmetic. (Electroplating, if it had been invented, was not in his repertoire.) “But I can’t go through life like this!” I wailed. “Oh, I think you can,” the dentist said.