The Beatles Are Here! (13 page)

July 26, 1966—Tues. Went swimming. I am too darn fat! I’ll never make a hit with Paul. (I love his tooth!) Mary Jo got a postcard from Sr. Andrew. Gotta brush my hair.

Around August 4, John Lennon made his famous remark about the Beatles’ being bigger than Jesus Christ, and the Beatles were banned in the Bible Belt. The furor soon died down, but the fact that religion had come up during the Beatles’ tour gave me new hope as Paul set out on the road to Cleveland. I boldly committed to my diary my most fervent desire. “I wish Paul would tell him off, the Beatles would break up, & Paul would enter a seminary,” I wrote. “Now you know!”

The next ten days were a frenzy of devotion. I listened to the radio religiously. Paul won a Favorite Beatle Contest, beating John by five hundred votes. My favorite disc jockey, Jerry G, was going to interview him when he was in Cleveland.
Revolver
came out, and “Eleanor Rigby” was issued as a single, with “Yellow Submarine” on the flip side. I watched for sightings of Paul on the news, redid my bedroom door with fresh pictures of my one and only, babysat to earn money to buy film and flashcubes to take pictures at the concert. My father would be working that night, and if there were no fires or riots he was going to pick Patsy and me up in the chief’s car and drive us home. The chief’s car could get through anything.

August 13, 1966—Sat. Made $3 at Aber’s house. Nice people & kids! You know what tomorrow is! I can’t wait! Paul is gonna sing “Yesterday.” I’m gonna stay up all night reading & waiting for the Beatles’ arrival & writing Paul a letter!

Certain that Paul would be feeling hemmed in by the constant travel and the strain of being on tour, I invited him to dinner. If Jesus Christ could rise from the dead, Paul McCartney could come to Sunday dinner, and my mother could put something decent on the table. Chatty and confidential—I felt free to be myself with Paul—I gave him precise directions.

All he’d have to do was catch the 81 bus on Prospect Avenue, across the street kitty-corner from Public Square. The bus stop was in front of a lingerie store called Mamselle, which was next to a nut shop that sold roasted cashews. He would need correct change. I apologized to Paul for the dreary route. Sometimes it seemed to me that the 81 took the longest possible route to our neighborhood, covering every street on the West Side that wasn’t served by some other bus. Scranton, Storer . . . I dreaded to think of Paul on these soulless thoroughfares. But I wanted him to see the real Cleveland.

I explained to him how the boring part would be over once the bus had made a major right turn onto Denison, and then a quick left onto Ridge. He’d pass Zayre’s on the left, where I shopped for fabric; a doughnut shop in the shape of a crown; and a bowling alley, where my first bowling score had been a humiliating nineteen (lots of gutter balls). Coming up on the left was a storage facility for telephone poles (it reeked of creosote), and then he should watch on the right for Merhaut Flowers and pull the cord to let the driver know he was getting off. Our stop was on the far side of the green bridge: Orchard Grove. He’d have to cross Ridge and walk up one block, to the Phillips 66 station, then turn left onto Meadowbrook. We were the seventh house on the right, a white colonial with green shutters. We ate at six.

I knew what hotel they were staying in. Perhaps I could hand the letter to a policeman to pass along to Paul?

On the evening of the concert, Patsy and I dressed in our Sunday best. I had on a panty girdle and my Easter outfit (without the hat and white gloves). I had the letter in my purse, along with my ticket, my Brownie camera, and a dime to call my father.

Revolver
was playing—“For No One”—as we found our seats. The stage was on the pitcher’s mound, impossibly far away, but the girl next to me let me use her binoculars, and for one ecstatic moment they brought me right up to Paul McCartney’s feet.

I rarely exceeded the four lines provided for an entry in my diary, but on this occasion I spilled over into 1967:

August 14, 1966—Sun. Wild scene! 5,000 kids, I was almost one of them, stormed the stage & the show was stopped. It was terrific, though! They had dark green suits & yellowish-green shirts. Paul was lovely. He sang “Yesterday” & almost everyone shut up! He waved & everything & stood behind a pole! We were far away, but in some girl’s binoculars he was close-up & man is he a doll!

When everyone stormed the stage, Patsy turned to me and said, “Should we go?” “I don’t know,” I said, staring straight ahead. I had turned into a pillar of salt. We stood at our assigned seats as everyone around us surged forward. That night, I later read, John Lennon said backstage that this would be their last tour.

August 15, 1966—Mon. Paul has a black kitten with white whiskers, with a real cool name, which I couldn’t understand. He is so funny. I wish I could sit around all week in solitude listening to Jerry G interviewing him. They left at 2 PM.

I failed to note that August 15 was the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. It did not escape my notice that Paul McCartney had been hustled out of town before dinnertime.

A FEW DAYS
later, I got a letter from Sister Andrew. She had been transferred, and Mary Jo and I made plans to visit her at the new convent. Paul got his tooth capped. My pictures didn’t come out—all I got was the backs of people’s heads.

In January, Jerry G, my favorite disc jockey, left town. “I don’t understand how anyone can call a city the best location in the nation & say its people are fantastic & they love it & it has captured them & then move to Chicago,” I wrote, bitterly.

That year, Paul’s Birthday, which I had given special holiday status in my diary, coincided with Father’s Day.

June 18, 1967—Sun. Ed Sullivan wished Paul a happy birthday, but today ended rather strangely. Paul revealed that he has taken LSD four times this past year. He said it has brought him closer to God and made him a more honest man, but still I wish I were dreaming.

It was not the outcome I had been hoping for.

June 19, 1967—Mon. There was an article in the paper about Paul and LSD today. I think God has answered my prayers. Or at least started to. LSD was the means by which Paul has come close to God.

Psychedelic drugs were not the only development that took time to sink in. When I went back to school in the fall, the nuns were different. They had changed out of their habits and reverted to their baptismal names. Sister Mary Abram, my French teacher, became Sister Diane Branski, of the dimpled elbows; a few years later, she left the convent and started smoking and using hair spray and wearing makeup. Sister Mary Peyton, a.k.a. Pat Gaski, who had wide-spaced pale-blue eyes and was very athletic for a nun, whipping the long blue skirts of her robe around when she perched on a desktop, held out until the following spring, when we were aghast to see her in a sailor suit.

By the time I read about Paul McCartney’s breakup with Jane Asher, his role in my life was greatly diminished. “I took all my Beatle magazines & Trixie Belden books downstairs,” I recorded (August 31, 1968). “I’m going to save them for my posterity.” One day, while I was away at college, my father cleaned the garage, where he had stashed the two big boxes that contained my archive, and threw them out. It made me sad.

It was over, of course. My determination to convert my idol had been absurd, misguided, laughable, naïve . . . but at the time it had served its purpose. You might even say that it was my salvation.

Anyway, that was the end of Sister Mary Paul McCartney.

Peter Duchin, bandleader

I
WAS PLAYING
at the Maisonette in New York City in 1964 when the Beatles arrived on the scene. It was at the St. Regis Hotel and it was a very ritzy but wonderful place and all sorts of people came from all walks of life. People would dine, dance, and hopefully have a good time.

Whenever we would play a Beatles song, which we did often, old guys would come up and say “Good lord! What’s that longhair music you’re playing?” Because of the Beatles’ hairdos they considered the music to be “longhair.” It was really amusing.

I thought the Beatles sounded great, especially lyrically. Rhythmically they were up and down. It wasn’t a group you necessarily looked at technically, perhaps because of the drummer, but they were really interesting lyrically. Many of the tunes were totally unlike the American songbook tunes we had been used to playing. Just look at a lyric like “Eleanor Rigby” or “Fool on the Hill”! People were not necessarily writing tunes about that kind of thing. It was all quite poetic and whimsical.

I began playing their music as soon as I started hearing it. Since we had to play every night, we not only played all the show tunes and old tunes and Cole Porter and all of that, but whatever was out there—Little Richard, the Beatles, et cetera. I played whatever I felt like playing, same as today.

There was other stuff, like Bo Diddley, that we played but that was not yet really accepted by society. The Beatles slowly became acceptable but it took a while for middle-aged people to actually let go and dance to that kind of music. The parents of a lot of the kids who really loved the Beatles couldn’t understand the craze. They’d ask, “God, how can you listen to that stuff?”

It was the sixties and American culture was in for a rude shock. I well remember chuckling with the band as we watched older people trying to emulate the way their kids were dancing on the floor. They gave new meaning to the term
self-conscious
!

The Beatles were in Hamburg for what, two or three years? They had all that time there, playing with and listening to other groups, and they noticed that everybody played the same thing. They had to work out their own style. They started doing their own thing. They were so talented that they totally changed the face of popular music.

Their music is still wonderful. It allowed other things to happen that might not have happened. It certainly changed the face of the American songbook. And it allowed all sorts of groups—the Who, the Doors, endless other rock and roll groups that might not have been as adventurous—to happen. And that’s important.

I think their lyrics tapped into feelings that were as yet unexpressed by the kids who were their fans. They represented the rebellion that was in the air back then.

Anne Brown, fan

WHEN
I
WAS
going into about the eighth grade, we went and settled in Charleston, South Carolina, where all the rest of our family lived. Charleston was a very, very kept-back little town. It was a repressed little town to be a teenager in. It sure felt that way. Of course, probably all of America was then.

Charleston had its heyday and then it was very much in decline for many years—which is probably why it’s so well preserved at this point. It didn’t keep growing and bustling.

The whole Beatles thing that came washing over America barely touched South Carolina. The scene in Charleston was pretty calcified. Fresh new things, new thinking, anything like that was threatening and not welcome and not enjoyed. It was such an impenetrable place.

I first learned of the Beatles when I heard some of their songs on the radio. Their music was
totally
unusual down there. What played on local radio was something called “beach music,” a kind of regional form of Motown. These were black singing groups—the Tams were one example—that were often made up of four guys, four women, that kind of thing. A dance called the shag, of all things, often went with beach music.