The Beatles Are Here! (15 page)

Fun.

Fun?

The deafening shrieks of teenage girls cheering the Beatles on
The
Ed Sullivan Show
was a sound I couldn’t identify or name. There is no equivalent for the word
fun
in my native language. I am French.

In February 1964, American women were flushing French perfume down the toilet because Charles de Gaulle, then president of France, had established diplomatic relations with communist China. I was new to Francophobia. I had come to New York to be with my boyfriend, a brilliant Yale graduate who, among other accomplishments, spoke French fluently. His mother was also a Francophile but her husband refused to acknowledge me or talk to me because he thought that I was a communist. As a student in a French Beaux Arts school, I had found an intern position with the legendary French designer Raymond Loewy, whose offices were in New York. My accent in English was atrocious. People only pretended to understand what I was talking about.

That spring, my boyfriend took me to visit a college friend of his, a trust-fund brat who lived in Greenwich Village and had perfected the raffish bohemian look of the moment. He showed us his most recent acquisition, a brand new Seeburg jukebox, and proposed to demonstrate how it worked by playing a couple of Beatles songs on it. But he didn’t have the proper coins and neither did we. “Wait a minute,” he said, “I’ll go down to the corner deli and get some change.” I was puzzled. He owned the instrument, so why did he have to pay to use it? Surely he could have tampered with the mechanism to avoid this inconvenience?

His answer blew me away.

“I put coins in the jukebox because it’s fun,” he said.

Fun. F.U.N.

Three letters that changed my life.

A couple of months later, de Gaulle criticized the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Americans expressed their anti-French feelings by pouring Bordeaux wine and Champagne down the drain. Confused, I speculated that it must have been “fun” to uncork the bottles and empty their content into a yawning porcelain bowl. Then I was on a roll. The word fun helped me to characterize my whole New York experience: sitting at a drugstore lunch counter, drinking soda pop from the bottle, double-dating, or pinning a corsage on my winter coat.

But I was faking it. There was a dimension of mirth I could never achieve. It was there in the intoxicating din of fans cheering the Beatles, in their jubilation and revelry. It was there in their childish delight and the abandon with which they expressed it. Years later, when the term “baby boomers” was coined, I assumed that it described the booming voices I had heard that night on
The
Ed Sullivan Show
—an upsurge of optimism triggered by the sight of the baby-faced performers.

I am not a boomer. I am four years ahead of the celebrated demographic bulge. My daughter, born is 1968, also missed being part of that same prestigious cohort—1964 being the last year on your birth certificate to qualify as a boomer. Although she and I sometimes pass for boomers (we have our moments of levity), neither of us is endowed with the natural exuberance that is the birthright of the 78.3 million Americans born in the post–World War II era.

Looking back, I can say in all earnest that acquiring that glee has been something of a spiritual quest.

It all started on February 9, 1964, at 8:10 p.m. EST, to be precise.

WHY ARE SOME
defining moments fixed forever in our mind, while others slip by, only to be revived, like Proust’s madeleine, in the glory of our hindsight? When I stood in the doorway of my boyfriend’s parents’ bedroom, listening to the loud screeching and screaming that punctuated every chord of “All My Loving,” how did I know that this particular scene deserved the Madame Tussaud’s treatment?

Today, I am revisiting the posh bedroom in this luxury New York co-op apartment as if I were on a 3D virtual tour. The décor is faux Italian Renaissance, with a built-in wall unit as ornate as the façade of a Venetian palace, complete with rows of loggias, one of which houses the bulky black-and-white television. A middle-aged woman wearing pearls and a quilted turquoise dressing gown reclines on the king-size bed, a cigarette in her bejeweled hand. Her husband, a monumental presence in a regal silk robe, stands by the window, a look of disbelief on his face. They have been stuck there, this prosperous pair, captive in my mind, for about fifty years. In the process, they have acquired a waxy, oily sheen.

I look around for clues. Everything in the room is monogrammed, gold-plated, marbleized, floor-length, wall-to-wall, special-ordered, embellished, tailor-made, custom-built, five-star, certified, and hand-finished. This claustrophobic environment is what affluence looked like in America in the early sixties—in bedrooms such as this more than a few boomers were conceived.

Not just a tableau, this memory is an installation. The black-and-white TV has been broadcasting the same program all these years. The image on the screen flickers as the kids keep screaming.

This is my ground zero. My quest will start right here, on the twenty-first floor of this luxury co-op, overlooking the East River, with the Triborough Bridge in the distance.

That evening my boyfriend and I snuck away from his parents’ bedroom, leaving them to their televised bewilderment. It was snowing. The doorman called us a cab and we headed crosstown through Central Park to the railroad flat I shared with a roommate on West 72nd Street. I slept in an alcove in the living room, while she was ensconced in the bedroom. Her boyfriend was a rowdy character, while my boyfriend was a typical Ivy Leaguer, herringbone tweed jacket, penny loafers, and all. He had recently become my lover—if you can call love the fumbling that usually preceded the debacle in the alcove.

But my preppy ejaculator was a hunk. His torso was an armored plate. His pelvic bones, cresting on either side of his taut belly, were strung like a Celtic harp. His arms and legs were wreaths of muscle. He may have been a Sistine Chapel specimen, but he was a disappointment in the sack. Even so, the intimacy between us could be thrilling. We would huddle and giggle under the blanket as stark naked figures emerging from my roommate’s bedroom made frequent beelines for the refrigerator, jerking it open in search of liquid sustenance.

Bad sex has redeeming qualities. Bad sex can be fun. Never underestimate the pleasure of crumpling sheets, spilling wine on the carpet, and mucking up towels. My boyfriend, alas, did not appreciate such simple delights. An inspired wordsmith who eventually got a doctorate in art history, he could enthuse about abstract expressionist smears and smudges—and would later do so in a five-hundred-page volume about modern art—yet he never saw the beauty of our more sultry drips and splotches.

The Rolling Stones album
Sticky Fingers
, released in 1971, was a far cry from the Beatles’ early hit “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Its message was clear: there’s more to sex than the missionary position. But for my boyfriend and me that news came too late. We had married each other, become parents, and engaged in extramarital sex, all without ever finding our way, sexually, to the viscous and molten center of the earth.

NEVER HAD THE
gap between one generation and the next been so painfully acute. On one side were such plain-vanilla kids as my boyfriend and me, utopians whose values were rooted in mid-century aesthetics; on the other side was a fun-loving cohort of Pop Culture savants whose appetite for commercial trivia became a permanent feature of the American psyche. In 1964, Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns mounted the American Supermarket exhibition, an event that turned Campbell’s soup cans into a national symbol. Warhol was a buffoon of sorts, but so was my boss at the time, Raymond Loewy, a trendsetter at the opposite end of the fun spectrum.

Loewy had always been the laughingstock of the New York design establishment. The people at MoMA simply dismissed him as a “stylist.” When I met him, he was a debonair little Frenchman, with a sedate smile, manicured hands, and a middle-age spread. At the end of the day he would tour the bullpen (the room was the size of a city block), silently reviewing the work of the different designers. No one spoke. He would take out his fancy fountain pen and sign with a flourish a couple of drawings before moving on. The remainders were emphatically thrown away—without his autograph, they were worthless.

When I got there, my professional ambition, nourished by Bauhaus delusions, had been to design politically correct electric fans and alarm clocks. Industrial design was a calling, as far as I was concerned. But Loewy was not Walter Gropius, far from it. Known for his streamlined locomotives and slenderized kitchen appliances, he would put whoosh lines and speed whiskers on everything from iceboxes to toothbrushes.

While I had hoped to work on something modernistic, perhaps an aerodynamic lemon squeezer or torpedo-shaped cups and saucers, I was in for a reality check. My first assignment was to draw a twelve-foot-long malignant cell. The giant protoplasm was to be the centerpiece of an exhibit for the American Cancer Society, an educational installation in the Hall of Science at the New York World’s Fair.

It should look like something from outer space, I was told. Light it from behind to make it glow.

Seriously? Indeed.

While the official theme of the 1964 New York World’s Fair was “Peace through Understanding,” it was actually designed to glorify commercial messages—it had the dubious distinction of being the first international exposition to give consumer brands the same status as participating nations. Conceived as a huge amusement park, with 200 major American corporations, such as Westinghouse, Clairol, General Foods and Simmons, it was a square mile of sideshows, live demonstrations, interactive exhibits, and fun rides. Its product-as-entertainment strategy targeted young consumers—the same teens who had shrieked through
The
Ed Sullivan Show
. Millions of them came, accompanied by their parents.

My sci-fi cancer cell wasn’t exactly “fun”—I labored over graphic displays dramatizing cervical cancer and the lifesaving wonders of the Pap test—but it was part of the same insidious scheme. The American Cancer Society had, for all intents and purposes, been transformed into a consumer brand.

THE WORLD’S FAIR—NICKNAMED
the “laissez-fair”—was the ugliest urban sprawl I had ever seen. Yet it was “fun!” Every visitor could find something to love amid the bric-a-brac of pavilions, reflective pools, memorials, and archways, even though waiting in line to see the shows—GM’s Futurama, Westinghouse’s time capsule, Clairol’s hair-coloring carousel—was usually the most thrilling part of the experience.

It was the same with the Beatles. The band was fun because it offered something for everyone. “Who’s your favorite Beatle?” was the burning question. Each one of the four musicians was so different—you almost
had
to love him more than the others. For me it was Ringo. Of course! In my estimation, the other three only existed to better showcase the quirky charm of the drummer.

As long as each performer had his own following—and each fan could demonstrate his or her allegiance with impunity—the popularity of the group was assured. To their bitter end, the Beatles preserved the public’s right to choose one over the other. In so doing, they confirmed the fragile individuality of each and every one of their screaming fans, a strategy that made Beatlemania that much more fulfilling and buoyant.

Contrary to popular belief, fun is not a shared experience. It is a very private emotion, an internal simmering of delicious apprehensions. Though it may express itself in a boisterous display of glee, it never loses its quiet, confidential dimension.

At the World’s Fair, I made a discovery whose memory outshines all others. Thinking about it provokes in me a Cheshire-Cat grin. What generated my merriment was “Think,” a short multiscreen projection sponsored by IBM for its World’s Fair pavilion. The strange and marvelous theater, designed by Eero Saarinen, in which this event took place resembled a giant egg resting on a canopy of steel trees. The show itself consisted of fifteen films by Charles and Ray Eames that, projected together, deliberately stimulated and challenged the viewer’s cognitive faculties.

Under the pretext of comparing the logic of computers with that of human beings, the Eameses created an exquisite visual choreography that got you to feel—and actually be—smarter. Juxtaposing signs and images into an ever-changing pattern, they turned abstract forms into ideas that suddenly made sense.

“Think” didn’t move me to think. It did even better. I experienced a complete and immediate rush, as if endorphins had been injected directly into my bloodstream. Had I been a teenager, I would have shrieked gleefully, stomped my feet, jumped up and down on my seat. I did none of the above—but I became hooked on a sensation that my brain’s reward system, from that moment forward, would seek to reproduce as often as it could.

Having fun.

I smile secretly, just thinking about it.