The Beatles Are Here! (29 page)

Why Couldn’t They Leave Us Alone?

by Sigrid Nunez

I REMEMBER WISHING
that they were called something else. Even the story about how they came up with their name, originally inspired by Buddy Holly’s Crickets (for a while they were the Silver Beetles) made me cringe. It wasn’t just the awful pun. The Beatles (like the Crickets) was the kind of name a group of boys would write on the door of their clubhouse. The kind of boys girls my age had lost patience with and were dying to leave behind.

It was even worse when they began to be called the Fab Four. Not that the Beatles themselves were to blame for that. But why couldn’t they be called something more dignified? It pained me when it was pointed out how silly their name was. And it was pointed out a lot. A perfect name for them! one of my teachers jeered. School dropouts who can’t spell and who look like they crawled out from under a rock.

Looking back, it’s hard to believe those four smiling young men with the Cub Scout name who almost always dressed in suits and ties appeared to so many as filthy degenerates.

In the beginning, it seemed one was always defending them.

The first time I ever heard the name was at a pajama party (no one said
sleepover
then). This was when they were already big in the UK but had not yet appeared in the States. Of the five girls at the party, only one of us knew who the Beatles were. The way she described them left me doubtful about the excitement bordering on hysteria that had supposedly taken hold overseas. Not only was there the dumb name. There were the hairdos, described by my friend (pretty accurately, as it turned out) as being like Moe’s.

Moe?
I hated the Three Stooges. So did every girl I knew. Impossible that anyone bearing even the slightest resemblance to Moe Howard could be another Frank Sinatra or Elvis or Fabian. Whatever had infected those British birds, it could not happen here.

Beatlemania: I remember being asked all the time to explain it and never knowing what to say. Now I would say it was like drinking a potion. All of a sudden you were possessed. You were in love and you wanted something—someone. Someone you’d never met and could never ever have. What to do with these strange, strong feelings? You screamed and jumped up and down for joy but you also cried a lot. Some forgot to eat. Some vomited. Many fainted. A new kind of love, not grown-up love but not just a crush, either, not puppy love. More like being under a spell.

When you tried to explain about the music, people rolled their eyes. How could it be about the music when, given a chance to hear the band live (a chance that I, alas, would never have), fans screamed so loud that the microphones might as well have been off?

Good question (and one that troubled the Beatles as well).

I remember watching one of the many TV broadcasts about the Beatles’ first visit to America: a girl not much older than I explaining herself with remarkable poise. I had never heard anyone so young be so articulate. (A teenager invited to express herself in this way, grown-ups actually listening to what she had to say: this in itself was something new. An early sign of what was about to hit with astonishing force: the whole world’s attention focussed on youth.)

To the question why fans would want to drown out a band they’d waited in line for hours to get tickets to hear, she responded with serene defiance: What are you talking about? I was there, and I heard every note. I heard every syllable of every song.

Good answer.

But who were these girls, the ones who got to be
there
, shrieking themselves inside out at Carnegie Hall and Shea Stadium? Who were that lucky few hundred who managed to be in the studio for
The Ed Sullivan Show
? Why, oh, why couldn’t I have been at least among the thousands to greet them when they landed for the first time, four demigods touching earth at the airport we were all just learning to call Kennedy (the president’s assassination had occurred not quite three months before). I was considered too young to be allowed to go into Manhattan without an adult, and I remember that the envy I felt for those girls who got to be
real
fans—seeing the band perform live, mobbing their hotels, chasing their limos, getting autographs—seemed a wicked injustice. Not too many years earlier I’d had a similar feeling about the kids who got to be Mouseketeers. Was life always going to be unfair to me?

To have the full experience, you had to have a favorite. Paul was the most popular; Ringo, the least. This, of course, had everything to do with looks. Always underappreciated, Ringo was the least handsome (and the shortest) of the four. He was odd-looking, in fact, with his hound-dog eyes, froggy mouth, and big, unshapely nose, though it seems to me that precisely because of his unconventional features the moptop suited him better than it did anyone else. I didn’t really have a favorite, but when pushed I would declare Ringo. He needed me. It helped also that, of the four, he came from the poorest background, that as a small child he’d been abandoned by his father and had been an unusually sickly boy, spending years in children’s hospitals. All this touched a chord in me.

As the old footage shows, all the Beatles were—early on, anyway —incorrigible cutups. John was the drollest, the quickest on his feet. But Ringo was the most natural and appealing clown. And, as much as I disliked the name of the band, I loved the nickname Ringo.

But, as any true fan could tell you, part of the miracle that was the Beatles was that they were
all
great, and that each, in his own way, was adorable and easy to love. In the beginning, you never heard anyone say I don’t like this one or that one; only after the band broke up did fans find themselves on Team John or Team Paul.

For me, if anything needed explaining it was Beatlephobia. I remember the phrase
like something that crawled out from under a rock
was heard a lot. So was the word
faggots
. (What other reason could there have been for the long hair, or for the drummer’s fondness for wearing several rings at once?) That their music was without a shred of artistic value, that they were a menace to society, sexual perverts with a diabolical ability to create mass hysteria—charges that caused them to be banned from performing in several countries, including Israel and the USSR. What in heaven’s name was behind this overwrought response?

You call that music? a friend’s father shrieked, spastic with rage. And when do you think was the last time those creeps had a bath?

Talk about hysteria.

To this day I have not forgiven an uncle of mine who happened to be visiting us the night the Beatles first appeared on
Ed Sullivan
, and who by his loud, mean-spirited mockery so thoroughly ruined the experience for me that I wept. Later I learned that parents of young girls everywhere had responded to the Beatles’ appearance that night by turning the television off.

And there was Mrs. T., a teacher I’d always particularly liked. One day she brought to school a newspaper article, which she had me stand up and read in front of the class. A fatuous editorial about how the writer and her husband had cured their daughter of Beatlemania by pretending that they, too, had gone ape for the band. I remember the smug tone of the piece and my feeling of outrage at the smirking pleasure the woman appeared to take in having killed her daughter’s passion. And I remember how betrayed I felt by Mrs. T.’s stupidity. She had chosen me to read the article precisely because I shared the girl’s feelings. A hateful thing to do. Before that day I’d always done very well in Mrs. T.’s class; after, I no longer cared to. And when, much concerned, she asked me what it was all about, I would not speak. Let her figure it out.

But what had gotten into all these parents and teachers? How could one trust them anymore—about anything? Brainwashed, delusional, sex-crazed, moronic sheep was how they described us. Why couldn’t they just leave us alone?

On the other hand, my heart went out to those wounded and frustrated boys—the heartthrobs in pompadours and crew cuts who all of a sudden found themselves spurned by girls who used to swoon for them and to whom they now looked all wrong. (Devastating, the Beach Boys would one day confess, the discovery that, overnight, you were no longer cool.)

Of course, as the rest of the decade would show, we poor deluded girls had been on to something all right. It seemed the more the Beatles played together the more brilliant and magical the music became. They got older, they changed, and we changed with them. We became hippies together, and the boys caught up, saying good-bye to crew cuts and pompadours, letting their hair grow, growing beards and sideburns and moustaches, digging the music as devotedly as we female fans.

There’s a well-known illustration, drawn sometime in the mid-sixties by an artist who, inspired by the famous song, tried to portray what John, Paul, George, and Ringo (they were always named in that order) might look like at sixty-four. It is poignant to think that two of them did not live to see that age—as it is to recall that once, musing about the toll of superstardom, John said, “I don’t want to die at forty.” (The very year . . .)

Once they split up, John was the only Beatle who interested me anymore, though not for much longer.

One night in 1978, at a premiere gala at Lincoln Center, I saw John and Yoko among the guests. He was wearing a tuxedo and the wire-framed glasses whose style had come to bear his name. He was clean-shaven, and his hair, which had begun to recede on top, was thin and dry and so unflatteringly cut that it didn’t look like a professional job. As often happens with celebrities encountered in the flesh, he was smaller than I’d always thought he was. He did not look very handsome; with age his face was growing pinched.

No one in the dense crowd was paying any special attention to him; he was just another guest. I don’t remember feeling much myself. By that time I’d left the Beatles far behind. I could not have told you what any of them was up to those days, and while the early hits remained—remain—indelible, I did not always recognize their new work when I heard it. Besides, I was now well into my twenties and at a stage in life when . . . well, if you thought I was going to bat an eye just because I happened to be breathing the same air as John Lennon, you were quite wrong. The truth is, there were several people present that night whom I admired much more than I admired him.

Nevertheless, it did amuse me to think what would have ensued had this late fulfillment of my ardent adolescent dream triggered a relapse and I had suddenly burst into maniacal screaming.

Hard to imagine. But oh, how much harder to imagine that, two years hence, a deranged soul believing himself half devil, half Holden Caulfield, would approach John as he left his home on Central Park West, get his autograph, wait for hours for him to return . . .

When I first heard the news of his death, I felt as if someone had murdered my girlhood.

And even then there was someone to scoff. I remember how the man I was living with at the time, himself never a Beatles fan, could not stop criticizing the media for treating the death like a major world event, and me for overreacting.

Some years ago when I was working on a book—a novel in which the main character takes a long hard look back at the sixties, the era when she came of age—I found that a certain Lennon-McCartney song kept coming into my head. A song I’ve always loved, perhaps my favorite Beatles song, not only their version but the various covers, in particular the one by Judy Collins: “In My Life.” And one day it struck me. That gentle meditation on love and loss, that tender look back, that song that might be the perfect anthem of nostalgic middle age, was written when the Beatles were in the full bloom of youth, the year Lennon turned twenty-six and McCartney twenty-four.

If I could have known about the coming day when an assassin would blow away the part of him that was mortal, I think I would have looked harder at John Lennon that night when I was so blasé. I might even have tried to get closer. I would not have been so worried about being uncool. I would have forgotten everyone else but him. I would have stared and stared.

Leah Silidjian, fan

MY MOM GOT
my dad tickets to see this tribute show,
Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles—On Broadway
, a couple of years ago, in January 2010, when I was fifteen. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to go. I thought, “Oh my god, it’s another one of those old bands that nobody likes anymore.”