The Beatles Are Here! (4 page)

The New York Times (by Jack Manning)

BEATLES IN DEMAND: Fans gathered outside Paramount Theater yesterday afternoon

THE
NEW
YORK
TIMES
SEPTEMBER
21, 1964

BEATLES AND FANS MEET SOCIAL SET

Chic and Shriek Mingle at Paramount Benefit Show

By GAY TALESE

Coolly elegant women in mink coats and pearls, together with men in black tie and in no need of a haircut, found themselves in the Paramount Theater last night sitting amid 3,600 hysterical teen-agers, who should perhaps have been home in bed or doing their homework.

But the Beatles were at the Paramount, the show was for charity and all was tolerated.

It took 240 policemen to keep things tolerable, however, as teen-age girls, even five hours before the 8:30 P.M. show began, lined Seventh Avenue and West 43d and 44th Streets, causing traffic jams and confusion in the Times Square area.

They screamed and squeeled [sic] at everything, these hundreds and hundreds of girls between 13 and 18, some wearing “Ringo, for President” buttons or carrying banners that read, “Beatles Please Stay Here 4-Ever.”

Pandemonium Grows

At 8:30 P.M., when the theater darkened, the girls inside shrieked and cheered. When a shaft of light flashed onto the bandstand they shrieked and cheered even louder. When the announcer just mentioned the word “Beatles”—even though they were not to be on until 10:45 P.M.—the whole house reverberated with the thumping, jumping, flailing, shrieking crowd of young people.

Anyone beyond 21 years of age yesterday felt ready for Social Security.

Those included, in addition to the policemen and the Beatles’ chauffeur, many of the adults who put on the $75,000 benefit for Retarded Infants Service, Inc., and United Cerebral Palsy of New York.

It was an incongruous sight last night, one that brought together the chic and shriek sets. The latter sat mostly in seats ranging from $5 to $25 each; the former sat mostly in seats costing $50 each (380 were sold) or $100 each (224 were sold).

The Beatles, when they finally got on stage, shortly after 10 P.M, sang for 25 minutes strumming out tunes that nobody could hear. They sang 10 numbers, but as they did, teenagers rose to their feet and jumped and twisted in the aisles; others tossed jelly beans, slices of bread or rolls of toilet tissue toward the stage.

Flashbulbs illuminated the theater, from the orchestra up to the remote reaches of the upper balcony, and policemen stood elbow to elbow in front of the high stage, neither frowning nor smiling, just looking tired.

For everybody, the Beatles, and their adoring fans—it was a long hard day and night.

Fooled by Chauffeur

The Beatles, who had been in Dallan [sic] and stopped over in the Ozarks earlier yesterday, landed in a remote cargo area to avoid the mobs at Kennedy Airport. Then, at 5:30 P.M., they left by helicopter for Manhattan.

At that time, there were 4,000 teen-agers squashed behind police barricades along 43d Street and Seventh Avenue near the theater.

Unwisely, they assumed that these spots would give them a view of the Beatles’ entrance. But at 6:10, the Beatles’ chauffeur, Louis Savarese (whose biggest thrill behind a wheel came when he drove the King of Burundi to the World’s Fair this summer), slyly slipped the rented Cadillac through West. 44th Street, sliding up on the sidewalk just beyond Sardi’s.

Then, as a few dozen teenagers spotted the British mopheads, and came rushing and howling toward the car, 40 policemen ringed the singers. The best the girls could do was smear fingerprints over the car, and rock it back and forth a bit. By then, however, the Beatles were safely indoors,

Many girls—there were relatively few boys at the Paramount last night—were in obvious pain at having missed the Beatles’ entrance: a few of them began to weep. Others just howled louder than before.

Awarded a Scroll

By 8 P.M., the theater was filled. The pre-Beatle show included songs by Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme, Leslie Uggams and the Tokens, Bobby Goldsboro, the Shangri-Las, the Brothers Four, Jackie De Shannon and Nancy Ames. All of them worked without fees, as did the Beatles.

Following their performance, the Beatles were honored with a presentation of a scroll by Leonard H. Goldenson, chairman of the United Cerebral Palsy Associations. It read:

“To Jack Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr who, as the Beatles, have brought an excitement to the entertainment capitals of the world and who, as individuals, have given of their time and talent to bring help and hope to the handicapped children of America.”

After their 10th number, the Beatles ran off the stage and left the building at 10:45 P.M., before the crowd inside could get to them.

The chic set was not interested in chasing them, for they—those who had either $50 or $100 tickets—had a champagne party in the downstairs lobby to attend.

In seven limousines, the Beatles and 14 members of their entourage sped to the Riviera Idlewild Hotel, for a night of rest before flying back to England today.

Only two people were in the lobby when the Beatles arrived, neither of them Beatmaniacs. They were reading newspaeprs [sic] and went back to them when the Beatles disappeared up the elevator.

In Love with Gorgeous George

by Penelope Rowlands

(the girl in the middle in the photo)

THE ARTICLE, WRITTEN
by Gay Talese, ran in the September 21, 1964, issue of the
New York Times
. Headed “Beatles and Fans Meet Social Set,” it described how almost four thousand “hysterical teenagers, who should perhaps have been home in bed or doing their homework,” had gathered at the Paramount Theatre the night before. Arriving hours before the group was due on stage, they “screamed and squealed at everything.”

A photograph shows a row of young women doing exactly that behind a banner reading “Beatles Please Stay Here 4-Ever.” The girls have an operatic look: They might be a row of divas, mouths open wide in song, arms flung dramatically wide.

I’m standing dead center, pushing forward, with a frenzied expression. I’m flatchested, freckle-faced, and curly haired—a very young thirteen. For months I’ve been screaming and squealing every chance I get. I’ve snuck into hotels with groups of similarly obsessed girls. I’ve chased after autographs, any possible souvenir, including a square of fabric from John Lennon’s boxer shorts that I bought for a dollar from an ad in a fan magazine. The thought that this might be a hoax crossed my mind, but only briefly. I knew for a fact that this cloth had once touched a Beatle’s flesh. Somehow, I could tell.

When I first opened the
Times
and saw this photo, after school in my family’s crowded apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, it could have been a thrill. But it distinctly wasn’t. I prayed that my mother would miss it, but she was no sooner home from her secretarial job at St. James’s, the Episcopal church our family had attended for five generations, than the phone rang with family friends passing on the news. By the time my new stepfather—I couldn’t bring myself to pronounce his name—returned to our apartment for the first time, I was on my way to being grounded for eternity.

It was the first day of their, our, new conjugal life. They’d headed off on their honeymoon the week before, leaving us three children in the care of our maternal grandmother. Racing off to Bucks County with a man we scarcely knew, my mother called out: “Be sure you don’t go down to the Beatles’ hotel while I’m gone!”

I ignored her, of course. I couldn’t have done otherwise, for George Harrison was the most important person in my life. While I first fell for his looks—he was twenty, jocular, glossy haired—my devotion went far below the surface. I knew that he would understand me as no one else did, and that I would do the same for him.

Loving George was more than just a feeling, it came with a future, a life. I’d imagine us making the scene together in Swinging London—the locus of everything that mattered back then. I kept his picture in a cheap gold frame from Lamston’s and kissed it every night.

So I really had to go.

I headed down to Delmonico’s, the hotel where the band was staying. I’d spent time down there a month earlier, too, when the Beatles were last in town. For two days that August, the corner of 59th Street and Park Avenue became an encampment. Thousands of girls clustered behind barricades. Police patrolled on horseback. Tourists stopped by.

It became de rigueur to at least have gone over to look. At one point both of my brothers went down to see if they could find me in the crowd. (They couldn’t.) I was astonished that my studious older brother, Eliot—an opera fan, to my intense mortification—had made the pilgrimage. Nine-year old Richard became an instant convert. “It was exciting!” he recalled, years after the fact.

The next month, when I went down there again, I took the IRT instead of the safe, familiar Fifth Avenue bus. Riding the subway made the adventure even more illicit—I wasn’t meant to take it alone. Still, with my mother and that man safely away in Pennsylvania, I felt free to do as I liked.

I stepped off the train at the Bloomingdale’s station, climbed the filthy, trash-strewn stairway to the street, then headed a block west. I could almost feel the frenzy of a thousand restive girls as I turned the corner onto Park. The crowd, when I reached it, seemed monstrous, alive. Thrilling! Policemen patrolled in pairs; passersby stopped to stare.

I took my place among the pack, my sisters in screaming, girls who, in memory, look remarkably alike, with the straight hair I envied; their Beatles-inspired bangs cascaded glossily down past their eyebrows. When I arrived they were talking excitedly among themselves. John—someone was sure of it—had been sighted on the eighth floor. We stared up, as one, and waited. Whenever we saw a shadow move, or a curtain ripple, we’d shriek.

We’d been screaming together, all over New York, for the past six months. Just weeks earlier, we’d waited in a quiet frenzy at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, where the brightly lit stage looked silvery in the humid, late summer night. When the Beatles walked out, four tiny stick figures in the distance, we rose as one. We heard only a chord or two of music. Mainly there was this enormous roar, and we were part of it. After forty minutes or so the figures retreated, the stage went dark, and we emerged from our collective trance. I would be hoarse for days.

Why did we scream? In my case, it seems clear. My world was closing in. My American mother had brought us back to her native New York from England, yanking us out of her unhappy marriage, some years earlier. Lately she’d become unrecognizable, sipping bourbon with her new husband—a “Mad Man” before the term was coined—each night in a ritual they call “The Cocktail Hour” and laughing at things that don’t seem funny at all. I slink past them, hoping not to be noticed, yet craving attention in a way that feels almost physically like pain. I head for my room, a shrine to the Fab Four, its walls covered with pictures from fan magazines (including my favorite, which offers an “A to Z on Gorgeous George”). Enveloped by the Beatles, in love with George, I am safe.

In my free time I roam the city in quest of one band or another. One Sunday, my best friend, Addison, and I, lurking outside the Ed Sullivan Theatre on Broadway in hopes of encountering the Dave Clark Five, find ourselves, anticlimactically, face-to-face with an elderly French singer instead. We ask for his autograph but, in truth, we couldn’t care less.

Standing around us are girls wearing tweed caps over their long black bangs. With their dark eyeliner and kabukiesque foundation makeup, they’ve got The Look, the one that I, in spite of my white lipstick and mod touches, can never quite pull off.

They don’t look our way as we chat with this creaky Frenchman whom no one has come to greet. None of us, clearly, is worth a glance. The singer signs his name twice, once each for Addison and me, and when he’s done he fixes me with a long stare. “You’re beautiful,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye that I later learn is legendary. “You’re not like them,” he adds, still twinkling, inclining his head toward the cluster of girls. “You’re a flower.” And then he is gone.