The Beatles Are Here! (5 page)

His opinion counts for nothing, but I’m buoyed up just the same. “I can’t believe Maurice Chevalier told you you were beautiful,” Addison repeats the whole way home on the Madison Avenue bus. But the best is yet to come. A day or so later, sneaking around in the city after school, I miraculously come across the lead singer of Gerry & The Pacemakers as he and his entourage walk briskly down the hallway of a Midtown hotel.

“Are you getting married?” I ask, falling in step beside him, in response to a rumor that’s flashed among us girls.

“If you’ll have me,” he teases, then steps into an elevator and is gone.

I soar. Gerry is from Liverpool—our Mecca—and his “Ferry Across the Mersey” is played every other minute on our favorite radio stations, WMCA and WABC. Joke or not, his proposal is valuable currency at school, where my life is deteriorating daily. I daydream through classes; my report card is a series of Cs and worse. When I’m told that I’ll have to repeat a grade the following year, it doesn’t matter to me at all.

By the next summer, when the Beatles return, everything has changed. My mother has returned to Earth, and my stepfather, while never quite beloved, has at least been integrated into our lives. And I’m newly sophisticated. With my faux Courrèges dress, ivory tights, and matching white lipstick, I at last have The Look.

On a stifling night in August I head out, yet again, to hear the Beatles play. A friend and I take our places in the volatile crowd, this time at Shea Stadium. The ant-size figures emerge. They play “Can’t Buy Me Love,” but all we hear this time, too, are the opening chords. The thrill of it all lasts long after a helicopter arrives to whisk the band away.

A full year later, I’m back at Shea. It’s August once more and, of course, sweltering hot (air conditioning isn’t yet widely used). I remember one moment at the stadium quite distinctly, even as I’ve forgotten so much of the rest: the instant when, standing in the sweating, frenzied crowd, I realized that I no longer cared in the same frantic way. I shrieked, of course, but only intermittently. Suddenly, it all felt embarrassingly young.

Today, decades later, the Beatles are revered throughout the world. But they were never adored as directly and simply as they were by us, the very first wave of Beatlemaniacs, who chased them down streets and hotel corridors and drowned out every word they tried to sing. There were thousands of us—each one was unique—but the arc of our passion was the same. There was a time for us when the Beatles were everything. But then, as we had to, we moved on.

A Letter

from Vickie Brenna-Costa

Vickie Costa

xxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxx

October 15, 2007

Penelope Rowlands

c/o Vogue

4 Times Square

New York, NY 10036

Dear Penelope,

I more than enjoyed your article “Nostalgia” in the August Issue of Vogue.

Still sipping wine from my very late supper on Monday Oct. 8th, around 10:20 pm NY time. . . . I was leafing through Vogue when I came to your article on the Beatles.

It quickly took me back in time to those very days you spoke about . . . for I too was a bonafide Beatlemaniac. However, when I turned to page 106 and saw the photo of the “row of divas” it was so surreal . . . as I saw myself right there, Brownie camera in hand!

I screamed to my husband “I’m in Vogue magazine!”. He said “C’mon, don’t be ridiculous.” I had to look again. No, there I was standing next to my childhood friend so I knew it was me.

I almost flipped out! You see, I never saw the original article in the Times. And here I was 43 years 17 days later! . . . My 15 minutes had arrived!

I am your “screaming sister” on the left side of you (with camera) And I remember talking with you that very day, for I too was very much in love with George.

Your Forrest Hills/Shea Stadium descriptions were right on! It was a very special time in a young girl’s life. And yes—as we had to—we moved on.

For me to happen upon your article was sheer serendipity!

Thank you so much for writing this.

Sincerely,

Vickie Costa

p.s. Did you get an archival print of the photo?

Henry Grossman, photographer

I
WAS A
busy photographer in 1964. I looked back at my list of job numbers. In the two weeks around my Beatles takes I was photographing Kennedy at the White House, Lyndon Johnson here, a Broadway show there. . . .

Time
magazine sent me to photograph
The
Ed Sullivan Show.

I knew who the Beatles were, kind of, from the news, but not a lot. I had no expectations when I went in to shoot. I had no ideas about the band. I wasn’t listening to their music.

I photographed the line waiting to get into the theatre. There were lines of girls waiting and screaming. While they were playing, I was photographing the audience. I saw the impact the Beatles had. The girls were screaming and crying.

I understand that what Sullivan did was that he taped one show in New York, then broadcast it in two separate sections, so that it looked like two broadcasts. He only did one tape [from New York], but he made two shows out of it.

[The first and third of the Beatles’ consecutive
Ed Sullivan
Show
appearances were derived from this taping in New York; the second show was broadcast live from Miami Beach.]

I was just amazed at the panoply of photographers at
The
Ed Sullivan Show.
I’d seen it before: I had photographed Kennedy during the campaign and seen how groups of photographers chased him around; at his first press conference as president there were lines of them.

I moved around during the broadcast. I shot on the ground floor. I sat in the balcony. I moved around up there. I covered it from every angle I could. After the show there was a photo opportunity where we photographers lined up to get shots of the Beatles.

At their first press conference in New York, I remember being amused by them and liking them. They weren’t smarmy or nasty or anything like that. They were just fun. They had great fun, and great intelligence.

When [the photos of the
Sullivan Show
for
Time
] came out, the British paper the
Daily
Mirror
called me and asked if I would go to Atlantic City for a day with the Beatles, and then a concert, and I went. (The paper had an office in New York and I was a photographer for them.) I spent a day and a night with them there.

They were playing Monopoly and cards in a hotel. I have a picture of George lying on the floor playing Monopoly with [the singer] Jackie DeShannon. Ringo was playing poker or something with somebody.

At one point I said, “So Ringo, how do you like America?” He took me by the arm and showed me a view of a blank wall looking over a parking lot. He said, “Henry, this is all we’re seeing of America.” I spent a day and a night with them down there.

At the Atlantic City concert there was a lot of screaming, a lot of yelling. I don’t think I was wearing cotton in my ears at the
Sullivan Show
but I certainly did at the concert because of the screaming. The Beatles later said they stopped playing together because of it.

I have a picture from Atlantic City with a cop holding his ears like this. [Lifts his hands to his ears.] It wasn’t from the music, it was from the screaming.

The following year, the
Mirror
sent me to spend a week with them down in Nassau, in the Bahamas, where they were filming
Help.
I got to know them. They were fooling around a lot.

When I came back to New York, I showed the pictures to
Life
magazine before sending them off to London.

Life
said “Go back!”

I lived at that time at 54th Street and Seventh Avenue. The Stage Deli was right around the corner. So I went in and spoke to Max Asnas, the owner. I said, ‘I’m going back to see the Beatles, down in Nassau.’ He gave me bagels, lox, and salami to take down to them, so I did. They loved it!

My favorite quote is actually a paraphrase of something Emerson once said. It goes something like “Stop talking! Who you are speaks so loudly I can hardly hear what you’re saying.” The Beatles didn’t come across that way. They weren’t trying to make an impression. Looking at all of the pictures I took of them [about seven thousand in all], there are none where they’re deliberately making a posture.

I have a twenty-five-minute audiotape I did later on at George’s house in England. It wasn’t an interview—we were just talking about philosophy and Indian philosophy and life and all this kind of thing.

I was three or four or five years older than he, but he was so far ahead of me in lifetimes of knowledge and philosophy. It’s more than admirable, it’s incredible.

Even Ringo. When I was taking his picture for the cover of
Life
’s international edition. I said, “Ringo, I wish I had the guts to wear a tie like that”—it was very psychedelic, a very bright tie.

He came over to me and felt my tie, a paisley tie from London. He said, “Well, Henry, if you did you’d still be Henry, but with a bright tie!”

I learned from this.

By the way, speaking of Ringo and the tie, those clothes they were wearing, the suits and the capes and all of that kind of stuff? They weren’t for show, they were totally to their taste. It was what they wore at home and among friends.

Another time, I was at Ringo’s house in London. I had just bought some JBL speakers in New York, some hi fi speakers, and I loved them, but I was blown away by the sound of Ringo’s speakers. I said, “The sound is gorgeous, Ringo, what brand are they?”

He said, “I don’t know, Henry, I just like the sound.”

Which is why you buy speakers! You don’t buy the speakers because you’re told they’re good. You buy the speakers because you like the sound!

The values they were living by were terrific. That’s why I kept going back. I had so much to learn from them.

I was spending a lot of time with them. George asked me when I got to London if I could take some pictures of him and Patti [Boyd]. And I said, “Sure,” so I went to visit him at his house and we took some pictures. Then he said, “Let’s go over to see John.” So we went over to John’s house. I photographed John at home, playing with his son Julian, who was a toddler.

John and George had their guitars and they both started playing music together when their wives were in the other room and Julian was around.

After the article ran I got a call from Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, who had heard that the pictures were being syndicated by
Life
in London. “They’ve never even let a
British
photographer into their homes,” he exclaimed. “Please don’t let them be syndicated!”

I cajoled him for about twenty minutes on the phone about why. It turns out he didn’t want the public to know that two of the boys were married. He wanted the public to think they were all available.

Next day I got a telegram from him saying, “Please disregard telephone call. I’ve just seen the pictures, can I have a set?”

I think it was the photographer [Henri] Cartier-Bresson who talked about how an artist can see not only what a situation is but what it is becoming. My contact sheet of the Beatles captures this. In one photo after another you can see who they are, what they were thinking, what they were relating to, how they played among themselves. I love that, I love that. I saw it from the first press conference. They had humor, they had personality.

On an early visit to New York, George said something like “What’s a word for this or that? I’m trying to find a word for this song I’m writing!” I said, “Well, have you looked it up in a thesaurus?” He asked what that was. So I went out to Marlboro Books on 57th Street, bought him a thesaurus and gave it to him.