The Beatles Are Here! (6 page)

Years later my sister sent me an interview in which George said something like “It was only after a friend of mine gave me a thesaurus that I was able to . . .”

That’s the best thing: There was a mutuality of interest and learning. I learned from them. I was learning from “Henry with a bright tie,” that kind of thinking.

I
WAS HOPING
to be famous one day. At first, I was going to be a famous actor, right? When I was seventeen, my aunt sent a letter after my first show. She sent me a telegram saying “May success come slowly so you’ll know how to take it.” (Later I was on Broadway in
Grand Hotel
for more than one thousand performances.) I was very interested in knowing how the Beatles were taking success and what it meant to them. I was curious to see how it changed them.

I would visit George whenever I was in England. On one visit, I noticed an instrument hanging on the wall that I’d never seen. He took it down and started tuning it. He said, “It’s a sitar, but I can’t find anyone to teach me how to play it.”

I said, “George, you make a lot of money, don’t you?” and he smiled. “You could afford to find the best sitar teacher in India and bring him here to spend the summer with you here.”

I read in the paper months later that George had gone to India and was studying sitar with Ravi Shankar. Now, I didn’t send him to India, but we gave each other possibilities. We gave each other possibilities, that’s what it is. We helped each other to understand some of the possibilities of what was going on.

The next time I went to visit George he greeted me barefoot and said, “Henry, wouldn’t you like to take your shoes off?” Of course—he’d been to India.

You know the other thing? So many people who came in contact with them wanted something from them. I was just delighted to be around them. I wanted to know who they were. I enjoyed it.

My father was an artist, famous for his etchings. He had met Gandhi and Einstein and done etchings of them from life. He once had an Indian chief in full regalia to pose! I had these etchings at home. I knew about being around famous people.

As an actor, I was interested in motivations, things I could use later, store away for later use on the stage.

I studied acting with Lee Strasberg. . . . I was at the Actors Studio once and there was a scene and Lee Strasberg got us to critique the scene. “Now let us suppose that I am king,” he said. Everybody laughed but then, when he entered the room as king, everyone bowed. Then he said, “Now, again, let us suppose I’m king,” and he entered as a doddering old man, reaching down to pick up a cigarette butt and everybody
still
bows. He said, “See, you still know I’m king. I didn’t have to say ‘Aha, I’m king!’ ”

The Beatles didn’t have to say “Aha, I’m king.” They didn’t have to say a word. It ties in with Emerson’s quote about how who you are speaks so loudly.

I’ve never met a group of people as talented and personable and connected as the Beatles. And yet as strong as each of them was individually, they worked together like that [holds up four fingers of his right hand].

My adviser at college used to use the phrase
sophisticated
, in terms of having more points of reference. That really told me what the word meant. These boys were sophisticated.

I wish I’d known fifty years ago how important they were going to be. I would have shot a hell of a lot more pictures.

Good Bye, Mitzi Gaynor

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

I
WAS ELEVEN,
and it was a small town in north central Iowa, not far from the small Iowa town in which my family had been living. And Mitzi Gaynor—“Hollywood’s exciting Mitzi Gaynor”—you were there, on the well-worn jacket of the soundtrack of
South Pacific
. I saw the way you turned your breasts (for you were barely clothed it seemed to me) in the embrace of Rosanno Brazzi. His mouth had a peculiar shape in that photograph, open, deliberate, unnatural. I realized later that he was singing to you. When I was eleven, I didn’t know he was singing. I thought he was preparing his orifice—his orifex, I think of it now—to kiss you. Just how and why and where he would kiss you with a mouth of that shape were beyond me. I was eleven and it was barely 1964, and that small Iowa town, still so new to me then, seems remote and disconnected only in retrospect. I had already been looking at you in puzzlement for years, Mitzi Gaynor, always a little surprised when I came upon my parents’
South Pacific
lying out in the open where anyone could see it. It was just about now that you lost your power over me, whatever it was. And with you went away all the childhood, all the parental music I had ever known, stacked among albums I never ever looked at again.

The world from which I (and you; all of you) witnessed the Beatles on that first
Ed Sullivan
Sunday can never be reconstructed. (I’m sure you must have realized this, Miss Gaynor, if you met the Beatles backstage when you headlined that
second
Ed Sullivan
Sunday.) The show can be revisited. I saw it again recently and almost all I could see were things hidden from me at age eleven: the Beatles watching themselves being beheld—the effect of all those Hamburg and Liverpool nights—a tight band, its members endlessly aware of each other—Paul, George, and John smiling sideways upstage, to and for each other, but restraining themselves for national television. What I didn’t know about the Beatles when I was eleven was endless. I knew nothing. And so I was perfectly prepared for them. That first night, Ed Sullivan might as well have said, “And now, coming to you from the thusness of Existence . . . THE BEATLES!”

And you were there too, Shirley Jones. What little I understood about musical fame came from my family’s association with
The Music Man
. My dad was a high school band director, and when
The Music Man
(the movie) premiered nearby in Mason City, Iowa, on June 19, 1962 (the Beatles played the Cavern Club that night), my dad’s band, wearing white shirts and black shorts, marched in a parade of massed North Iowa bands and Hollywood celebrities, including you, Shirley Jones. I have the photos to prove it. So strike me dead when Paul sang “Till There Was You” that first
Ed Sullivan
Sunday, a song that you, Shirley Jones, sang as Marian the Librarian in
The Music Man
. I mean, what the fuck. It was as though the Beatles had worked up a version of the Bonanza theme or “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” just to reassure the parents of all those shrieking, cataleptic girls in the balcony. Looking back, it seems like a moment of near-horror, hearing your saccharine, epiphanic words, Shirley Jones, sung by Paul McCartney. How easily this might have been a different sort of band—a romantic, dirge-like, Leonard Cohen sort of ensemble, singing, or rather slowly breathing (thinking itself funereally sexy), “Oh please” (pause, cigarette) “say to me” (looks at shoes) “you’ll let me be” (confiding to the microphone) “your man.” Thank god for the drive, the energy, the high-calorie, major 7th choogling of the first number in the second half of the show that night—“I Saw Her Standing There.” It put all doubts to rest.

It wasn’t simple, turning this mass music, this public music into something utterly private, which is what it became for me. There was, for one thing, the lack of a personal record player. The family stereo was in the dining room, and it seemed that whenever the Beatles shouted or screamed or hit the high “hand!!” in the chorus of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” one parent or another would come through the swinging door from the kitchen. Those uncouth noises, those high notes, belonged to me the same way so many other things did at that age. They were mine by right of embarrassment. They didn’t embarrass me in themselves, but hearing them in the presence of someone else did. I was never going to be part of that squealing, smelling salts crowd, sharing publicly what I felt for the Beatles. There was no need to see the Beatles live. I had only one chance to do so, and it was no chance at all. We moved to Sacramento, California, a month or so before the Beatles’ final concert at Candlestick Park. I have been forever glad that I was only fourteen at the time, new to California, unable to persuade anyone—especially my Midwestern parents—that I could find my way alone to San Francisco and the concert.

Once in California, I came at last into possession of a private record player. And until much later, long after they had broken up, I always tried to listen to the Beatles by myself. I remember, early on, still in Iowa, listening to “Please Please Me” with my brother John. I remember because John, who must have been six or seven, asked me if that was a harmonica we were hearing. With the addled assurance that Peter might have felt the night the cock crew thrice, I assured him it wasn’t. (It was, of course.) I also somehow managed to leave Iowa with an electric guitar, an old harlequin Supra. I learned to play it by picking out the riff to “I Feel Fine.”

I can’t account for all the ways those songs found the heart of me. They weren’t really about anything. I never imagined that the lyrics of an early Beatles song might be a way of Cyranizing some peach-like imaginary girlfriend. (I saved the Beach Boys, so endlessly sincere, for that.) The lyrics of those early songs expressed nothing by word. All that mattered was the pulse, the changes, the emotional dynamism, the unexpected. That becomes clear watching John Lennon singing (with Paul) “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on
Ed Sullivan.
John is not yet the walrus, not by a long shot, and yet one still wonders, “
You
want to hold her
hand
?” I was eleven, and
I
wanted to hold her hand. I had no idea there was anything beyond hand-holding (witness Miss Gaynor and Mr. Brazzi) until my parents, realizing I was a sneak thief, hid an especially medicinal guide to sex, or rather the apparatuses of sex, in their bedroom bookshelf. That book had the lyrics, or perhaps the recipe, for sex, but it lacked the music of sex and the very thing the Beatles projected: emotion. Curiously, what they projected wasn’t an emotion directed at someone else. It was an emotion directed back at them, and through them their astonishing music.

I wasn’t allowed to buy long-playing albums, so I collected the early songs on 45s. The difference between the British and American releases caused some chronological confusion, but each new single added to what felt like a continuing crescendo of hope and expectation, followed by a momentary strangeness that soon deepened into intimacy. The walls and ceiling of my Iowa bedroom (which I shared with my brother Roger, who had placed all his bets on the Dave Clark Five) was taped over with photos of the Beatles. It sounds like the most conventional kind of idolatry, but it was just a way of getting around the fact that I couldn’t listen to the Beatles twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes my parents needed the dining-room stereo to listen to the soundtrack of
Hello Dolly!
They had their own dull musical lives, it seemed.

There’s always something private in the play of children, no matter how much their play is shaped by the commercial culture around them. I was a Mickey Mouse child and a Davy Crockett child. Being a Beatles boy might just have been the next chapter, but no. What the Beatles gave me was something that bore me away from everything I had thought about myself or the world I had lived in. I was suddenly in possession of something that no one but I could ever understand. That there were millions of other Beatles fans meant nothing. Coming into the Beatles was like coming into an unknown and unexpected birthright. It was like riding an iceberg as it falls away from a calving glacier. They somehow squared the puberty I had entered, and they made music more important than whatever else puberty was supposed to be doing to me.

Two songs in particular told me that I was now in a completely different world from the one that had existed, a world to which no parent, no adult could ever track me. Those songs are “Ticket to Ride” and “Help!,” released in April and July 1965. Looking back and listening to them now, I can hear
Rubber Soul
coming, an album into which I have probably gazed more deeply than any other Beatles recording. And though the Beatles feel continuous right up until this moment, something changes with “Ticket to Ride” and “Help!” That change—what is about to come—remains frozen in the changing when I hear John’s voice in those songs or listen to the beautiful lag of Ringo’s staggered drumming in “Ticket to Ride,” so visible in the Beatles’ final appearance on
The
Ed Sullivan Show.
I listened to those two songs again and again and again in 1965, still in Iowa, not even knowing that California—or the rest of my life—was a possibility. All I wanted when I had finished hearing them was to hear them again. They contain, each in its own way, a feeling I can’t name or describe, the languor of regret, the urgency of despair. But above all they contain the love of music.