The Beatles Are Here! (8 page)

John, John, John.

It was February 9, 1964, and I was lying on a shag rug in Santa Monica, with my parents and my little brother sitting on the living-room sofa behind me. In the next moment, Ed Sullivan waved his hand, the Beatles sprang onto the stage—and I was instantly transported through the television screen into another realm. In that realm, John had been waiting for me forever.

The predominant emotion for me that night was intense
recognition
. It was as though, on some altar in primordial space and time, I’d left a request for just this man and now at last he had been given unto me, with his mop of dark hair and his wire-rimmed glasses. In the aftermath of that night, the pure shock of recognition gradually gave way to a more comfortable familiarity, and I could begin to articulate
why
John was my chosen one. I loved that he wasn’t handsome in the pretty boy way of Paul, but in a quirky, ironic way that was visible in his quizzical eyebrows and his wry, slightly crooked smile. I loved the edgy tenderness of his songs. When I listened to them, I could let my heart be swept by giant tides of emotion without a twinge of feeling corny. And when John’s books came out, I loved that he was not only a singer but also an author. Since I had already decided that I was a writer, this was another powerful bond between us.

There were so many. At the time, my mother—whom I’d heard people describe as “a handsome woman”—had short brown hair. She also had a somewhat long face, lively brown eyes, a strong nose, and a narrow mouth. In sum: She looked quite a bit like John Lennon. Since she had been adopted at birth, and we only knew that she was of English ancestry, it didn’t take long for me to realize that my mother was actually John’s older sister. This, of course, made him my uncle: an absolutely thrilling discovery. Yet somehow—through a logic that is quite mysterious to me now—this familial connection didn’t diminish by one iota the romantic connection between me and John. Above all, John was my predestined lover, husband, father of my future children.

Prior to
The
Ed Sullivan Show,
the most notable feature of my bedroom had been its wallpaper, with a pattern of smiling pig-tailed girls holding bunches of pink balloons. In the weeks and months that followed the show, the wallpaper gradually disappeared under giant posters of John: John in profile holding his guitar, John in a leather jacket standing in front of the brick wall of a Liverpool pub, John making the peace sign in front of the Statue of Liberty . . .

At night before I went to sleep, I would lie for quite a while, gazing up at him, studying every feature of his face, every nuance of his expression. Then I would shuffle through the ever-growing stack of Beatle cards that I kept in a drawer beside my bed. The cards came in square packs of dusty-pink bubble-gum; eventually I had hundreds of them. Each card had a Beatles photograph on one side, with some factual information about one or more of them on the other. Before falling asleep, I would shuffle through the cards, memorizing the information as if studying for some wonderful exam. To this day, I could still probably give the correct answer if someone were to ask: “What is John’s shirt size?” “How does he like to take his eggs and tea?” “How old was he when he went to live with his Aunt Minnie?”

I would never have spoken these answers aloud, however. Though I knew that these were very public facts, available to any girl who had the dimes to buy the gum, I’d gleaned them through a kind of pillow-talk. They were treasures that John himself had buried in my ear, as we lay in my bed on the brink of sleep—and I had to protect them. Beyond the boundaries of my bedroom, I didn’t broadcast my love for John. And I told no one that he was my uncle. I kept all this secret, inward.

For me, this secretness made my connection to John more real, intimate and special. But there was also another reason that I didn’t broadcast my love. A more excruciating reason. The truth is, I could never bear to be identified as belonging to
any
group to which I actually belonged. Even as a small child, I hated to be seen
as
a child: to be glimpsed in pajamas by my parents’ friends, to visit homes where children ate weenies and Twinkies at kiddie tables.

I always shut doors, so grown-ups—even my own parents—couldn’t overhear me playing. Once I woke in the middle of the night to see my parents’ glowing faces: they were bending over me, holding a flashlight for two dinner guests to see. I was mortified. For me, the worst thing was to be caught seeming to be the thing I was. As I got older this only intensified. If I could not bear to be seen as a sleeping child, how could I bear to be seen as a lovesick teenager?

When the Beatles came to the Hollywood Bowl, I didn’t go with the rest of my Girl Scout troop. I didn’t agonize over the decision. When our scout leader first proposed the idea, I looked down at the ground as the other girls jumped in the air, giggling with excitement and clapping their hands. I knew in every fiber of my being that it would not be possible for me to carry the passionate intensity of my love into such a public place—much less to see it mirrored in the faces of a thousand screaming teenage girls.

On the day of the concert, I was edgy, jumpy. Although I knew that I absolutely could not be at the concert, it felt impossible to be anywhere else. At first I planned to stay in my room all day, holding a kind of solitary vigil. With a Beatles record playing in the background, I tried to concentrate on an activity that usually soothed me: drawing a portrait of John in a large sketchbook that already teemed with portraits of him in every conceivable pose, and in every available medium: pencil, ink, chalk, Magic Marker, crayon . . . Perhaps, on this day of all days, I’d ask to borrow my mother’s precious Winsor & Newton watercolors?

It was quickly clear that I couldn’t muster the patience or focus. My nerves were tingling and I felt like a racehorse, stuck in a pen. I tried riding my bike around the neighborhood, but it felt like a dumb thing to be doing when John was in town. Finally I decided to walk to the beach. In those days, parents weren’t so fearful about letting their children roam; it wasn’t unusual for me to make the mile-long trek from our house to the beach by myself—even though the trek ended in a dark, urine-scented tunnel.

As I walked through the winding streets of our neighborhood, it occurred to me that the Beatles were breathing the same Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan air as I was. The thought was dizzying. The day appeared to be an ordinary day—people were clipping their hedges, walking their dogs, washing their cars—and yet, as I looked around, it seemed as though everything was vibrating with the evening’s momentous, imminent event.

When I came to the tunnel, I held my breath as I always did and tried to zoom as fast as I could over the bits of broken glass, the beach rocks and empty soda cans, without hurting my feet in their flip-flops. Back in the light of day, I rushed down through the sand, pulled off my shift and ran into the sea in my paisley bikini. Finally, I had found something equal to my restless, overpowering excitement. I hurled my body into wave after wave, until finally my fingers and toes grew white and I threw myself down into a dip of warm sand and slept as if sleeping off a spell.

After the night of the concert, several days passed before the rumor reached me: during the performance, a girl I knew from my neighborhood had made a frenzied leap into the moat that surrounds the stage at the Hollywood Bowl. Carol Partridge. I’d always thought of her as a rather shy girl—not someone who, in the most literal way, would stand out from the crowd. Once I heard the rumor, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Though my official reaction was one of hilarious disbelief, I actually felt a kind of awe. And since I had known that I myself would not be able to bear the intensity of the Beatles’ actual presence, I had no trouble understanding how it was that Carol had simply broken out of her skin. . . .

I could so vividly see how she, rising from her seat, had been compelled toward the circle of light where they sang. I could see her pale face transfigured, her thin body borne over the roaring heads and waving arms and into the moat. I could see her thrashing toward them like some brave wild creature—until the security guards leaped in and fished her out. Like Paul Revere’s ride, Carol Partridge’s swim took on a kind of mythical, archetypal status in my mind.

From junior high all the way through high school, I remained faithful to my secret love. When I came home from school each day, I’d stack every Beatles record I had on my phonograph and enter a kind of musical swoon that would carry me all the way to suppertime, often while simultaneously reading John’s books. Once, when my father came to my bedroom door to rouse me, he said, “The day will come when you don’t do this anymore.” I looked at him as if he was crazy.

It’s strange to me now that I don’t remember when, or even how, my father’s words came true. Was there a single day when I suddenly stopped listening to the Beatles? Or did the habit taper off gradually, so that I piled fewer and fewer records on the turntable until finally I listened to none? With almost religious devotion, I’d repeated a certain behavior day after day, year after year—yet the demise of this behavior left absolutely no trace in my mind.

What has stayed, however, is the image of Carol at the Hollywood Bowl. And here’s the truly strange thing that time has done: In my memory, the scrawny wet Girl Scout swimming so frantically, yet bravely, in the moat is not Carol Partridge. It is I.

I’m sixty now, and after all these years it’s as though I have finally released myself to reveal to the world what I was: a teenage girl, madly in love—like all the other millions and millions of girls—with the Beatle who, in her mind, exists only and forever for her alone.

Gay Talese, reporter

I
BECAME A
staff writer at the
New York Times
when I was twenty-three, and I was there for nearly eight years when I first reported upon the Beatles in 1964. I was covering entertainment: writing about the Beatles was one of perhaps five assignments I did that week—it could be on opera, ballet, Baryshnikov, the Yankees, whatever. It was all a story.

The
Times
was one of six or seven daily newspapers in New York City in those days and was known as a reporter’s paper. The
Herald Tribune
was the writer’s paper—it was where you had a columnist like Jimmy Breslin or a very stylish writer like Tom Wolfe, and many others. I was something of a peculiar character at the
Times
in that I was a writer more than a reporter.

My specialty was writing about people. I wrote about baseball players, bridge builders, civil rights leaders. It didn’t matter if what they were doing was criminal or celebratory, whether they were starting a riot or holding up a bank or robbing a building—it was all part of the daily news.

At the
Times
there was a sense that the newspaper’s contents weren’t as perishable as ordinary journalism. We were a paper of record. When you wrote for the
Times
you were writing for the first stage of history. All of us daily reporters were doing that, although we never thought of it that way. We just covered the hour by hour events.

So there I was, in New York with the greatest paper in the world and the freedom to write about whatever entered the city. This took all forms—artistic, militant, political, racial. It changed day to day. I was masquerading as a master of everything but really I was a master of nothing. But I had a good pair of eyes and a good pair of ears and I’d listen and observe. I was out every day and every night.

THE BEATLES WERE
four long-haired originals making their entrance into the city of opportunity. Their arrival was a departure from ordinary journalism. The
Times
’s editors decided that this foppish group of longhairs—these Liverpool lunatics—were worthy of history. They anointed me to go out and write of the group’s arrival in a seaport city in which ships and planes every day bring new people, new dreamers, new rattlers, new personalities, and new opportunists to the shores of Manhattan.

New York City was in a great transition from being a place in which the news consisted mainly of powerful, rich, and socially connected people to one where you were also writing about people in the streets. The streets became the news. This happened because of the war in Vietnam, which caused street protests against the draft, and the civil rights movement.

The Beatles were a spectacle and I was a specialist in covering spectacles, from race riots in Harlem to the shooting of Malcolm X and the early protests against Vietnam on such campuses as Columbia University and NYU. I also spent a lot of time covering the construction of the Verrazano Bridge that connected Brooklyn and Staten Island. A lot of people didn’t want the bridge built—eight thousand people had to be moved out of the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, and there were huge protests against it.