The Beatles Are Here! (9 page)

And I wrote about what was left of society—the philanthropic evenings, the charity balls. The sixties were a time of social change, turmoil, yet also a continuation of New York as the financial capital of the United States. A lot of luxury living was going on in Manhattan. The rich were thriving. At the same time there were protests against poverty, especially in Harlem, and the lack of civil rights in this so-called liberal city.

AFTER I GOT
the Beatles assignment, I spent a whole day watching them as they moved into public recognition. I watched them from afar. I’m in the crowd, seeing them from a distance. I didn’t talk to them, I just watched. That’s what I specialized in. I don’t really like to talk to people. I’m a watcher, a scene describer. When I’m writing I’m not a civilian, but a kind of performer—a participating, fantasizing performer. I’m like an actor who plays a role and the role I play has to do with the people I’m writing about.

I didn’t talk to the Beatles, I didn’t
want
to talk to them. I described the scene around them. I always find that it’s more interesting if you describe a scene as if you’re writing a movie or even taking pictures. Journalism should be scenic; it should tell a story, like a novel. It has to be visual, like a film or a painting. I had no idea whether the Beatles would live on beyond the big show, the big splash. I wanted to watch them emerge in this ever-changing city, this city of spectacle, which is what Manhattan is and has always been.

THE BEATLES WERE
different from anything in the entertainment world, which was still in the era of the crooner. Frank Sinatra was thriving—he was very much a big story in 1964. But suddenly the Beatles were in the forefront. They were the latest arrival from switched-on London. They imported a clashing new culture. They personified the new fashion and styles, the long hair, this new kind of music.

The British were undergoing a revolt against tradition, a revolt against the Establishment. They were an old colonial power in decline. Their royalty was in decline. Most of what was British was in decline, except the underclasses, which were surging in theater, fashion, and music. They made a profound impression on the American underclass, middle class and, as my article pointed out, even the upper, elite, moneyed class—the grandfathers of today’s hedge fund trillionaires.

NEW YORK IS
a city of big splashes. I had a lot of experience seeing people make splashes, whether it was Mickey Mantle hitting a home run, or the New York Knickerbockers winning the championship from Los Angeles, which they did around that time. I covered astronauts, ballet, defectors from the Bolshoi and the Soviet system. I covered all that stuff.

More often than not the city gets tired of people who emerge as the latest fad. Performers and their music have their one night stand, then fade into obscurity. It’s much rarer to be recognized for a long time, as was the case with Sinatra.

After I left the
Times,
in 1965, I spent a year writing for
Esquire
. One of my assignments was to write about Frank Sinatra. I went out to Los Angeles to try to see him, but he wouldn’t see me because he’d gotten mad. So I wrote the whole piece [the famous story titled “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”] without talking to him. I didn’t
have
to speak with him. As I’ve said, I wasn’t interested in talking with people anyway. When I work, I’m only into the story. I don’t sing, but when I was reporting the Sinatra story, I was imagining Sinatra. And just as I didn’t interview the Beatles and wrote about the scene instead, I didn’t talk to Sinatra because I wrote about the scene around him. All I wanted was to look. I was an observer.

At about this time Sinatra’s press agent in Beverly Hills put out a press release about a television special that Sinatra did for NBC, which said something along the lines of “This is not the music of mopheaded young men.” Sinatra had been a celebrity since the post-WWII 1940s. Like the Beatles, he’d played the Paramount Theatre. In fact, the Paramount had been Sinatra territory, with his own screaming young people, known as the “bobby soxers.” He had been there, done that.

Sinatra’s place had been somewhat challenged earlier, by Elvis Presley; now he had these foreigners—these “mopheads!”—coming in. There was this lack of appreciation, if not outright skepticism, about their talent. It was reflected in this press release, which was condescending in tone and secure in its position that Sinatra was king and that these other people, the Beatles, were sort of temporary court jesters.

I thought of the Beatles as just a wondrous event of a day. But later, after months and months and months, I began slowly, as a civilian, to hear their music as it was repeated every day around the clock on the radio. I began to appreciate them, as I appreciated Puccini, Verdi, Sinatra, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley—I was open to everything. I was eclectic in my interests, then as now.

My Four Friends

by Cyndi Lauper

WHEN
I
WAS
nine, I got some Barbie dolls and two albums for Christmas. One was a Supremes album called
Meet
the Supremes,
and the other was
Meet
the Beatles
. I was glad to meet both of them. The Supremes sounded like they were my age, like they were my friends, and I would sing with them constantly. Their songs were memorable and easy to sing along to. And I guess that was the first call-and-response I ever sang. The Beatles, however, were intriguing in a different way because I had a crush on them. And because the media introduced them to us individually, and we were encouraged to pick our favorite Beatle, I picked Paul. My sister and I would dress up like the Beatles for our family and perform with mops.

My sister, Elen, always wanted to be Paul, so I was John. Whatever my sister was doing, I wanted to be with her. My mom told me that I was born to be her friend, and I took that literally. Besides, I didn’t mind being John, because he was married to someone named Cynthia. And that was really my name, not just Cindy. And I had a dream once that I was brushing my teeth with John Lennon and spitting in the same sink. (Later, I told that to Sean Lennon, but I think it scared him.)

By singing with my sister like that, and listening to John’s voice, I learned harmony and the structure of songs. By the time I was eleven, I began writing with my sister. When Elen graduated from junior high school she got an electric Fender guitar and amp and I got her acoustic guitar when I was graduating from sixth grade. Our first song was called “Sitting by the Wayside.” I guess if I heard my kid write that now I’d be worried, but we were living in the protest era.

Before that, I was always singing along to Barbra Streisand from my mother’s record collection. I also performed for myself a lot with my mother’s Broadway albums:
My Fair Lady,
The King and I, South Pacific
. I was Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin. I was also Richard Harris in
Camelot
. At times when I sang I would act like my relatives, because they were always very dramatic. (They were Sicilian, after all.) But mostly I liked the way it felt to change my voice, and when I sang I could imagine the leading man right in front of me. My interior life and my play life were so real to me that I could make up anything. I guess the saddest thing about being introduced to the Supremes and the Beatles, though, was that all of a sudden there was a difference between my mother’s music collection and mine.

In high school I listened to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Sly and the Family Stone, the Chambers Brothers, the Four Tops, and Cream. Motown was king, and, of course, Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. When I got older, they came out with
The White Album
, and I put each of their pictures on the walls of my room. That’s where I’d daydream, write poems, paint, write songs, or play other people’s songs on my guitar. Sometimes I’d hear my mom call out to me to clean my room and I’d try to ignore her. Once I must have pushed her right over the edge because she finally came in and said, “I want you and all your friends (pointing to the pictures on the walls), to clean this room up
right now
.” It was not easy for her.

MY MOM WAS
pretty cool. When I was eleven and the Beatles were coming to New York, my mother drove my sister, her friend Diane, and me to the Belt Parkway where the Hilton Hotel is, by the airport, so we could see the Beatles drive by, and she left us there for a while. She knew we weren’t going to run into traffic. So we waited. And waited. All of a sudden we saw cars coming and
it was them
. So I started screaming, and I shut my eyes, and by the time I realized I should open my eyes, I’d missed it. I was dressed all nice, too. I had dark jean clam diggers with pointy shoes and a sleeveless green blouse, and black plaid shirt with a man-tailored collar.

A Facebook Encounter

Vickie Brenna-Costa, fan

(the girl second from the left in the photo)

I
WAS VERY
young, only twelve or thirteen, when I first heard the Beatles. We were living in the Wakefield section of the Bronx. I don’t remember reading about them but I do remember the first time I heard them on my little pink Zenith transistor radio. I didn’t know what they looked like yet. I just wanted to hear more music. I
had
to own the 45 of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” with “I Saw Her Standing There” on the flip side. After I got it, I played it to death.

I used to see my best friend, Joann Pugliese, all the time because she lived in my aunt’s apartment building, five blocks from where I lived; it was really my second home. It was one of those old Bronx buildings with two entrances off the vestibule. My aunt’s apartment was on the first floor in the left wing and Joann lived on the third floor in the right wing. My aunt’s kitchen window and Joann’s kitchen window overlooked the back courtyard. If I looked out my aunt’s window and Joann looked out of hers we could see each other. When the windows were open we would call out to each other.

One day Joann called out and then came down from her apartment to my auntie’s. She was waving her arms and shrieking, “I’ve got the album! I’ve got the album!” It was the long-awaited
Meet the Beatles.
We were finally seeing them for the first time. We went ballistic! Well, now we REALLY loved them! I immediately had a crush on George and she on Paul. That’s when we started trying to convince each other which one was cuter . . .

What made them so special? Their sound had a rhythm or beat like we’d never heard before—they named themselves The Beatles, after all—and their words just spoke to us. For me, they were in step with a young girl just becoming a young woman. “I Want to Hold Your Hand”?—a very big deal back then, holding hands. And the lyrics to “I Saw Her Standing There”? “My heart went boom when I crossed that room and I held her hand in mine”? We lived those words at St. Mary’s sock hops! Elvis, Dylan, and Motown were all great, but the Beatles thrilled us to the core.