The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  The Stones covered it, and their version of “I Wanna Be Your Man” reached number 13.

  “That’s when Mick and Keith decided they should write songs together themselves,” John tells Spector.

  Then Paul comes up the aisle with an important message from the pilot: “Tell the boys there’s a big crowd waiting for them.”

  Chapter 20

  How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?

  —“Baby, You’re a Rich Man”

  As Ed Sullivan predicted, the Beatles bring out the fans. More than four thousand of them are crowded into the arrivals terminal at the newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of their idols.

  CBS musical director Ray Bloch believes he’s discovered the reason for the crush, and he’s unimpressed. “The only thing that’s different is the hair as far as I can see,” he says. “I give them a year.”

  But the hair is important. “Won’t be long before every group with long hair will be sought by American companies,” Cashbox music magazine predicts.

  As Dr. Joyce Brothers, writing on the front page of the New York Journal-American about “Why They Go Wild Over the Beatles,” explains: “The Beatles display a few mannerisms which almost seem a shade on the feminine side, such as the tossing of their long manes of hair.…These are exactly the mannerisms which very young female fans (in the 10-to-14 age group) appear to go wildest over.”

  “They’re so cute,” June Clayton of Brooklyn tells the New York Daily News. “And Ringo’s the cutest. Look at them comb their hair!”

  But before they can take the stage at Broadway’s Hammerstein Theater, the Beatles have to contend with the New York press corps.

  “Do you wear wigs?” one of them asks.

  John shuts down the attack on their signature look. “If we do they must be the only ones with real dandruff.”

  Although the boys from Liverpool don’t wear wigs, everyone else seems to—not only does Ed Sullivan don a mop-top wig to introduce them on his show, but their airplane pilot also puts on a Beatles wig when they fly to Miami. Official promotional “Beatle Kits” (comprising an autographed photo, an I LIKE THE BEATLES button, and a wig) are even getting handed out.

  Opinion makers seek to quantify what makes fans love the Beatles. Though it’s no big mystery—England’s Daily Mirror has already proclaimed, “You have to be a real sour square not to love the nutty, noisy, happy, handsome Beatles.” Documentarians Albert and David Maysles capture every moment—from the Beatles’ dazed emergence to screaming crowds waiting on the tarmac at JFK Airport to four limos carrying each individual band member to the Plaza Hotel, on Fifth Avenue, where they have rooms on the twelfth floor. The February 1964 footage for Granada TV is eventually released as the film What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA.

  “The Americans will never understand it,” Ringo later explains. “Now kids come to Liverpool and say, ‘Oh, this is where they came from.’ But for us, it was ‘We’re in America—where the music came from!’ It was always about the music.”

  On February 10, at the Baroque Room in the Plaza, cameras flash as the band accepts two gold records—signifying one million copies sold apiece—for their album Meet the Beatles and their single “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which topped the American charts on February 1, just weeks after its December 26, 1963, rush release.

  On Sunday, February 9, 1964, at 8:00 p.m., seventy-three million people—plus the 728 inside the theater—tune in to watch the Beatles perform live. An odd protester or two, including one young man holding a sign reading ALONZO TUSKE HATES THE BEATLES, contends with a robust police presence patrolling the streets.

  The televised caption SORRY GIRLS, HE’S MARRIED does little to calm the fervor of fans who decree by placard JOHN, DIVORCE CYNTHIA.

  “Us guys had to play it kind of cool,” recalls Joe Perry, who would go on to found and play guitar in the band Aerosmith, of his school-age self, “because the girls were so excited and were drawing little hearts on their notebooks—‘I love Paul,’ that kind of thing. But I think there was an unspoken thing with the guys that we all dug the Beatles, too. We just couldn’t come right out and say it.”

  In Hicksville, Long Island, a musically inclined fourteen-year-old is also watching. “I remember noticing John that first time on the Sullivan show,” Billy Joel later recalls. “He’s standing there, looking around him as if to say, ‘Is all this corny or what?’”

  In the first of two musical segments, the Beatles sing “All My Loving” followed by the Peggy Lee ballad “Till There Was You.” As John sings “She Loves You,” a song he and Paul wrote while strumming their guitars on opposite beds at a hotel in Newcastle, England, he recalls that Paul’s father, Jim, asked, “Couldn’t you sing, ‘She loves you, yes, yes, yes?’ There’s enough of these Americanisms around.”

  There is nothing proper about the way the fans—nearly three thousand of them—carry on a few days later, on February 12, at a pair of thirty-minute concerts at Carnegie Hall. “Shut up!” John shouts at the screaming masses, who were producing noise a local DJ describes as “the most piercing, uncomfortable sound I’ve ever heard.”

  It was like “that terrible screech the BMT Astoria train makes as it turns east near 59th Street and Seventh Avenue,” remarks the New York Herald Tribune.

  At their show in Washington, DC, the noise is so loud that journalist Michael Braun reports, “One of the policemen at the ringside removed two .38 caliber bullets from his belt and placed them in his ears.”

  The strain of their popularity is already starting to wear, even when it comes to making music.

  Music journalist Larry Kane, who at age twenty-one is reporting for WFUN Miami, remembers, “They never did sound checks—usually there wasn’t time. And modern musicians will look at the puny sound equipment they had and will be amazed. Some concerts had the music going out on the stadium public address system.”

  “No theater ever got it how we liked it,” John says of the setup on the microphones. “They’d either be in the wrong position or not loud enough. They would just set it up as they would for amateur talent night. Perhaps we had a chip about them not taking our music seriously. It drove us mad.”

  * * *

  The Beatles arrive in Miami, Florida, on February 16. Thirteen-year-old Lynn Henderson, a journalism student at Miami Springs Junior High, is wearing her construction-paper press badge when the band lands at Miami International Airport to a crowd of five thousand. She runs for the limousine, and the police give chase.

  John Lennon sees Henderson’s homemade badge and holds off the cops while he, Paul, and Ringo answer her interview questions. Then “John blew me a kiss and the window slid shut and they took off.”

  Henderson earns an A in class and so do the Beatles, whom Ed Sullivan introduces as “four of the nicest youngsters we’ve ever had on our stage.”

  The Beatles have never seen a palm tree before—or a policeman carrying a gun. But a staged press opportunity is already familiar.

  “It was all part of being a Beatle, really,” George says of the scene on February 18 at Miami Beach’s 5th Street Gym, where twenty-two-year-old 1960 Olympic gold medalist boxer Cassius Clay is in training for an upcoming fight against world heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, and the Beatles are “just getting lugged around and thrust into rooms full of press men taking pictures and asking questions.” Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali) “was quite cute” and goofed around with the band for a series of photographs. He delivers a taunt to his rival, the heavily favored thirty-one-year-old Liston, rhyming “When Liston reads about the Beatles visiting me / He’ll get so mad, I’ll knock him out in three!”

  But Liston dismisses the gibes, sneering, “Are these motherfuckers what all the people are screaming about? My dog plays drums better than that kid with the big nose.”

  Liston is wrong about the Beatles and about his prospects against Clay. On February 25, Cassius Clay dethron
es Sonny Liston, and the Beatles are back in the studio (taking a break that evening to celebrate George’s twenty-first birthday), already hard at work recording for their next big project.

  The Beatles are going to star in a film.

  Chapter 21

  So glad we made it.

  —“Gimme Some Lovin’”

  The movie shoot is scheduled to take seven weeks. They’re calling it Beatlemania, and the assumption is it’ll be a cheap cookie-cutter teen flick designed to capitalize on the Beatles’ massive success with that audience.

  It’s March of 1964, and “Can’t Buy Me Love” (which Paul and John had written over the course of a few hours during a break in Miami) is the first British single to hit number 1 simultaneously in Britain and the United States. The record is certified gold even before its release, selling two million copies during its first week on sale.

  The Beatles have the top five singles on the American charts.

  John doesn’t have high hopes for their film, which chronicles the thirty-six hours leading up to a televised concert—until he finds out that the director, Richard Lester, was responsible for bringing John’s favorite zany radio comedy, The Goon Show, to television. The Beatles, John says, are “the extension of that rebellion.” And the screenwriter, Alun Owen, was raised in Liverpool and wrote an acclaimed TV show about the city called No Trams to Lime Street—John cheekily noted that “Lime Street is a famous street in Liverpool where the whores used to be”—but more seriously, Owen “was famous for writing Liverpool dialogue.”

  “The trouble is, it’s only us who can write for us,” John laments. Still, with a director and screenwriter both as driven about filmmaking as John is about music, he readjusts his attitude.

  But not about acting. It’s “fucking stupid, isn’t it?” he says to Dick Lester of his boredom with the strict shooting schedules, early morning calls, and endless waiting on set.

  Lester quickly decides that little acting is required, choosing a black-and-white cinema verité style to capture the Beatles’ humor, which is amplified by the bond among the four. “They had this great thing of gangs,” the director later reflects, a sense of “us against the world.”

  Late in the filming, on set, Ringo is talking about their having yet another “hard day’s night.”

  “What does that mean?” a young woman asks.

  “It’s a Ringoism,” John explains, “said not to be funny, just said.”

  Ringo elaborates on his way with words. “I used to, while I was saying one thing, have another thing come into my brain and move down fast. Once when we were working all day and into the night, I came out thinking it was still day and said, ‘It’s been a hard day,’ and looked round and noticing it was dark, ‘…’s night!’”

  Dick Lester loves it, and during the film’s final production stage, he tells John the movie title has changed from Beatlemania to A Hard Day’s Night.

  Which means John and Paul have to come up with a new title track.

  It takes them twenty-four hours—with a little help from journalist Maureen Cleave.

  In a taxi on the way to a recording session at Abbey Road, John shows her lyrics he had written on a fan’s birthday card to Julian—“When I get home to you / I find my tiredness is through.” Maureen balks at “tiredness” and, borrowing her pen, John changes the lines to: “When I get home to you / I find the things that you do / Will make me feel all right.”

  John takes full creative credit, saying that “I did practically every single with my voice except for “Love Me Do.” Either my song, or my voice, or both”—though he acknowledges, “The only reason he [Paul] sang on ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was because I couldn’t reach the notes.”

  But they can always deliver. Of the songwriting process, John says, “Sometimes we write together. Sometimes not. Some of them take four hours; some twenty minutes. Others have been known to take as long as three weeks.”

  “John needed Paul’s attention to detail and persistence,” says Cynthia. “Paul needed John’s anarchic, lateral thinking.”

  Before the film even premieres, the Beatles perform songs from the sound track on their first world tour, which takes them as far as Australia. On June 11, Australian television—in operation only since 1956—makes the Beatles’ arrival in Sydney live news.

  The response delights Derek Taylor, press manager for the 1964 world tour, but it doesn’t surprise him. Taylor met the band in May of 1963 as a reporter for the Daily Express covering a show at the Odeon Cinema in Manchester. “I’m obsessed with them,” he says during the Australian tour. “Isn’t everybody?”

  “Each time we’d arrive at an airport,” Taylor recalls, “it was as if de Gaulle had landed, or better yet, the Messiah. The routes were lined solid, cripples threw away their sticks, sick people rushed up to the car as if a touch from one of the boys would make them well again, old women stood watching with their grandchildren and as we’d pass by I could see the look on their faces. It was as if some savior had arrived.”

  John has brought along a personal savior on the world tour—Aunt Mimi. Despite their early antagonisms, “I owe her a lot,” he says. “She practically brought me up single-handed after my mother died. A wonderful woman.”

  And one who was kept separate from tour antics. “There were lots of girls who were very keen to party with anybody from the tour,” recalls Noel Tresider, keyboardist with Melbourne supporting act the Phantoms, but John takes the music as seriously as ever. When issues with the sound equipment in Wellington, New Zealand, can’t be resolved, he threatens to cancel the remaining concerts. The shows go on until days before the film opens.

  On July 6, the Beatles are back in England and join Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon, and the Rolling Stones for the premiere of A Hard Day’s Night at the London Pavilion. The movie opens to fantastic reviews—and record profits. The studio makes $5.8 million in six weeks against a $500,000 expenditure; the film later earns two 1965 Academy Award nominations, for best original screenplay and best music (for George Martin’s score, not the Beatles’ songs).

  The film holds up as both a promotional piece and a legitimate work of art—a surrealist mock documentary–slash–Marx Brothers film that showcases the Liverpudlian musicians’ charisma and wit.

  “No attempt has been made,” Variety writes, “to build the Beatles up as Oliviers; they are at their best when the pic has a misleading air of off-the-cuff spontaneity.”

  But how do they rate back home in Liverpool, where John and the others have heard that the local fans have soured on the Beatles? The Cavern, where they haven’t performed since August of 1963, has reportedly written them off. “That’s Liddypool for you,” grouses Paul.

  In the four days between the London and Liverpool film premieres, near terror sets in. Fans, John says, “only like people when they’re on the way up.” Friends of the band “kept coming down to London,” Ringo recalls, “saying, ‘You’re finished in Liverpool.’”

  Yet lining the familiar streets surrounding the Odeon Cinema at home are fans, thousands and thousands of them, hoping to catch a glimpse of the four young men whose home-grown brand of fame and music are still very much celebrated.

  John declares A Hard Day’s Night “not as good as James Bond,” though with the London premiere of Goldfinger due in September, he stands an even chance with Sean Connery for delivering on the third Bond film’s tagline: “Everything he touches turns to excitement!”

  Chapter 22

  We can climb so high

  I never want to die.

  —“Born to Be Wild”

  That August, the Beatles head back to America. They perform twenty-six shows across the United States and Canada.

  The tour is intense.

  Insane.

  The fans are obsessed. Girls like fifteen-year-old Sandi Stewart do anything they can to sneak into hotels to meet the Beatles. Reflecting back, Sandi said of her favorite Beatle, John, “He seemed so intelligent and witty. His b
ody was very sexy. He became the one I loved passionately,” she says. “When absolutely nothing else in my life was good, I’d go to my room and have the Beatles, especially my darling John. They all furnished something I desperately needed.”

  “George is the handsomest and he’s loving it all,” states Maureen Cleave (again on tour with the band for London’s Evening Standard) in a piece for the San Francisco Examiner headlined HOW THE FRENZIED, FURRY BEATLES TOOK OVER ENGLAND. An American fan swoons, “George has got sexy eyelashes. He’s got sexy eyelashes!”

  John breaks down the band’s appeal. “We reckoned we could make it because there were four of us. None of us would’ve made it alone, because Paul wasn’t quite strong enough, I didn’t have enough girl-appeal, George was too quiet, and Ringo was the drummer. But we thought that everyone would be able to dig at least one of us, and that’s how it turned out.”

  During performances, audience members toss objects at them, especially candies. Initially, the gesture is meant as a tribute to George, who was quoted in an article as professing a love of sweets, but by 1963 he replies to a fan letter and specifically asks it to stop.

  “We don’t like Jelly Babies, or Fruit Gums for that matter, so think how we feel standing on the stage trying to dodge the stuff, before you throw some more at us. Couldn’t you eat them yourself, besides it is dangerous. I was hit in the eye once with a boiled sweet, and it’s not funny!”

  But instead the behavior only escalates. “They hurt,” Ringo says of being pelted with hard candies and objects like flashbulbs and hair curlers. “They just felt like hailstones.”

  John, who refuses to wear his heavy horn-rimmed glasses onstage—“Mustn’t spoil the image,” he says—has even had contact lenses painfully knocked out after flying offerings hit him in the face.