One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
In his biography of John, Ray Connolly judges Pete Shotton to be honest, so believes his claim that John said he had let Brian masturbate him. ‘But was John telling the truth? It was well known to those around him that he was keenly heterosexual. But he loved to shock, too. Did he invent a homosexual experience for the fun of it, or, perhaps, did he just exaggerate the incident after Brian made a pass at him? Both are possible. But, equally, as all his life he would be eager to experience anything new, was he curious about homosexuality? When Brian came on to him, did he simply want to know what it was like to be touched by another man?’
Bob Spitz is convinced ‘something happened’, but is unsure what: ‘In the privacy of their room, after an evening of drinking and sporting about, Brian initiated something that led to physical contact.’ Though Spitz peppers the relevant passage with conditionals – ‘if John participated in some sort of homosexual act, it follows that …’ ‘Curiosity may well have gotten the better of him …’ ‘He may have been experimenting …’ – he concludes on a note of certainty: ‘Away from home, in a beautiful resort with a man – certainly a father figure – who was devoted to taking care of him, John was relaxed and open enough to let it happen unconditionally.’
True to form, the relentless Goldman thinks there is no question about it: ‘He and Brian had sex.’ Quoting Shotton’s book as evidence, he argues over the details: ‘Brian told Peter Brown the real story: he had given John a blow job. Lennon couldn’t afford to acknowledge that sort of intimacy because it would stigmatise him for life.’ Yet, as we have seen, Peter Brown was in fact much more circumspect, saying only that Brian had ‘fulfilled his fantasies’.
Having already gone too far, Goldman then goes miles further, asserting, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that ‘John and Brian did not confine themselves to a single sexual experiment in Spain. They were sexually involved for the balance of Brian’s life, and their relationship was a controlling one, with John playing the cruel master and Brian the submissive slave.’
Philip Norman labels Goldman’s book, not unfairly, as both ‘malevolent’ and ‘risibly ignorant’. In his biography of Paul, Norman judges the idea of a sexual encounter between John and Brian possible but not proven, adding that ‘Years later, he told a close friend he’d had sex of some sort with Brian, “once to see what it was like, the second time to make sure I didn’t like it”.’ But in his biography of John, Norman offers a different account, this one from Yoko Ono, with whom he had conducted a series of interviews over three years: ‘Years later, John finally came clean about what had happened: not to anyone who’d been around at the time, but to the unshockable woman with whom he shared the last decade of his life. He said that one night during the trip, Brian had cast aside shyness and scruples and finally come on to him, but that he’d replied, “If you feel like that, go out and find a hustler.”’ Norman adds that ‘Afterward, he had deliberately fed Pete Shotton the myth of his brief surrender, so that everyone would believe his power over Brian to be absolute.’6
Perhaps it is best to leave the last word to Paul. ‘In an earthquake, you get many different versions of what happened by all the people that saw it,’ he observed, decades later, of the Beatles phenomenon. ‘And they’re all true.’
1 In 1967, Makin was to make all the arrangements for Epstein’s funeral. Some credit him with inventing the term ‘Beatlemania’.
2 Goldman (1927–94) wrote The Lives of John Lennon (1988), in which he portrayed John in a uniquely unflattering light, even going so far as to suggest he was a murderer. Goldman died of a heart attack in an aeroplane on the way to London, following a heated argument with flight attendants about having his seat upgraded. ‘Goldman looked like Truman Capote and sounded like Bette Davis,’ wrote his Daily Telegraph obituarist. ‘He was not a modest man: “With the counter-culture,” he declared, “I had found a great field that needed a great mind like mine to explore it.”’
3 The telegram was sold at Sotheby’s in 1984 for £550. In 1980, shortly before he died, John spoke of ‘hitting him with a big stick, and for the first time I thought, I can kill this guy. I just saw it on a screen: if I hit him once more, that’s going to be it. I really got shocked. That’s when I gave up violence, because all my life I’d been like that.’
4 The memoirs of former Beatles office staff share this strange quality of divine omniscience with the memoirs of royal housekeepers and valets.
5 Those who have claimed Epstein made passes at them include Pete Shotton, Larry Kane, Pete Best and the Liverpudlian comedian Freddie Starr (1943–2019), who was then singing with a group called the Midniters. Given to exaggeration, Starr is the only one to talk of a struggle: ‘I started punching his upper arms, which startled him, because it bloody hurt. He quickly backed off and composed himself.’
6 Yoko also told Philip Norman that ‘from chance remarks’ John made, she gathered that he had thought of having an affair with Paul, but Paul had not wanted it. ‘Around Apple, in her hearing Paul would sometimes be called John’s Princess,’ writes Norman. Yoko also told him that she had once heard a rehearsal tape with John’s voice calling out ‘Paul … Paul …’ in a strangely subservient, pleading way. ‘I knew there was something going on there,’ she remembered. ‘From his point of view, not from Paul’s. And he was so angry at Paul, I couldn’t help wondering what it was really about.’
27
The Beatles began 1963 in relative obscurity, and ended it the most famous group in the country. Within another six weeks, they were the most famous group in the world.
As we have seen, at the start of 1963 they were just another jobbing pop group. Their first single, ‘Love Me Do’, had peaked at number 17. Their first concert of 1963 was presented by the Elgin Folk Music Club at the Two Red Shoes Ballroom in Elgin, Scotland, and was attended by two hundred people. Driving in their van from Elgin to the town hall in Dingwall, they were so cold that they lay on top of one another to keep warm. ‘When the one on top got so cold that hypothermia was setting in, it would be his turn to get on the bottom,’ recalled Paul. ‘We’d warm each other up that way.’
At the time, plenty of other British acts – Adam Faith, Mark Wynter, Jet Harris, and of course Cliff Richard and the Shadows – were doing much, much better.
But when success finally came, it came as a landslide, flattening those ahead. Bands and singers who a few months before might have agreed with some reluctance to employ the Beatles as their warm-up act now found themselves in the humiliating position of opening for them. Within the space of five days in September 1963 they were presented with the Top Vocal Group of the Year award at the Savoy Hotel and headed the bill of The Great Pop Prom at the Royal Albert Hall. Meanwhile, ‘She Loves You’ was at number 1 in the charts. As they stood in their smart new suits at the top of the steps behind the Albert Hall, Paul felt the sunshine on his face. ‘We looked at each other, and we were thinking, “This is it! London! The Albert Hall!” We felt like gods! We felt like fucking gods!’
And this was just the beginning. In October, their appearance on Sunday Night at the London Palladium attracted fifteen million viewers. On 4 November they played the Royal Command Performance. Later that month their new single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, sold a million copies in the UK before it had even been released – roughly one copy for every fifty people in the country.
By the end of 1964 they had become the most famous young men on earth. In Madame Tussauds, their wax effigies took their place alongside world leaders, mass murderers and members of the royal family. In West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, four brainy pupils of the Becket Grammar School closed their school concert with a spirited rendition of ‘From Me to You’ in Latin.1 The students of Leeds University elected Ringo Starr their vice-president in preference to a former Lord Chief Justice. Visiting the EMI studios, Sir Malcolm Sargent, the most celebrated British conductor of the day, asked George Martin if he might effect an introduction (‘Chaps, Sir Malcolm would like to say “Hello”’).
Everyone wanted to meet them. In Hollywood, top movie stars – Edward G. Robinson, Dean Martin, Lloyd Bridges, Kirk Douglas, Shelley Winters, Jack Palance, Jack Lemmon – donated money to charity in order to queue for their autographs. In exile in France, the Duchess of Windsor sang their songs to herself. ‘Oh, the Beatles. Don’t you just love ’em?’ she said to the up-and-coming young interior designer Nicky Haslam, over on a visit. ‘“I give her all my love, that’s all I do-ooo!” Adore ’em. Do you know them? Oh, you are lucky!’
Where did this leave their rivals? For groups like Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, it must have been hard to stomach. A year before, the Beatles had looked up to them. From the back of the hall, George would gaze at the Jaywalkers as they set up their flashing coloured lights, their flashing drum kit and their exploding cymbals, and he would think of them as ‘real big shots’. But now those days were past.
Groups that just a short time before had been on level pegging now found it impossible to keep up. The Hollies had formed in 1962, and were having hits by 1963, but by 1964 their achievements seemed minuscule beside the Beatles’. It’s not hard to spot a note of resentment in Graham Nash’s reminiscences, published half a century later:
In those days, tweaking a Beatle was like blaspheming the pope. But who the fuck cared? I was getting sick and tired of their holy status, the way they said whatever was on their minds, no matter whom it affected, right or wrong. All of London was in their thrall. And if you didn’t know Popes John or Paul, or at least drop their names in conversation, you might as well take the next train back to the provinces, over and out. Keith Richards said it best in Life: ‘The Beatles are all over the place like a fucking bag of fleas.’ They were a great band and I loved their records. Every English group owed them a huge debt, but I had no intention of kissing their asses. Besides, last I looked, the Hollies were holding down places on the same top 10 as the Beatles, so pardon me if you don’t like our fucking record but keep it to yourself, if you please.
1 ‘A Me ad Vos’.
28
At the close of 1963 the Beatles starred in their own Christmas variety show at the Astoria in Finsbury Park, playing twice a day for fifteen days. In all, a hundred thousand people bought tickets. The show’s compere was Rolf Harris, the chummy Australian entertainer whose novelty singles ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ and ‘Sun Arise’, both produced by George Martin, had been top 10 hits. Ten years older than the Beatles, Harris belonged to an older showbusiness tradition, in which professionalism was paramount.
One night, while Harris expounded on the Aboriginal setting of ‘Sun Arise’ to a restless young audience, John began larking around with a microphone backstage. As Rolf was explaining how some tribes regarded the sun as a goddess, John’s grating voice boomed harshly over the speakers: ‘I dunno about that, Rolf.’
The audience laughed uproariously. Rolf looked around, but couldn’t see where the interruption was coming from. So he persevered, describing how, every morning, the tribes thought the sun’s skirts of light were covering the earth.
‘Well, of course, you could say that,’ John piped up. ‘But, then again, I dunno, Rolf! Maybe you’re just making it up!’
Ever the pro, Rolf put on a brave face, and emitted a laugh of forbearance. ‘But inside,’ he later admitted, ‘I was seething.’
When the show was over, he barged his way into the Beatles’ dressing room and shouted, ‘If you want to fuck up your own act, do it! But don’t fuck up mine!’
But the Beatles remained unbowed. ‘Oooh, Rolfie’s lost his rag,’ said John, and George joined in: ‘Yeah, Rolfie’s upset.’
Harris tells the story in his 2001 autobiography Can You Tell What it is Yet?, and affects good cheer. ‘They started laughing and so did I,’ he writes. ‘They had such charm that I couldn’t be angry with them. At least I’d made my point and they didn’t do it again.’
But was he really so conciliatory? In an unguarded moment in 1994, he offered a much less merry version of the event: ‘The Beatles mucked about with me. At that Christmas show, they stood off in the wings with a microphone and made silly comments during one of my songs and I came storming off the stage and shouted, “Get some bloody professionalism into you! Jesus! You don’t muck around with somebody else’s act. Don’t ever bloody do that again.” I was so angry. And after that they didn’t bloody do it again, I can tell you!’
29
Just five days separated the births of John Lennon (9 October 1940) and Cliff Richard (14 October 1940).
By the winter of 1958 Cliff had become a big star, number 2 in the charts with ‘Move It’. Meanwhile, John remained a no-hoper, scuttling around Liverpool with his Quarrymen, playing the odd village hall or private function, often for no more payment than a beer and a sandwich.
‘Is this boy too sexy for television?’ gasped the Daily Sketch after Cliff had gyrated a little too suggestively on television’s Oh Boy. The critic on the New Musical Express was even more perturbed: ‘His violent hip-swinging was revolting, hardly the performance any parent could wish her children to see.’ Before 1963 it was Cliff, not John, who was the rebel, the firebrand, the threat to civilisation. The same evening when Cliff and the Shadows were causing a stir on national television, the Quarrymen were playing skiffle standards at George Harrison’s brother Harry’s wedding reception in Upton Green.
From 1958 to 1962 Cliff had twenty songs in the top 20, including six number ones. He also starred in two films, Expresso Bongo and The Young Ones. Small wonder then that John, no stranger to envy, entertained mixed feelings towards him. When the Beatles finally squeezed into the charts with ‘Love Me Do’ in December 1962, reaching a high point of number 17, Cliff was looking down at them from number 2 with ‘Bachelor Boy’. The following month, the New Musical Express published its annual readers’ survey. In ‘Top Acts’ Cliff Richard came second to Elvis Presley, with the Beatles a lowly joint 111th. They did better in the more specialist ‘British Small Group’ category, coming eighth with 735 votes; but the Shadows came first, with 45,951 votes.
Three months later, in March 1963, the Beatles reached number 2 with ‘Please Please Me’, but they were prevented from reaching number 1 by Cliff, who was already there with ‘Summer Holiday’.
But as 1963 rolled on, the tables turned. By the end of that year the Beatles were making Cliff seem old hat. For George Melly, Cliff’s erotic twitching was now no more than ‘a bent-kneed shuffle, not so much a sexual courtship dance as a suggestion that he’d wet himself’. The Beatles were the future, and Cliff the past. Try as Cliff might, it niggled. In a rare fit of candour, he grumbled about the Beatles’ primitivism to a reporter from the Daily Mirror: ‘All they’ve done is revert to rock’n’roll. We’ve played the whole thing down, the screaming and the raving. The Beatles have stoked the whole thing up again.’
That Christmas, the Beatles occupied the number 1 and number 2 slots in the UK charts with ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘She Loves You’, while Cliff languished at number 8 with ‘Don’t Talk to Him’. By now, his fans were drifting off in search of brighter, brasher idols. In the New Year it was revealed that Cliff’s own sisters had recently formed a Dave Clark Five fan club.
For five years Cliff had struggled to crack the American market, but without success. In fact, it was Cliff’s failure that spurred Brian Epstein to plot the Beatles’ American campaign with such meticulous care. ‘Cliff went there and he died,’ John told the American journalist Michael Braun with pitiless relish as they boarded their plane to Kennedy Airport. ‘He was fourteenth on a bill with Frankie Avalon.’
Cliff was in the Canary Isles, completing his third movie, Wonderful Life, when he heard the news that the Beatles had achieved the success in America that still eluded him. Wonderful Life was released on 2 July 1964, but was overshadowed by A Hard Day’s Night, released four days later. A Hard Day’s Night broke box-office records, and was hailed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic for its freshness and originality. In contrast, Wonderful Life was called ‘a sad little picture’ by Films and Filming, while the Sunday Times described it as ‘this bloodsome bore of a film’ and ‘drivel’. The film was retitled Swingers’ Paradise for the American market, but to no avail. At the age of twenty-three, Cliff’s film career was over.
Soon after the release of both films, Melody Maker published a feature on the shifting tastes of youth. ‘I grew out of my Cliff Richard days a couple of years ago,’ said a twenty-year-old man. ‘When I look back I think how soppy I must have been. Groups now like the Beatles and the Stones have really got something and I can’t see me getting tired of them. Not until I’m old, anyway.’
From then on, John occupied such a peak of fame and fortune that he rarely bothered to glance down at Cliff Richard. On the other hand, the slightest allusion to the Beatles played havoc with Cliff’s composure. From the mid-sixties he was an ‘all-round family entertainer’, wholesome and unthreatening, performing in cabaret, in pantomime1 and on Saturday-evening television. Deep in his bones, he knew he was no longer ‘with-it’: ‘The success of the Beatles and the Stones had shelved me and the Shadows. We were now the oldsters.’ On Saturday, 6 April 1968, while John Lennon was staying with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, composing songs for The White Album, Cliff was bouncing his way through ‘Congratulations’ in the Eurovision Song Contest, dressed in a light-blue double-breasted suit with frothy white ruffles around the neck and wrists. When the final scores were totted up, it emerged that Cliff had come second to Spain’s Massiel singing ‘La La La’.
Though he was known for his pleasant, can-do persona and his Christianity, Cliff never quite managed to stifle his indignation towards the Beatles. On Sunday, 19 January 1969 he was singing hymns in an Edinburgh church and talking about his religious beliefs when he snapped, ‘The Beatles are very successful artists, and yet they are not successful in life. The Beatles do nothing but chase around the world after a dream, and they must now realise that their Maharishi just doesn’t help them at all. I think they are looking for what Christians have found.’
John Pratt/Stringer
Almost a quarter of a century later, Cliff could still be rattled by a mention of the Beatles. Interviewing him for Q magazine in 1992, Tom Hibbert2 asked if he had ever felt jealousy towards them. The vehemence of his reply suggests he had never stopped brooding.
‘There was a certain amount of jealousy. It was hurtful to be overlooked so dramatically by the media. But I still sold records by the million, so what the heck? And look at me now. The Beatles don’t exist any more, and I was going five years before the Beatles, so no one’s ever going to catch me up. I’ll always be ahead of everybody. I’ve just done my thousandth week in the chart and my nearest competitor hasn’t reached five hundred weeks in the chart, which means that if that person is to catch me up, I would have to stop recording now and they’d have to have a record in the charts every week for the next five years. It’s not possible. I’m well ahead … And another thing: when it came to rebellion, we were far more the rebellious crowd. The Beatles were accepted by royalty, they were accepted by all the high society. The Shadows and I never were. So we had one up on them.’
1 I myself greatly enjoyed Cliff Richard’s performance as Buttons in Cinderella at the London Palladium in 1966, with Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd as the Ugly Sisters, Tudor Davies as Dandini, and Jack Douglas as Baron Hardup. The Brokers’ Men were played by the Shadows. The speciality act was a baby elephant called ‘The Adorable Tonya’. During this same period, the Beatles were recording ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’.
2 Tom Hibbert (1952–2011) wrote very funny interviews with, among many others, Robert Maxwell, Bernard Manning, Yoko Ono and Sir Jimmy Savile for Smash Hits and Q magazine. In his obituary of him in the Guardian, Mark Ellen wrote: ‘Tom was unafraid of silence. He would give his subjects the impression that, despite their obvious successes, they were still somehow shameful underachievers, and then sit back quietly with a cigarette to enjoy the panicked response.’
30
One day, it struck Ringo Starr that he would never be able to go back to being plain Ritchie Starkey.
He was with his family at his auntie’s house in Liverpool, when some of Ringo’s tea spilt into his saucer. He was shocked by what happened next.
‘Everyone’s reaction was, “He can’t have that! We have to tidy up!”’
In the old days, he would have been left to clear up his own mess. But not any more. Now they were treating him differently, as though he were a superior outsider, and not one of them. It felt, he said, ‘like an arrow in the brain’: ‘Suddenly I was “one of those”, even within my family, and it was very difficult to get used to. I’d grown up and lived with these people and now I found myself in weirdland … Once we’d become big and famous, we soon learnt that people were with us only because of the vague notoriety of being a “Beatle”. And when this happened in the family, it was quite a blow.’
There was no way back. Any complaint would serve only to reinforce their attitude. ‘I couldn’t stand up and say, “Treat me like you used to,” because that would be acting big-time.’
31
A Party:
King’s Road, London SW3
18 April 1963
‘Please Please Me’ is going down in the charts, crossing paths with ‘From Me to You’ on the way up. Meanwhile, the Beatles are appearing in a variety concert at the Royal Albert Hall, ‘Swinging Sound ’63’, along with Del Shannon, Lance Percival, Rolf Harris, Shane Fenton and the Fentones, the Springfields and George Melly.
In an interval between rehearsals, they meet Jane Asher in the Green Room. At the age of sixteen, Jane is already something of a showbiz veteran: her first starring role was Mandy in 1952, and then she starred opposite Jack Warner as the Little Girl in Hammer Horror’s The Quatermass Xperiment. Since then she has appeared in Alice in Wonderland, The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Robin Hood. In the theatre, she was the youngest ever Wendy in Peter Pan. Recently she has become a household name as a regular panellist on TV’s Juke Box Jury.
Jane is attending the variety concert on behalf of the Radio Times: a reporter and a photographer are there to record her reactions. The Beatles are in awe of her, perhaps Paul most of all: ‘We had a photo taken with her and we all fancied her. We’d thought she was blonde, because we’ve only ever seen her on black-and-white telly doing Juke Box Jury, but she turned out to be a redhead. So it was: “Wow, you’re a redhead.”’
Their Royal Albert Hall concert proves to be a milestone, the first time an audience has screamed with quite such abandon. Later, fans climb on the roof of their car and block its way. The police eventually manage to clear a path, and the Beatles and their friends drive off, without really knowing where they are going. They usually end up at the Ad Lib Club, just off Leicester Square, but George, the shyest of the four, worries that hundreds of fans will already be on their way there. Accompanying them, the journalist Chris Hutchins suggests they all go to his place on the King’s Road. He then immediately regrets it, wondering how the four Beatles, Shane Fenton1 and Jane Asher will all be able to squeeze into the tiny bedsit, and where they will sit, given that there aren’t enough chairs.