NYC Still Belongs to the Fab Four

 

NYC Still Belongs to the Fab Four

By Dennis Duggan

Newsday

February 9, 1989

    At the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway yesterday morning, the stagehand seemed surprised to hear that this was where the Beatles made their first New York appearance. That was 25 years ago today, a quarter of a century, for God's sake.

 "We can't let you in here." One of them told me they're rehearsing the Kate and Ally show. I could see the bright television lights beaming down on the actors on the stage of Studio 50, from which the Beatles took most of the country by storm, but not everyone.

      In the New York Times that week in 1964, Ray Block, the musical director for the Sullivan program, snorted, "The only thing that's different is the hair, as far as I can see. I give them a year."  But here we are, 25 years later, and yesterday, when I asked 24-year-old Terry Nelson, who was a rock Compact Disc buyer for Tower Records how the Beatles records are selling. He flashes a big smile and points to a rack at the front of the store near Lincoln Center. The rack is all Beatles. 

    "It's amazing. We can't get enough of their albums. We have more than 20 titles on this rack, and people of all ages buy their records."

     Sure enough, I picked up Revolver and scanned some of the titles, most written by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, and suddenly I am back in the 1960s when their extraordinary music fueled a surge of rebellion, when the war in Vietnam had become a travesty, when, sadly, drugs emerged the way primordial monsters shot up from the muck in Grade B movies. 

    Yeah, yeah, yeah. From "Eleanor Rigby" to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", a song that hip dopers thought wrongly had been written for them.  To "Good Day Sunshine" and from "All You Need Is Love" to the "Long and Winding Road" would a marvelous and lasting imprint their lyrics and their music have left on us. 

    "Oh, boy, do I remember them!" said Tony Padilla, 54, a Bellman at the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Street where the Beatles stayed on their first trip to the city. "The place went crazy!  They rented half of the 12th floor and they  had more than 200 pieces of luggage."

     Padilla, who lives in East Harlem with his family and has worked for the plaza for 32 years, says he will never forget the frenzy that overtook the Beatles fans the day the Fab Four arrived. "They tried to break into the lobby here, over there, on that desk, some of the girls jumped up and down and screamed before the security guards could get them out. It was something!  I wish now that I had asked for their autographs from my four children."

     Terry Bertolotti, 54, a ruddy-faced doorman, resplendent in a red coat with gold braids and wearing a shiny black top hat, recalled that vibrant day as well. The Sunny sSde Queens resident has worked the doors at the Plaza Hotel for more than a quarter of a century, and has seen kings and queens, princes and princesses and even a few presidents, but "The Beatles were one of a kind!" says Bertolotti. "The day they went over to do the Ed Sullivan Show, we had to smuggle them out  of a kitchen and into a subway tunnel where they came up the stairs and into a limousine. We fooled the fans. They waited outside on Fifth Avenue and alongside Central Park South behind barricades. They were so noisy you couldn't hear yourself think ."

    Twenty-five years ago, The Beatles were in their young 20s, but they wrote songs that were filled with wit and wisdom, with charm and buoyancy, and sometimes with the sadness that only those much older should have known. In "When I'm 64", they asked, "Will you still need me? Will you still feed me when I'm 64?"  and in a witty part of the Lyric, noted that I could be handy mending a fuse when your lights have gone.

     At Strawberry Fields yesterday, across from the Dakota apartment house on West 72nd Street and next to a circle embedded in a sidewalk with the words "Imagine" in its center, two young Japanese students from Tokyo got off their bicycles and stood alongside the black and white tiled circle. One of them pulled a camera from his backpack and took several pictures of the Dakota where Lennon and Yoko Ono and their son Sean, lived together until Lennon was gunned down on December 8, 1980 by a wretched excuse of a man.

     They did not speak much English, and I speak no Japanese, but they made it clear that they were both 22 years old, that they were students at a university in Tokyo, and that they were both Beatles fans. "Beatles, oh yes!" they said. 

    Later, I sat down with Thomas E McNamara, 60, a retired railroad worker who lives in Flushing, Queens, with his wife. He was a moonlighting guard when the Beatles came to New York and his boss called and said he needed a security guard to work with a rock group. "Which group? I asked him", said, McNamara, who wore three Beatles buttons on his shirt.  "The Beatles, I think they're called", said the boss.

     McNamara worked for them for two days and rode up and down in the elevator. "My job was to keep the fans from killing them with love", he said, "but I never thought at the time they would become so famous. Now I'm a fan. I'm going to a Beatles convention in Connecticut in a few days that a fan club called Good Day Sunshine is throwing.

     In New Jersey. Molly Rubin, 35, who teaches kids at an elementary school in Patterson, said she's just finished designing a map called The Beatles in New York, which she says will be a companion piece for two others in Liverpool and London. It will include all the places they stayed when they were here, where they played like Shea Stadium and Forest Hills, where they did radio talk shows, and, of course, the Ed Sullivan Theater. 

    Her life's ambition is to meet Paul McCartney, "the most gorgeous thing who ever walked the face of this earth," she said.  She has scrapbooks that date back to February 7, 1964, when the Beatles landed at the recently renamed Kennedy International Airport. And she says of her quarter century of devotion to the Beatles "is very intense".

     "I once met John Lennon. This was in 1972 a year or so before he moved out of his home at 105 Bank Street, a block from where I lived. It was at Shanvilla's grocery store on West Fourth Street, run by an Irish man who planned to turn the store over to the Puerto Rican family who worked for him. But the store is gone, done by the high rent, and now it's a pricey French antique store."

     Lennon is gone too, done in by the same madness that cost us so dearly. John and Robert Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, and Medgar Evers.

     But what the hell,  I could go on forever. The Beatles were, as Jeffrey Stokes wrote in a book published in 1980 "The Four Horsemen of our apocalypse." They wrote the anthems of our age, whether it was "Good Day Sunshine" or  "All You Need Is Love", all of them are evergreens, as music critic Stuart Trope notes, yeah, yeah, yeah.