Life with the Beatles
Bewitched, Bothered, Besieged
By George Harrison
Liverpool Echo
February 27, 1964
With the sound of that wonderful Washington Coliseum audience's fantastic reception still making their ears tingle, Ringo put it this way, "I wanted it to go on and on. I could feel the screams going right through me."
The Beatles rushed back to the hotel and changed into more formal clothes for the so called charity ball at the British Embassy. It wasn't really a ball in the accepted sense. Two or three times each year the ambassador's wife, Lady Ormsby-Gore (She is now Lady Harlieh, as her husband, Sir David Ormsby- Gore has since succeeded to the family title.) has arranged dance parties for the Embassy staff and their friends, British and American.
As usual on this occasion, she charged only $5 (about £1 15s) a ticket, which included buffet and drinks. And she devoted the proceeds to one of her favorite good causes, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The 200 tickets she had optimistically printed were snapped up immediately as they became available. A veteran member of the staff told me, as he looked at the packed dance floor. "We've never had such a crowd in all the years I've been here, not even for Sir Winston."
As the night wore on, things became more merry than one would normally associate with a staid Embassy party, and many of the younger guests let their hair down. The Beatles found themselves constantly being cornered by dinner jacketed men and their evening gown wives demanding, rather than requesting autographs. John Lennon in an aside to me commented, "This lot must have big families. I've signed hundreds of autographs, but everyone says, 'oh, it's not for me. Of course, I couldn't care less, old boy, but my children asked me to get you to sign. You know?'"
Hemmed in at every turn by jostling men and women to such an extent that sometimes they could scarcely raise glasses to their lips, John, Paul, Ringo, and George took it all in good part, although once or twice, I detected signs of anger in John when he thought they were being pushed around too much. On each occasion, it was Ringo who stepped in quickly to act as peacemaker. Then he too became somewhat annoyed as one of the laughing guests milling around him suddenly produced a small pair of nail scissors and clipped off a bit of his hair at the back of his neck.
Since we have been back to England, I have noted that the foreign secretary in a house of commons replied to questions, has denied that this incident occurred. You have my word for it, Mr. Butler, it most certainly did! Several of us saw it. If you need any confirmation, just ask Ringo.
The Embassy party followed the excitement of the Coliseum left the boys tired out, and they slipped on next morning until drug out of their beds to make a quick trip around Washington's historic places for photographs to be taken. They had decided to return by train to New York, although the snow had ceased and the aircrafts were able to use Washington airport in the normal way. But as I knew, that February 12 was Abraham Lincoln's birthday celebrated by all New York schools closing. I thought I'd do better to fly on ahead of them to see what was happening in the city, where the boys were to perform two concerts in the evening at the famous Carnegie Hall.
I arrived in New York about noon and made for our venerable Plaza Hotel. It was in a state of siege. The biggest mob of teenage girls we had so far encountered surrounded it. A sergeant told me, "The kids started arriving just after sun up, and they've been pouring in ever since. It's a school holiday, of course, and that explains it."
Reinforced police barricades confided most of the fans to the square opposite the Plaza's main entrance. Every window overlooking the Plaza entrance was filled with onlookers for this was New York's strangest free spectacle for years, and nobody wanted to miss it.
Then the news was announced on the radio that The Beatles were returning by train due to Pennsylvania Station at 4pm. This was the starting signal for a rush by hundreds of girls aboard busses for Penn Station. They were soon joined by more than 1000 others who had flocked back to the station from LaGuardia Airport, where they had been awaiting the boys expected arrival by plane. Railway officials flashed an emergency call for help to the city police, and 100 men, including mounted officers, were transferred at once to the rail terminal to deal with the situation which threatened to get completely out of hand when the Beatles train drew in.
Every gate was closed bearing access to the platform. Bewildered passengers off incoming trains were shepherded by police to other exits, and all the time, the girls kept up an air splitting, high pitched shriek, which numbed your senses. The four targets for all this commotion were in a special coach at the rear of the Washington train, waiting the word that it would be safe for them to get out.
Paul told me later, "We could hear the yelling before the train even stopped. What a row!" At last, officials decided they could probably smuggle the lads out by way of another platform. The coach was shunted off but the girls were not easily fooled. They spotted the ruse and dashed around to the new exit. Hefty policemen went down under the mad rush by something like 2,000 screaming kids intent on getting near their idols. John, Paul, George, and Ringo started running and following the railway officials in a dash for a mail bag service entrance.
With the mob chasing full pelt after them, they got through the gate, which was slammed behind them and locked,stopping the girls in their tracks. Hastily, the boys piled into two taxis that made a rendezvous en route to the hotel with their own hired limousine in which they finished the journey to the Plaza. Their arrival fired off the excited waiting youngsters into a surge through the barricades to reach the car. The sweating, heaving police just managed to hold on long enough for the Beatles to get a few seconds of grace and escape into the hotel before the crowd reached the entrance doors, which were promptly bolted. Inside the Plaza, security guards hired by the management, patrolled every quarter, winkling out kids who had sneaked through the blockade somehow or another.
And so we moved across the to historic Carnegie Hall, opening its doors for the first time in 75 years to the beat from Mercyside. The Beatles were smuggled out of the Plaza via the kitchen and an underground employee entrance leading to a quiet street unwatched by fans. The taxi whipped them to the stage door, taking by surprise the 2,000 girls and boys without tickets who were waiting at both ends of the street ready to pounce, expecting them to arrive in their black limousine. The girls gave the battered taxi no more than a glance and the boys were out of it and inside the stage door before they were spotted.
The towering height of Carnegie Hall's vast, 5,000 seat auditorium, seen from the stage with the balconies rising way up until folks sitting there look like midgets, is a pretty overpowering sight. I know for I was sitting on the stage behind the Beatles who kept turning around to shout quaint comments in my direction throughout the show. A couple of 100 customers who had paid top price of around two guineas for the privilege were also occupying the stage seats. You can also add half a dozen of those inevitable police and security men. They were presumably on the spot, in case we got up to mischief.
Somehow, out in the packed, huge hall, the Beat-chicks really had a ball. They yelled, they yah- hooed, they squealed. They hardly ever seemed to sit down, and they hung along the plush balconies, hand painted signs reading, "We Love You" and "Beatles stay forever".
An elderly Carnegie Hall official said to me, "Do your audiences in England behave like this when the Beatles appear?" I assured him that they did, and he shook his head, sighing, "Extraordinary, truly extraordinary! Never seen anything like it."
Afterward, the promoter of the show, Theater Three productions, announced that they would offer the Beatles a return engagement in a Carnegie Hall next September. In the audience and enjoying all the excitement were such interesting people as Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller, wife of New York's millionaire governor, with her two children, film actress Lauren Bacall, and Sybil Burton, ex wife of actor Richard Burton. She admitted to being a Beatle fan from way back.
After the show, Mrs. Rockefeller enthused, "It was one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen. I loved it. They were marvelous." But women newspaper comments Inez Robb, who has a very big following for her syndicated articles, wasn't so happy. She wrote, "This nation, hard pressed on all sides, cannot long endure the squealing syndrome that seizes U.S. adolescents and the presence of the Beatles. Beatlemania, rather than the Beatles, must be destroyed, root and branch if we are to survive. The glassy eyed adenoidal girls always on the verge of knee jerk hysteria, who compromised the Beatles camp followers and television audience could not possibly be interested in this British chamber quartet. They were only interested in an excuse for lapsing into the squealing syndrome with its accompanying spastic movements. I refuse to have anything to do with a 'Stamp out the Beatles' movement. What is imperative is a project to stamp out American adolescence", she fumed.
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