The Beatles are Stuck With Hide-and-Seek (Cincinnati 1966)

 

The Beatles Are Stuck With Hide and Seek

By Dale Stevens

The Cincinnati Post

August 20, 1966

    The Beatles are trapped in stardom, and for me, looking back at every interview I've done with popular performers who no longer are free to walk down a quiet street, I have to wonder if the English boys sometimes feel they've given up more than the money has given them. Privacy is a wonderful thing. You lose it in the glow of such phenomenal success. Your best fan becomes your worst enemy. A group of people who love you becomes a mob. Love becomes violence, so the Beatles can't stick their head out of their hotel door. The police escort becomes a way of life. Many a star has told me he or she would rather have the privacy and not quite so much stardom, but by then it is always too late, and thus beside the point. 

    Point is, how now do you handle the fans who have gone berserk with their affection? In the case of the Beatles, the answer has been the will-of-the-wisp tactic, a frantic game of hide-and-seek, in which the yare always wins. They hide, as it were, to keep fans from getting hurt. Somewhere there must be a dividing line, an illusory, indefinable line between being fair to your fans and getting yourself or your fans torn apart. On the one side of the line is the obligation to give something in return to the people whose dollars have literally bought stardom for you; you cannot then turn your back on them completely in the name of safety. And yet, the other side of that line is mayhem for such an act as the Beatles. They appeal mostly to the younger audience, and the girls who scream at them would trample each other if they thought they actually might touch a Beatle, so the Beatles are virtually forced to hide away, to stay away, to run as briskly as possible to the stage with police on each side of them, and be spirited away in whatever trickery is needed after it's over. Are the Beatles overprotected? Do they cheat their fans of a fair chance to look or shake hands? It's easier to touch President Johnson than the Beatles, and the Beatles are quick to agree.

     But while Paul McCartney will admit overprotection, he and the other Beatles insist that one, it's the idea of their management, and two, it's necessary to protect the fans from themselves. I wasn't the most popular person in the Beatles' dressing room when they were at Crosley Field over the weekend, but I held my own in some feverish discussions with McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the Beatles' press boss Tony Barrow. When I said they are overprotected, Ringo said. "No, I don't think so. They just want to touch us. But when it gets into 1000s of people, it's dangerous, you know. It's as much for their protection as ours."

     McCartney made the point that as artists, it isn't their job to organize police control. But when I said they were being overprotected, he said, "Oh yes, that's the truth of it-the whole truth."

     Tony Barrow, as part of the management team, wouldn't quite agree with my contention that the Beatles are overprotected by their paid advisers. "There is a minimum," he said, emphasizing the word minimum, "of three organizations: the Beatles, police, and the promoters." By which McCartney quickly added, "And in all that were very insignificant in that lot, were where organization is concerned, we don't organize any of it." 

    What it all boils down to, as insider's note, is that McCartney, Ringo, John Lennon, and George Harrison are tightly controlled by their personal manager and co-owner, Brian Epstein. The Beatles would rather run into a crowd and shake hands, as Ringo told me they sometimes do. Epstein merely has to sit them down and give them the instructions, and his reputation for shrewd brilliance can be seen in the way. The Beatles obviously follow his directions. "That's why we have management," Ringo said to me. "We just do our job. We don't have anything to say. It's all organized for us. Without the protection, we'd never get a show done." But Lawrence Olivier and Frank Sinatra don't cloister themselves so extremely; they can go out. Ringo replied, "They're not pop stars. I've never seen 5000 people queued up to see Frank Sinatra around his hotel."

    The difference Ringo believes is the teenage audience for pop stars, and that's the way he wants it. "It's the young audience I like. They're nearer to us than older people are, you know, in age, thinking no, in the way they are. This generation, we're a part of this generation, and anyone over 35 is the last generation. And I like staying with our generation. It's better than the last one. I'm not saying you don't like the Beatles. A lot of older people do; I've had letters from people of 68 or 86, you know."

     As for the protection fuss, when the Beatles left, newsmen were waiting at the plane door at the airport ramp Saturday morning, John Lennon later told Walt Turner of WSAI. "It might have been 18 seconds, as the paper said, but you want to praise the police for their speed and efficiency, not shout at us. We have no control. We sit on the plane. The order comes. 'All right, Beetles, off the plane.' The car's waiting at the bottom of the ramp. We leap off the plane, go clunk down the stairs. We just zoom in, do what they tell us. Jump in the car. They say 'come along. Side here. Dive into that door.' Click, click, and you're in your bed. You know."

     McCartney, referring to the five Lexington, Kentucky girls who wanted to give the Beatles $367 worth of flowers, said the Beatles would have stopped had they been told. "We tried to, but those girls just jumped on the car, without an explanation. This is what happens. The whole business is so organized, even subdivided, sublet, that for an instant, all that Manila stink we got into was because exactly that one thing we didn't know about it."  The police said, "Get in that car', and so we got in. So that's the protection bit."

     Their contract stipulates they won't sign autographs, and for every other kind of request, they can fall back on the oldest dodge in show business: You'll have to see my manager. The truth, it is the kind of protection the really big stars must have, because as their management says, it's not a matter of making things safe for the Beatles, but safe for the people.