My Experience Meeting the Beatles (1965)

 

When I went to get my notes about the "Bigger Than Jesus" article I wrote after digging through the Art Unger Files, I found a copy of a letter sent to Datebook for publication consideration.  The magazine did not publish the story of Lee Donoff meeting the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965, probably because it wasn't true.  She was alone?  Didn't get their autographs?  Didn't take a picture?  I personally think this is fan fiction, but I also think how lovely it would be to be a 16-year-old Beatles fan in 1965 and have this beautiful daydream of meeting the Beatles.  But then again -- who knows?  Maybe it happened exactly like Lee said it did.  You can decide. 

Dear Datebook: This is the true story of my meeting the Beatles. I send it to you for you to print and share it with other Datebook readers. I found some of their experiences wonderful. The meeting was about five minutes long, and I kept my story as short as possible. Thank you for your time and your wonderful magazine, Lee Donoff. P.S. This is a picture of my cousin and I taken outside of Shea Stadium. I'm the one on the left. If you can print this article, you can cut the picture in half and use just me, or use both of us since she was at the concert.

 Meeting the Beatles 

by Lee Donoff

 West Islip, Long Island, New York

West Islip High School

age 16

    Meeting the Beatles is an experience a person never forgets. The Beatles may forget when they met me, but I'll never forget when I met them. My cousin Adrienne and I had been waiting for what seemed like ages until their New York concert. We waited for nine and a half hours to get in, and it was a luxury to sit down. I came all prepared with a camera, film, binoculars, gum, and tissues. Little did I know what was in store for me. 

    Just before the concert had started, my cousin and I tried to find better seats. Ducking cops and stadium officials, we found ourselves on the field next to two empty seats. It was dark, and the Beatles hadn't arrived yet. I asked Adrienne to come with me to get a Coke, but since neither of us had the correct ticket stubs, we thought it was safer for me if I went alone.

     I had already ordered my drink when I heard everyone screaming. I grabbed my Coke off the counter and ran to the railing. I watched the Beatles leave their truck, and I started to cry. I stood there, and after several seconds, I walked back to the counter. The police let me pass because they had seen me buy the drink. As for the girls behind me, they were stopped.

     I stood by the counter, and as soon as the man turned his head, I opened a door and ran down a flight of stairs. I was standing at the bottom when I heard an English accent; I just knew it, and I started to cry. I didn't want to, but I couldn't control the tears. They must have heard me because the next thing I knew, they were gathering around me. They were dressed casually. Ringo was shorter than I pictured him, and his blue eyes went on and on and on. George was slender, and his hair was clean and frizzy. John had a bit of a tan. Paul, well, he just looked great. 

    I was still crying, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't stop. For the next five minutes, they kept saying, "Please stop crying." Finally, Ringo asked me, and I stopped. Ringo shoved a tissue in my hand, and I still have it. I tried to take a picture, but someone yelled at me. Paul said, "You better not luv. I don't want you to get in trouble." I completely forgot to ask for autographs, although I did take a couple strands of their hair. 

    Paul turned around and looked at me. "Why does everybody cry when they see us?" I had no answer, and I mumbled something about never expecting to meet them. A voice told me to go because the Beatles had to change. I kissed John, Ringo, Paul, and George, and walked away in tears. 

    Some cop yelled at me, "Why are you crying? What are you crying about? The concert hasn't even started." Little did he know.

    It was all my cousin could do to shake me out of hysterics and find out what happened. Within a few minutes, we were running down the row of steps again. Only they weren't there. A few reporters were milling around, and one approached us and asked if we had seen the girl who had met the Beatles. My cousin said that was me.  Next thing I knew, I had a couple of microphones in my face and questions coming from all sides. Questions like "Who's my favorite Beatle?" and "How did I feel?" and so on. They asked us to stand in front of the stadium, and they took our pictures. 

    The concert was fantastic. I tried to make it to the stage, but a cop grabbed me. I got an encouraging wink from Paul. It was a wonderful experience, and for several minutes every day, I lay down and relived everything that had happened.

A Day at Tittenhurst

 August 3, 1971 - Tittenhurst 

Helping Hands

 

Fan club office

 

Here we have Mary "aka Anne Collingham," Paul, George, John and a mystery person that no one ever knew who he was!  

Tambo and a stick

 August 3, 2001 - Ringo on the Today Show in New York City 

Datebook and the Bigger Than Jesus Debacle of 1966

 

Last year I traveled to Columbia, Missouri and was able to take a look at the Art Unger files in the archives at the library there.  It was so interesting!  Art Unger was the editor of Datebook magazine.  Here is what I discovered during my time there.  I really want to go back because the few hours I had was not nearly enough. 

Tony Barrow sent Art Unger of Datebook a clipping of the Maureen Cleave interview with John Lennon in early March 1966.  Art liked the article, and because Datebook "tries to cut a bit deeper than the fan magazines do," he thought the John story, as well as the ones about Paul, George, and Ringo, might fit well with his magazine.  During this time, Art was in the process of moving Datebook from a quarterly publication to a monthly and was particularly looking for articles that would sell magazines. 

Art contacted Maureen by mail and asked whether she could redo the articles specifically for Datebook.  She was happy to add to and redo her original journal articles for the magazine for teenagers, and Art paid her only $150 for the job.  He was willing to pay her $150 for all four rewrites of the articles. Cleave wrote back to him, "The fee you offer is laughable. I do not mean to be rude, but you cannot have expected any journalist of any standing to write so much for so little."  

Not willing to negotiate the price with Maureen Cleave, Art went straight to the United Features Syndicate and paid $150 for one of the articles in the series.  By reaching out directly to the syndicate, Cleave's articles were not rewritten for the teen magazine, and she did not receive any money for their publication in Datebook.  She most likely didn't even know they were in the magazine until everything blew up. 

Art's next move was to capitalize on the Beatles quotes that would stir up the most noise and sell the most magazines.  He put the most shocking quotes by Paul and John on the front cover and then sent the copies to one specific place in the United States.  Art himself said, "I knew that was a controversial one, and I sent advance copies to Bible Belt disc jockeys."  Yes, Art Unger himself, the editor of Datebook, was the person responsible for sending disc jockeys in the Deep South the magazine with the "more popular than Jesus" quote right on the front cover, with the hopes that it would shock the jockeys so much that they would talk about it on the air and cause more people to buy his magazine. 

And we all know that is exactly what happened.  The disc jockeys didn't read the article, but read the cover and talked about it on air to gauge local reaction.  Listen to one of those radio discussions was Al Benn, who was a UPI Reporter listening in Birmingham, Alabama.  He heard the outrage from the jockeys and listeners over what John Lennon said about Christianity and the station's plan to ban Beatles music and organize a Beatles burning, and thought it was too good a story to pass up.  So he wrote an article about the Beatles ban in the South, and it got published in the New York Times and other newspapers around the country.  

Art realized that things were getting out of hand, and so he contacted Brian Epstein, who was on holiday and most likely didn't want to be bothered with nonsense from a teen magazine editor.  Art told Brian that things were getting out of hand and that Beatle burnings were being planned all throughout the country.  To this, Brian said to him, "Arthur, if they burn Beatles' records, they'd better buy them first."

Once Brian realized how big a deal the situation had become, he came to the United States to straighten things out.  He told the press that John had been "quoted and represented entirely out of context," but Teenage magazine reprinted the Lennon interview from a London newspaper.  He continued to say, "It was understood by him (John Lennon) and myself to be exclusive to the Evening Standard. It was not anticipated that it would be displayed out of context nd in such a manner that it was in an American teenage magazine."

Art Unger was mad that Brian said, time and time again, that the article was "taken out of context" and "misinterpreted" because it had been reprinted word for word from its original London publication.  He had not changed a thing, and remember, he was too cheap to pay Maureen Cleave to make any changes to it.  

Brian said, "It's quite unfortunate that this quote and this article appeared in a teenage magazine where it's open to so much misinterpretation."  After that, Art confronted Brian about the statement he kept making, and it simply was not true.  Nothing about the article was taken out of context.  To this, Brian told him, "The distortion came by placing it in a teenage magazine" 

Art never gave up trying to sell magazines; in the 1970s, he was publishing the Christian Science Monitor magazine and contacted John Lennon, saying, "Maybe we should do something again to see if the Beatles had proven to be bigger than Jesus." 

Carry these in your wallet

 August 2, 1961 

Learning from the best

  Last week Paul taught a class on songwriting to these fortunate young musicians.  I keep seeing comments saying how they don't know how lucky they are, but somehow I think they do know and they enjoyed every moment of their time with Paul. 

The day after

 

August 2, 1971 

It's George and Ringo and 'Yesterday" Again...Almost (1971)

 It's George and Ringo and 'Yesterday' Again...Almost

By Bob Micklin

Newsday

August 2, 1971

    The right answer to why 20,000 of us jammed Madison Square Garden last night, and another 20,000 crowded the Garden yesterday afternoon, would be that we all really cared about what's happening to 7,000,000 refugees of a cruel civil war between East and West Pakistan. 

    The real answer is that most of us came to see half of what used to be the supergroup of all rock supergroups, the Beatles.  George Harrison and Ringo Starr performing together on a concert stage for the first time in six years. A backup band of super players such as high-priced talent as Eric Clapton on guitar, Leon Russell on piano and electric bass, Billy Presson on organ, Klaus Voormann and Jesse Davis on guitars, Jim Keltner on drums, and oh, those extra added attractions: Ravi Shankar and his classical Indian raga music as the opening act, and Dylan, Bob Dylan, the guest star of all guest stars, walked on stage about two thirds of the way through the evening, clutching his acoustic guitar, his harmonica strapped to his chest, joining with Harrison, Starr, and Russell, what had to be one of the great impromptu quartets in the history of rock concerts.

     Yes, that's why we were there. We knew that both concerts were charity events, fundraising sessions for those war victims. None of the musicians got a penny for his work. And after Shankar and his quartet of Indian virtuosos finished their opening set, grim movies of the plight of the refugees were flashed on two large screens over the stage. Yet few of us seemed to notice. We were too eager, too restless. We wanted to see those Beatles. Besides, we had done our part. The tickets were bought, and 40,000 people at two concerts meant at least $300,000 worth of aid for those tragic people whose images flickered on the movie screens.

     We were ready to be pleased. We expected one of the heaviest musical events we'd ever seen. We were not disappointed. It took us a while to relate to Shankar's hypnotic music, but Ravi told us at the onset that he expected that. "We are making no political statements," he told us. "We are artists." Shankar is a Bengali, and the Bengalis are getting the worst of it in the war. His fierce, terribly intricate playing revealed some of his feelings about that situation, and before he was through, his artistry had moved us, but Ravi knew what we really wanted. He finished his set in little more than a half hour and told us that he realized we were waiting to meet the Beatles. 

    They came out quickly: George in a white suit and orange shirt, carrying a white guitar; Ringo heavily bearded and dressed in all black; Clapton in faded denim, the rest of the band in casual attire. In addition to the featured side men, a band of seven horns and saxophones were on one side of the stage, a seven-voiced chorus on the other, a few guitar noodlings, and they were all into "Wah-Wah", one of Harrison's tough bluesy numbers from his hit solo album of last year, then into "My Sweet Lord", with Harrison on vocals and Clapton's whining guitar doing the obligato. We were enraptured. "Look at them", we said, and look at us listening to them. It's too much. We loved it, and when Billy Preston took the spotlight, we loved him too.

     But then there was Ringo. We knew from just a few bars of intro that he was going to do his hit song, "It Don't Come Easy." We cheered for Ringo sitting up there behind the band and pounding away on the drums in his simple Beatles style. We cheered his flat, unpretentious voice. It suddenly occurred to one spectator that we had really come to cheer, not to listen.

     Leon Russell. We were ready for him too. His sinister mustache, his impassive face, his long, long blondish hair. Leon Russell jumped into the Rolling Stones' " Jumping Jack Flash", blasting off with raw screams and taking us all with him on the excitement trip we had expected all the time. George returned us to the center. However, one of the nicest things about last night's concert was watching George Harrison. No matter who was playing, who was singing, George was the leader. 

    He followed Russell with a fine version of "Here Comes the Sun", played and sung quietly but with a gentle lyricism that was lovely. Scarcely missing a beat, he brought on Bob Dylan, and while the other musicians and singers left the stage, Harrison and Russell picked up guitars, and Ringo joined them with a tambourine, a magic moment. Dylan at the microphone, running down his classic songs. "A Hard Day's Rain Gonna Fall", "Blowin' in the Wind," "Mister Tambourine Man", "Just Like a Woman." While Harrison, Starr, and Russell provided the accompaniment. Dylan raised a clenched fist to all of us as we cheered him while he left the stage.

    The finale George back in the smoky blue-white spotlight to sing "Something", surely one of the greatest of Harrison songs. Oh how we cheered him as he and the others left the stage, to which they soon returned to give us a stomping version of "Bangladesh", a new Harrison song honoring the ambition of East Pakistan to establish a new nation, but that's not why we cheered. We cheered for the Beatles, or at least half of them, and for a beautiful concert. And then we filed out of Madison Square Garden into a sticky, humid New York City night, and we were happy.