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."
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