Life With the Beatles
The Finest American Hour
By George Harrison
Liverpool Echo
February 26, 1964
For days before the Beatles landed in New York, newspapers and radio commentators, particularly the disc jockeys, had been telling the city's breathlessly excited teenage population that the boys would be staying at the dignified, exclusive Plaza Hotel overlooking Central Park. So, hours before the touchdown of our jet plane at the John F Kennedy International Airport, youngsters, mostly schoolgirls, began arriving to stand behind the police barriers erected opposite the hotel's main entrance on swanky Fifth Avenue.
By the time the news of the tumultuous scenes which greeted the Beatles at the airport had been flashed by radio transmitters to the Central Police Department in Manhattan, the crowd of kids besieging the plaza was well over 1,000 strong. Suddenly, New York woke up to the fact that the earlier warnings given by disc jockeys and newspapers of a possible teenage invasion bringing chaos to the city were not merely idle forecasts to be ignored.
The police force of 50 already on duty by the Plaza was obviously not going to be sufficient to contain those enthusiastic girls once their idols showed up. Hastily mounted police were drafted to the scene, followed by more than 100 men called off their ordinary beats. A solid ring of New York's finest men in blue surrounded the Plaza, and it was as well as they did, for when eventually the Beatles battled their way through the milling masses of wildly screaming girls at the airport, and in a four-car cavalcade with police escorts, went racing along the 15-mile motorway to Manhattan, the excitement among the waiting crowds was already at a fever pitch.
Then the cars carrying the four mop-top head lads from Liverpool swung into the police encircled enclosure of the Plaza's front door, and the lid flew off all the pent-up emotion. The crowd pushed over the barriers and broke the chain of locked arm cops in one gigantic surge, which carried them right across the road to the cars. The Mounted Police horses were almost useless in such a crush; they could scarcely move. As each car pulled up, the boys inside had their doors already open and somehow, aided by hefty no-nonsense police, John, Paul, George, and Ringo managed to scramble out and up the hotel steps without the deliriously thrilled mob reaching them. But it was a near thing, and although they had a good laugh about it a few minutes later, as they stood in a front window and waved to the yelling youngsters packed in the square below them, they looked a bit shaken.
George Harrison was the palest of them all, but in his case, it wasn't just the aftermath of their narrow escape from what might have been some severe man, or rather, girl handling from the excited fans. On the plane, George had complained of a sore throat. No sooner were we settled in the hotel than he developed a high temperature, and there was an immediate SOS for the doctor.
He arrived and promptly sent the feverish George to bed, diagnosing him with a very bad case of tonsillitis. The doctor told me, "I am giving him injections and keeping him in bed. It is most unlikely that he will be able to sing on Sunday night's television show, but I'm administering to him to him what I call my 'powerhouse treatment' of drugs. It has worked before in these cases, and it might work again."
For safety's sake, the doctor refused permission for George to leave his bed and go with John, Paul, and Ringo to be photographed in snow-covered Central Park the next day. Neither did George accompany the other three when they went to the television studio that afternoon to rehearse for their Ed Sullivan Show. But astonishingly, by midday on Sunday, the boy was not only up and about again, but he was telling me, "I feel fine and I shall certainly be in the full dress rehearsal this afternoon and in the show tonight." The powerhouse treatment, whatever it was, had succeeded.
Its history now how the show went on as arranged and scored for Sullivan, the biggest triumph in the 16 years of television. The program headed by the Beatles was watched by more than 80,000,000, people throughout the entire United States. This is the highest figure ever reached by the Sullivan Show and easily surpassed that for Elvis Presley's appearance at his peak.
Men wise in the wilds of show business in New York told me afterwards that when Sullivan signed up the Beatles for three of his shows, he thought he was doing them a favor, but it's turned out they've done the favor to him. Yet the Beatles were dissatisfied with their own performance, despite the deluge of praise which came flooding over them from everywhere. "My microphone was only at half strength," complained John Lennon to me.
What with the half-power mic and the "powerhouse" George also having to sing at half cock,, swallowing hard to ease his throat every few bars, they didn't sound as good as I knew they could be, but it was obvious that their audience of teenagers in the studio did not notice anything was wrong. They gave the boys the full treatment of near hysteria. They screamed, bounced in their seats, tore their hair, wept in ecstasy, and behaved pretty much like British teenagers do.
Meanwhile, in the nation's capital, Washington, arrangements had been completed for the Beatles to make a one-performance appearance at the 8000-seater Coliseum, an ice hockey arena on the city's outskirts. "On Tuesday night, you can expect a darn sight hotter welcome here than the boys ever got in New York," said my English informant on the telephone. "The kids are going out in their 1000s to the the airport to meet the plane." That conversation took place on the morning of Monday, February 10, three days after the Beatles had descended on New York. A few hours later, I met Brian Epstein in the Plaza Hotel lobby. He looked worried, and I asked the reason.
"I've just heard that a snow blizzard is sweeping across the country and that Washington is likely to get the worst of it," he said. "I've been on the phone to the concert organizers, and they say the blizzard is expected to strike there tomorrow morning. I've canceled our plane trip, and we should try to get through by train."
I had been booked to go on the same plane with them, so I switched my booking too. Thank goodness we did. You never saw anything like the gale driven snow storm through which that train of ours had to plow through. The next morning, no planes took off from New York that day.
Three hours after leaving New York, the train pulled into Washington Union Station. John Lennon said to me as we slowed down, "There won't be anybody here, that's a certainty." And I agreed. Along the platform and way out toward the rear of the train, newsreel and press cameramen were strung out in a long line, unsure where their targets were situated. I scraped the snow off the train steps leading down the platform and got out ahead of the boys, stamping my way through the treacherous slush towards the exit gates.
Then I saw for the first time the kids. Police had closed and locked every iron grill gate across the station to keep them out, but there they were, thousands of them, with their hands extending through the bars like countless claws, presenting a fantastic display of imprisoned, impossible desire to reach out and touch. I asked the policeman, "Which is the way ou?", and as soon as the nearest youngster heard me speak, they shouted, "He's English! They're here!" And the yell spread right across the station like a gigantic, ever-growing echo. It was unbelievable, maybe stupid, but oh so splendid.
I heard later that more than 1000 girls and boys had defied the blizzard in the early morning to fight a way through to the airport where they were originally expected to arrive. When they learned of the changed plan, they headed back for Union Station just in time to join the others in a dependence chant of "London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down because we've got the Beatles!"
That night in the vast Coliseum, our lads gave their finest performance of their lives and loved every minute of it. The stage was rather like a boxing ring set in the middle of the arena, but without any ropes. The audience sat all around. 8000 adorning youngsters, plus a lot of older folks too. The snow had stopped, but lay eight inches deep everywhere. Yet there wasn't an empty seat in the place. "They must be starkers," commented Ringo. "Fancy coming out here in this lot", kicking at a six foot snow drift as he walked into the hall.
Yet this was their finest American hour. They captured Washington for the British nearly 200 years after we had lost it. The police and duty were marvelous. On this occasion, they handled everything with magnificent tact, even though many of them were hit in the face and eyes by those confounded jelly babies, which American audience everywhere kept throwing at the Beatles because of some misguided publicity yarn about how much they like this particular kind of sweet (they don't).
At the finish of a show that was truly memorable, a police sergeant standing alongside my seat leaned over and said, "Call off the Beatles. Washington surrenders, sir. " It was just about right too. Union Jacks were being waved all over the packed arena. The Beat-chicks were going through their jives of joy, squealing and crying. "We love you. Yeah, yeah, yeah."
It took two hours to clear the auditorium after the show, and I had a two mile walk through the snow to my hotel, so I could change clothes to go to the British Embassy dance. There wasn't a taxi to be had anywhere, so I had to hoof it.
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