At a second-run theater in Evanston, we took in From Russia with Love, and before the film began I bragged about having met James Bond’s papa during the war. Divorced dads get to do that.Īnd August had been swell. Maybe not groovy, but cool.” I had maintained a strong relationship with my son by not insisting on having my own way. Everybody’s going on vacation with family, so we can’t take gigs anyway. “So what about August?” I’d asked him over the phone. Normally Sam spent summers with me in Chicago, but he had begged off of June and July because his combo - yes, the Beatle bug had bit him hard - had a weekly pool party gig at a Bel Air country club that paid “incredible money” ($100). He lived with his mother and my ex-wife (that’s one person) in Hollywood with her husband, a fitfully successful film producer.
The Beatles, through no fault of their own, had created a problem for me with Sam. More importantly, Miss November - who you may have calculated was younger than me - loved it. Earlier this year, Sam had convinced me to take in their flick A Hard Day’s Night, and I’d liked it. They were a pretty fair combo, better than most of the little bands that had made the Twist a very big deal on Rush Street, and they seemed to have a sense of humor. Unlike many of my contemporaries - I was a successful businessman in my well-preserved late fifties - I did not have disdain for the Beatles. But it also signaled the end of barbershops as we knew them and extended the fad called rock ’n’ roll through the rest of the century and beyond.
My son once told me that that joyful noise had signaled a rebirth for his generation, the Baby Boomers, granting them permission to smile and have fun and be silly again. The latter broadcast I somehow missed, but Sam has made it abundantly clear over the years that the February 9 appearance of those four Liverpool lads on The Ed Sullivan Show was right in there with JFK getting it. Soon, amid beauties with their mascara running, she and I had hunkered around a portable television with a little gray picture in a big shiny white kitchen. I learned of the former in a guest room at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Chicago - in the company of Miss November, fittingly enough. My son’s generation will always remember two key events of their teenage years - where they were when news came of President Kennedy’s assassination, and seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
0 kommentar(er)
