1675-5 Deauville Hotel N
/13/200
THE MIAMI HERALD
Copyright (c) 2004, The Miami Herald
DATE: Friday, February 13, 2004 EDITION: Final
SECTION: Front PAGE: lA LENGTH: 140 lines
ILLUSTRATION: photo: John Lenon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo
Starr play in the surf of Miami Beach in 1964 (a) , Ed Sullivan talks with
Paul McCartney and John Lenon during rehersals at the Deauville Hotel in
Miami Beach (a) , four pictures of the Beatles in Miami (a)
SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: BY HOWARD COHEN, hcohen@herald.com
THE BEATLES ARRIVED IN MIAMI 40 YEARS AGO TODAY ON A FAMOUS FIRST VISIT TO
NORTH AMERICA. FOR MANY FANS IN SOUTH FLORIDA, BEATLEMANIA NEVER EBBED.
It was 40 years ago today, the Beatles came to Miami to play.
Four young men from Liverpool, England, arrived on that sunny Miami day,
Feb. 13, 1964. The Magic City was never the same.
The Beatles, too, were smitten by Miami, one of the early stops on their
first U.S. tour.
"That was just like paradise because we'd never been to anywhere where
there were palm trees, " Paul McCartney said in the Beatles' Anthology
documentary. ' 'We took a lot of photos. We were like tourists. "
Indeed, they were. They frolicked in the surf. They jested with Muhammad
Ali, then known as Cassius Clay. And they thrust Miami Beach into the national
spotlight when they performed at the Deauville Hotel at Collins Avenue and
67th Street for their second straight appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The
week before, they had appeared on the show in New York.
For some lucky fans in South Florida, the Beatles' visit to Miami - the
band loved it so much they stayed an extra week - altered their lives forever.
Ruth Regina, the makeup artist for The Jackie Gleason Show in Miami Beach,
was hired to do similar honors for the Liverpool lads - McCartney, John
Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr - and clung to their sides for the
group's entire stay. Rick Shaw, in the right place at the right time, was the
first local DJ to play I Want to Hold Your Hand over the airwaves. Four
Herald staffers got to be the Beatles for a day.
Then there was Larry Kane. Forty years ago, he was a news director with
Miami's WFUN-AM (now WAXY-AM 790) . Today, he has the distinction of being the
only U.S. journalist to accompany the Beatles on every stop of their 1964 and
1965 North American tours. His book, Ticket to Ride (Running Press, $22.95) ,
came out last fall.
Yet Kane almost bagged the assignment.
"I didn't want to go, " Kane, 61, said by phone from his Philadelphia
home. "I told the program director, 'Why would a guy like me, a serious
journalist, want to travel with a band? ' I thought it would be a flash in the
night, that they wouldn't be around in a year. "
Kane, then 21, covered it all. Presidents, popes, mayhem, malcontents - not
pop bands visiting from England.
FULL-BLOWN EXCITEMENT
But six days before the band's Miami arrival, I Want to Hold Your Hand was
pounding across the airwaves. Meet the Beatles !, the American version of the
band's second album, With the Beatles, topped the charts, and more than 3,000
hysterical fans greeted the group's plane in New York City. The Beatles ' first
appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show drew 73 million viewers.
The following week, the Beatles would make their second appearance on
Sullivan's show - from a stage inside the Deauville (now the
Radisson-Deauville) . About 2,600 people were in the audience. The set list
included She Loves You, I Saw Her Standing There, I Wanna Be Your Man, From Me
to You and the ballad, This Boy.
When we got off the elevator with the police and security it seemed like
the girls popped out of the walls, " said Regina, the makeup artist, laughing
at the memory from her makeup and wig shop in Bay Harbor Islands. "In their
room we could hear the roaring of fans, like the sound of waves, coming from
downstairs by the beach. Every once in a while they would walk over [to the
window] to see what was going on. They were sweet about it. They were very
much not aware of just how popular they were. I think they were a little
shocked by the whole thing. "
WFUN wasn't going to let this phenomenon go undocumented. When the Beatles
were due to deplane inside Concourse 3 at Miami International Airport,
National Airlines' hub back then, Kane had his orders: Be there and cover the
story.
CHAOS AT THE AIRPORT
The scene at MIA was crazy. Estimates suggest that about 7,000 frenzied
fans turned out. Sinatra and Elvis were big; Beatlemania was monumental.
"The kids had flooded the concourse . . . they were on the tarmac, " Kane
said. "Most took cabs there because they were not old enough to drive. "
The Herald also got into the act. Two copy boys, a reporter and a
photographer dressed up in mop-top wigs and dark suits and rode around in an
airport cart clutching guitar cases before the real Beatles arrived. They did
it to write about their adventures the next day.
Paul Schreiber, recently retired as a reporter/editor with Newsday, was a
Herald copy boy then and Beatle Paul.
Fans weren't fooled for long. For one, the Fake Four - who also included
reporter Kurt Luedtke, who went on to win an Oscar in 1986 for his screenplay
for Out of Africa - arrived without a jet.
"They were on to us and hooting and yelling and so on, " Schreiber, 60,
said, laughing, from his New York home. "They were mostly teens, going nuts
trying every way to get to the Beatles. I saw a line of girls spiraling down
the baggage shoot to get to the plane. "
Schreiber says he was already a Beatles fan and has remained so. Regina was
charmed by the lads and became a lifelong Beatles fan.
It would take a bit longer for Kane to be converted.
He first interviewed the Beatles at a sparsely attended news conference at
the Deauville. The band, especially Lennon, thought the button-down newsman
looked like a nerd. Kane thought Lennon was "scruffy. "
That would have been it, but in August he was assigned to interview the
band again, just prior to their Jacksonville tour stop. He wound up being
invited to accompany the Beatles on the entire tour because their manager,
Brian Epstein, mistakenly believed Kane was the head honcho of news for a slew
of stations.
Kane was in. "It was the most amazing experience I ever had, " he opines
now.
"In my career I've interviewed every president since LBJ, covered 19
political conventions, every condition of the human being. Yet wherever I go,
the first question I always get is what Jimmy Carter asked me before his
election defeat: 'So Larry, what were the Beatles like?' It's something I
can't escape. "
Kane wasn't the only person in South Florida to initially hold some
reservations.
Veteran DJ Rick Shaw was the first local jock to air the U.S. breakthrough
single I Want to Hold Your Hand when he worked for then pop-oriented WQAM. It
was about a month before the Beatles' arrival.
"Capitol [Records] special-delivered the record at noon on a Saturday. No
4111111111111/11111111111111111011111101111Milft 41101
one else was at the station, " Shaw, now 65, recalled. ' 'Back then it was a
big deal if you had the record first. I called Jim Dunlap, the program
director, and said we have this record by this new British group, so he said
to play it.
Shaw's initial reaction to Hand?
' 'It was good. Nice song. Didn't blow my socks off. But I can see an
opportunity when it's banging on the door, " said Shaw, now on weekday
mornings at WMXJ, Majic 102.7 FM.
Listeners responded.
"This is the only time this has happened, but 30 seconds into it the
phones exploded! I still have that 45. I saved it. "
Shaw suggests that the November 1963 assassination of President John F.
Kennedy opened the door for the Beatles. The youthful president was a favorite
with the rock 'n' roll generation. ' 'It was a giant culture shock when he was
assassinated. It's 1964 and guess who shows up on Sullivan? The Beatles. "
In October 1964 record buyers slit open their copies of the group's fourth
LP, Beatles for Sale, to read this liner note written by the group's PR man,
Derek Taylor: ' The kids of A.D. 2000 will draw from the music much the same
sense of well-being and warmth as we do today. "
Sure enough, the group's 2000 release, Beatles 1, a compilation of 27 of
the quartet's biggest hits, ranks as the No. 1 title on Billboard's Pop
Catalog chart.
"The biggest thing is you won't see something like you saw on the Super
Bowl the other night, " said Joe Johnson, host of Beatle Brunch, a syndicated
radio program that runs at 10 a.m. Sundays on WMXJ. "Families can trust that
any Beatles CD will be . . . acceptable. You won't see Paul doing something
obscene. It's a safe harbor for families. "
KEYWORDS:
TAG: 0402140214