Tabla de contenidos para PEOPLE The Beatles: Celebrating Beatlemania! en People

In early 1964 Americans were still reeling from President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. And at this darkest hour, light burst in from an unlikely source (accompanied by the frenzied cries of teenage girls): four Liverpudlian rock-and-rollers, in Chesterfield suits, with mops of hair—startling in a crewcut era—and a droll, cheeky wit. Nearly two centuries after the British surrender at Yorktown, the Beatles recaptured the colonies. “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You” and other singles blared coast-to-coast from car radios and turntables; and when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr landed in New York on Feb. 7, 1964, Beatlemania kicked into overdrive—some 73 million people watched them on The Ed Sullivan Show, a communal experience rarely seen today. The Beatles’ sensibilities, style and sophisticated songwriting…

“THERE’S A HEAD!” shrieked the fanatic. It belonged to Ringo Starr, and he almost lost it on Halloween 1963 to a mad, roiling mob of sobbing, screaming fans. Police had formed a flying wedge to protect the Beatles as they attempted to make their way across the tarmac, suddenly swarming with fans, after landing at England’s London (later Heathrow) Airport. They had made little progress through the crowd when Ringo’s head, along with the rest of him, disappeared from sight—“swamped,” a Life correspondent reported, “in a sea of clutching hands and autograph books.” As police grabbed at Ringo and bodily dragged him from the grip of one desperate fan, she screamed, “I touched him! I touched him!” Even the Beatles were initially confused by the ruckus. “Is all this…

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AS THE BEATLES STEPPED OFF Pan Am’s Flight 101 in New York on Feb. 7, 1964, “we all had our hands to our ears,” remembered Cynthia Lennon. “But the screaming was not from the jets. It was the fans—thousands and thousands of fans.” Conjured by radio stations that bombarded listeners with songs from Meet the Beatles—soon to be No. 1 from coast to coast—and giveaways that promised a free T-shirt to every fan who went to welcome them at newly christened John F. Kennedy airport, the crowd of 5,000 delirious teenagers was the largest the group had seen or heard to date. The Beatles themselves, traveling first-class with guests including Phil Spector, were warned mid-flight that a big crowd awaited. Accustomed to American indifference—“We don’t think the Beatles will…

“IS BEATLEMANIA Dead?” Time magazine posed the question in a 1966 headline, and with the cover of their landmark album release the following year, the Beatles themselves would answer it, staging what looks like a funeral for their younger lovable mop-top selves. But at the dawn of 1966, the delirious derangement called Beatlemania was alive, well—and a right pain for the four lads. It quashed George Harrison’s plans for a vacation after the 22-year-old’s January wedding to model Pattie Boyd, whom he’d met during the filming of A Hard Day’s Night two years before. “We shall not have a honeymoon yet,” mourned the groom, his arm around Pattie’s red-fox coat. “We would just be hounded.” Then, in March, the London Evening Standard published a solo at-home interview John had…

AS HE always would, Richard “Ritchie” Starkey came into the world behind the beat—a week late (and weighing a booming 10 lbs.). The first percussive blasts of war—the opening salvos in the Luftwaffe’s devastating two-year night bombing of Liverpool—began soon after his arrival in July 1940. “Our neighborhood was really bombed,” he said of the Dingle, a poor Irish-immigrant neighborhood near the Germans’ prime target, the Liverpool docks. “We used to hide in the coal cellar—it was more like a cupboard. I remember big gaps in the streets where houses had stood. We used to play on the rubble when I was older and in the air-raid shelters.” Ritchie survived infancy and war, but then his luck ran out. His parents split when he was 3—his father, Richard Sr.,…

Fainting, crying, screaming: At every step on their first trip to America, the Beatles were met with fan fervor the world had yet to see. But those massive crowds were made up of individuals, each with a story of showing up at the airport to catch a Beatle’s eye or a fantasy of being something more than a tear-streaked face in a shrieking mass of humanity. For the following five women, those epic days in February weren’t about history. They were about showing love and support for a group that had captured their imagination—and hearts. On Friday, Feb. 7, 1964, more than 3,000 teenagers descended upon JFK International Airport to witness the group’s arrival. Among them was 11-year-old Annette Joseph-Walker, who, along with other fans there, shared her memories…

WHAT DID THE END of touring mean to the Beatles? In the words of Ringo, “I don’t wear a black suit anymore.” He was joking, but he was onto something: Until then we remember the Beatles in black-and-white: mop-topped lads in suits delivering cheeky one-liners and rocking stadiums around the world. Soon they would appear in riotous color, posing among flowers with the Maharishi or splendid in almost Day-Glo satin on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The color was metaphor: The Beatles themselves were striking out in new directions, as a band and—as would soon become painfully evident—individually. Although Revolver was released just before their 1966 tour, they played none of its songs onstage; the effects and sound were often too complex for a four-piece…