THERE’S A TREASURE TROVE of candid scenes and personal stories in “Beatles ‘64,” a new documentary streaming on Disney+ about the Fab Four’s first trip to the United States.
The star of the film is the candid archival footage shot by brothers Albert and David Maysles, who trailed the Beatles around New York City, Washington D.C. and Miami during those two weeks in February 1964.
Their footage first appeared in their own 1964 documentary, “What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.” In “Beatles ‘64,” it’s interspersed with other archival footage around present-day interviews from some of the fans who were there when Beatlemania arrived in America.
Among them: Director David Lynch, who was 18 when he attended the Beatles’ first U.S. concert at the Washington Coliseum; Jamie Bernstein, who demanded permission from her father, the conductor Leonard Bernstein, to wheel a black-and-white TV into the dining room at dinner to watch the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show; and Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes, who recounts how she sneaked the band out of The Plaza hotel and spirited them to a Harlem BBQ joint where they relaxed unrecognized by the diners.
But one of the Martin Scorsese-produced film’s most unforgettable cameos comes from Wellington snowbird Harry Benson.
He was a London newspaper photographer traveling with the Beatles on the Pan Am flight that landed at John F. Kennedy Airport on Feb. 7, 1964. About six weeks earlier, on Dec. 24, 1963, the airport (formerly New York International, or Idlewild, as the locals called it) had been renamed in honor of the slain president.
The film notes that the Kennedy assassination, on Nov. 22, 1963, still cast a pall over the nation by the time the Beatles arrived. And Benson, in his cameo, recalls how the assassination was on the minds of the four young musicians from Liverpool as the plane approached New York City.
“On the way out to America, they were telling jokes on the first half of the trip, but then it got serious because they weren’t sure what kind of reception (they would get),’’ Benson, the only photographer to sit in first class with the band during the flight from London, says in the film.
“They were a bit apprehensive, they were a bit worried. Part of it was because John (Lennon), he’d read the papers. He was a bit afraid. He used to speak about, of all things, Lee Harvey Oswald. He would speak about the Kennedy assassination. He was a bit worried about the violence here.’’
Benson’s comments are chilling. Nearly 17 years after the Beatles arrived in America, Lennon was shot and killed outside The Dakota apartment building in New York City on Dec. 8, 1980.
In the film, Paul McCartney suggests JFK’s death might have helped the Beatles’ success in America.
“When we came, it was quite shortly after Kennedy had been assassinated. Maybe America needed something like The Beatles to be lifted out of sorrow,’’ he says.
Benson watched the film with his wife, Gigi, at their Wellington home the day it was released, Nov. 29. He gave it two thumbs up.
“I enjoyed it. It gives a good idea of what it was like and it shows the way the Beatles handled everything,’’ he said in an interview Dec. 1.
Benson, who was interviewed by the documentary crew in New York City in January, makes another cameo talking about the rude treatment the band received at a reception at the British Embassy in Washington.
And he witnessed plenty more behind-the-scenes Beatlemania moments not mentioned in the movie.
“Girls sending notes up to their room. Women arriving under the room service carts. It was funny but then it was basically quite dangerous. The security and police would have to come up, and they were rough,’’ he recalled Dec. 1.
The tour that eventually brought the Beatles to the United States in February 1964 started weeks earlier in Europe, where Benson started traveling with the band.
Years later, Benson was asked what The Beatles learned on their first trip to Paris. “They learned how to order room service,’’ he replied.
“They’d order food all night,’’ he said Dec. 1. “They ate like kings and left it like kings, too, just eating a bite out of it and leaving it. That was a scruffy mess to be around them at eating times.’’
Benson turns 95 on Dec. 2. He will be honored in Miami with a birthday celebration Dec. 3 hosted by Frederic Got Gallery during an Art Basel VIP preview event.
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About the author
Joe Capozzi is an award-winning reporter based in Lake Worth Beach. He spent more than 30 years writing for newspapers, mostly at The Palm Beach Post, where he wrote about the opioid scourge, invasive pythons, the birth of the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches and Palm Beach County government. For 15 years, he covered the Miami Marlins baseball team. Joe left The Post in December 2020. View all posts by Joe Capozzi.