Read Online The Beatles Are Here! by Penelope Rowlands - Free Book Online

cars—and yet, as I looked around, it seemed as though everything was vibrating with the evening’s momentous, imminent event.
When I came to the tunnel, I held my breath as I always did and tried to zoom as fast as I could over the bits of broken glass, the beach rocks and empty soda cans, without hurting my feet in their flip-flops. Back in the light of day, I rushed down through the sand, pulled off my shift and ran into the sea in my paisley bikini. Finally, I had found something equal to my restless, overpowering excitement. I hurled my body into wave after wave, until finally my fingers and toes grew white and I threw myself down into a dip of warm sand and slept as if sleeping off a spell.
After the night of the concert, several days passed before the rumor reached me: during the performance, a girl I knew from my neighborhood had made a frenzied leap into the moat that surrounds the stage at the Hollywood Bowl. Carol Partridge. I’d always thought of her as a rather shy girl—not someone who, in the most literal way, would stand out from the crowd. Once I heard the rumor, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Though my official reaction was one of hilarious disbelief, I actually felt a kind of awe. And since I had known that I myself would not be able to bear the intensity of the Beatles’ actual presence, I had no trouble understanding how it was that Carol had simply broken out of her skin. . . .
I could so vividly see how she, rising from her seat, had been compelled toward the circle of light where they sang. I could see her pale face transfigured, her thin body borne over the roaring heads and waving arms and into the moat. I could see her thrashing toward them like some brave wild creature—until the security guards leaped in and fished her out. Like Paul Revere’s ride, Carol Partridge’s swim took on a kind of mythical, archetypal status in my mind.
From junior high all the way through high school, I remained faithful to my secret love. When I came home from school each day, I’d stack every Beatles record I had on my phonograph and enter a kind of musical swoon that would carry me all the way to suppertime, often while simultaneously reading John’s books. Once, when my father came to my bedroom door to rouse me, he said, “The day will come when you don’t do this anymore.” I looked at him as if he was crazy.
It’s strange to me now that I don’t remember when, or even how, my father’s words came true. Was there a single day when I suddenly stopped listening to the Beatles? Or did the habit taper off gradually, so that I piled fewer and fewer records on the turntable until finally I listened to none? With almost religious devotion, I’d repeated a certain behavior day after day, year after year—yet the demise of this behavior left absolutely no trace in my mind.
What has stayed, however, is the image of Carol at the Hollywood Bowl. And here’s the truly strange thing that time has done: In my memory, the scrawny wet Girl Scout swimming so frantically, yet bravely, in the moat is not Carol Partridge. It is I.
I’m sixty now, and after all these years it’s as though I have finally released myself to reveal to the world what I was: a teenage girl, madly in love—like all the other millions and millions of girls—with the Beatle who, in her mind, exists only and forever for her alone.

Gay Talese, reporter
I BECAME A staff writer at the New York Times when I was twenty-three, and I was there for nearly eight years when I first reported upon the Beatles in 1964. I was covering entertainment: writing about the Beatles was one of perhaps five assignments I did that week—it could be on opera, ballet, Baryshnikov, the Yankees, whatever. It was all a story.
The Times was one of six or seven daily newspapers in New York City in those days and was known as a reporter’s paper. The Herald Tribune was the writer’s paper—it was where you had a columnist like Jimmy Breslin or a very stylish