Two days later, when the Eastern Seaboard was blanketed in snow, the Beatles took a train from Penn Station to Washington DC to play a show at the Washington Coliseum. During the southbound journey the press were able to hang out with the Beatles in the Pullman car, finding the Englishmen relaxed and playful. By the time they pulled into the capital they were all friends, though Al Aronowitz of the Saturday Evening Post detected evidence that Paul was letting the attention go to his head. The others were calling him ‘the star’ sarcastically. Another journalist on the train had a ticklish question for the star. David English of London’s Daily Mail took Paul aside and told him his office had information that a Hamburg barmaid was claiming to have given birth to his daughter. What did he have to say to that?
The woman in question was Erika Wohlers, one of the girls the Beatles apparently hung out with in Hamburg, though Paul’s German barmaid friends have only a dim memory of Erika and no recollection of her dating Paul. ‘Maybe he went with her one day, I don’t know. But she definitely wasn’t his girlfriend, because I was going out with him every day,’ says Paul’s regular Hamburg girlfriend Ruth Lallemann. In any event, Erika claims that she had an affair with Paul in Hamburg and that the daughter she gave birth to at Hamburg’s Barmbeck Hospital in December 1962, a month shy of her 20th birthday, was Paul’s.
In July 1962 my doctor informed me that I was pregnant. There was a lot of arguing with Paul because he was of the opinion that we were still too young to have a baby. Paul and the owner of the Star-Club wanted me to have an abortion, but I refused, and on 19 December 1962 my daughter Bettina was born.
Here is the first problem with Erika’s story. Working back nine months places conception in March 1962, when the Beatles were in England. Erika’s explanation: ‘Bettina was born prematurely, in the seventh month.’ (The Beatles were in Hamburg from 13 April to 2 June 1962.) Erika claims that Paul’s ‘less than favourable reaction’ to the pregnancy ended their relationship. After her daughter was born, she placed Bettina in care, and went to work as a barmaid. By the time of the Beatles’ first US adventure Bettina was 14 months. When David English tried to confront Paul with this story on the train to Washington, McCartney avoided the reporter. When English persisted, Paul exclaimed: ‘Oh fuck, why did you have to say that now?’ This was less than an admission and, lacking hard evidence that Erika’s story was true, the Daily Mail didn’t publish. But that wasn’t the end of the matter.
‘THE BEATLES IN THEIR FIRST FULL LENGTH, HILARIOUS ACTION-PACKED FILM!’
A week after returning from the USA, the Beatles began work on their first feature film. Paul and his band mates had grown up with the cinema, and had great affection for jukebox movies such as The Girl Can’t Help It. In their career to date there had been an element of play-acting, while their contract with Brian made explicit reference to their ambition to make pictures together. Epstein now cut a deal with the American company United Artists for the Beatles to star in a movie named after a Ringoism. ‘It’s been a hard day …’ the drummer sighed at the end of another gruelling day, only to notice it was already night, causing him to correct himself mid-sentence, ‘… day’s night.’ Playwright Alun Owen wrote the script, having had the benefit of spending time with the band on the road, while the director was 32-year-old American Richard Lester, who would shoot quickly in black and white on a low budget, United Artists wanting the movie in theatres before the Beatles craze passed.
A Hard Day’s Night was a musical, essentially, featuring tracks George Martin had in the can, plus new songs written especially. But the cinema-verité style in which Lester shot the picture gave it the feel of a documentary, one in which four cheeky but nice youngsters are pitched against their own over-excited female fans (most of them mere children, as can be seen from the crowd scenes in which Lester used real fans) and adult authority figures who are depicted as comically inept, creepy, or out of touch and pompous, the latter exemplified by an advertising executive into whose office George Harrison stumbles. ‘Now, you’ll like these. You’ll really dig them. They’re fab and all the other pimply hyperboles,’ the advertising executive tells the Beatle, whom he assumes has come to help them promote a new range of shirts.
‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in them,’ replies George. ‘They’re dead grotty.’
‘Grotty?’
‘Yeah, grotesque.’
Spending time with the Beatles, Alun Owen had picked up on slang expressions like grotty and fab commonly used by and, in at least one instance, coined by the boys. The first usage of grotty in English was by George in the film, according to the Oxford English Dictionary; while fab – simply an abbreviation of fabulous – had been in common usage among young British people since 1961, but came to be associated primarily with the Beatles who, in their early days, were sometimes billed as ‘the fabulous Beatles’. The Beatles’ PR man Tony Barrow wrote about the ‘fabulous foursome’ in his press releases, shortening this to the ‘fab four’. More than any other trendy term, fab suited them.
The Beatles acquitted themselves adequately in A Hard Day’s Night, though Richard Lester thought Paul tried too hard:
Paul was the most theatrical of them all. He had a girlfriend who was an actress. She and her parents and her brother went to the theatre a lot and Paul went with her. He loved the theatre. He loved show business, as it were, in a way that the others didn’t care. I think this was a disadvantage to him, that in a way Paul sometimes tried too hard to act … Had he been less enamoured of the trappings of cinema and the theatre he might have been a bit more relaxed.
It would be hard for Paul to be truly relaxed. He was under too much pressure. While making the movie, the Beatles were also recording an original soundtrack album, for which he and John had to come up with new songs. They rose to the challenge, with Paul largely responsible for the stand-out tracks, such as ‘Things We Said Today’, the lyric of which had a new maturity. Paul was also responsible for ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, a 12-bar blues rearranged by George Martin as the band’s next single, going to number one virtually simultaneously in the UK and the USA. The success of the song in the United States was proof that American fans hadn’t forsaken them after their flying visit. Indeed, plans were being finalised for a full-scale US tour. Before this took place the Beatles were committed to play shows in Denmark and Holland, after which they had to schlep halfway round the world to Hong Kong and Australia. When Ritchie fell ill with tonsillitis the day before departure, stand-in drummer Jimmy Nicol was despatched in his place, clear evidence that not all Beatles were equal. It is inconceivable that the tour could have gone ahead without Paul or John.
The mania followed the band on tour abroad, with scenes equally if not more excessive than seen in Britain and America. Young Dutchmen and women leapt into the canals of Amsterdam in a desperate attempt to reach the Beatles on a boat trip they took through the city. A girl caller got through to the Beatles’ Copenhagen hotel suite saying she was dying and her last wish was to speak to a Beatle. Journalist Derek Taylor, who had recently joined the Beatles’ entourage as an additional PR man, was taken in, but Paul had seen and heard enough of the mania to guess it was a ruse, taking the phone and ticking off the caller, as Taylor recalls: ‘“Now Mary Sue,” he said, lofty, dry and mildly admonishing, “you know you shouldn’t go around telling lies …”’ When they got to Australia,