The Prince Georqe Citizen, TV TIMES - November 18th, 1995 - 15
        Inside Scoop
         Yesterday: a reporter's life on the road with the Beatles
            by Ivor Davis
  sang with the Beatles more than three decades ago! But I doubt that George, Paul or Ringo will talk about it during the six-hour Beatles Anthology on CTV and ABC this week.
  My participation came while I was on a dream assignment for the The London Daily Express — covering every step of the band's first North American tour in 1964 — 24 cities in 32 days, with stops in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.
  One evening in September 1964, we—a few reporters and the Beatles—found ourselves trapped in the dressing room at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. A fellow scribe named Ian Smith, a Scotsman, pulled out his bagpipes and began to play a familiar tune. Within seconds, John and Paul on guitars, Ringo and George joined in an impromptu singalong as we warbled She Loves You to wailing bagpipe accompaniment.
  Travelling on the road with the Beatles was an incredible experience. None of us—not even Brian Epstein, the man who created the band—ever imagined it would become a legend.
  In Hollywood, we were whisked by limo to Elvis Presley’s pad for an awk-
ward summit. For the first 20 minutes, the Liverpool lads sat with their host on a long pink couch while we stood a few feet away. Elvis was the King—the four lads had come to pay homage. Eventually, Elvis, John and Paul adjourned to another room to make music while Ringo and George played pool.
  Part of my job was to ghostwrite a regular column for George Harrison for my newspaper. George was a man of few words and he was not happy about my writing. “It's bloody boring,” he pronounced. “I know,” 1 told him, "but you need to be available. You’re up all night and sleeping half the day, so we never get a chance to talk. As a result. I have to make it up.”
  George was never the most easygoing of the quartet. One night, the Beatles had been lured to Los Angeles’ trendy Whisky a Go Go nightclub by publicity-hungry Jayne Mansfield. When one persistent photographer overstayed his welcome. George tossed his whisky and Coke at him, dousing actress Mamie Van Doren in the process. Next day, a photo of an angry George appeared on the front page of the L.A. newspapers.
  Back then, John was the one with the
weirdest sense of humor. He’d go to the window of his hotel and do Nazi salutes to the crowd. One of my most tranquil times with John was an unscheduled stop in Key West, Fla., to wait out Hurricane Dora. Just 90 miles from Havana, with the rains thundering down, we sat in John’s hotel room playing Monopoly while, in the background, Fidel Castro railed for three hours on TV.
  As Castro bellowed, John said he detested being trapped in hotel rooms and was, in fact, unhappy about the whole Beatles furor: "We're like a bunch of bleeding budgies,” he complained. "We'll all end up like performing fleas in suits.”
  And he wasn't far wrong.
  Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ press officer, best summed up the craziness of those touring days: “I always saw the Beatles as a bit like Tom Thumb, who, in Victorian times, was wheeled around like a freak—a cute freak, but a freak nonetheless.”
  Still, Taylor, who works for Apple in London, pays tribute: “They really were lords of the air—and that’s what drives through this incredible story.”
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ö
McCartney, Starr, Lennon and
 Harrison in 1964; (right) Epstein and Ed Sullivan with Lennon, Starr and McCartney; (far right) Davis and Harrison: performing fleas
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