Paul McCartney and John Lennon fly to New York to promote Apple

On May 11, 1968, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, joined by ‘Magic’ Alex, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans and Derek Taylor, travelled from London to New York to promote their newly formed company, Apple Corps. They stayed in New York until May 15, hoping for a discreet visit, but media and fan frenzy ensued as soon as their plane hit the ground.

Officially, they were guests at the Saint Regis Hotel, which served as the venue for interviews with the financial press. However, to maintain their privacy, they actually resided in the New York apartment of Nat Weiss, who had previously partnered with Brian Epstein to establish the management company Nemperor Artists in 1966. Despite their efforts, the ruse was soon discovered, leading numerous fans to disrupt the tranquillity of their temporary residence.

During their time in New York, Paul McCartney reconnected with Linda Eastman, whom he had met a year earlier in London (in a club on May 15, 1967, and at the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” launch party on May 19, 1967) but hadn’t seen since. She would eventually become Mrs. McCartney when the two married in March 1969.

The press article “101 Hours with John Lennon & Paul McCartney,” written by Lillian Roxon and featured in Eye Magazine in September 1968, documented their entire visit. At that time, Lillian Roxon was a close friend of Linda Eastman, who provided the photographs for the article. Notably, Linda Eastman is not mentioned in the article’s text.

Even though I visited England in between times, I didn’t see Paul again until he came to New York with John in May 1968 for a press conference at the Americana Hotel.

Linda McCartney – from “Linda McCartney’s Sixties“, 1992

On May 12 Paul and John went to New York to join me and other officers of Apple to officially announce its inception. The trip was basically a five-day publicity blitz arranged by the public relations firm of Solters and Roskin. It included a press conference; a meeting of the board of directors of Apple, which I chaired aboard a Chinese junk in Manhattan harbor; a photo-layout in Life magazine; and an appearance on the “Tonight Show,” with an estimated audience of 25 million.

Peter Brown – From “The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles“, 2002

Paul McCartney and John Lennon were so enthusiastic about Apple, and its potential to advance art, science, music, and retail fashion merchandising, that they planned to announce its inception as guests of
Johnny Carson on his indisputably number one late-night talk show. Their appearance was booked for May 15, and they flew to New York on the 12th. They tried to sneak into the United States as quietly as possible, but some DJ got hold of their schedule and there was the usual airport nightmare. No hotel wanted to put up with the security and crowd-control problems that the presence of the two big Beatles would involve, and Paul and John were not wild about the idea of being imprisoned in one. The solution was to stash them away in Nat Weiss’s luxurious two-bedroom apartment on East Seventy-third Street and hope that their presence could be kept a secret. Weiss himself arranged to stay at the St. Regis, planning to be at his apartment during the day. […]

One person who knew the Big Secret of the Beatles’ New York hideaway was Nat’s friend Linda Eastman. Recalling their flight together from London to New York a year earlier, after Linda had met Paul for the first time and couldn’t stop talking about him, Nat told Linda that Paul was coming to town and, lo and behold, was going to stay at his own apartment. Not surprisingly, she begged Nat to be allowed to visit and he ran the request past Paul, who approved. […]

The routine was that Linda arrived early in the afternoon and stayed until the evening, chatting away with Paul. When she left to go home and be a good mom, Weiss would take Paul and John out to dinner, or to a club to hear music. It was just the three of them; Linda and Paul did not see each other in the evenings, and they did not make love on Seventy-third Street. In retrospect, that week in 1968 was the defining moment—albeit a week-long moment — of their relationship.

From “Linda McCartney – A Portrait” by Danny Fields, 2000

According to John Lennon, Paul McCartney wrote his song “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” during that stay in New York:

This wasn’t to do with the American fans (The Apple Scruffs). It was when Paul and I went to America (New York – May 1968) to publicise Apple about two years ago, and we were just in the flat we were staying in and he just came out with that line, ‘She came in through the bathroom window.’ So, he had it for years, and he eventually finished it.

John Lennon – From “The Beatles: Off the Record” by Keith Badman, 2008

101 Hours with John Lennon & Paul McCartney

[…] Saturday March 11th was not a fine day, though it might have turned out that way had not the disc jockeys of Manhattan foolishly jabbered that the time of the Lennon and McCartney arrival was 2:40 P.M.; the BOAC flight number 531; the place, the International Arrival Building at Kennedy.

Now, seeing the Beatles from behind an airport barricade is, apparently, like kissing with braces on your teeth. It is better than nothing, certainly, but no one mature imagines it is anything but a very poor substitute for the real thing. […]

The four magic travelers were quickly, as the rich and famous always are, hustled into the waiting limousine and driven off, through all those miles and miles of graves that make up the welcome committee for every new arrival to Fun City, not to the St. Regis Hotel, but to 181 East 73rd Street, the home of Nat Weiss. […]

From “101 Hours with John Lennon & Paul McCartney” by Lillian Roxon

Scenes

THERE I STOOD, next to Paul McCartney and John Lennon — calm, but without a thing to say. I wasn’t intimidated, but more amazed I had managed to get through an endless skein of Beatlemanic intrigue. But with the aid of my press card there I was, for 15 minutes altogether, with them as they were hustled from one custom’s checkpoint to another last Saturday afternoon. Only while driving back to the city later did I remember that I had forgotten to ask them about all the rumors. Was it true that they were here to denounce the Maharishi? Was it true that they were breaking up and that’s why only two of them had come? Was it true that they were merely in New York to help promote their Apple enterprise into another million dollar Beatle spinoff? […]

I did ask Paul if the screaming teenyboppers still turned him on and he said of course. He did a lot of sophisticated waving, and signed autographs for some of the airport personnel. John, more aloof and at times sort of surly, looked pretty tired even in white suit, white shirt, white tie, white shoes, and a plain white button on his lapel. He scrawled autographs without looking at the paper or the beseecher. […]

From The Village Voice – May 16, 1968

JOHN AND PAUL VISIT STATES

JOHN and PAUL made their first 5-day Apple business trip to America last month. They flew from London to New York on May 11 accompanied by Mal Evans. In New York they met up with five other Apple executives, including Neil Aspinall, for conferences in connection with Apple Films and Apple Records. The two Beatles stayed at the New York apartment of lawyer Nathan Weiss who heads the American management firm Nemperor Artists.

On their final day in New York the Apple delegation held a press conference at which they announced that they had already made plans for three TV spectaculars and several major feature films.

From The Beatles Monthly Book, N°59, June 1968

It was the spring of 1968 — the year of the Beatles’ most challenging record, the White Album — when two Bronx beauties received the surprise of their young lives: a three-day flirtation with John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

On the 50th anniversary of the Fab Four’s first U.S. visit, Joanne Rubino and pal Nina Tornabene recalled a whirlwind Mother’s Day weekend in which a then 27-year-old Lennon and 25-year-old McCartney gabbed with the fresh-faced teens in a series of phone calls and brief Manhattan meetings.

“All of our middle and high school years, we were doing this foolishness,” Rubino, 63, now a guidance counselor in Bronxdale, told The News Wednesday. “It was harmless fun.”

Although the lifelong friends first laid eyes on the group 50 years ago this year after winning tickets to sit in on a Midtown press conference through the Beatles fan club, it would be another four years before they exchanged words.

“I remember they were smoking cigarettes and they were answering questions in their cute way,” said Tornabene of the 1964 press conference. “There were a lot of girls. People from the back pushed. I was in the third row and I got pushed through the dais and onto the chairs.”

Four years later, the pair took their obsession to the next level by searching phone books for the group’s manager, Nat Weiss. They called Weiss constantly and would wait outside his Upper East Side flat whenever the Fab Four came back.

Their persistence worked. The day before Mother’s Day in 1968, they’d stood outside Weiss’ house all day, staying even when Weiss came outside and told them and other fans that the Beatles were holed up at the St. Regis Hotel.

Around 6 p.m., a limo pulled up and Paul McCartney and John Lennon emerged. Rubino went to Lennon, Tornabene McCartney.

“He had a cut on his chin,” Rubino recalled. “I asked, ‘What happened to you?’ He said, ‘I cut me self shaving.’”

“Paul touched my arm!” Tornabene said. “It was exciting.”

That night, the girls — then 16 — called Weiss’ house and Rubino put Lennon on. “I talked to him and he sounded impaired,” recalled Tornabene. “Then I talked to Paul.”

“‘Do you guys wanna come to a party?’” Tornabene claims McCartney asked — although she declined the invitation.

“He wanted us to come down to a party at their house,” recalled Tornabene. “We weren’t going to do that. We were Catholic school girls. He was playful, but he wasn’t persistent. And he didn’t know how old we were.“

The next day, Mother’s Day, Tornabene and another girlfriend returned to Weiss’ Upper East Side pad.

Tornabene slipped McCartney an album by pint-sized warbler Tiny Tim, who would break TV viewership records a year later when he married Victoria Mae Budinger in front of millions on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

It was during an interview with Carson at the end of 1968, however, that Tiny Tim made mention of Tornabene on national television while promoting the Fab Four’s Christmas Album, which featured Tiny Tim on ukulele.

Tim explained to Carson that McCartney reached out to him personally shortly after “a fan” passed along the record while in New York City on tour for the latest album.

“I always considered Nina a footnote in rock history,” said Rubino. “I’m sure Tiny Tim had no idea, but whenever I saw him in later years, I’d say, ‘If it wasn’t for us…’”

From The New York Daily News, February 6, 2014 (The Beatles 1968 Christmas Record included a rendition of The Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” by Tiny Tim)

[…] The above story though mostly accurate says that John and Paul went straight to Nat Weiss’ apartment instead of a hotel when they arrived. However, they actually went to the St. Regis Hotel first. I, and a network of fans, know this because around 50 of us were there. […]

By May of 1968, the above group became an intertwined grapevine (to rival today’s Facebook) that alerted when a Beatle or anyone Beatle-related came to town. I’d cut school, play hooky drop everything and anything without a thought and head to Manhattan to meet everyone. This day in May of 1968 we headed to the St. Regis Hotel. We hung around the front of the hotel waiting in hopes that their arrival would be real.

It was very real. John Lennon and Paul McCartney pulled up in a yellow taxi. I’m not going to name the other fans who waited along with me, except for Tommy S., who was one of my closest friends at the time, but is, sadly, no longer alive. One is my best friend today. There are others I was close with, but I lost touch with. What happened next happened in a blurr. John came out of the taxi first. I believe he was wearing all white. He ran right past me and disappeared through the hotel’s revolving door, past all of us, leaving Paul behind. Paul, wearing a green jacket with darker green patches on the sleeves, was held back by us. We surrounded him. I don’t remember who or what anyone said. There was no screaming. I slipped my hand into Paul’s, as he stood there. I also remember running my fingers along his sleeve to make sure he was actually there. After seeing them so distantly from impossible seating at Shea Stadium, I touched Paul McCartney and stood inches from John Lennon! I didn’t get the electric shock nor did I hear thunger. They were human beings, who I still prefer to uphold as supreme.

When they came out later, our group subdivided into cabs which followed them to the, then, Americana Hotel, where a press conference was to be held. A bunch of girls sneaked into the conference room and hid under a table until discovered. I was not a part of that adventure. I and others hung around trying to get into the hotel and then tried to get into the Johnny Carson Show. We were unsuccessful at both. As I recall, though I may be wrong, John and Paul went back to the St. Regis and we later followed them in cabs that led to Nat Weiss’ apt on East 73rd.

By this time, school had been let out, and there were thousands of fans surrounding the building. We made friends with a girl who lived diagonally across the street in an apartment building and she invited us up. Around twenty of us crowded a tiny balcony about 25 stories high to try to get a view of Nat Weiss apartment. We saw nothing of course. […]

The day they left Nat Weiss’ apartment, This time I touched John’s hand. It felt dry. Their limo had a police escort. I will never forget the sound of the siren and the chills the sound instilled down my spine. It was a sound that underlined how powerful the Beatles were.

Pearl Cawley, August 3, 2013 – From The Beatles Secret NYC Hideaway | The Cruise For Beatles Fans (wordpress.com)

I was one of 1000s of fans hanging outside the St. Regis Hotel in NYC. Word was out that John and Paul had flown into NYC this particular week.

At the time there was a very serious Beatles’ cult underground in NYC. We knew and shared every fact and move the Beatles made (or allegedly made) at the time. Remember now, in 1968, we had no computers, emails, call waiting or any other modern technology. Yet we had a finger on the pulse big time all of the time! I must admit, though, that we went on many a wild goose chase hunting down the Beatles. However, in the process we met everyone else who was big at the time from Brian Jones to Mick Jagger to Mary Hopkins to Jefferson Airplane, etc. We also cut a few too many classes to hunt the Beatles down. If you ever saw the movie, “Beatlemania” that was us!

Anyway, back to the St. Regis. My friend and I snuck away from the crowd. We had cased the place and knew that Gucci’s was connected to the St. Regis Hotel. So, we creep through Gucci’s, right into the St. Regis lobby and straight up the stairs to John and Paul’s supposed floor. I think it was the 9th or 7th floor. Unbelievably, we crept up to the floor without a hitch. It was way too easy considering all the fans and security surrounding the hotel, but we did it. (Hey, I am not complaining at all!)

So, here we are on the floor! We are not shy. We are not embarrassed. We are not frightened. We are running on pure adrenalin. So, we go right to the suite where we believed John and Paul were staying. The door to their hotel room was located in this small hallway right off the main hallway of the hotel. I had the gall to go right up and ring the doorbell. I kept ringing and ringing. Someone must have been asking who it was because I kept saying, is John there; is Paul there?

Meanwhile, my friend was grabbing me and shaking my arm. She kept poking me in the back and pulling on me. (In fact, I even had black and blues the next day!) However, because my concentration was solely on the inside of that hotel suite, I never looked back at her. I was too excited about ringing the bell and getting in. She finally got my attention and I turned around…the rest of this story is in slow motion…

…as I turn around, whom do I see? Standing there, right there in the hallway with us, were…JOHN and PAUL!!!!!!!!!!!! I fell back against the wall dumbfounded! I mean I was totally and absolutely floored. My eyes were bugging out of my head. My friend was also plastered against the wall opposite me. All I kept thinking was to say something but I was speechless!!!!!!!!!!!!! They were there, breathing the same air as me!

Meanwhile, I remember vividly how Paul’s hair was so dark and how John’s hair was so light, like a strawberry blond color. John had the granny glasses on and a band-aid on his chin. My mouth dropped open by how very handsome Paul was(of course). However I was equally fascinated by John’s looks. I remember thinking that they were taller than I was. I am 5’8″ now (at the time I was 14 but was always tall).

John and Paul were alone and they kept saying repeatedly, is this the room, is this the room? They were very amused at how stricken we looked. John says, very loudly, hey bizarres (accent on the e), is this the room? Finally, I decide to pipe up and pull myself together. (I had to make an impression, ya know!) Yea, your room, yea, this is your room. The next thing I remember, I turned to John and said something like, oh, John, I’ve came all this way to see you. (I guess I was looking for an icebreaker.) Paul was standing there with a very sweet smile. In fact, John was kind too, amused but kind. (Hey, we were really kids and looked and acted every inch of it.) John says kindly but very sarcastically, yea, and I came all the way from England to see you too! Oh my gawd, I have told this story 1000 times in my life! It was a turning point! LOL!

At this point, I remember a hotel security guard finally came into the little hallway where the four of us were standing. The guard sees us and starts ranting and raving about you goddamn kids, I’m sick of you all, bla, bla, bla. The guard then grabs us by the neck and literally drags us down the hallway by the backs of our necks. Our legs were complete Jell-O and we saw our big opportunity slipping away. As the guard is dragging us, we are waving and shouting, and all we were saying is bye Paul, bye John, bye Paul, bye John. In the elevator down to the rest of the 1000s of fans, we could not stop laughing hysterically! We knew this was BIG! Were our fellow comrades so jealous as we told this story over and over. When we got out front, they were shouting, you just missed them, you just missed them. No, we didn’t and we share our experience oh, at least, 2 million times. […]

Lisa M. Howard – From Meet the Beatles for Real: The New York Underground fans.

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