On Feb. 9, 1964, photographer Henry Grossman walked less than two blocks from his home to Studio 50 to shoot The Beatles’ American debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
When he arrived at the theater, Grossman — whose usual jobs included Metropolitan Opera performers, the occasional bank president or even a White House photo session — quickly realized he was in for a different kind of assignment.
“It really was a mob,” Grossman, a 77-year-old now living in New York, tells The Post. “The screaming was so incredible. The girls were screaming and crying and yelling.”
When Time magazine assigned him to snap The Beatles’ appearance on “Sullivan,” he didn’t much care for rock ’n’ roll — he loved opera, and was studying it at the time.
During The Beatles’ performance, Grossman moved throughout the theater and audience to capture as much of the scene as he could. Some of his pictures showed policemen standing by the stage with their fingers in their ears — because of the screaming, not the music.
In August that same year, The Beatles went to Atlantic City to play a show at the Convention Center, and Grossman got assigned to cover it for a British newspaper.
There he asked the four mop-topped Liverpudlians, “What do you think of America?”
The Beatles, and a few assorted guests, were passing time in an AC hotel room before the show: George Harrison was playing Monopoly; Ringo Starr was playing poker. Ringo took Grossman by the arm and led him to the hotel room’s window. It looked out onto a brick wall and an empty parking lot.
“Henry, this is all we’re seeing of America,” Ringo said, as Grossman recalls. “Because they said [we] couldn’t go out of the hotel.”
After that first year of Beatlemania, Grossman got to know the band personally over the years and shot most of them in their own homes. He discovered that John Lennon, who had become one of the biggest stars in the world, lived just six blocks away from Grossman’s own home in New York City.
Lennon invited him over one day to his home in England; Grossman got to watch as neighborhood kids peered in the windows, and Lennon had to go to the door to explain that he had company, and that now wasn’t a great time.
When he wanted to reach the band for a social call, he had to call the Apple Records office in London — The Beatles’ numbers would change every week to throw off fans.
“They called it the ‘phone number du jour,’ ” Grossman says.
Later, Grossman photographed every member of the band, except Paul McCartney, in their homes, making him the first photographer to shoot The Beatles in their private space. He’d go on to hang out with the band many more times, including a potluck at Harrison’s house featuring about 20 other musicians and friends. He was impressed by how The Beatles handled the fame, and tried not to abuse his connection to the band.
“Even though I was a friend, I didn’t want to add to any kind of people piling up on” them, he says.
Fifty years later, his photographs from “Sullivan” became some of the defining images of Beatlemania. And he’s come around a bit on the music. Some of it, at least.
“I still don’t listen to pop rock and stuff like that. I find a lot of the music very repetitive and rhythmical,” he says. “Now, I love their early stuff. ‘Michelle, my belle’ and that kind of stuff.”
The opera is still more his style. Lately, he’s been shooting dress rehearsals at the Met.
Grossman’s photos from “The Ed Sullivan Show” will be on display starting at tonight’s opening at Gallery 151, 132 W. 18th St. from 7-9 p.m. The exhibit, which also features photos from the Beatles in Germany by Astrid Kirchherr, will be up through Feb. 8.