Of course there were the thousands of screaming teenage girls who loved them — yeah, yeah, yeah.
But when the four Beatles first landed in New York in early February 1964 — here for “The Ed Sullivan Show” and a few other performances — they each got some more personal attention from some ladies.
John Lennon was traveling with his then-wife, Cynthia. Paul McCartney had the company of Jane Asher. And Ringo Starr seemed to meet a pretty young dancer during a night out at one of New York City’s hottest clubs, the Peppermint Lounge.
George Harrison? Just a couple weeks shy of his 21st birthday, he had his older sister, Louise, along. And, as it turned out, he was lucky he did.
The band had just been in Paris, prior to flying to New York from England, and when they got in, Louise tells The Post, “George had a temperature of 104 degrees and a really, really bad strep throat.”
The house doctor at the Plaza, where The Beatles were staying, was consulted and, recalls Louise, he said: “We need to put this guy in the hospital. He’s really very ill.”
One of the reasons George immediately got a reputation as “the quiet Beatle” is because he didn’t feel like talking much since he was sick, Louise says.
“At that point, [Beatles manager] Brian Epstein was just about to have a heart attack,” Louise remembers with a chuckle. “He said, ‘We can’t let anyone know there’s anything wrong.’ ”
And when the doctor suggested getting a nurse, Epstein declared, “No, no, no. We don’t need anybody!”
Someone told the doctor that George’s sister was with him, so he put her in charge of caring for the stricken Beatle.
“Suddenly, I became Florence Nightingale,” she says, “and I moved into the room with George and looked after him.”
Louise, 11 years older than George, had moved to Illinois in the late 1950s with her then-husband. George had visited her there the year before The Beatles came to America. Today, Louise Harrison, 82, lives near Branson, Mo., and is working on a book.
The day after their Friday, Feb. 7, arrival, John, Paul and Ringo took a walk through Central Park, posing for the countless photographers. But the ailing George stayed behind, missing out on that bit of New York tourism.
But that afternoon, he had to accompany his bandmates to the “Ed Sullivan” studio. “They called urgently and said they needed him to be there to do sound checks and camera angles and that sort of stuff,” Louise says.
“The doctor told me, ‘OK, but don’t stay there any more than an hour, because you risk him not being able to stand on his feet tomorrow [for the live performance].’ ”
Epstein informed Sullivan, and after 60 minutes, George and his sister retreated to the hotel, where she was treating him with all the medicines the doctor had prescribed.
On the Sunday of the show, George’s temperature had gone down — to 102. During the performance, Louise says, “He was swaying on his feet trying to stand up and sing and everything.
“A lot of people have asked me over the years if it was exciting. But I don’t really remember if it was exciting or not. I was too busy worrying about George. I was so concentrating on hoping he could make it.”
Still, there was one particular moment of hoopla and hysteria that she does recall, when they left the Plaza that Sunday to head for “Sullivan.”
“We had to run through a big bunch of police holding up their arms, like they do at military weddings, making a tunnel for us to run out the door and into the limo.
“And then we took off down the street, and all the people who had climbed on top of the limo were falling off. We looked out the back window, and all these eyeglasses and pocketbooks and hats and shoes and all kinds of things were coming down the street behind us.”
The Beatles certainly enjoyed their American debut. And Louise says she found Ed Sullivan “charming.”
“He was like a little puppy with two tails. I guess he was accustomed to people treating him respectfully, because he was sort of a big-shot, serious old man. But they were just joking with him and laughing,” Louise says.
“They were just having so much fun themselves that they just pulled him into the fun as well. The Beatles just embraced him like he was one of them.”