Charlie Brill has a message for Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. “You owe me a dime,” he wants the remaining Beatles to know.
With interest, it might be a bit more — because it would be 50 years’ worth.
Brill, half of the husband-and-wife comedy team of McCall & Brill, gave Beatle John Lennon some change for a soda backstage at “The Ed Sullivan Show” the night of the Liverpool lads’ American debut Feb. 9, 1964. Brill and his wife, Mitzi, were also on the bill and in their third-floor dressing room feverishly reworking their routine as instructed by Ed Sullivan, who told them their planned set was “too sophisticated” for the mostly 14-year-old audience.
“There was a knock at the door,” Brill recalls. And then they saw him standing there. “This darling kid,” says McCall, and he says” — here McCall adopts a British accent — “ ‘Give us a Coke, luv.’ ” And Brill gave him that dime.
The couple, only 23 years old themselves at the time, figured out he was with the band they had heard about. “As he’s leaving, I look out the window at the crowd,” McCall says.
“Can you believe this is all for you?” she asked the young Brit, whom she later learned was John Lennon.
“And this cute kid said, ‘Ahh, it’s not for me. It’s for Ringo.’ ”
The Beatles played two sets that night, and the comedy duo went on right before the second one.
“A lot of times during our act, I couldn’t hear Mitzi,” says Brill. “The crowd was still yelling, screaming, hollering.”
“They didn’t want us,” McCall adds. “It was like, ‘Who are those idiots? Get them off. We want to see our lads again.’ ”
But, she continues, “The Beatles were amazing. And in my nervousness onstage, I ad-libbed: ‘You know, I was just backstage and I stepped on a beetle.’ ”
When it was all over, the duo thought they’d bombed. Actor/impressionist Frank Gorshin — aka The Riddler of TV’s “Batman” — was also on the show that night, and took them out for a drink.
Too shaken to return home to California, the couple flew to Florida to visit Brill’s grandparents. Of course, McCall says, “We didn’t know the Beatles were going to Florida!”
As it happened, the Beatles were taping another Sullivan broadcast in Miami.
The couple took in a Mitzi Gaynor show one night at Miami’s Diplomat Hotel. (“I married a half-Gaynor,” Brill kibitzes about his shorter wife.) “Afterward, walking up to our hotel, there’s a limo behind us,” he recounts.
When he told his wife they were being followed, she accused him of being paranoid.
“The limo speeds up and stops next to us,” Brill recalls. “The window rolls down, and it’s John.”
Lennon recognized them. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Escaping from you,” Brill replied. “You ruined our lives.”
The couple laughs. “I don’t know what ever happened to those guys, but Charlie and I have survived,” McCall jokes.
“And we’re happy. We didn’t know we were in the middle of history. And, as the years went on, we became enormous Beatles fans.”