Like all teenage girls in the winter of 1964, Irene Katz knew exactly where The Beatles were going to be. She sat in her family’s Stuyvesant Town apartment listening to the DJs on WMCA-AM give updates of the Fab Four’s arrival in America, in advance of their appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” But she wasn’t satisfied to watch from her small television set. So she and her friends concocted a plan.
“We knew in our teenage hearts that if they saw us they would fall in love,” Irene, now 63, retired and living in central New Jersey, tells The Post. “So we needed a way to be noticed. We thought having a sign and standing in front of the hotel was the best thing we could do.” Specifically, she had her eye on Paul.
Irene’s parents would never let her out of the house early enough to get to the Plaza Hotel (where the group was staying) first thing in the morning, so she planned a sleepover at a friend’s house. They bought poster board and began brainstorming slogans.
“I knew I wanted something that sort of sounded British,” Irene recalls. “I was playing around with ‘the king is dead. Long live the king.’ ”
Then an idea hit her that encapsulated just how The Beatles were about to obliterate everything else on the radio: “Elvis is dead. Long live the Beatles.”
Elvis “appealed more to a half generation ahead of us,” Irene says. “We had new kings taking the mantle.”
They got to the hotel at 6:30 a.m. Within a few hours, the plaza in front of the hotel was full of people screaming and singing songs.
Irene left the hotel after nine hours, heartbroken she never caught a glimpse of The Beatles. But someone caught a glimpse of her: a news cameraman filming the crowd. Her father was watching the news that night, too.
“When I walked in he was yelling and screaming,” Irene says. “He didn’t think it was very seemly to be screaming in public.”
She set up a second-day stakeout, combing the streets in search of the band’s limo. She and her friends were getting cold, so they ducked into a coffee shop. Suddenly, her pals bolted.
“Guard the purses!” Irene screamed to the server as she ran out, too. There, at a stop light, was a black limousine — and the face of John Lennon clearly visible through the window.
Irene ran around to the other side, where Paul was sitting, and pressed herself up close.
A mob quickly formed, banging on the car and making Ringo look “absolutely terrified.”
“Let’s not scare them!” Irene told the crowd. “Look at Ringo. We’re frightening the guys that we love!”
She saw the band four times after that. She didn’t save the infamous sign, but the photo of 13-year-old Irene holding it became a symbol of the generational shift of the 1960s, appearing in museums and documentaries.
Then, in 2002, she was at a Paul McCartney concert in Philadelphia. He launched into a rendition of “All My Loving” and, suddenly, a familiar image popped up on the Jumbotron behind him.
“I just started screaming ‘That’s me!’ and I went nuts,” she says. She hadn’t even told the story to her friends at the concert: They were younger and she didn’t want to reveal how old she was.
“Age be damned,” she thought, as she relived her 13-year-old moment, “this is so cool.”
Irene Katz is one of 35 special guests appearing at a fan convention, Feb. 7-9, at the Grand Hyatt at Grand Central Station. The emcee is Beatles scholar Martin Lewis. For tickets, visit thefest.com.