The Beatles & Me: A Love Story
I fell in love for the first time on Feb. 9, 1964. Like all first loves, this one hit hard—the racing heart, the weak knees, the way that everything around me seemed to disappear except me and the shaggy-haired, brownbedroom-eyed boy singing to me. When he told me, “Darling, I’ll be true,” I believed him. I was 7 years old, and that winter night, I knew that someday I would grow up and marry Paul McCartney.
I was the kind of kid who liked to memorize things— the birthstone for each month, the astrological signs and state capitals. I used that same determination to learn everything I could about Paul. Most of my facts were gleaned from magazines like Teen Talk and 16, so the veracity of much of what I learned was shaky. But he really was, of course, from Liverpool, England. And he was left-handed—that I could see when I watched him play his guitar. Soon I started collecting Beatles trading cards; they came in bubblegum packs, just like baseball cards. I wore a charm bracelet with dangling Beatles heads and guitars and owned a set of 5-inch-tall plastic Beatles dolls with rubber heads, creepy lifelike hair and identical faces. I’d line them up on my bureau, put on a 45 of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and pretend I was at a real concert.
Unlike some fans that strayed after the double A-side record of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” came out, I remained steadfast. One afternoon I dreamily asked my mother if she thought I might really marry Paul when I grew up. She took a long drag on her Pall Mall, looked me in the eye and said, “Well, he’s got to marry somebody. It might as well be you.” But two years later I heard that Paul was rumored to have married someone named Linda Eastman. In my diary, which mostly had single sentences—”Bored” and “So bored” and “It’s so boring here”—I wrote my one and only passionate entry: “I just heard Paul McCartney got married. Oh God, please don’t let it be true.”
Even though it was indeed true, my love for the Fab Four never waned. More than three decades after I first watched them on The Ed Sullivan Show, I was able to share them with my kids, Sam and Grace. After dinner we twisted to “Twist and Shout,” and we sang “Eight Days a Week” in the car as loud as we could. At 5, Grace became as big a Beatles fan as I was. Like me, she memorized facts about them. Together we watched A Hard Day’s Night over and over on the VCR and played her favorite song, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” on repeat in the car.
The day after Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep, I collected all of those albums and books and put them away in the attic. Just the
sight of them broke my already broken heart even more. Instead of listening to the music of my childhood, I avoided it. Once it brought me such joy; now it only reminded me of all I had lost.
Eventually, when “Michelle” or “Eleanor Rigby” came on the radio I didn’t have to change the channel. But those lovely voices singing together never failed to make me cry, never failed to bring my blond, bespectacled daughter back to me in crushing detail.
Then one day I found myself moving out of my home, divorced and, again, heartbroken. On a whim, I bought a turntable for my new loft. I was starting over, and so often when we start over we look to our past for comfort and strength. My albums arrived in two cardboard boxes, the psychedelic cases they’d once lived in mysteriously gone. Even more mysterious—all of my Beatles albums were gone too.
Deep into middle age, new love found me, and I shared with him my girlhood dream of marrying Paul McCartney, singing Beatles songs with my children, losing Grace and
shutting the Beatles out of my life, only to discover my albums missing when I was ready to let them back in. One day, this man handed me a present, heavy and square. I unwrapped it and found he’d replaced my Beatles albums, every single one. Without hesitating, I put Help! on the turntable. When “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” came on, my heart grew full. Here was my first love singing to me. Here was the real man of my dreams taking me into his arms. And if I listened closely, here was my daughter, never really gone from my heart, singing along. Best-selling author Ann Hood’s latest book is She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah). She is also the author of The Book That Matters Most and The Obituary Writer.