‘The whole country was fixated’
Darien duo relives Beatles history
DARIEN — Two people who had never met — but were in the crowd for the Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show — spent some time together in Darien last week reminiscing about one of the most groundbreaking events in cultural history.
Longtime Darien resident Preston Bealle hosted a visit from Los Angeles resident Debbie Gendler, who like him was in the audience on Feb. 9, 1964, when the Fab Four from Liverpool played the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.
“It was overwhelming,” said Gendler, who was then age 13.
She was actually given a single ticket for the show by Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who had sought to
enlist her as an American fan club liaison for his boys, who had just begun penetrating the U.S. market.
“I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going to scream and I was going to take in every single minute,” she said.
But moments after they started, she literally couldn’t control herself and began jumping up and down and yelling.
“It was stunning, because the whole country was fixated on them,” said Bealle, whose father, Jim, was Sullivan’s lead sponsor through Lincoln-Mercury, and who was allowed to see the show despite being only 12 years of age.
“The tension was very high in the studio ... you felt like it was taking forever,” he said, remembering one shocking aborted moment when Sullivan stepped out wearing a Beatles wig and gave the audience a start.
For anyone not entirely familiar with The Beatles, they were the consummate super group, dominating the music charts with a slew of number one hits beginning in 1963 through 1970.
Just two months after the Sullivan show they would achieve the unprecedented — and never repeated — feat of holding the top five slots on the Billboard chart.
While they had conquered the European market in their first year, they were eventually the first breakthrough English musical act — to a large extent beginning with their legendary appearance on the Sullivan show — heralding what became known as the British Invasion of other English groups in following years.
While there were some 50,000 requests for tickets, only 728 people got to attend the first Sullivan show, including some dignitaries. The television audience, however, was a colossal 74 million people, amounting to roughly one third of the country’s population at that time, who tuned in to her The Beatles play five songs over two segments that Sunday night.
“Anyone alive at that time remembers the night and where they were,” Bealle said, who was a big fan but made a point of putting his hands over his ears at one moment in the hope that it might get him on camera in the audience.
It worked, as he is easily visible in the clip of the show.
“I got quite a bit of attention when I returned to school on Monday,” said Bealle, a retired entrepreneur and stock trader, who grew up in New Canaan.
Gendler’s journey to the show began 10 months earlier when her parents brought her the first Beatles’ LP — “Please Please Me” — from London before it was even for sale in the United States.
While her friends didn’t fancy the music, she was so enamored that she wrote a fan letter asking to be put in The Beatles’ fan club — one she never received a response to.
Six months later, however, when Epstein was in New York City trying to firm up the booking of his group on the Sullivan show, he reached out to Gendler and invited her to meet, along with her father, at his attorney’s office.
“I have all this in my diary,” she said — how Epstein invited Gendler to help organize a U.S.based
fan initiative and lead the fan club.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Epstein, I have to go to college,” the 13-year old told him.
He told her, however, that if the deal for the show went forward that very night — Nov. 11, 1963 — he would get her a ticket and told her she would be featured on the show, which she was — the veritable first American fan at their quintessential first American appearance.
Ironically, years later, Gendler enjoyed a career as a television producer for CBS and other companies, eventually going to work with Andrew Solt — the man who today owns the entire Ed Sullivan Show catalog.
Doing research on the show, in fact, is what brought Gendler — who is visiting Darien through August along with her husband, Paul Supnik, in touch with Bealle.
Gendler recently embarked on writing a memoir — tentatively entitled I Saw Them Standing There — which recounts her unique history with The Beatles, which extends far beyond that initial experience with the Ed Sullivan Show.
Ironically, while Bealle heard from many friends about the show the next day, Gendler’s contemporaries accused of making up the whole story.
Consequently it was literally decades before she knew she was visible in the tape of the show, thanks to Solt pointing it out one day.
“’Take a look at this,’” he said. “I said, ‘Jeez, I think that’s me.’”