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“So Ringo, how do you like America?” He took me by the arm and showed me a view of a blank wall looking over a parking lot. He said, “Henry, this is all we’re seeing of America.” I spent a day and a night with them down there.
At the Atlantic City concert there was a lot of screaming, a lot of yelling. I don’t think I was wearing cotton in my ears at the Sullivan Show but I certainly did at the concert because of the screaming. The Beatles later said they stopped playing together because of it.
I have a picture from Atlantic City with a cop holding his ears like this. [Lifts his hands to his ears.] It wasn’t from the music, it was from the screaming.
The following year, the Mirror sent me to spend a week with them down in Nassau, in the Bahamas, where they were filming Help. I got to know them. They were fooling around a lot.
When I came back to New York, I showed the pictures to Life magazine before sending them off to London.
Life said “Go back!”
I lived at that time at 54th Street and Seventh Avenue. The Stage Deli was right around the corner. So I went in and spoke to Max Asnas, the owner. I said, ‘I’m going back to see the Beatles, down in Nassau.’ He gave me bagels, lox, and salami to take down to them, so I did. They loved it!
My favorite quote is actually a paraphrase of something Emerson once said. It goes something like “Stop talking! Who you are speaks so loudly I can hardly hear what you’re saying.” The Beatles didn’t come across that way. They weren’t trying to make an impression. Looking at all of the pictures I took of them [about seven thousand in all], there are none where they’re deliberately making a posture.
I have a twenty-five-minute audiotape I did later on at George’s house in England. It wasn’t an interview—we were just talking about philosophy and Indian philosophy and life and all this kind of thing.
I was three or four or five years older than he, but he was so far ahead of me in lifetimes of knowledge and philosophy. It’s more than admirable, it’s incredible.
Even Ringo. When I was taking his picture for the cover of Life ’s international edition. I said, “Ringo, I wish I had the guts to wear a tie like that”—it was very psychedelic, a very bright tie.
He came over to me and felt my tie, a paisley tie from London. He said, “Well, Henry, if you did you’d still be Henry, but with a bright tie!”
I learned from this.
By the way, speaking of Ringo and the tie, those clothes they were wearing, the suits and the capes and all of that kind of stuff? They weren’t for show, they were totally to their taste. It was what they wore at home and among friends.
Another time, I was at Ringo’s house in London. I had just bought some JBL speakers in New York, some hi fi speakers, and I loved them, but I was blown away by the sound of Ringo’s speakers. I said, “The sound is gorgeous, Ringo, what brand are they?”
He said, “I don’t know, Henry, I just like the sound.”
Which is why you buy speakers! You don’t buy the speakers because you’re told they’re good. You buy the speakers because you like the sound!
The values they were living by were terrific. That’s why I kept going back. I had so much to learn from them.
I was spending a lot of time with them. George asked me when I got to London if I could take some pictures of him and Patti [Boyd]. And I said, “Sure,” so I went to visit him at his house and we took some pictures. Then he said, “Let’s go over to see John.” So we went over to John’s house. I photographed John at home, playing with his son Julian, who was a toddler.
John and George had their guitars and they both started playing music together when their wives were in the other room and Julian was around.
After the article ran I got a call from Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, who had heard that the pictures were being syndicated by Life in London. “They’ve never even let a British photographer into their