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homes,” he exclaimed. “Please don’t let them be syndicated!”
I cajoled him for about twenty minutes on the phone about why. It turns out he didn’t want the public to know that two of the boys were married. He wanted the public to think they were all available.
Next day I got a telegram from him saying, “Please disregard telephone call. I’ve just seen the pictures, can I have a set?”
I think it was the photographer [Henri] Cartier-Bresson who talked about how an artist can see not only what a situation is but what it is becoming. My contact sheet of the Beatles captures this. In one photo after another you can see who they are, what they were thinking, what they were relating to, how they played among themselves. I love that, I love that. I saw it from the first press conference. They had humor, they had personality.
On an early visit to New York, George said something like “What’s a word for this or that? I’m trying to find a word for this song I’m writing!” I said, “Well, have you looked it up in a thesaurus?” He asked what that was. So I went out to Marlboro Books on 57th Street, bought him a thesaurus and gave it to him.
Years later my sister sent me an interview in which George said something like “It was only after a friend of mine gave me a thesaurus that I was able to . . .”
That’s the best thing: There was a mutuality of interest and learning. I learned from them. I was learning from “Henry with a bright tie,” that kind of thinking.
I WAS HOPING to be famous one day. At first, I was going to be a famous actor, right? When I was seventeen, my aunt sent a letter after my first show. She sent me a telegram saying “May success come slowly so you’ll know how to take it.” (Later I was on Broadway in Grand Hotel for more than one thousand performances.) I was very interested in knowing how the Beatles were taking success and what it meant to them. I was curious to see how it changed them.
I would visit George whenever I was in England. On one visit, I noticed an instrument hanging on the wall that I’d never seen. He took it down and started tuning it. He said, “It’s a sitar, but I can’t find anyone to teach me how to play it.”
I said, “George, you make a lot of money, don’t you?” and he smiled. “You could afford to find the best sitar teacher in India and bring him here to spend the summer with you here.”
I read in the paper months later that George had gone to India and was studying sitar with Ravi Shankar. Now, I didn’t send him to India, but we gave each other possibilities. We gave each other possibilities, that’s what it is. We helped each other to understand some of the possibilities of what was going on.
The next time I went to visit George he greeted me barefoot and said, “Henry, wouldn’t you like to take your shoes off?” Of course—he’d been to India.
You know the other thing? So many people who came in contact with them wanted something from them. I was just delighted to be around them. I wanted to know who they were. I enjoyed it.
My father was an artist, famous for his etchings. He had met Gandhi and Einstein and done etchings of them from life. He once had an Indian chief in full regalia to pose! I had these etchings at home. I knew about being around famous people.
As an actor, I was interested in motivations, things I could use later, store away for later use on the stage.
I studied acting with Lee Strasberg. . . . I was at the Actors Studio once and there was a scene and Lee Strasberg got us to critique the scene. “Now let us suppose that I am king,” he said. Everybody laughed but then, when he entered the room as king, everyone bowed. Then he said, “Now, again, let us suppose I’m king,” and he entered as a doddering old man, reaching down to pick up a cigarette butt and everybody still bows. He said, “See, you still know I’m king. I didn’t have to say ‘Aha, I’m king!’ ”
The Beatles didn’t have to say