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“Aha, I’m king.” They didn’t have to say a word. It ties in with Emerson’s quote about how who you are speaks so loudly.
I’ve never met a group of people as talented and personable and connected as the Beatles. And yet as strong as each of them was individually, they worked together like that [holds up four fingers of his right hand].
My adviser at college used to use the phrase sophisticated , in terms of having more points of reference. That really told me what the word meant. These boys were sophisticated.
I wish I’d known fifty years ago how important they were going to be. I would have shot a hell of a lot more pictures.

Good Bye, Mitzi Gaynor
by Verlyn Klinkenborg
I WAS ELEVEN, and it was a small town in north central Iowa, not far from the small Iowa town in which my family had been living. And Mitzi Gaynor—“Hollywood’s exciting Mitzi Gaynor”—you were there, on the well-worn jacket of the soundtrack of South Pacific . I saw the way you turned your breasts (for you were barely clothed it seemed to me) in the embrace of Rosanno Brazzi. His mouth had a peculiar shape in that photograph, open, deliberate, unnatural. I realized later that he was singing to you. When I was eleven, I didn’t know he was singing. I thought he was preparing his orifice—his orifex, I think of it now—to kiss you. Just how and why and where he would kiss you with a mouth of that shape were beyond me. I was eleven and it was barely 1964, and that small Iowa town, still so new to me then, seems remote and disconnected only in retrospect. I had already been looking at you in puzzlement for years, Mitzi Gaynor, always a little surprised when I came upon my parents’ South Pacific lying out in the open where anyone could see it. It was just about now that you lost your power over me, whatever it was. And with you went away all the childhood, all the parental music I had ever known, stacked among albums I never ever looked at again.
The world from which I (and you; all of you) witnessed the Beatles on that first Ed Sullivan Sunday can never be reconstructed. (I’m sure you must have realized this, Miss Gaynor, if you met the Beatles backstage when you headlined that second Ed Sullivan Sunday.) The show can be revisited. I saw it again recently and almost all I could see were things hidden from me at age eleven: the Beatles watching themselves being beheld—the effect of all those Hamburg and Liverpool nights—a tight band, its members endlessly aware of each other—Paul, George, and John smiling sideways upstage, to and for each other, but restraining themselves for national television. What I didn’t know about the Beatles when I was eleven was endless. I knew nothing. And so I was perfectly prepared for them. That first night, Ed Sullivan might as well have said, “And now, coming to you from the thusness of Existence . . . THE BEATLES!”
And you were there too, Shirley Jones. What little I understood about musical fame came from my family’s association with The Music Man . My dad was a high school band director, and when The Music Man (the movie) premiered nearby in Mason City, Iowa, on June 19, 1962 (the Beatles played the Cavern Club that night), my dad’s band, wearing white shirts and black shorts, marched in a parade of massed North Iowa bands and Hollywood celebrities, including you, Shirley Jones. I have the photos to prove it. So strike me dead when Paul sang “Till There Was You” that first Ed Sullivan Sunday, a song that you, Shirley Jones, sang as Marian the Librarian in The Music Man . I mean, what the fuck. It was as though the Beatles had worked up a version of the Bonanza theme or “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” just to reassure the parents of all those shrieking, cataleptic girls in the balcony. Looking back, it seems like a moment of near-horror, hearing your saccharine, epiphanic words, Shirley Jones, sung by Paul McCartney. How easily this might have been a different sort of