One last song for George

A case for 45 rpm records, a gift on her 12th birthday, is one of the few material traces left of Colette Bancroft’s Beatlemania.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
© St. Petersburg Times,
published December 10, 2001

When George Harrison and the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan in 1964, Colette Bancroft, then Colette Mullaney, was screaming in front of her TV set.

In 1964 I was a schoolgirl, 11 years old, parsing Latin verbs at St. Patrick's in South Tampa and hanging out with my dog because boys were icky.

Then the Beatles arrived, and I lost my religion and saved my soul.

Sounds silly, I know, but almost nothing had so much instantaneous impact on how I saw the world as the first time I Want to Hold Your Hand blasted out of my little plastic transistor radio set to WLCY, the first time the four of them charged grinning to the mikes on The Ed Sullivan Show. I sat in my living room and shrieked just like all those girls on camera. Why? I had no idea. At 11 I'd never felt a more powerful emotion, and I didn't analyze it. I just plastered my bedroom -- all four walls and the ceiling -- with Beatles photos and spent all my babysitting money on records.

My girlfriends and I talked and argued about it endlessly: Who's your favorite? Why? George was mine. Paul was too cute (even at 11 I knew how tough the competition for cute boys was) and Ringo was too goofy and John seemed a little dangerous (later, I'd switch allegiances, and John would be my favorite for just that reason).

But in 1964 George was not much more than a boy himself, sweet and shy and even then seeming like the quiet center of the cultural hurricane that was Beatlemania. It's hard now to imagine, even for those of us who were there, the innocence of those days. In the wake of John Kennedy's assassination, what was left of that innocence was precious and fiercely held. Two of the top movies of 1964 were My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins; pop music's idea of edgy was the sunny Beach Boys, who got more excited over their Little Deuce Coupe than their Surfer Girl.

The Beatles were the fast boys from out of town who relieved us of our innocence and made us happy about it. Today, photos of them in 1964 look about as scary as bunnies, but for the times they were a revelation. Those infamous haircuts made the first big dent in the iron boundaries of sexual identity. The nuns at St. Patrick's upbraided us relentlessly for listening to Beatles songs, sure those orange-and-yellow-labeled 45s were an even faster vehicle on the road to perdition than patent-leather shoes.

And they were right. The songs sound almost innocuous now, but then, when the Beatles sang Please please me, oh yeah, like I please you, we knew what they were singing about. Okay, at 11, we imagined what they were singing about. But make no mistake, Beatlemania was all about celebrating lust. The screams tell the story. And that was why schoolgirls like me loved their music -- and were a little afraid of it.

And that was why I loved George then. George was the serene, self-effacing one, with the dry wit and the reassuring air. In those early days, pretty Paul romanced us with And I Love Her, and sexy John enticed us with the ecstatic pleas of Twist and Shout, but George wrote and sang gentle Big-Brotherish songs: You Like Me Too Much. Being a George girl was a step toward grownup freedom, but not a leap.

When my fifth-grade friends and I planned our dream weddings (you had to do this in a group no bigger than four and be sure there were no dueling claims on Paul), George was the only one I could imagine walking away from all those other screaming girls to me, transformed, of course, from skinny girl in cutoffs to blushing bride in mod white lace miniskirt. At that age, I pictured the kiss at the altar but not what came afterward, and George was the gentleman.

The summer I was 12, I was at day camp, which I went to because I loved to ride. I was holding the bridle of a cranky old horse while a counselor changed a bandage on its injured ankle when the horse slewed its head around, grabbed the right side of my long, sun-bleached hair in its teeth and sheared it off almost at the roots. To add insult to injury, the horse ate it.

I was frantic. The horse had barbered the whole right side of my head. My mother took me to her hairdresser, who tried to make the haircut look perky and intentional. But I went back to school a couple of weeks later feeling like a freak. Then the cutest boy in my class, a big Beatles fan, looked at me and said admiringly, "You look like George." Somehow I felt better.

Even after I outgrew the who's-your-favorite phase and widened my tastes to the Stones and Yardbirds and Hendrix and Joplin, the Beatles were the band of my heart, and Harrison held a special place. I first slow-danced with my first love to Harrison's seductive Something; when I watched the band break up in slow motion in the Let It Be movie, it hurt to see Harrison stung by Lennon's and McCartney's barbs about his songwriting.

That breakup felt personal. After the Beatles dissolved, I never felt quite the same about a band again. As if they were old boyfriends, I still loved them but kept a distance, except when Lennon's murder punched a hole in my heart. All these years later I still feel an angry ache when Imagine comes on the radio.

Harrison's death on Nov. 29 was no such bitter surprise, coming slowly over months, not a jolt but another reminder that Beatles and schoolgirls too come to dust.

By all reports he accepted death with grace and wisdom. That's what I saw (or hoped I saw) in those recent photos: his handsome face grown haggard but his eyes still gentle.

No one would look at me now and see that screaming schoolgirl, or that dreamy hippie waltzing to Something in the way she moves . . . She's still here, though, and what she still sees is the brilliant, beautiful young man with the guitar, balanced over the air at the edge of the stage, beaming, while both of them were young. He has been gone less than two weeks and she misses him and always will.

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