THE BEATLES’ VISIT

Bill Eppridge covered hundreds of assignments during his career at Life magazine and Sports Illustrated. Many of his photos are famous, like that of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination and images from an intimate photo essay that followed the lives of two young drug addicts in New York.

But other photographs are lesser known, including those he took during the first trip by a certain British musical group to the United States in February 1964.

Mr. Eppridge, then 26, was a classical music man himself, but he recognized this was a pretty good story and followed John, Paul, George and Ringo for the next six days. Other than four photos published in Life at the time, the images were rarely seen for the next 50 years.

Until now.

A few months before his death last October, Mr. Eppridge, with his wife and picture editor, Adrienne Aurichio, completed a new book, “The Beatles: Six Days That Changed the World,” which is being published this week by Rizzoli.

Mr. Eppridge wrote a short introduction:

I was in the Life magazine offices early in the morning of February 7, 1964. It was nearly eight o’clock and Dick Pollard, the director of photography, was the only other person on the floor. As I was walking down the hall, he saw me and called out, “Eppridge, what are you doing today? You want to shoot something for me? We’ve got a bunch of crazy Brit musicians coming to town this afternoon — the Beatles. Do you know anything about them?”

I answered back: “Nothing. Yes. And, no.”

The only news story I had ever seen about the Beatles was from a Life issue, photographed in England, a month or so earlier. I remembered a picture of teenage girls in a state of frenzy. The magazine often sent me out on assignments with very little information on my subject and this was no different. The editors wanted to see the story through my eyes, not based on what reporters might have written before. They didn’t want my vision clouded by other opinions.

I had just returned from photographing a story on hate groups and fear mongers in the South including the Grand Wizard of the United Klans of America, Robert Shelton. After I had taken his picture I accepted Shelton’s offer of a seat aboard a small plane the Klan had chartered from Tuscaloosa to Montgomery. On the way to the airport I changed my mind and decided to drive the distance. I never told Shelton that I would not be on the flight. When I arrived at a Life reporters’ hotel room in Montgomery a few hours later, I learned the plane had crashed, and I had been reported missing and presumed dead. After that, the Beatles seemed like a welcome diversion.

 

Bill Eppridge/The Estate of Bill Eppridge The Beatles arrived at Pennsylvania Station in New York. Feb. 12, 1964.

In the three years that I had been shooting for Life and the time before that for National Geographic, I had worked in 22 countries, seen riots and a couple of revolutions. I saw that the world was changing in the 1960s. There were serious situations in the South with civil rights. Fidel Castro was affecting our country’s involvement in Latin American politics. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was escalating, and there was a great fear of nuclear weapons. At that time, I would never have believed that four musicians could have had such an impact. 

Pollard told me to go to the airport right away — their flight was arriving in a few hours. I grabbed several cameras and took a cab to Kennedy airport. I arrived before noon and found New York press photographers, reporters, and television crews staking out their positions.

Police were gathering inside the Pan Am terminal, and teenagers were multiplying. It looked like a few thousand of them, and barricades had been put in place to keep them contained. There was something different about the excitement level — the kids knew it, and were part of it.

Airport personnel had provided elevated rolling stairs for the press photographers to use but I preferred a position on the ground. When the Pan Am jet finally taxied into the gate at 1:20 p.m., stairs were rolled up to the door, and out walked a Pan Am stewardess — bright, young, and pretty. Right behind her were four young gentlemen in coats and ties. Not exactly what I was expecting. I waited for a quartet of ragged rock musicians to emerge, but photographed these four, whoever they were.

I quickly turned around to look back at the photographers on the stairs. They all had the same expression on their faces — disbelief at what had emerged from the plane: young men who acted normally, looked happy to be there, and seemed pleased with the reception greeting them. Their hair was longer than most, but that was the only thing that set them apart.

The teenagers, thousands of them, went wild. Many were on the top floor of the terminal, outside, and what had been loud noise in the background suddenly rose in volume to a roar of piercing screams. The Beatles acknowledged all this with smiles and waves. Their press conference in the Pan Am lounge was one of the funniest I have ever been to. I liked these guys immediately.

 

Bill Eppridge/The Estate of Bill Eppridge A news conference at the Pan American Airways lounge at Kennedy Airport. Feb. 7, 1964.

I called Pollard right after that, and told him that I wanted to stay with the group for the next few days. I really didn’t have any idea of what was going to happen, or where they were going. I had no itinerary. Maybe the reporter who was with me did, but I can’t remember. With my Life credential, I was accepted into the inner party. Shortly after, Ringo Starr turned to me and said, “All right Mr. Life magazine, what can we do for you?”

“Nothing,” I said, “not one single thing. Just be you and I’ll turn invisible. I won’t ask you to do a thing.”

I shot 90 rolls of film. Life published only four of the images in 1964. I had no time to look at the negatives or the contact sheets. After I finished the story on February 12, I was given a contract with Life and assigned to the Chicago bureau. At some point I asked to see the film, but my negatives were missing or misplaced in the office. The film turned up seven or eight years later, and I finally got to relive what had happened over those few days I spent with them. By then the Beatles were no longer together but they had caused a revolution, and were significant in ways that no one could have imagined at the time.

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Bill Eppridge’s Beatles photos will be on view at the Museum at Bethel Woods in Bethel, N.Y., starting April 5, and at the Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe, N.M., starting April 25.