One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time

As the Ronettes entered, John, George and Ringo made a beeline for them, and showered them with praise. ‘You’ve got the greatest voice,’ George told Ronnie Bennett, the lead singer. ‘We loved it the first time we heard you.’ Generally thrifty with his compliments, John was similarly effusive. ‘Fuckin’ great,’ he said.

‘They kept telling us how much they loved our long black hair, and how our whole look blew them away,’ remembered Ronnie. ‘And we weren’t exactly having a bad time ourselves.’

They all started dancing to records by the Ronettes – ‘Be My Baby’, ‘Baby, I Love You’, ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’. Over the course of the evening the three girls enjoyed teaching the Beatles the latest dance moves from America: the Pony, the Jerk, the Nitty-Gritty. Usually a reluctant dancer, John proved eager for tuition from Ronnie. ‘Every time we’d start to dance, John would come over and say, “I don’t know if I’ve got this one yet, Ronnie. I may need some extra instruction.” It didn’t take me long to figure out that he liked me.’

At the same time, George was making it clear that he was similarly taken with Ronnie’s elder sister, Estelle. ‘We were young and in a foreign country, so we decided to forget our boyfriends back home and have some fun,’ recalled Ronnie, whose highly-strung boyfriend, the record producer Phil Spector, was safely back in America.

As the night wore on, George and Estelle disappeared from the dance floor, and Ronnie agreed to let John take her on a tour of the house. She was impressed: ‘There were antique vases and fine art in every room.’ Upstairs, John began trying all the door handles. It dawned on Ronnie that he was after a hidey-hole. ‘John finally found one door open, so we walked in, but it was so dark we didn’t even notice that George and Estelle were already in there, sitting on the bed. “Oops! Sorry guys!” I said.’ They eventually found an empty room. Together they sat on a window seat, gazing out over a view of ‘this fairy-tale land of lights and towers that seemed to go on forever’ as the mood became more intimate.

‘What’s all this like for you?’ asked Ronnie.

‘Well, there’s a draught, and this window seat is killing my bum.’

‘That’s not what I meant. I mean being famous.’

‘Oh, I see. Serious stuff. I’ll need a smoke for this, then.’

They talked about fame. John remembered sitting in cafés with the other Beatles, fantasising about the future. ‘We’d sit there with our jam butties and tea, saying, “When we get our record contract, everything’s going to change. We’ll have limousines and chauffeurs, and we’ll never have to eat another jam butty as long as we live!” Then we got our record contract, and you know what’s ’appened?’

‘Nothing really changed?’

‘Nope. Turns out we were right – everything did change. We got our limousines and our drivers, and now we’ve gone right off jam butties. If I even think of them I want to heave up.’

All this talk made Ronnie wonder whether John was ‘one of these heavy brain people, just like Phil’. She could also tell that John liked her ‘for more than just my voice. When he leaned over and started kissing me, I have to admit he made me forget about Phil for a few seconds.’

Professionally, Ronnie had often sung about kissing – ‘I’ll make you happy, baby, just wait and see. For every kiss you give me, I’ll give you three’ – but so far she had taken things no further. ‘I know it might seem hard to believe now, but I hadn’t done much more than kiss a guy on the lips until then, and that included Phil. Romance was everything, and sex was still a mystery. But the way things were going on that window seat, it didn’t look like it was going to stay that way for long.’ As they kissed, John started ‘moving his hands around in places I didn’t even know I had’. He then put them around her waist, and tried to edge her towards the king-sized bed, but at that moment Ronnie’s thoughts turned to Phil, and she suddenly dug her feet into the rug, causing John to topple over onto the floor. ‘Do you think we could go back down to the party?’ she asked.

Gilles Petard/Getty Images

Estelle and Ronnie embarked on a series of double dates with George and John. Ronnie was intrigued by how starstruck the two Beatles were, always wanting to know more about American singers and musicians: ‘Tell us about the Temptations! … What’s Ben E. King really like?’

One night, George and John collected Estelle and Ronnie from the lobby of the Strand Palace Hotel. Caught off-guard, John made the mistake of asking their mother, who was accompanying the girls, if she would like to come too. Her enthusiastic response came as a bitter disappointment. ‘Dinner? Oh, that sounds fun. Let me get my purse.’

The evening proved awkward, not least for Ronnie. ‘How can you say anything with your mother sitting around? And the worst part was that she didn’t say a word the whole time. She just kept staring at us through the whole meal.’

Decades later, her mother confessed to Ronnie that she didn’t care for the way ‘these big grown men were really liking my little girls … I thought, “Well, what kind of a life am I going to have now?”’ It was, she thought, ‘the most hurtingest night of my life’.

Towards the end of the month, Phil Spector arrived in town. Ronnie knew his presence would spell the end of their fun: he was bound to refuse to go clubbing, and would certainly never let her go out without him. Phil never said anything, but Ronnie sensed that he didn’t like the way she had been spending so much time with the Beatles: Phil could be tricky that way.1 At the same time, on their UK tour Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones had fallen in love with Ronnie: ‘Keith used to say, “Oh, we would have great babies because you have that black, thick hair and I have black, thick hair.”’

On 5 February Tony Hall threw another party at his Green Street flat, this time for the Beatles, who were set to embark on their first US tour. ‘It was a very sweet evening,’ recalls one person there that night, ‘because the Beatles, as big as they were at that time, had no idea what was about to hit them when they went to America, so they were very apprehensive.’ Everyone danced along to Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Heat Wave’, and Ronnie joined in the singing at the top of her voice.

‘Ronnie was the bird everyone wanted to shag’ remembered Tony Calder, a music PR. ‘Everybody was salivating over this incredible little thing.’ Meanwhile, he saw Phil Spector ‘getting very wound up about the attention everybody was paying to Ronnie. You could feel the sexual tension, every guy in the place looking at her. Because she was exotic. And she was American!’

Phil’s jealousy rocketed still further when he heard from Ronnie’s mother that John had invited the Ronettes to fly to America with the Beatles. Ronnie hadn’t had the nerve to tell Phil about their generous offer, so she had asked her mother to broach the topic.

‘You know, Phil, it might be good publicity if the girls went back on the jet with the Beatles.’

‘No, I’ve already bought their tickets.’

The Ronettes flew back to New York the next day, without the Beatles. Phil told Ronnie he would make his own way back.

1 And how! In 1968, soon after their marriage, he gave her a car for her twenty-fifth birthday, but insisted she drive it only when accompanied by him – or if he was unavailable, by a life-sized inflatable plastic replica of him, with its knees bent in a permanent sitting position. ‘Now nobody will fuck with you when you’re driving alone,’ he explained triumphantly. Year upon year, Phil’s jealousy increased. He trapped Ronnie in their house, surrounding it with barbed wire and guard dogs, and confiscating her shoes to prevent her from running away. Furthermore, he threatened to have her murdered if ever she tried to escape. ‘I’m completely prepared for that day,’ he told her mother. ‘I’ve already got her coffin. It’s solid gold. And it’s got a glass top, so I can keep my eye on her after she’s dead.’

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