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Friday, October 04, 2002

By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic

As the nervous wreck behind the fuzzy sweater in "A Hard Day's Night," he's flustered by the Beatles' every move when their appearance on his television program undermines his tightly structured sense of order.

	Victor Spinetti, center, with Paul McCartney in "A Hard Day's Night." (Miramax Film Corp.)

"It's a young man's medium," he sighs. "I just can't the stand the pace."

But while his character was someone whose sweater the Beatles could playfully mock, in reality, Victor Spinetti, the actor who played the beleaguered director, had already been embraced as a member of the Beatles' inner circle.

In fact, they met backstage at his show, not the other way around (although he was -- and is -- a fan).

In 1963, as Beatlemania was taking hold around the world, Spinetti had a hit show of his own, the antiwar musical "Oh, What a Lovely War!"

The Beatles saw it, as did Richard Lester, the director of "A Hard Day's Night."

It was the Beatles who suggested that he don the fuzzy sweater.

As Spinetti recalls, with a laugh, "George Harrison said, 'You've got to be in all our films.' I said, 'Why?' And he said, 'Well, if you're not in 'em, me mum won't come and see 'em 'cause she fancies you.' "

He was in two more Beatle films -- the classic "Help" and not-quite-classic "Magical Mystery Tour" ("The only difference was we had a 15-minute break for meditation," Spinetti recalls). He also directed a play in London based on "In His Own Write," working closely with its author, John Lennon.

But today, he's in the States to talk about his earliest collaboration with the group, "A Hard Day's Night," as recently released on DVD with extras ranging from an interview with Richard Lester to George Martin assessing the soundtrack with surprising candor ("I'm Happy Just to Dance With You," he says, was "a bit of a potboiler. I think they could've done better and they did in other songs").

Spinetti, on the other hand, is happy just to talk about his dear old friends, the Beatles.

"The extraordinary thing," he says, "is that with all that Beatlemania going around, there was always a still, small center. And in that center, like in the eye of a hurricane, the Beatles sat. And there was stillness and quiet in there. You could hear all that screaming, but inside, there was talk and good humor and joshing and really discussing things. People used to say to me, in those days, particularly the intellectuals, 'Well, what on Earth could they talk about? Pop creatures. What did they say?' I said, well, for example, yesterday, John was talking about the Freudian interpretation of dreams as opposed to the Jungian interpretation. How 'bout that?' Their jaws dropped."

On meeting the Beatles, Spinetti was instantly struck by how open they were.

"They weren't hidden," he says. "When you meet, you go through a dance, the discarding of the veils, the dropping of attitudes. There was none of that. Just straight in. There we were. It was very easy to talk with them and meet with them. We didn't have to pass any tests or whatever, which is what happens when you meet most people. It was an immediate thing, an immediate recognition that we're all alive and here we are on the planet."

To illustrate how down to Earth the Beatles were about their fame on that planet, he talks about the time he brought his sister and her fiance to London for the weekend, an engagement present.

"So I told the lads," he says, "one day on the set of 'A Hard Day's Night,' 'My sister's coming up. My present is that.' And they said, 'Oh, that's great, Vic. Where are you taking her?' I told them and they all turned up that night. I wouldn't have dreamed of asking them. But they came. They said we've come to have a dance with you for your engagement. And my sister was cool until they left and then she went mad."

No one in Spinetti's travels seemed immune to Beatlemania.

One time, he threw a party, Spinetti recalls, "And Laurence Olivier wanted to come because he wanted to meet the Beatles. I can't tell you the number of people who turned up at this little party in my small apartment that I had in London because they were there."

It was Olivier who asked him to direct the Lennon play.

"He said 'You have to direct it for us, my dear baby, because none of us understand it.' "

But Spinetti understood it. And it represented yet another opportunity to work with his favorite Beatle.

"In one book," Spinetti sighs, "it said that John Lennon was so out of it on acid -- people will say anything to get a million dollars -- that the whole venture was turned over to Victor Spinetti. He was there. We wrote the bloody thing together. He was there at rehearsals. He was there the opening night. When he saw the first run-through, he was crying. I said 'Oh Christ, is it that bad?' He said, 'No, you made me remember all the things I used to think about when I was 15.' So that's my review. I don't care what the others say."

As for talking about a film he did in 1964, Spinetti says, "It's my pleasure. I mean that. I was there. I was fortunate. And if I don't give it away, I can never keep it. If you don't give away enthusiasm, you don't get it. If you don't give away joy or happiness or wonder or all the important things in life ... you've got to give those away in order to keep them."

Ed Masley can be reached at emasley@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1865.