Except Paul. Paul was in the house.
This is how I remember it:
The Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl on August 23, 1964. It was the summer after my freshman year in high school. Somehow I had a ticket, although wikipedia says they all sold out in a few hours in April; a more alert friend must have bought them for a group of us.
But I gave away the ticket because I wasn't going to be there. My then 22-year-old sister and her best friend Carolina decided to go to Mexico in August and my sister persuaded my parents, over whom she had magical powers, to let me go too.
So we went, and spent two or three weeks in Mazatlan, Guadalajara, and Vera Cruz. I had my first drink, a Tequila Sunrise, in Mazatlan our first night out (drank it in ten minutes; threw up five minutes later). I had my first kiss in Vera Cruz, in the back seat of a speedboat on a beautiful river at dusk (nice boy; if only I'd been a little older...). I had a definitive case of turista another night in Vera Cruz, throwing up in a very rudimentary hotel room while my sister and Carolina were out on the town and an epic thunderstorm lit up the night (listening to scratchy shreds of Vin Scully broadcasting the Dodger game on my transistor -- they were heading for their consecutive second world series).
Although the turista departed, leaving me spiritually reborn and physically immune to all digestive insults forever, I decided I wanted to go home. So my sister and Carolina put me on a very small rickety prop plane in Vera Cruz, where luckily I sat next to an experienced pilot who explained all about flying to me and why the plane would not drop out of the sky. Normally, anyway. We flew to Mexico City and then I got home on a bigger plane. The Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl that night.
When I got up on the 24th, there was all kinds of coverage of the concert. More to the point, one of my classmates called. "Linda's sister is giving us a ride out to Beverly Hills. That's where the Beatles are staying!"
There's a part of my 15 year old self I just don't know; I can't fathom why I/she went along. But I did. Six Catholic high school girls, 14 and 15 years old, on a mission, however unlikely, to see the godlike beings who erupted on the radio in December 1963, three months after we started high school, and ruled our generation's world.
Linda's sister drove us from Pasadena out to Beverly Hills and then went her way. Somehow we knew where the Beatles were staying; maybe a disc jockey on KRLA or KFWB had reported it. Maybe someone knew someone. Maybe it was on the TV news (Jerry Dunphy or Baxter Ward???). We found ourselves in an assertively gorgeous Beverly Hills neighborhood, with mansions and iron fences and trees and green, green lawns. And over there, in front of one of the houses, police barriers and police and about 200 girls just like us, milling and gawking and screaming at any sign of movement from the house.
Five of us six were agog, and happy to mill along with everyone else, at least for a while. But unbeknownst (at the time) to us, we had in our six-person midst a powerful force, an Eisenhower, a very Mulan: Kathy LastName. The rest of us were more than fulfilled at being so CLOSE to THE BEATLES. But Kathy cast a disdainful eye over the embryonic groupies and drew herself to her full height (five feet four).
"This way," she commanded, and led us halfway down the street, while she surveyed the ground and laid her plans.
Then, all of a sudden, she gives a signal and we're climbing over fences. Over iron fences, a few downmarket chainlink fences, six foot wooden fences, and bumpy stone walls. And hopscotching from one back yard to another -- and these aren't your standard issue back yards. This is Beverly Hills, where back yards eschew right angles and are the size of parks and are full of hills and trees and ground covers and dogs. The dogs at least are too dumbfounded to do anything about us. And nobody else seems to be in the back yards, even though it's a beautiful day.
After about half an hour of El Capitain-level toil, I am wrung out, completely disoriented and not sure I can keep up. If I collapse in one of these back yards what will happen? My friends couldn't support me, the way a school of dolphins holds an injured comrade up with their flippers. And what if Bethie or Linda or Kit collapse too? Somehow I don't think Kathy would accept our excuses. We slog through some more man-eating gazanias.
Up a brutal hill, through some un-Beverly-Hills-ish scrub grass, up to another chain link fence. And -- there they are.
The Beatles. About 50 feet away in the next back yard, around a pool, in swimming trunks and accompanied by four or five starlets (I think) in bikinis and self assurance, and a few large older men in ill-judged monokinis.
After a stunned pause (I think even including Kathy), we shriek in unison. They look up. And they -- John and George and Ringo, because Paul was in the house -- stop diving into the pool and talking to the starlets and come over! And talk to us! Through the fence!
All I remember, now, is how nice they were. Maybe even relieved to see people who were not business managers or starlets. Oh, and Kit said to Ringo, "I went to school with a girl who looks just like you." And Ringo said, "God help her."
Then Brian Epstein and another monokini came over and they called a cop or a security guy and they hustled us out of there. It was epic.
There was a lot of other stuff going on that summer. On July 2, LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. CORE's Freedom Summer was underway and the 18 year old sister of one of my classmates was in Mississippi. After their disappearance in June, the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were found near Philadelphia, Mississippi on August 4. The Gulf of Tonkin "incident," and the infamous Gulf of Tonkin resolution, came down that same week.
The Democratic National Convention started August 24, the day we saw the Beatles, and the showdown over which Mississippi delegation to seat was looming (spoiler: it didn't turn out very well).
John Kennedy and Medgar Evers had been assassinated with the previous year. The murders of Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. would take place within three years.
But it was a beautiful day, that day we met the Beatles.