Beatles 50th Sullivan Anniversary Count Down…6 Days

Mayhem in Miami. The photo on the left was shot during the dress rehearsal and is a mirror reflecting the Beatles over the head of the audience of 2,500. One camera is shooting the crowd and one cameraman with his back to us is shooting the band. There were 6 TK30s there for the Miami show, but the only camera on stage was the CBS/Ikegami hand held we saw last week. On the right is a shot of The Deauville Hotel on Saturday, the day before the show and the crowds are already huge. Yesterday Betty Forster who was a Sullivan production secretary told me how hard it was for staff to get into Studio 50 on Saturday and Sunday the week before in New York, but the Miami mob scene was just incredible. The fire department had a hook and ladder at the hotel because girls were literally climbing the walls of the hotel to get inside. Barbara said the one work that would best describe the Miami show is “overwhelming”. Not only for the staff, but so was everything else, including the hotel’s power, air conditioning and security force. Generators had to be brought in to run the production truck as the hotel power source became unstable. Adding all the stage light heat to an unusually hot day and two audiences of 2,500 each, the air conditioning was straining and this was a problem. Mitzi Gaynor who was also on the show was shiny with perspiration in rehearsals and make up people were constantly adding powder to all the entertainers. The owner of the hotel wrote in a telegram to Sullivan that the security force was double the size of the one on hand for a visit from President Kennedy the year before, but as we’ll see later in this week, that still wasn’t enough. At the New York show, the camera crew had learned the hard way to do exactly what they did in rehearsals because you could not hear anything in the headsets because of all the screaming.

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