TIMES OF ISRAEL
by Tom Tugend
September 6, 2014

50-years after covering the group’s first US tour, author Ivor Davis finally tells all, with plenty of space for manager Brian Epstein

It was 6 a.m. on Aug. 19, 1964 when the phone rang in the Los Angeles apartment of Ivor Davis, the young West Coast correspondent for London’s Daily Express, circulation 4 million. On the other end was the paper’s foreign editor, who told Davis to drive to the airport and catch the 11 a.m. flight to San Francisco. His assignment was to cover that evening’s gig at the Cow Palace by a hot British pop group called the Beatles.

For Davis and the band, it would be the start of a hysterical 34-day, 24-city tour across the United States and Canada. “I had unfettered access to the boys … I lived and ate with them, played cards and Monopoly until the early hours of the morning,” Davis recalled. “I was there when they popped pills, talked candidly about their passions … and how they coped with the revolving door of women that was the inevitable result of their perch as global sex symbols.”

It has taken 50 years, but Davis, 76, otherwise a quick and prolific journalist and author, has finally put together the highs and lows of the memorable tour in a lively new book, “The Beatles and Me.” In it, he writes of the pressure, adulation, booze, drugs and girls in the lives of the group. Davis, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in East London, devotes considerable space to the influence of the “Fifth Beatle,” Brian Samuel Epstein, manager of the Fab Four and a frequent target of the stereotypical Jewish cracks of that time and environment by some of “the boys.”…..

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