Max Collins - Ask Not

September 1964

My son’s generation will always remember two key events of their teenage years — where they were when news came of President Kennedy’s assassination, and seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

I learned of the former in a guest room at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion in Chicago — in the company of Miss November, fittingly enough. Soon, amid beauties with their mascara running, she and I had hunkered around a portable television with a little gray picture in a big shiny white kitchen. The latter broadcast I somehow missed, but Sam has made it abundantly clear over the years that the February 9 appearance of those four Liverpool lads on The Ed Sullivan Show was right in there with JFK getting it.

My son once told me that that joyful noise had signaled a rebirth for his generation, the Baby Boomers, granting them permission to smile and have fun and be silly again. But it also signaled the end of barbershops as we knew them and extended the fad called rock ’n’ roll through the rest of the century and beyond.

Unlike many of my contemporaries — I was a successful businessman in my well-preserved late fifties — I did not have disdain for the Beatles. They were a pretty fair combo, better than most of the little bands that had made the Twist a very big deal on Rush Street, and they seemed to have a sense of humor. Earlier this year, Sam had convinced me to take in their flick A Hard Day’s Night, and I’d liked it. More importantly, Miss November — who you may have calculated was younger than me — loved it.

The Beatles, through no fault of their own, had created a problem for me with Sam. He lived with his mother and my ex-wife (that’s one person) in Hollywood with her husband, a fitfully successful film producer. Normally Sam spent summers with me in Chicago, but he had begged off of June and July because his combo — yes, the Beatle bug had bit him hard — had a weekly pool party gig at a Bel Air country club that paid “incredible money” ($100).

“So what about August?” I’d asked him over the phone.

“August is cool. August is groovy. Everybody’s going on vacation with family, so we can’t take gigs anyway. Dad, are you okay with this?”

“It’s cool. Maybe not groovy, but cool.” I had maintained a strong relationship with my son by not insisting on having my own way. That’s right. I spoiled his ass. Divorced dads get to do that.

Have to do that.

And August had been swell. At a second-run theater in Evanston, we took in From Russia with Love, and before the film began I bragged about having met James Bond’s papa during the war.

“I doubt Ian Fleming was on Guadalcanal, Dad,” Sam had said skeptically over his popcorn.

“It was on Nassau,” I said. “He was doing spy stuff.”

“The stories you tell! How am I supposed to know when you’re bullshitting me?”

Another way I spoiled Sam was to let him swear around me. His mother hated it. Which I loved.

I sipped too-sweet Coke. “Someday you’ll appreciate your old man.”

“Hey, as dads go, you’re one of the cooler ones.”

Not cool, just one of the cooler ones. I’d settle.

Sam — actually Nathan Samuel Heller, Jr., but his mother and I decided one Nate around the house was plenty (more than enough, as it turned out) — had caught up with my six feet now. He had my late mother’s Irish good looks, the Jewish half of my heritage nowhere to be seen in either of us, and we looked enough alike to be brothers. If he had a really old brother.

Oh, and he had his mother’s brown hair, not my reddish variety. Cut in that Moe Howard bowl haircut the Beatles had bestowed on American males. Once upon a time I’d wished he would let that dumb crew cut grow out. Careful what you wish for.

“Listen, uh, Dad... I need to talk to you about college. I’m thinking about liberal arts.”

“Not business?”

“No. I want to be able to take music courses.”

Like the Beatles had ever studied music!

Sam was my only son. My only kid period. I had no desire to reshape him into Nathan Heller, Jr., even if that was his name. But I did have a successful business — the A-1 Detective Agency, here in Chicago and with branches in Los Angeles, New York, and more recently Las Vegas — and I hoped he’d eventually take it over.

Not as a detective — private eye days were long gone. Hell, they’d even canceled Peter Gunn. But the agency was a very profitable business indeed, and Sam would make a great executive — he was smart and personable and already pretty darn savvy.

“Music, huh?” I said lightly. “You’ll teach, then. What, marching band? Chorus? What’s the starting salary, thirty-five hundred a year?”

“Money isn’t everything, Dad.”

Said the kid with two well-off parents.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I don’t wanna teach. I don’t know what I want to do, maybe keep playing my music...”

His music. The last time I looked, “his” music was the Beach Boys, Beatles, Chuck Berry, and, what was that instrumental group? The Adventures? Surf music. Jesus God.

“... or something else, maybe, but not... business. ”

He said the word the way a Republican says Democrat.

“You know I’ll support you any way you want to go, son. But you might, I’m just saying might, want to—”

“It’s starting,” Sam said, meaning the movie, or anyway the previews.

And it was starting. The first major struggle between father and son, at least since back when he wanted to stay up and watch Johnny Carson on school nights.

So August flew by, and we went to the fights and to ball games and more movies and had plenty of great food with an emphasis on Gino’s pizza. We loafed around my Old Town bachelor pad and watched my color TV with its impressive 21-inch screen. I even arranged for an afternoon tour of Hef’s mansion, just to give Sam a little hint of what being a successful businessman might bring.

Anyway, it was September now. This was Saturday and Labor Day was Monday. Back in Beverly Hills, school had been in session a couple days already, but I’d arranged for Sam to stick around so I could give him his seventeenth birthday present.

The Beatles were performing tonight at Chicago’s International Amphitheater. This was the hottest ticket in town, the latest stop on a twenty-four-city, thirty-two-day tour. Tickets were going for $2.50, $3.50, and $4.50. A really great dad, with just the right connections, might be able to score his kid one of those tickets. But I could top that.

Just like the Beatles could top Elvis Presley, whose first Amphitheater appearance had required two hundred policemen, for security — three hundred fifty cops were being put on for John, Paul, George, and Ringo, plus a couple hundred firemen with half a dozen ambulances standing at the ready. But celebrities like these required personal security as well, for their Midway Airport arrival, their Stock Yard Inn press conference, and the concert itself.