(Sung to the tune, if you will, of John Wesley Harding’s “When the Beatles Hit America.”)
The Casual Savant asks: “What was George’s last name?” (Or rather: “Ok, I’ll bite. This is one piece of pinoy trivia I don’t know.”)
Here’s an excerpt from a later interview, in 1986:
GEORGE: Yeah, well we went to Manila back in the sixties, The Beatles on a tour and we did the concert and next morning we were in bed and somebody knocked on our door of our hotel suite saying, Come on youre supposed to be at the palace. And we said, No were not! We didnt have any engagement anywhere but somebody, some smart guy had said, Sure, Ill get The Beatles up to the palace. And they said turn on the TV. We turned the television on and there it was, this big palace with lines of people and the guy saying, Well, theyre still not here yet. And we watched ourselves not arrive at the palace. But we were never supposed to be there. And so what they did was they said Beatles snub first family, which Im glad we did. See even in those days we had taste,
and so consequently he set the mob on us and tried to beat us up, which they did. They beat up a lot of people with us and wouldnt let the aeroplane leave Manila, until Epstein, our manager had to get off the plane and give back the money we earned at the concert. So thats what I think of Marcos, (George gives a lovely British two-fingered salute to the screen). Old twat he was!
(If I remember correctly, Eric Gamalinda’s novel The Empire of Memory — oddly categorized at Kabayan Central as “psychology/self-help” — opens with this very scene.)