Book Review: I Saw Them Standing There by Debbie Gendler

Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion

Debbie Gendler is an Emmy-nominated talent and development executive who has worked at CBS and ABC. She was there for the launches of the cable networks HGTV and National Geographic. Impressive right? Well listen up Beatles fans, she was an OG Beatles fan in America, and not just any OG Beatles fan in America, probably one of the first Beatles fans because she got a copy of Please Please Me back in April 1963, almost a whole year before The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show! What a flex! How did she even get a copy of the album so early and hype up The Beatles before day 1 in America, well keep on reading!

This year marks 60 years since The Beatles’ famous performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Today marks 60 years since The Beatles arrived at JFK Airport.

This was an event that touched so many young Americans’ lives and was one of a few things that marked the beginning of a rock and roll revolution: the British Invasion. Rock and roll would never be the same again. From there, The Beatles paved the way for other great British 60s bands.

For those who grew up in the streaming and on-demand era, it’s hard to comprehend a time where we had these cultural touchstones, like a TV show that everyone watched and everyone would talk about at school or work and everyone knows the references – it’s part of the zeitgeist. It’s so crazy looking at TV show viewership statistics then and now and wrap your brain around that. How was the population smaller then but the TV shows got way more viewers? That’s because you only had like 3 TV channels in America (ABC, CBS, and NBC), so not much choice. This was a time before cable TV, home videos, DVRs, and the internet. YouTuber MatPat of The Film Theorists made an interesting video about this:

Anyway, American boomers know where they were and have memories of watching The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show on 9 February 1964. And oh boy did it have cultural impact! Over 73 million people watched it, record-setting views! According to urban legend, crime went down that night because everyone was watching The Beatles. Wish I could say that was true, but the myth came from a snarky comment the news editor for the Washington Post, B.F. Henry, made dismissing The Beatles as some teenage fad.

Here’s a statistic for you, the theatre where The Ed Sullivan Show was filmed only seated 728 people and 50,000 people requested tickets so that means you had about a 1% chance of getting in. If you were one of the lucky ones to get in, you have a story to tell and if you’ve been looking for a book about that, then check out Debbie Gendler’s new book I Saw Them Standing There – the story of an OG Beatles fan. And that’s just one of many Beatles encounters she talks about in her book.

Her fascination with England started in April 1963 when a family friend came back from England and brought back a Please Please Me vinyl for her as a gift. In those days, it was really expensive to fly overseas (no budget airlines!) and it was a big deal for someone to fly overseas. You had to wear your best clothes on the Pan Am or BOAC flight. The world was not as globalised then as it is now and so overseas was considered exotic.

Her first impression is that they were the cutest boys ever and she loved the music. She played it for her friends, but they weren’t impressed and everyone thought she was a weirdo for being into The Beatles. She wanted to find other Beatles fans and with it being a time before social media, she wrote to The Beatles fan club in London, eagerly waiting months for a response, but no dice. One day, she got a telegram about The Beatles. They were looking for fans to appear at places in New York to build up hype for the band and they wanted Debbie to come to a meeting in New York. She and her dad travelled there and met Brian Epstein and he told her he wanted her to manage the fan club office. While she was a bit too young for that at the time at only 13 years old, she was very involved in the fan club. As a thank you, she got a coveted ticket to see The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.

As soon as The Beatles got popular, everyone wanted to talk to Debbie and be her Beatles buddy. She started a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings and she still has it 60 years later and continues to add Beatles stories she finds in the newspaper. Finally on Sunday 9 February, she went to the Ed Sullivan Show and it was everything she dreamed of. The Beatles looked beautiful and the whole crowd were screaming as they played “All My Loving”, “Till There Was You”, and “She Loves You”. Other celebrities that appeared on that same episode were magician Fred Kaps, Tessie O’Shea, and a pre-Monkees Davy Jones who was in the musical Oliver! The Beatles finally came back to play a couple more songs: “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand”. As you can expect, the following day at school, everyone was talking about The Beatles. Debbie got to work with the fan club in New York, but the location had to be top secret so fangirls wouldn’t camp outside so she had to go to the fan club alone.

There’s a lot of interesting insight about how the fan club worked, one of the most interesting tidbits is that a lot of people working at the fan club went by pseudonyms and often one person might have more than one pseudonym and this is because fans were rabid and people working for The Beatles wanted to have privacy. Debbie started fan club chapter #28 and it expanded from her home state of New Jersey to Connecticut, Long Island, Upstate New York, and Pennsylvania. She made friends all over the country and across the pond thanks to the Beatles fan club. Isn’t it incredible how music brings people together? As a middle school graduation gift, she got tickets to see The Rolling Stones at Carnegie Hall. As part of the fan club, she got tickets to an advance screening for A Hard Day’s Night. Of course she loved it and wanted to see it again and she did, she went to the very next screening! Through the fan club she got a lot of networking opportunities, one of the most interesting ones include her being asked to start a fan club for Donovan, meeting Cilla Black, attending The Beatles’ first press conference in America in 1965 and meeting them afterwards, and a local newspaper writing a profile on her.

However, as quick as The Beatles rose to fame, cracks started appearing in the band and the fan club by 1966. There were a lot of other talented bands competing with The Beatles and so not everything was about them anymore and they had some controversy like the John Lennon “bigger than Jesus” quote, playing the Budokan in Japan (which upset old conservative people), and Philippines First Lady Imelda Marcos was offended when The Beatles rejected meeting her. In an unconventional move they stopped touring, with their last tour being in 1966. The following year, Brian Epstein died. It was the beginning of the end. Still, their albums sold well because they’re The Beatles.

With The Beatles fandom in a lull, Debbie saw The Velvet Underground at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and she interviewed beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Just one thing was left to make her dreams come true… visiting England so she can meet her pen pals and people associated with The Beatles fan club and publications, and of course, walk in The Beatles’ footsteps and see all the landmarks associated with them, check out some hip boutiques like Granny Takes A Trip and Dandie Fashions, and go to some clubs. And so as a 17th birthday present, she and her mum went to London, flying BOAC of course, just like The Beatles. One of the highlights of the trip was meeting Paul and Ringo at Abbey Road Studios (then called EMI Studios). That wasn’t the last she saw of Paul that trip, she also saw him at a club with Mal Evans and Stash De Rola. She also travelled to Liverpool to meet Paul’s father and stepmother and George’s parents, who were incredible hosts and showed her around the city. It was an experience of a lifetime!

When she heard the news of Brian Epstein’s death she was in Peru visiting family and there was an earthquake – must be a sign! The following year she started attending Boston University to study communications/broadcasting. Even before graduating from secondary school, she had an incredible CV thanks to her Beatles fan club work. 

From there, the book talks about her life as an adult: backpacking in Europe in 1971 as a college senior, getting to know Paul McCartney’s brother Mike, working for CBS, moving across the country to LA, teaching a class on The Beatles for UCLA Extension, loaning some of her Beatles memorabilia to the Robert Zemeckis film I Wanna Hold Your Hand (unfortunately some things got damaged), attending Beatlefest, meeting Graham Nash, Spencer Davis, and Joey Molland, testifying at the Apple Corps Limited v. Beatlemania trial, meeting Timothy Leary, seeing Paul McCartney live with Mike McCartney, working for the TV programme On Trial which was the first show to bring cameras into the courtroom, Linda McCartney cooking a vegetarian meal on a show she worked on, meeting Jane Asher, speculations about the Kray twins having something to do with Brian Epstein’s death, and many more things.

There’s also some interesting information about The Beatles’ merchandising deals in the 60s and surprisingly, they didn’t make anything off the memorabilia in the early days of fame. Debbie also acknowledges and appreciates her parents’ support of her love of The Beatles and she said she couldn’t do all that she did without them. 

This book is an incredible story of a teenage girl who had a dream to meet her favourite band, whom she championed early on, and it changed the whole course of her life. Debbie Gendler is an amazing storyteller and I found the book so captivating and I couldn’t put it down, I wanted to keep reading! I love all the photographs in the book. What a journey! Oh the places you’ll go because of rock and roll! 

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