Beatleman!a

John Lennon in Miami Beach, FL | February 1964 (I)

The Beatles during the filming of Help! | 1965 © George Konig

John Lennon at the Plage de la Croisette in Cannes, France | May 1965 © ross6606

John Lennon reviewing the script & George Harrison talking with director Richard Lester on the set of A Hard Day's Night | 1964

“It is, he says, a city full of memories for him, from the moment he gets there. “I often arrive these days on an airplane at the John Lennon Airport,” McCartney begins to tell me, and I think that his point is going to be that even the airport has a Beatle-y name, but it’s something else, something far odder and less expected. “From the word go, there, I’m getting memories of me and John cycling to that airport to look at planes, me and George going to the Liverpool Air Show where some guy, birdman, flew out of an airplane and his parachute didn’t open,” he says. “And we watched him drop and went, ‘Uh-oh…I don’t think that was right.…’ We thought, ‘Any second now his parachute’s gonna open, and it never did. We went, ‘I don’t think he survived that.’ And he didn’t.” When McCartney tells me this, I wonder whether it’ll turn out to be one of those hazy, half-mythical recollections that don’t seem to have a real-life concordance, but it’s not. On May 21, 1956, a few weeks before McCartney’s 14th birthday, Léo Valentin, who was the most famous “birdman” of his time, and who billed himself as “Valentin, the Most Daring Man in the World,” was scheduled to fly using man-made wings in front of 100,000 spectators in Liverpool, but one of his wings hit the plane as he was exiting and was damaged, his backup parachute failed to deploy correctly, and Valentin fell to his death.”