Besides the Ed Sullivan Theatre, one of the sites in New York City most associated with The Beatles’ first American visit in February 1964 is the Plaza Hotel, which was surrounded by thousands of screaming, chanting teenagers during John, Paul, George and Ringo’s stay there.
The Plaza was, of course, a must stop on a walking tour of New York Beatles sites that my friend Al Sussman and I took my son Bill on one sweltering Sunday afternoon a little over 20 years ago.
I first had visited the Plaza in the fall of 1983. I was covering television for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the time and was in the city for one of the periodic press tours that the TV networks put on to promote upcoming series, movies and miniseries (remember them?).
The Plaza was the base of operations for part of the tour.
I remember a press conference at the hotel with the cast of the superb miniseries “Kennedy” (starring Martin Sheen, with a luminous Blair Brown stealing the film as a spot-on Jackie).
I also recall a Plaza luncheon with Dick Van Dyke to promote a long-forgotten TV movie called “Found Money,” at which I collared the star briefly to talk about his early days working in local TV in Atlanta.
But my main memory of the Plaza is from a year later, October 1984, when I again was in town for a network press tour (this time based at the Waldorf Astoria) and the editors back in Atlanta decided that since I already would be there — and since I was the AJC’s resident Beatles expert — I should attend the press function for the upcoming Paul McCartney movie “Give My Regards to Broad Street.”
No arm-twisting necessary there.
The screening of the film was the night before the press gathering — a group interview in which five or six writers would sit down with McCartney for an hour (a luxurious amount of time, as those press things went).
The McCartney interview was scheduled for mid-morning. Armed with my tape recorder and camera, I naturally got to the Plaza about an hour and a half early and was the first writer shown to the room where the interview would take place. I sized up the table, figured Paul would sit at the head of it (at the end nearest the door), and planted myself next to that spot.
I guessed right. So it was that I spent an hour at Macca’s left elbow, snapping pictures while he answered questions — starting with one of a page full of queries I asked during the session.
(The Boston Globe music editor came up afterward and complimented me on my excellent questions — he didn’t know I’d spent half my life preparing for that moment, particularly the previous five years publishing Beatlefan magazine!)
The hour passed all too quickly. Eight years earlier, I’d passed up the chance to ask George Harrison for his autograph at the end of a brief interview I did with him at a Washington record label press party, because I was worried it would look unprofessional — and nobody else was doing it. Fortunately, I didn’t face the same dilemma with McCartney. At the end of the hour, all the other writers whipped out photos for him to sign, so I did likewise, as he and I chatted casually about the fact that a few days earlier I had interviewed Beatles film regular Victor Spinetti.
Vic, who it turned out had the same hometown in Wales as my mother, had suggested that I ask why he wasn’t in Paul’s new film! So, I did. And McCartney (who had used Spinetti in the music video for Wings’ “London Town”) basically said that he really didn’t have a character in his script that he thought would suit Vic’s talents.
Most of the interview naturally had focused on the “Broad Street” film and McCartney’s career, but I was the only one of the writers to ask McCartney about the Rupert Bear animated short that was being released on the same bill with his feature film.
Twentieth Century Fox had given next to no publicity to the 13-minute “Rupert and the Frog Song,” which featured an adventurous little bear who starred in a popular U.K. comic strip. So, it wasn’t surprising that the other reporters barely were aware of it.
But as someone who, like Paul, had grown up with the hardcover books featuring Rupert that were issued annually in Britain, I was even more excited about “Frog Song” than I was “Broad Street.”
After all, we’d been waiting for McCartney to do a Rupert Bear film ever since it was mentioned in the 1970 announcement that he was leaving The Beatles!
It wasn’t unusual for Paul to have grown up as a fan of the plucky, adventurous bear, a children’s favorite since 1920 in Britain. But I was a rarity in the U.S. in even knowing about Rupert, much less having read many of the colorful books featuring the character that were issued annually by London’s Daily Express.
I owe that to my grandmother and aunt in Wales, who used to send me and my brothers packages of weekly British comics and, every Christmas, a hardcover annual of some sort.
At first, I got annuals aimed at younger kids, featuring the adventures of another little bear named Sooty — who appears to have been a favorite of another Beatle, George Harrison, who once wrote a foreword for a book about the character.
After a few years of Sooty, who briefly was featured in the U.S. on Disney’s “Mickey Mouse Club,” I graduated to the magic- and fantasy-filled stories of Rupert Bear, who seemed the quintessential British boy, even if he had white fur all over him! (That is, except on some of the annual covers, where, for some reason, he was pictured as a golden-brown bear.)
When childhood friends came over to our house, they always got a kick out of reading the British comics and annuals that we had (which they couldn’t see anywhere else).
And that leads me back to The Beatles’ breakup in 1970. One of the surprises (at least, for Americans) in Paul’s announcement that he was undertaking solo projects away from the Fab Four was word that he had bought the film rights to Rupert Bear and planned on making a feature film about him.
(Years later, I read a note that Paul had written to friend and publicist Derek Taylor about The Beatles’ animated flick, “Yellow Submarine,” in which he had expressed disappointment that the Fabs hadn’t done a Rupert story instead.)
During the ensuing years, Rupert became something of a running joke among McCartney fans, as Paul periodically would talk about his plans for a film (and actually recorded demos of songs with Wings in 1978 for a proposed soundtrack, complete with Macca’s narration of the story), only to have nothing come of it.
Naturally, any mention of Rupert in connection with McCartney grabbed my attention, so that’s why, when I heard about “Rupert and the Frog Song” being released as the “opening act” for “Broad Street,” I couldn’t wait to talk with Paul about the short, which was conceived and produced by the Beatle, who also wrote a song for the film (“We All Stand Together”) and provided the voice of the title character.
When I asked him about “Rupert and the Frog Song,” Paul told me that, beyond the short, he really wanted to “make the big, full-length, Walt Disney sort of thing” about Rupert.
I asked why it had taken 14 years since the first word of a Rupert film for us to get even a short. “Well, people are not keen to make animation these days,” he said.
Actually, “Rupert” wasn’t Macca’s first foray into animation. His company, MPL Productions, had produced two animated shorts, “Oriental Nightfish” and “Seaside Woman,” based on songs by his wife Linda. “Seaside Woman” even had won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
McCartney warmed to the subject after I brought up Rupert, waxing nostalgic about some of his favorite Disney films, saying “I’m trying to make a ‘Jungle Book’ or ‘Lady and the Tramp’ or ‘Bambi.’ I don’t like … modern animation at all. I’m still totally stuck with Thumper. To me, that is the absolute height of animation.”
With classic animation, he said, “you can create that illusion and such emotion that Disney got. Fabulous. So that’s what I’d like to do with Rupert, really.”
Working on “Rupert,” he said, had given him an even greater appreciation for the many details in story and art that make Disney animated classics special.
“When you come to do animation,” he said, “it’s fabulous, ’cause you realize just how good those guys were. Like, in ‘Lady and the Tramp,’ you’ve got two characters, Lady and Tramp. And if you or I were writing it, I think you would have Tramp call her ‘Lady’ But he never does. What does he address her as? ‘Pidge.’ That’s just brilliant. And nobody ever notices it till you try and write one of those.”
Paul repeated that he still had bigger plans for Rupert. “I really want to make the full-length picture,” he said. “What we’ve done with this short is see if we can move him, make him talk and make it work. I think it does work, so if a few more people agree with me, we’ll make the feature.”
As it turned out, the Rupert short actually was a much more successful piece of filmmaking than “Broad Street” and would go on to have a much longer shelf life.
“Rupert and the Frog Song” won the BAFTA (British equivalent of the Oscar) for Best Short Animated Film and had a good run on the Disney Channel, where it premiered in September 1986, paired with the world TV premiere of “Pinocchio.” It continued to be shown periodically on the channel over the next four years. TV Guide called it “absolutely charming” and named it Best Kidvid Title Not Released by Disney in 1986.
And while the single of “We All Stand Together” wasn’t issued in the U.S., it became a major hit in the U.K. and had a music video that included a live action intro in which McCartney, wearing his Rupert scarf, goes into an attic to dig into a trunk for one of his old Rupert annuals (which had been displayed in 1984 at the Walker Art Gallery’s “Art of The Beatles” exhibition in Liverpool). And when “Frog Song” was released for home video, it became the best-selling video of 1985-86 in Britain.
Subsequently, Macca hired a scriptwriter and director to work on a feature-length Rupert film, and by the fall of 1988, the project seemed to be picking up steam. And then … nothing. McCartney moved on to launching world tours and the feature-length Rupert film never happened.
In a 1991 interview with ANGLOFILE, a sister publication of Beatlefan, scriptwriter Chris Boucher, who had been hired to write the story for the film, said he didn’t know why it never got made, but he speculated that McCartney’s obsession with “looking for perfection” might have had something to do with it.
However, McCartney did continue to dabble in animation, with some of those projects getting released, including “Tropic Island Hum.” He also became a children’s book author, including the recent “Grandude” titles inspired by what his grandchildren call him.
It’s worth noting, though, that we’re still waiting on the highly touted “High in the Clouds” feature film first announced in 2013, based on a children’s book McCartney co-wrote in 2005 with Philip Ardagh. The film originally was set to be released in theaters in 2015 but then was delayed several times. Netflix and Gaumont were co-producing it, but Netflix dropped out in October 2023. Last word was that production was expected to begin in early 2024 for release in 2026. We’ll see.
In the meantime, you can read a detailed account of the 1984 Plaza Hotel interview with McCartney in our latest issue, Beatlefan #270.
And there’s also Beatlefan #123 (April 2000), which featured a cover story in which we provided an in-depth look at the history of McCartney’s involvement with Rupert.
Entitled “A Beatle and His Bear,” it’s a fascinating story, and if you missed it then, it’s still available as a back issue for $7 postpaid in the U.S. and $10 elsewhere.
For a copy of that Rupert issue, send a check, money order or credit card information to: Back Issues, 3009 Delcourt Drive, Decatur, GA 30033. Credit card orders must include address, expiration date and CVV number. You also can pay via PayPal to goodypress@gmail.com.
And if you’d also like a copy of Beatlefan #270, with the story of my McCartney “Broad Street” interview, you can order one for $10 in the U.S., $14 abroad.
As for my own involvement with Rupert, in the years after my chat with Paul, Leslie and I had two children, Bill and Olivia, and both my kids became very familiar with the little bear.
In fact, a bootleg of Paul’s Rupert demo recordings was one of my daughter’s favorite albums when she was little, and she took it to a kindermusic class one day, and the teacher played it for the children.
Naturally, when “Rupert and the Frog Song” was released on home video, our kids watched it, and we picked up more Rupert annuals and toys on trips to see family in Britain. We hauled a rather large stuffed Rupert that is as big as a child back with us from one of those trips.
I also was glad to see in the years after “Rupert and the Frog Song” that, thanks to Macca, other Americans became more aware of Rupert. When Paul performed in concert in Atlanta in 1990, one of the fan gifts he held aloft at the end of the show was a stuffed Rupert tossed up to him by local fan Clay Brady.
I’m not done with Rupert, either. I plan on introducing my grandkids, Nora and Harrison, to the little white bear — something I imagine that “Grandude” McCartney already has done with his “chillers.”
Bill King