Rehearsal for The Ed Sullivan Show

The day before their second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles spent all afternoon rehearsing at their Miami hotel.

The group rehearsed at the Deauville Hotel’s Napoleon Room; George Harrison and Ringo Starr wore shirts and swimming trunks. At 2pm there was a dress rehearsal before an audience of 2,500 people, the majority of whom had been queuing outside the hotel since early in the morning.

After the rehearsals were complete The Beatles went fishing.

I think, though, we were hanging out with Mafiosi at that time. There was a critic giving us a hard time in the press; George Martin and Brian Epstein were discussing it when a big heavy guy came up and said, ‘Mr Epstein, you want we should fix this guy?’ – ‘Er, no, that’s OK.’ That was the kind of crowd we were in: ‘Yeah, I’m in the Mafia.’ But we didn’t know that: we just saw a nice man with a pool and a yacht. I must admit we were more interested in the yacht than in him.

At this stage, we started to meet people whom we’d only seen in newspapers and on film, and now we were rubbing shoulders with them.

Also on this day, a telephone interview with The Beatles was broadcast on Dick Clark’s influential ABC-TV series American Bandstand. The half-hour show was broadcast from 12.30pm EST.