But while they enjoyed this time in California—“I fell in love with Hollywood then,” said Ringo—it also brought them some bad press. Despite tight controls on the band, when voluptuous blond starlet Jayne Mansfield shows up at the Beatles’ rented mansion, she persuades the group (sans Paul) to accompany her to the Whisky a Go Go on their last night in Los Angeles.

They caravan to the club, with John, the actress, and journalist Larry Kane sitting together. “Before anyone knew what was happening,” Kane recalls, “John grabbed Mansfield and they started making out like mad.”

Mansfield had assured the Beatles they would have privacy at the club. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Cameras are everywhere, and the place is in a frenzy.

She poses between John and George, one of her hands on each of their thighs. Irritated by the crush of people, George throws a drink at photographer Bob Flora—who perfectly captures the shot.

The next day, George’s image is everywhere. “I remember sitting on the plane, reading the paper and there was the photo of me throwing the water,” he says.

“When in future days someone would say—and someone often did say it—‘You guys never go out anywhere. Don’t you ever feel shut in?’ We would recall the time we went nightclubbing with Jayne Mansfield and sigh,” manager Derek Taylor recalled.

The following week, the Beatles return to New York, where John is hoping to meet Bob Dylan. He has asked Al Aronowitz, who covers music for the Saturday Evening Post, to make the introduction.

Meeting him has been on John’s wish list since the spring of 1964, when a French DJ gave the Beatles The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

John is a published poet—his first book of drawings and verse, In His Own Write, was released in March of 1964, during the filming of A Hard Day’s Night—and, according to Paul, “the fact that Bob Dylan wrote poetry added to his appeal.”

The 1963 album—Dylan, now twenty-three, began recording it at age twenty—marked a notable shift, with Dylan joining John and Paul’s ranks as a prolific songwriter. On his eponymous first album, Dylan had written two out of thirteen songs; on Freewheelin’, he wrote twelve of thirteen.

Coincidentally, on Dylan’s first album, released in 1962, one of the songs he’d recorded was “The House of the Rising Sun,” an old folk ballad of unknown provenance. Earlier in 1964, another British band called the Animals relays its own innovative cover, which ends the Beatles’ number-one run in America. “Congratulations from the Beatles (a group),” reads the telegram the Fab Four send the Animals, humbly masking a growing anxiety about losing their top place in the British Invasion. Dylan is so taken with the Animals version, in fact, that it’s credited with inspiring him to pick up an electric guitar.