Many esteemed MBE recipients don’t want to share their honors with the boys from Liverpool. Some go so far as to return their awards to Buckingham Palace in protest. One of them, Colonel Frederick Wagg, declares, “Decorating the Beatles has made a mockery of everything this country stands for. I’ve heard them sing and play, and I think they’re terrible.”

Most attitudes are a little more tempered, however. While one Liverpool man interviewed says that “in some respects” he agrees with the argument that giving the award to the Beatles is debasing it, he also says, “I think they’ve done a lot of good. Nobody’s had a bad word to say for them at all. They’ve not been a bad example to anybody.” And unsurprisingly, the response from a female fan is that the award is simply “smashing! They should have got it and I think they’re great!”

Among themselves, the band pronounces the MBE “daft,” then decides “it all just seemed part of the game we’d agreed to play.”

Although none of their families is present at Buckingham Palace—or Buck House, as John calls it—to watch the Beatles’ investiture ceremony in the Great Throne Room that day, the four of them are accompanied by a proud and glowing Brian Epstein. And no matter how much they might want to downplay it, the truth is that they’re all more than a bit overwhelmed to be in this situation.

“To start with,” John says, “we wanted to laugh. But when it happens to you, when you are being decorated, you don’t laugh anymore”—though they did have a smoke in a palace washroom. “Although we didn’t believe in the Royal Family, you can’t help being impressed when you’re in the palace, when you know you’re standing in front of the Queen,” John adds. “It was like in a dream. It was beautiful.”

John takes his medal, tucked inside its small presentation box, to Mendips, Aunt Mimi’s home. Playing the role of the queen, he pins the medal on Mimi’s chest and tells her she deserves it more than he does.

*  *  *

But if meeting the queen was something the Beatles hadn’t initially cared much about one way or the other, meeting the King is a different story.

While they’d been on tour in Los Angeles, they’d had the evening of August 27 off from performing, and the opportunity arose to meet their hero: Elvis Presley. They’d all leaped at the chance to go to visit him at his home in Bel Air.

“We just idolized the guy so much,” John says.

“We were all major fans, so it was hero worship of a high degree,” Paul says in agreement.

George voices the band’s sole condition. “If this is going to be another dirty big publicity circus, let’s forget it.”