If you’ve been watching the media coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics, you might have gotten the impression that the Cold War is still in full swing. There’s no question that in 1964, the Cold War was in full-tilt boogie. The Russians were wiping the snow and ice with our athletes until a 23 year-old barber skated into Olympic history when he defeated the Russian World Champion in his specialty, the 500-meter speed-skating event, winning the only Gold Medal for the downtrodden U.S. Team.
Gold Medal winner Terry McDermott was finally on his way home to Essexville, Mich., but he was about to be pulled into another historic moment, Beatlemania. Anxious to see Virginia, his spouse of four months, and get back to work at Bunny’s, a barbershop in nearby Bay City, he decided on a layover in New York City where the cagey host, Ed Sullivan, had invited him to make an appearance on his Sunday variety show.
McDermott’s unexpected victory was the only high point for the U.S. team in the 1964 Winter Olympics. A decided underdog against the World Champion, McDermott beat the Russian favorite by one-tenth of a second. What McDermott didn’t know as he dozed high above the Atlantic was that Sullivan was more interested in his barbering skills than his Gold Medal.
Although McDermott was introduced to the audience of 728 watching the Sullivan show in CBS Studio 50, the real action had been back stage in the “green room” which the small-town barber shared with the Beatles.
“I didn’t know who they were,” McDermott said in an interview from his Bloomfield Hills home. The Beatles knew who he was and congratulated him on his gold medal.
“They were really gentlemen and not rowdy,” he said.
Sullivan’s staged a publicity photograph showing McDermott cutting the hair of one of the “moptops,” one of many names they were called by skeptical U.S. media. Sullivan’s idea worked perfectly, and the iconic photograph of McDermott cutting Paul McCartney’s hair while Sullivan, John, George and Ringo looked on in horror was sent across national wire services. At the time, McDermott and the Beatles didn’t exchange autographs, but nearly 50 years later McDermott met up with McCartney at a Detroit concert and asked him to sign the famous photograph.
