Two days after landing at New York's newly renamed Kennedy Airport, the Beatles played to a studio of 728 people at CBS's Studio 50, which had received 50,000 ticket requests. At home, roughly 73 million Americans, about two in five, watched them play songs including "All My Loving" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand". The broadcast launched American Beatlemania and the wider British Invasion of the US charts.
Ed Sullivan had booked the band months earlier after witnessing the frenzy of fans at London's Heathrow Airport. By the time they arrived in New York on February 7, 1964, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was already number one in the United States, and some 3,000 fans were waiting at the airport. The show's producers fielded 50,000 requests for 728 seats.
The band opened with "All My Loving", followed by "Till There Was You" and "She Loves You", and returned later for "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand". During "Till There Was You", captions introduced each member; under John Lennon's name, a second line read, "Sorry girls, he's married." The audience in the studio screamed through most of the performance.
The Nielsen ratings put the audience at about 73 million, then the largest for an American entertainment program. Many musicians later traced their careers to that Sunday night. Less than three months after President Kennedy's assassination, the broadcast offered a burst of uncomplicated joy, and by April the Beatles held the top five positions on the Billboard singles chart.
Key people: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Ed Sullivan