PLEASE MISS POSTMAN

Beatles secretary and fan-wrangler celebrated in irresistible 'Good Ol' Freda'


Talk about a dream job. Freda Kelly was just 17 when she landed a job as personal secretary to The Beatles in 1962. No one had any idea how big the band would become, and Liverpool homegirl Freda rode that colossal wave with them for the next 11 years. But unlike so many others with even the most tenuous claim to having once known The Beatles, Freda never sought the limelight—no rounds of chat shows, no tell-all autobiography. Her unique story has remained untold—until now.

Ryan White's documentary, Good Ol' Freda, is as ebullient, down-to-earth, and irresistible as Freda Kelly herself. "I was just a secretary," she shrugs, with typical lack of pretension. "Who wants to hear the secretary's story?"

Now a middle-class matron (still working as a secretary)—with the best memorabilia ever in a box under the eaves in her attic—she decided to share her amazing story so that some day her grandson will know that, back in her youth, she'd done something fun and exciting. It is, as a friend says, "one of the last true stories of The Beatles you will ever hear."

Freda was a typist in a secretarial pool at a Liverpool office on the fateful day some mates took her out to lunch round the corner at the Cavern Club. The cellar location "had a very unique smell," she recalls as "disinfectant and sweat." But it was the band onstage, not the ambiance, that kept local kids coming back, and White employs what scant footage exists of John, Paul, George, and Pete Best in action at the Cavern, augmented by tons of still photos to get the idea across.

Wrap your head around this: going to see The Beatles live at the Cavern on your lunch break. Every day. The group played some 284 gigs at the Cavern, and Freda estimates she saw 190 of them. In between sets, they hung out in the band room, chatting with their loyal fans.

Brian Epstein (fondly recalled as "Eppie") managed the NEMS record store an kept an office in the building where his family sold furniture. When he came to the Cavern to see what all the fuss was about, the group was on its way. As their new manager, one of the first thing's Epstein did was hire Freda as their secretary. Her job was mainly to answer fan mail and to make sure "the boys" produced enough autographs and signed photos to go around.

"I was one of them, " Freda says of the fans, "I knew how they felt," and she did her best to accommodate their requests. She couldn't send Paul round to a birthday party, for instance, but when a girl sent in a pillow case, Freda took it to Ringo's mum to see that he slept on it for a couple of nights. Her duties soon expanded to running the official Beatles Fan Club, and writing a regular fan newsletter. On a 1963 recorded Christmas greeting sent out to Fan Club members, the boys included a special shout-out to "Good ol" Freda!"

Her insights into the group are fond, never catty. Paul was always "nice and friendly," John was "a man of many moods," and "quiet Beatle" George "was never quiet with me." While she picked a new favorite every day, depending on who was nicest to her, she does not divulge if she ever had a deeper relationship with any of them. "That's personal," she smiles.

Her friend says "The Beatles saw her as a sister and their families saw her as a daughter." When Ringo joined up, motherless Freda became especially close to his mum. George's parents, the Harrisons, she recalls, "enjoyed the fame more than the other parents." And as that fame grew, and Freda's workload increased from 200 fan letters a week to 2-3000 a day, she became even more tenacious in guarding their privacy, not putting up with anyone "telling lies about her boys."

Which doesn't mean she couldn't give back as well as she got from the boys themselves. Once when John—evidently in one of is moods—threatened to sack her for being late, she told him she'd continue to work for the other three and he could do his own mail. To which he immediately back-pedaled that he was only kidding!

Freda today at the Cavern—where it all began

White assembles a great collection of vintage still photos and newsreel footage to tell this story. The soundtrack is full of period music, mostly R&B originals (like "Twist and Shout" and "Please Mr. Postman") later covered by The Beatles. Viewers might wish for more actual Beatles recordings, but that White managed to secure the rights to the four Beatles originals he does use is pretty impressive for a Kickstarter-funded project.

From early days (when no one could imagine bigger success than Playing the Empire Theatre in Liverpool at the bottom of the bill with Little Richard), through worldwide celebrity, marriages, divorces, death, children, movies, the foundation of Apple Corps, and the final divergence of four individuals going their separate ways, Freda has seen it all. Her common sense, good humor, and irrepressible sense of fun make her a most personable tour guide through an extraordinary cultural era.