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As they worked frantically in their dressing room there was a knock on the door. “There was this guy standing there with funny hair and granny glasses,” Brill recalled.
He asked them for a dime for the Coke machine in the corner – they had no idea what he was saying at first in his Scouse accent – then stayed with them, chatting and sketching them on a napkin. “All we thought about was, I wish this kid would go so we can work on our act,” Mitzi McCall recalled.
Eventually John Lennon left them alone, and a few minutes later they heard The Beatles playing All My Loving out front, but could hear little above the screaming.
Brill and Mitzi McCall were the last act before the interval, with The Beatles returning straight afterwards. As they prepared to go on there were screams – replaced by sighs of disappointment when the audience realised they were not the Fab Four.
They pushed on with their peppy sketch about a casting director (Brill) interviewing different women played by Mitzi McCall. Every punchline was greeted with silence, except for a few titters when she threw in an ad-lib about stepping on a beetle. It was, they both said later, the worst three minutes of their lives, and when they came off the other performers would not look them in the eye.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/entertainment-celebrity/mitzi-mccall-comedian-whose-career-was-nearly-wrecked-by-the-beatles-on-the-ed-sullivan-show/ar-AA1qW9Oj?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=8cd7fc8b6e3647b199810147ccca5826&ei=16