As a Beatle fan and a Bay Area native myself, I’ve looked at this 1965 letter with wonder. And in one of those truly modern moments, combining ennui and having all the world’s information at my fingertips, I decided to Google if Caen was in fact correct. Did the Beatles stay at the Cabana Hotel in Palo Alto?Dear Steffi:
Thanks for your nice letter — and you can contact Paul Catalana at the Safari Room in San Jose.
However, the Beatles want to be close to the Cow Palace, so East Bay might be out. The latest rumor we have heard is that they are considering the Cabana Hotel in Palo Alto.
Thanks again for writing,
Herb Caen
Before embarking on my trip, I read as much as possible in newspaper archives about the Beatles’ 1965 Bay Area visit. One article said that when the Beatles checked out of the Cabana, the hotel staff took their bedsheets, cut them up, and sold them to fans in the parking lot.
The article notes that the gift Jane handed the Beatles was a set of matching long johns. I wasn’t just charmed by this story. It encapsulated everything I believed: that timeless magic might just be contained in a smoldering cigarette handed to a teenage fan, or in a hotel room where the Beatles once slept. Herb Caen’s letter to my mom, with its yellowed-by-age stationery, felt like directions to a buried treasure. In 1965, my mom wanted to see the Beatles at the Cabana Hotel, but she was too young to drive. Fifty-seven years later, I have a car and a driver's license. Call it settling unfinished business, but I wanted to see what I could find at the Crowne Plaza Cabana.Jane darted around the guard to John Lennon’s side of the limousine and thrust a gift-wrapped package through the window … she was graciously handed the cigarette John Lennon had been smoking. Jane danced away in a wide arc, holding the half-consumed item as if it were a martyr’s relic.
When I was 12, in April of 1993, I was a colossal Nirvana fan. The jangly yet distorted guitars, the thunderous drums, the sing-song childlike melodies, Kurt Cobain’s gravelly caterwaul—I couldn’t get enough. I was dying to see them play at the Cow Palace, the same cavernous venue where the Beatles had played in the 1960s. Unfortunately, my parents dashed my dreams. “You’re not even a teenager yet,” my mom said. My dad said that before I could see a concert of my own choosing, I’d have to go to five concerts of his choosing with him. I reluctantly agreed to this deal and conceded that there’d be other opportunities to see Nirvana.
That night, as I drifted off to sleep in a room where one or two of the Beatles once slumbered, I thought of an odd job I once held. In grad school, I worked as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a job choice clearly inspired by Stephen Malkmus of Pavement and David Berman of Silver Jews, who both worked as guards at the Whitney before embarking on careers as indie-rock heroes.
My mom wasn’t able to get to the Cabana in 1965, but I was still on a mission to have a Beatles experience in 2022. I needed to find out if there was any of their creative magic lingering in the walls of room 810. I had an idea: I’d invite a medium to determine if there was any residual Beatle energy at the Crowne Plaza Cabana. I scheduled a meeting with Jess Boyer, a San Francisco-based medium, to come check out the room. Several mediums passed on my request to visit the hotel. One declined by saying that she felt I “was trying to conjure up dark energy.” Another told me it seemed like I was looking for a medium “like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost and that is definitely not what I do.” But when I spoke to Boyer, she said she’d been listening to a lot of Beatles lately, even though she’s not a superfan. She was intrigued by the assignment and felt there was something synchronous between her recent Beatles binge and my call.Boyer, blonde and dressed in black, entered the room and flung the curtains open as wide as they’d go, letting sunlight flood the room. She took a seat in a chair by the circular coffee table with a stack of Beatles books on it. I sat across from her. Boyer began by meditating and held one stone in each hand—rose quartz in one and blue apatite in the other. Despite the fact I’ve never been to a medium, or had a palm reading, or even dabbled with tarot cards, there was a sense of déjà vu to my meeting with Boyer. I mentioned that to her, and she said she got chills. I asked if the Beatles creative energy lingered in room 810 of the Crowne Plaza Cabana Hotel. “Yes,” she said, “we can feel their presence here. But … we can feel it anywhere. They’re accessible to anyone who seeks them.”
On the Revolver track “I’m Only Sleeping,” released a year after the Beatles stayed at the Cabana, Lennon warbles, “When I’m in the middle of a dream, stay in bed, float upstream.” It’s a song that taps into the dreamlike feeling of existence. We can float upstream through life in a dreamlike state, and then we’re handed an object—a cigarette or a piece of costume jewelry—from a mythical figure, be it John Lennon or Little Richard. These artifacts ground us in reality. This isn't a dream. This is actually happening. Fans seek deeper connections with their favorite artists—whether they’re shrieking outside of a hotel for Ringo or Jimin from BTS. But what we really gain is connection with each other. When Herb Caen dashed off that letter to a teenage girl in 1965, he never could’ve guessed that it’d lead to that her son tracking down the hotel room decades later; the Beatles never could’ve predicted that a corporate Silicon Valley hotel chain would turn their room into a tourist attraction; and I never could’ve predicted that I’d get to talk to a death-row lawyer about her sister, all because of a cigarette. On the Beatles’ last album, John Lennon wanted us to come together over him, and all these years later, of course, we still are.