Tailor-Made Friendship With Beatles

For Angela Berns, it’s been a long and winding road.

Today she leads a quiet suburban life in Simi Valley. But there was a time when she fetched tea for the Beatles while her dad fitted them for their trademark collarless suits -- the very ensembles they wore on their conquest of America that began 40 years ago this week.

Like other rock musicians seeking finer apparel, the lads would come to Dougie Millings’ tailor shop on Great Pulteney Street in London’s Soho district. They would smoke, joke and fool around on the grand piano he kept for his clients’ pleasure.

Outside, star-struck girls would prostrate themselves over the sidewalk vents for an earful of whatever bons mots could be heard from within. As Berns recalls, those timeless phrases often were variants of “Bring on the fish and chips!”

Berns, 54, is an insurance claims processor married to a retired teacher. Her father died three years ago at 88. The same year, her son Scott, now 16, celebrated his bar mitzvah in a replica Beatles suit designed by his grandfather.

Berns, a lover of “Let It Be,” among other Beatles anthems, is not one of those fans who built personal shrines to the group; her affection for them, like the lining of a well-made jacket, remains mostly private.

She remembers the quickening of her heart as she gazed upon the Fab Four in her dad’s workshop, the thickening of her tongue as she tried to make small talk with Paul McCartney, the leap of pride she felt when the boys would give her a big hello.

“I’d think, ‘They’re talking to me!’ ” she recalled as she sat in her living room, which was free of Beatles memorabilia. “I hung on every word that came out of their mouths.”

Her father cut more than 500 suits for the Beatles, including the ones they wore on their epochal Ed Sullivan debut Feb. 9, 1964. Sometimes he stuffed scraps of material into envelopes marked John, Paul, George and Ringo so Angela could dole them out to her pals at school.

“I gave them all away,” she said with a rueful chuckle. “What a fool!”

Her dad also lavished her with perks from the moptops: backstage passes, autographed albums, front-row seats.

At a mobbed London concert, Angela sat next to a pleasant, middle-aged man.

“I’m George’s father,” he said.

“I’m Dougie’s daughter,” she replied.

It was in 1962 that Dougie Millings -- poet, pianist and Scottish regimental veteran -- took on his most famous clients.

Brian Epstein, the group’s manager, was seeking a more distinctive look for his charges, who not long before were performing in black leather jackets. When he brought them in to see Millings, who had crafted outfits for stars like Cliff Richard and Sammy Davis Jr., a new look was born.

“He spawned a revolution in menswear,” said Myra Walker, a fashion expert who curated a 2000 exhibit called “Rock Style” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Millings wove together fashion strands from numerous sources, including Pierre Cardin, who designed a collarless jacket as early as 1950, and the Italian tailoring of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack.

He added pearl buttons here, flared cuffs there. The jackets had braided edges. The pants were as tight as the group’s harmonies.

“Dougie Millings was influenced by everything that was happening in London in the early ‘60s,” said Walker, director of the Texas Fashion Collection at the University of North Texas. “His brilliance was that he could distill it all into what’s known as ‘the Beatles suit.’ ”

A Beatles suit cost the band about $90.

Sets of four, purported to be Millings originals, recently have been sighted on the Internet for as much as $250,000.

“My father could have milked it and pursued the financial side, but he didn’t,” Berns said. “If he had enough food on the table, that was enough for him. He loved his homemade soups, he loved his garden and he loved his music.”

When she was just 17, Berns was stricken with wanderlust and, with her father’s encouragement, she worked on an Israeli kibbutz for four years.

She wound up traveling half the world, eventually marrying and settling in California 25 years ago.

“I came to the U.S. with $550 and one suitcase,” she said, “and I didn’t look back.” But she made periodic trips back to London, checking in with her dad as he puttered about in his greenhouse, listening to the BBC.

She said he occasionally cut suits, until shortly before his death. In the delirium of one of his last illnesses, he sat up in bed, working with shears that weren’t there.

From time to time, Berns rummages around in the cartons of poetry her father left behind. He reveled in light verse, framing couplets like:

“The heart, they say, is quite hydraulic,

Makes you sad and helps you frolic ...”

In 1968, he published a thin, funny volume called “The Unzipped Muse of Dougie Millings.” In a book-jacket blurb, McCartney likened it to a sweet English snack, calling it “the best thing since jam butties.”

The Beatles called Millings “Dad.” They gave him a cameo role as, naturally, a tailor in their 1964 film “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Even decades after the foursome’s 1970 breakup, Millings and McCartney stayed in touch. When John Lennon was killed, Millings sent McCartney a poem, which the singer framed and hung on his office wall. When Millings died, McCartney sent his widow, Lilian, a bouquet and a note:

“We’ll miss Dougie,” it said. “Lots of love ... “

Millings left two children. Gordon, 58, runs his father’s old shop, making suits, not for rock stars but for members of Parliament and the like.

Now and then, he tells appreciative Beatles fans about his dad. He also is manufacturing ready-to-wear Beatles-style suits. “It’s the look,” he said. “It just won’t lie down.”

His sister agrees.

She spent some of the last year in a somber room awaiting radiation treatments for cancer. One day, she passed around an old photo of the Beatles with her family, and the other patients grew animated.

“Everyone had a story,” she said. “This one remembered standing in line at Shea Stadium; that one’s husband has cupboards full of Beatles sheet music. It really brought us together.”

Even Berns’ lilting English accent has been enough to spark Beatles musings from total strangers.

At a supermarket, a chatty clerk scanning Berns’ purchases learned she grew up in London and said: “Oh, I really did love the Beatles.”

In a hurry to get home, Berns kept mum on how the threads of her life had intertwined with those of John, Paul, George and Ringo.

“Oh, me too,” she told the clerk, smiling. “I really loved the Beatles too.”