Sunday Review: Good Ol' Freda

Good fortune

By Morris Dean

This week a fortune teller told me I was going to watch a film that night about a Mexican painter. I said, "No, I'm not. I'm watching Good Ol' Freda [2013, directed by Ryan White]. It's about the Beatles' secretary, Freda Kelly." The fortune teller said, "Ah, my mistake. I thought I was seeing the name Frida Kahlo."
    Freda Kelly was 10 when Kahlo died in 1954, and only 17 and barely out of secretarial school when the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, hired her to be his (and the Beatles') secretary. The Beatles were not much older and were still playing almost daily gigs in Liverpool's Cavern Club, where Freda first heard them and liked them so much she returned again and again and became a familiar face to the lads, who in those days still included Pete Best on drums.

Ritchie (as Freda remembers Ringo), Freda, & George

    Epstein himself was only 26 (and would die six years later). But if anyone had any inkling of the Beatles' imminent take-off it might have been Epstein. Freda says in the film, though, that none of them had any idea. Who could have?

    When Epstein asked Freda to set up and manage a fan club, she gave it her home address, never imagining that the post office would fairly shortly be delivering so many bags of mail a day her dad would complain he couldn't find the water bill.
    Freda opened the mail, formulated replies for all occasions, and distributed the replies to John, Paul, Ringo, and George to sign as they were sitting around doing nothing much. She was still managing the fan club's mail even after the Beatles went their own separate ways ten years later – the fans weren't ready for the Beatles to end. She was still dealing with some fan mail after she'd left and moved onto another secretarial job, doing it on her own time as she could manage. All of the mail got answered.

Freda & Paul

    Freda wouldn't acknowledge that she was "great" (see the tagline on the DVD cover). But she was certainly good – and loyal, discrete, and hard-working – qualities, along with self-effacing, that gave Freda the distinction of being the only employee Epstein never fired. (He re-hired a number of the ones he did fire; he was "mercurial.")

Freda, back at The Cavern (the museum) for ol' times' sake

    Good Ol' Freda was as "unputdownable" as any film I've seen, which was an unexpected pleasure, this quiet, almost domestic behind-the-scenes look at the Fab Four. To me, too, they've remained more The Beatles than John or Paul or Ringo or George.
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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

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