As the trial progressed, Ellsberg, who died Friday, was running out of funds for his defense.
That’s where Barbra Streisand, the Beatles and other celebrities came in.
Streisand and activist Stanley K. Sheinbaum, who organized Ellsberg’s defense fund, decided to hold a fundraiser on Ellsberg’s 42nd birthday in April 1973. The singer invited scores of celebrities, including John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, who paid $250 each to attend, the Associated Press reported. The party marked the first public event featuring three of the four Beatles since the band’s 1969 breakup.
“I can’t ever remember having a birthday party like this,” Ellsberg said, according to the AP.
Partygoers sat on Hollywood executive Jennings Lang’s boarded-over pool in Beverly Hills, listening to Ellsberg and journalist David Halberstam speak and hearing Streisand sing.
They raised $60,000 — more than $400,000 in today’s dollars — by bidding to request songs, the AP reported. Director Peter Bogdanovich paid $1,000 for a Streisand rendition of “You’re the Top”; comedian Carl Reiner shelled out for “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
Streisand even sang a Beatles tune, ending her set on “With a Little Help from My Friends” as John and Yoko Lennon nodded along, Los Angeles Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber reported.
Asked about the chances of reconciliation in 1973, Lennon told the television station ITN that “the chances are practically nil.” A day later, he, Starr and Harrison attended Ellsberg’s birthday celebration.
Haber called the event “one of the best parties ever, with some of the best entertainment ever.” The attendees included “the New Hollywood’s liberal chic,” she said.
But Ellsberg’s trial loomed.
“Last week a reporter said to me, ‘I bet you’ve never had more fun in your life’ — never thinking of how a government trial can go on and on for a year and cost $1 million,” he told guests, according to Haber’s column.
A month after the party, the court dismissed the charges against Ellsberg because of government misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering in the case, including a White House-directed burglary of his psychiatrist’s office revealed in The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Watergate scandal.
Streisand later said the concert contributed to her inclusion in Nixon’s enemies list, a distinction she welcomed. The party preceded decades of increasing celebrity engagement in politics, from Sinéad O’Connor’s ripping up a photo of Pope John Paul II to Kim Kardashian’s push for criminal justice changes.
That trend included the Beatles.
Lennon, who would be assassinated by a fan in 1980 at age 40, was an outspoken antiwar advocate, including in song. Harrison held a benefit concert for a Transcendental Meditation-based political party in 1992, the L.A. Times reported; he died in 2001 at age 58. Starr has spoken out in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and told the BBC in 2017 that he would’ve supported Brexit. Paul McCartney, the missing Beatle from Ellsberg’s party, has long advocated for animal rights.
Despite their shared affinity for activism, it took decades after Ellsberg’s benefit for three of the quartet to reunite again, with McCartney instead of Lennon. The trio released a 1995 documentary titled “The Beatles Anthology,” featuring two previously unfinished Lennon compositions.