Family Believes Mom Is Paul McCartney Fangirl

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“I don’t care what other people think!” I will love the Beatles forever and always will. Even when I’m 105 and an old grandmother, I’ll love them,” the young girl enthuses in the video. She has a thick New York accent, as thick as a patch of overgrown weeds in an abandoned lot in Flatbush, and her hair is pulled back under a black beret.

“And Paul McCartney, if you’re listening, Adrienne from Brooklyn loves you with all her heart. I love you, Paul! And please come to the window so I can see you. I saw you smoking before and I kissed the limo you got out of. But I love you and I want you, Paul. And Ringo, you can go out too, because I like you,” she gushes.

Adrienne’s video was filmed by CBS News in 1964, during the Beatles’ first visit to the United States. Although it has been making the rounds in Beatles fan circles for years, it was featured prominently in Ron Howard’s 2016 documentary. Eight days a week – The years of touring, and started making the rounds on TikTok last year. On Friday, Sir Paul McCartney responded: “Hey Adrienne, it’s Paul. Listen, I saw your video. I’m in Brooklyn now. I finally got here,” he says in the video announcing a Beatles photo exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. McCartney’s video went viral, with fans speculating in the comments about what had happened to Adrienne from Brooklyn, hoping she would stumble upon the video.

It’s easy to see why the music video has gained so much popularity. For anyone who has ever been a fan of a musician at some point in their life, who has screamed at the top of their lungs over their songs and cried over them on the bathroom floor, Adrienne from Brooklyn Ardor is the symbol of the fierce and eternal love between a teenager and their favorite pop star, which is so strong that nothing as quotidian as time, space, distance or the vagaries of the human condition can weaken it. For those looking for a heartwarming online story, the prospect of reuniting Brooklyn’s Adrienne with her idol seemed irresistible.

Now, after reviewing photos and video footage, as well as public records verifying various biographical details consistent with what we know about “Adrienne from Brooklyn,” rolling stone can exclusively reveal what is most likely the identity of the real Adrienne from Brooklyn — and while her story doesn’t deliver the ending Beatles fans and TikTokers likely expected, it’s nonetheless a testament to the tireless power of the fandom.

“When I saw it, when I heard it, I said to myself ‘that’s mom’,” says Nicole D’Onofrio. rolling stone SATURDAY.

A mother of four from Staten Island, D’Onofrio initially saw the interview with the young woman she believes to be her mother while browsing TikTok with her seven-year-old daughter. “I was like, wait a second. Play it again,” she said. She sent it to her three older siblings, including her brother John. “It looked like him and it sounded like him, with that thick Brooklyn accent,” John, a retired NYPD officer, told me. “We were like, oh my God, mom is Adrienne from Brooklyn.”

Adrienne D’Onofrio was born on July 29, 1951, the daughter of a Swedish father and an Italian mother. According to John, her father died when she was 11, and she and her two older siblings were raised primarily by their mother in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, then a predominantly Italian, middle-class neighborhood. “She never left Brooklyn,” John told me.

Because Adrienne’s mother worked long hours, John said, she spent a lot of time playing hooky and skipping school to see Murray the K at the Fox Theater. John says he vividly remembers her telling him about sneaking out of school to see the Beatles arrive in New York on their first trip to America, the moment which was captured in the footage emblematic of CBS News. “I remember her saying she was getting on the train to see them, and it was only a nickel, and if you had 50 cents you could get a hot dog for 10 cents and a packet of cigarettes,” he said.

Adrienne met her husband, Harry, a first-generation Italian immigrant, when they were both sophomores at FDR High School in Brooklyn. He was her best friend’s brother, and to hear Donofrio tell it, the two fell in love instantly, taking the subway to Coney Island to go on dates.

In 1967, when she was just 15, she became pregnant by Nicole’s older brother, causing her to drop out of high school. (They both eventually earned a GED.) Because the Catholic Church refused to marry Harry and Adrienne until they both reached the age of 16, they married in October 1967 and she gave birth to John in December of that year. She eventually had four children: Nicole’s two older sisters in 1969 and 1977, and Nicole in 1981.

Nicole says her mother threw herself wholeheartedly into stay-at-home motherhood, joining the PTA and cooking dinner for the kids every night while her husband worked for his father’s construction company. “She took us everywhere. She did everything for us,” she says. “She was the mother who helped with all the science projects. If she had a last dollar, it would be yours.

In September 1992, just a month before Adrienne and Harry’s 25th wedding anniversary, Adrienne was diagnosed with lymphoma. “The doctor said she had stage 4 cancer and she just gave up,” John says. “That was it. She didn’t even get a chance to get radiation. (She) called me and left me a voicemail: ‘Johnny, I’m dying.’ terrible.”

At the end of October that year, Adrienne and Harry threw a party for their 25th anniversary. In images from the party, she appears frail but happy in an oversized white fur coat, with her hair cut short. A few days later, John said, she developed pneumonia and was taken to Lutheran Hospital, where she fell into a coma. She died in 1992, aged 41.

“I had her until I was 11,” Nicole says. “But in those 11 years, she was more of a mother than anyone could be.” Their father Harry died of liver cancer in 2012.

After Adrienne died, the siblings say, they found all of their mother’s old Beatles records in the closet – the only records, John says, that their mother played in the house (although she also loved the Rolling Stones and Herman’s Hermits). One, John said, had “Adrienne and Paul” scrawled on the sleeve, a heart drawn around it. Adrienne had also given her niece commemorative Beatles coins celebrating their trip to the United States in 1964, photos of which were shared with Rolling stone.

Because Adrienne and most of her family members who would have been alive in 1964 are deceased, the D’Onofrios know that there is no foolproof way to confirm her identity. They also know that the tragic end of Adrienne’s life was not what Beatles fans expected, as Nicole’s husband, Mike, learned when he responded to a few fans on TikTok with details on the identity of his mother-in-law. “I felt a little bad being so adamant about it, whether people believed it or not, because she had passed away a long time ago,” she says. “And people seem really disappointed by that.”

On the other hand, Adrienne’s children are aware that there is perhaps no better testament to her mother’s short life than a 60-year-old viral video recorded in the prime of her life , in full captivity of the emotional journey that accompanies this stage of your life. life, when everything matters so deeply and nothing seems to change. For Nicole in particular, who is currently battling stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, stumbling across the video is like “getting a message from mom coming back saying: listen, I’m here, I’m here to watch on you,” John said. Adrienne from Brooklyn may not have lived to be 103 — but somehow, her teenage love for Paul will survive well beyond that. “It’s a nice new chapter in his life, after such a long absence,” Mike says.

As for how Adrienne from Brooklyn would have felt about her teenage obsession in response to his declaration of love, 60 years after the fact? “She would be delighted,” John said. But she would have to talk to my father about it. My father would have said, “Sir Paul had better talk to me before he talks to you.” »

Updated Saturday May 4, 2024, 6:44 p.m. An earlier version of this story stated that Nicole D’Onofrio had three children. She has four.