HE LOVES YOU, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH!
Paul’s call to ’64 Beatlemaniac ID’d as late mom
It was a long and winding road, but “Adrienne from Brooklyn” may have finally been found.
A bubbly teen who proclaimed her love for Paul McCartney in a famous 1964 film clip has been identified by family as Adrienne D’Onofrio, the late mother of a retired NYPD detective and a Staten Island mom, The Post has learned.
“I love the Beatles, and I’ll always love ’em, even when I’m 105 and an old grandmother,” the teen said with a distinctive Brooklyn cadence in the viral video, which was featured in Ron Howard’s 2016 documentary about the Fab Four titled “Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years.”
“And Paul McCartney, if you are listening, Adrienne from Brooklyn loves you with all her heart.”
Now, 60 years later, McCartney has finally responded in his own clip as he promotes a collection of rare Beatles-era photographs on display at the Brooklyn Museum.
“Hey, Adrienne, it’s Paul,” the rock legend said on TikTok. “Listen, I saw your video. I’m in Brooklyn now. I’m in New York. I finally got here. We got an exhibition, a photo exhibition. Come along and see it.”
D’Onofrio was first identified in a report by Rolling Stone magazine. Unfortunately, she died in 1992 at age 41, but her children — including retired cop John D’Onofrio and his sister, Nicole D’Onofrio Panepinto — said her adorable proclamation of love for the one-time rock ’n’ roll heartthrob has become the stuff of family folklore.
“I’m like, ‘What! That’s my mother,’ ” D’Onofrio said after seeing the 1964 clip several years ago. “It looked like her, sounded like her. I took a screenshot of it and sent it to my sisters. I go, ‘Is this mommy?’ And they were laughing.
They said, ‘Yeah, that’s mommy.’
“My mother always talked about the Beatles,” the 56-year-old former detective added. “She told us how she was outside the Ed Sullivan Theater. I remember that story vividly. She had played hooky.”
Panepinto, 43, the youngest of Adrienne’s four children, said the family stumbled onto the video in 2016 and her brother urged the kids to go public with the mystery teen’s identity.
“He was like, ‘You can do something with this,’ but we never did,” she said Tuesday. “We were like, ‘Nah. That’s just not who we are.’ It was just a nice thing for us.”
But that changed when they saw McCartney’s overdue reply to their mom.
“At that point, I’m like, ‘Wow, this is a sign. This is the sign to say we’re Adrienne from Brooklyn’s family,’ ” she told The Post. “I feel like it’s a sign. Seeing this now, it’s a sign from her that, ‘I’m still with you guys.’
“That’s how I feel. The truth is, she has been gone since ’92, and I have four beautiful kids, and this makes them connected with her through this story.”