For some months, the London offices were used mainly as a press office and for the promotions staff, like Tony Barrow and Tony Calder. Andrew Loog Oldham also worked there for a while until the Stones, whom he managed, took off. Things were going so well that Brian got big offices in Argyle Street, next door to the London Palladium. As a kid, the biggest show ever on TV was Sunday Night at the London Palladium. For a star being on it was important; being next door wasn’t bad either.
Brian made an announcement in the Liverpool press that NEMS was basically moving shop to London and, very properly, he called us in one at a time to personally ask those he’d selected if they’d like to make the big move down south with him and the Beatles. He chose me and the switchboard girl, Laurie McCaffrey, and the accountant, who was a southerner. We were excited and all agreed to go. Then Brian called everybody together to announce who was going, and who would be staying to hold the fort in Liverpool.
We moved to London on a Friday and opened up the following Monday morning. It was as simple and as quick as that. Switchboard Laurie had such a good voice, a wonderful deep Irish-Liverpudlian brogue. She was the first voice that people heard when they called. Brian always said she was virtually irreplaceable. She was one who stayed on, all the way through Apple. Later, she was a big success as one of the first people to do voice-overs for Capital Radio, as well as their in-house ads.
At first, we were quite homesick. We found Londoners hard to get along with. They saw us as Scousers and wacks and witty scallywags, speaking a strange lingo that nobody seemed to understand. Silly expressions such as “fab gear” went over their heads, which was hardly surprising since much of the time we were just speaking our own rubbish to communicate. Otherwise, we might just as well have been from Iceland. It wasn’t until we had been living in London for about six months that I started being able to talk to people about normal things. In the 1960s, Britain was very regional. The BBC was very upper class, very London and county, definitely not provincial. People hadn’t really started to travel, not as we know it now. We had only one real motorway, the M1, which just about reached Birmingham from London. After that, it was all two lanes, not that it really mattered since few of our parents had cars.
Paul bought the first car in his family, but not until after he’d moved to London. Liverpool was the back of beyond, even to Londoners, a place sung about in sailors’ folk songs and sea shanties, like “The Leaving of Liverpool” and the one about Maggie May, the Liverpool sailors’ trollop. (Not the Maggie May whom Rod Stewart had in a tent at the first Glastonbury pop festival!) Brummie, Scotland, Wales and the West Country were all the stuff of comedy. The lower classes were still only one step up from the peasants, the rabble, the mob. The sixties’ revolution hadn’t started yet, so Lord knows what the rest of the world made of it all. I suppose that the novelty of it was part and parcel of the whole Beatles, Merseyside, Liverpool success story. It might have only been rock ’n’ roll and silly pop music, but it came at exactly the right time. Pot and the Pill went hand in glove. If the Beatles hadn’t happened, I don’t think the Pill would have been so widely used and accepted so fast. There would have been some kind of social embarrassment or embargo, which would have slowed down the pace of change. All this came about after we arrived in London. Looking back, the Beatles triggered a massive social and sexual revolution.
Brian’s early acts, quickly following on the heels of him signing the Beatles, were old friends of ours, all from Liverpool. Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer, Cilla, the Fourmost, Tommy Quickly and the Remo Four were the first to sign to NEMS at the beginning of 1963. Endless hits seemed to explode out of them that year alone. The Beatles had four, and the others had a couple each. It was astonishing, a hit factory—and I’m not talking a few thousand records that would represent a hit today, but millions.
Brian gloried in it all. He loved the hands-on element of booking his acts, negotiating the fees and making the arrangements. I think it made it all seem real to him, fielding the phone calls and answering all the inquiries like: “We want Gerry and the Pacemakers next Friday in Wigan; how much is it going to cost us?” But as so much started to happen, he could no longer do it. Once he was settled at the new NEMS he head-hunted various agents from other agencies to look after particular artists. He got Bernard Lee from the Grade Organization, and some people from Rik Gunnell’s office. Unusually, he paid these agents a wage instead of a commission.
It was now my job to go out on the road with whoever was touring. I was constantly on the move, acting like another pair of hands for Brian. In fact, that was how he introduced me: “This is Tony—he’s my second pair of hands.”
Just after we moved to Argyle Street a show was put on at the Palladium with the Fourmost, Cilla, Tommy Cooper and Frankie Vaughn, all NEMS acts. It was supposed to be a sort of interim show between the end of the summer season and the start of Christmas Pantomime, but it was such a success that it ran right through from March until December. I would pop next door to the Palladium in the evenings and learn stagecraft, lighting and rigging. I picked up all the knowledge, which was to come in handy when Brian bought the Saville Theater a couple of years down the road.
After the show I’d go to the Shakespeare’s Head at the top of Carnaby Street with Tommy Cooper, who was known for his stage outfit of dinner jacket and a red fez. Tommy, one of the best-loved comic magicians in Britain, loved a drink but he wasn’t allowed to have one before he went on. So he was watched very carefully. Sometimes he managed to get off the leash and slipped away to sink a few. Everybody could tell because he was larger than life, his show a little wilder, his laughter more manic, and his famous red fez more likely to slip down over his eye. One evening, the “boy” went by, shouting, “Three minutes, Mr. Cooper!” Nothing. Tommy was missing and people were in a panic.
He was discovered in a different pub than his usual haunt, playing darts and drinking port and brandy mixed. He was out of it, but brought back to the theater in time for his spot, given coffee and fanned with a towel. He usually set up his props himself before he went on but that night he couldn’t get it together so a stagehand had to do it. This poor guy tried to follow Tommy’s instructions but didn’t get it right. One of the props was a wicket fence, about thigh-height, with a gate in the middle that opened inward. The stagehand set the fence up back to front so the gate opened out. When it was time, the curtain came up, Tommy took a deep breath, strode out and opened the gate to walk through it. Of course it didn’t open but Tommy’s momentum kept him going and he went headfirst over the gate, landed on the stage in a heap, rolled over and sat up looking out past the footlights. The audience went wild. They just howled with laughter. They thought it was part of his shtick, and the more he tried to get up the more they laughed. Like any great comedian, he responded to the audience and was never funnier. When he came off he said: “I think I might keep that in.” Then he rubbed his back, had second thoughts and said: “No! Where’s that stagehand? I’ll kill him!”
Until the Beatles officially moved away from Liverpool, they and Neil, Mal and I were installed in the President, an unassuming hotel in Russell Square. Initially Brian also stayed at a hotel—a different one—but ultimately his lifestyle demanded privacy and he looked around for a place of his own. Perhaps it was the proximity of Harrods that attracted him to the modestly small though expensive flat in Whaddon House, a modern block in Lowndes Square, just behind the famous store in Knightsbridge. It was convenient to the tube, but Brian never traveled anywhere by tube. No, he bought himself a magnificent customized red Rolls Royce with monogrammed fittings and hired a driver, Reg, a rough and ready Cockney he fancied. He commissioned (for the cost of a country house) a top decorator to design a stark black-and-white theme for his flat, with fitted white carpets and black leather furniture. Lonnie, a black butler, was hired to cook meals and valet Brian’s extensive wardrobe. Finally emancipated from Queenie’s suffocating bosom, Brian was living the louche life he had alw
ays yearned for.
He has been described as being a country bumpkin, arriving in London as green as grass; but in fact he knew his way about. He believed that manners maketh the man, that the façade of dressing well and living a rich and luxurious lifestyle was not only the right way to go, but it would keep him out of trouble. It was this careful attention to detail, the posh speaking voice he had honed at boarding school, and his general courtesy that made the people he came to deal with in business think he was upper crust. In those days before a general breakdown in class structure, this was important and gained him respect and an air of authority. Because of this cultured veneer, no one guessed the doubts constantly gnawing away within him about his own ability, or questioned his decisions—some of which were to prove very damaging.
I liked and admired Brian enormously and in many ways was in awe of him. What he had achieved in a few months seemed little short of miraculous. Even the normally cynical Beatles were astonished. George had even said in an interview, and meant it, “Without Brian we’d be nowhere.” They all believed that and until his death blindly went along with whatever he suggested. It never occurred to them to question or debate his decisions. Even when, for example, with their growing fame and box office pull, they could have gone out for bigger fees, if Brian had confirmed a booking months previously for next to nothing, he insisted on sticking to the deal. “A gentleman never reneges on a promise,” he would say, noting how important it was to be known as a fair dealer. Through his fairness and honesty Brian broke the mold, the image of the crooked and devious manager.
And regarding his homosexuality, if he tried to hit on me, I never noticed. I think he was too wrapped up with his obsession for John. This had come to a head, but not peaked, during a strange little interlude that had taken place at the end of April 1963.
On April 8, in Liverpool, Cynthia had given birth to a baby boy, named Julian after John’s mother, Julia. John wasn’t there for the birth. The Beatles were in London, doing live radio and TV, as well as a concert. The popular legend is that it was a full week before John managed to sneak into the hospital, but we were in Liverpool on the ninth and tenth and he went to see the baby then, wearing as a disguise a silly hat and his heavy black “Buddy Holly” spectacles that made him look older than his years, more like a university professor. The glasses worked as a disguise because for ages, until he gained in confidence, he never wore them in public and people didn’t recognize him in them. (Paul’s regular disguise was a droopy stick-on Mexican mustache from a costume shop and a flat workman’s cap.)
The previous year John had said it felt weird “walking about married.” He had cringed at the thought of his mates seeing him with his pregnant wife and now he was embarrassed to be a dad. It made him feel old and settled down. To him marriage and parenthood and a baby pushed about in a pram represented everything he loathed—or more likely, was scared to death of. Later he would change, but perhaps it was because he was determined to show he was still a rebel that John did one of the most outlandish things he could think of. Almost three weeks after the birth of his son—whom he had seen only a couple of times by then—he agreed to go to Spain with Brian on a private holiday, while the other three Beatles flew to the Canaries for their spring break. I don’t think John told Cynthia what he was doing—he rarely told her anything—and he certainly wouldn’t have asked her permission. When she found out, she dissolved in tears, but she was scared of John and said nothing. To say we were astonished is an understatement. Much has been made of this trip. It was sun, sand and sea—but was it also sex?
John himself said he finally allowed Brian to make love to him “to get it out of the way.” Those who knew John well, who had known him for years, don’t believe it for a moment. John was aggressively heterosexual and had never given a hint that he was anything but. If it had been George, we might have believed it. George could act camp and had many homosexual friends, but John loved to say things to shock, and his sly statement was probably just another in a long line of such provocative statements. In fact, it was more in character for John to taunt Brian with promises during those long hot nights in Barcelona than to succumb. Equally, it was in Brian’s masochistic nature to enjoy being tormented, then perhaps to rush off in search of a young bullfighter. Brian adored bullfighters so much, he ended up sponsoring one. (And I think Brian would have confided in somebody if it had happened.)
After Julian’s birth, Cynthia left Brian’s flat in Falkner Street and moved in with Mimi again, to endure a miserable and cowed existence, avoiding Mimi’s sharp tongue and trying to keep the baby—who was a “screamer”—from disturbing the lodgers by sticking him in his pram at the end of the garden where he shrieked away unheard, while John spent most of his time on the road or in London staying in hotels. The next time he saw Cynthia was at Paul’s twenty-first birthday party in June, which, because so many fans were camped outside Paul’s family home, was quietly organized elsewhere. A big marquee was set up in the back garden of one of Paul’s aunts who lived across the Mersey from Liverpool and invitations were secretly sent out.
Despite the tours and the mob scenes, there was still a sense of innocence and “Is this really happening to us?” about their fame. Paul was delighted when the Shadows turned up at the party, even though his hero, Jet Harris, had left the band by then and wasn’t there. (Bruce and Hank were, and, I think, Brian “Liquorice” Locking, the replacement bass player.) Paul often said that if it weren’t for Jet Harris, who had been the original bass player in the Shadows, he would never have picked up a guitar in the first place as a kid.
“I can’t believe it,” Paul said, shaking his head. Then, as he considered, he said almost shyly with a toothy grin, “But we’re sort of like one of them now, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, only bigger,” I said. Paul looked at me doubtfully, as if I was pulling his leg. It still didn’t seem real to him that they were the biggest names in the United Kingdom—and shortly would be the biggest names in the entire world.
John said, as if surprised, “Hey, you’re right, we’re part of this now!” The thought made him and Paul laugh wildly, because it really did still seem a dream. That night everyone drank too much, especially John. Bob Wooler taunted him over his holiday in Spain with Brian, said he was a queer, and John saw red. He assaulted Bob, breaking his ribs and ending up with a bloody nose himself. Brian settled the case out of court for two hundred pounds—a large sum, equal to the amount the Beatles were currently getting between them for a big theater booking.
Cynthia’s woes accumulated when her mother heard of John’s success. She flew back from Canada to also move in with Mimi. Yes, it was a disaster. Unable to return to the family home in Hoylake that they had shared in happier times before Cynthia’s father had died because it was still rented out, Cynthia, her mother and Julian rented a shabby little bedsit in Liverpool at five pounds a week. It simply didn’t occur to Cynthia that as the wife of a pop star who was earning a fortune she could have asked for a beautiful house with a garden and a nanny for the baby. Neither did it occur to John, who was incredibly selfish, to ensure that she was comfortable.
The women were left behind in Liverpool, but with the rest of us in London, Brian rented an expensive though sparsely furnished flat in Green Street, Mayfair, behind Oxford Street, for the Beatles. A bleak, soulless place, it had beds but little else. I could never find anywhere to sit and the kitchen was always as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. They hated it so much, feeling quite the little boys lost and alone, that Brian moved them into a flat underneath his own penthouse in Knightsbridge. I rented a bedsit in Bayswater, a cosmopolitan district just north of Hyde Park, which was more a place to sleep and keep my clothes than a home. This didn’t bother me. I was never in.
Being around the Beatles meant I didn’t have to pay for very much. Accommodation, food and drink were freely offered wherever I went, Brian was generous with expenses and I spent most of my wages—by now upped to fifteen pounds a w
eek—on clothes. I bought several good suits, about thirty pairs of jeans and a remarkable sixty shirts, so many that I could wear two a day if I wanted without going to the Laundromat for a month. Pure luxury. Things seemed cheaper then, or perhaps it was just relative. The Beatles’ suits cost twenty pounds and their famous made-to-measure Beatle boots from Anello and Davide in Leicester Square were an outrageous seven pounds—which will now only get you three pints of beer.
Weekends in London could be boring. Work stopped on Friday night and the West End was dead, with few people, no traffic, shops that closed half days on Saturday and even the cafes closed. Sometimes on a Friday night I would take the tube up to Edgware where the main road north began and hitch a ride home to Liverpool to see Mum and all my mates and be there in about four hours for nothing.
Once down in London we were to find there were even more drugs, so easily available that we didn’t think they were illegal. They were sold openly at clubs such as the Scene in Soho, where people like Georgie Fame played. Certainly, to us, “wacky backy” was a naughty, but not an illegal thing to do. And while I personally didn’t use it, preferring to be more alert than dozy—my opinion—all four of the Beatles fell on pot like rabbits in a field of lettuce.
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