Brian Epstein had two ambitions: to be a dress designer and/or an actor. The one thing he wouldn’t do was the one thing expected of him: to go into the family business.10 There were heated discussions about it whenever Harry and Queenie visited him at Wrekin. Finally, when Harry said he must, Brian (by this point 16) removed himself from Wrekin six months before sitting his School Certificate, the decisive exams for which his entire traumatic schooling had been designed. At Christmas 1950 he was home in Liverpool under a black cloud.
Harry felt he knew his eldest son. He said dress-designing wasn’t manly; Brian didn’t budge. He said it was a ruthless uncertain business; Brian didn’t budge. He then said Brian stood very little chance of being the best, at least not for a while—indeed it was likely he’d be unemployed. The defenses of a boy who’d one day concede “I loathe being second best at anything” were breached.11
He started at I. Epstein & Sons in the opening days of 1951, as a £5-a-week salesman, bottom of the ladder. His zayde (grandfather Isaac) was still there at 73, arriving at 6AM every day and holding firm to his ethic, “The fair deal is the right deal.” Brian was 16, fresh-faced and prone to blushing, but he had sound principles, faith in the shop’s stock, was receptive to guidance, and was a natural-born seller. On his second day, a woman came in to buy a mirror and Brian sold her a dining table—“because I honestly felt she would be better off with a dining table.”12 He found he was good at gaining people’s confidence, that his manners and sincerity bred effective communication and his BBC voice broadcast it. He also confirmed an instinctive flair for display, rearranging the furniture artfully and seeing the effect of linking presentation to selling. As he put it, “I think if you show the public something lovely, they’ll accept it.”13
In November 1952, a manila envelope fell on the carpet at Queens Drive. It was Brian’s call-up. Everything in and about his character explains what kind of a time he had during his stint in the British army. Effete, effeminate, slight, shy, elegant, cultured, artistic, cerebral, temperamental, unphysical, dramatic, nicely spoken, middle-class, Jewish, with a history of walking out or being expelled from schools … he was all this and more. He was mentally and physically unsuited to the mind-numbing “square bashing,” to the brutal agonies and bullying disciplines, and to the rude, crude, insensitive Tommies in his barracks. Above all, he was oh-so-easy meat for the sadistic regimental sergeant majors (RSMs). One day Brian was at home in Childwall, the next he was in bleak barracks at Aldershot, and the shock to his system was total.
Out of this grisly period in his life, compensations would emerge. Being with so many thousands of other men, he heard whispers about homosexual activity in London. Private Epstein S/22739590 angled for a posting and got one by spring 1953—he was moved to Regent’s Park Barracks. The bullying was nonstop appalling but the location a dream—a mile from the West End with its galleries, theaters, art-house cinemas, restaurants, pubs and clubs. Brian explored the capital for the first time and reveled in its culture. He’d later say he didn’t go near the bars and clubs he’d heard about “but I became aware of other homosexuals everywhere I went.” He also wrote that he had no physical encounters while in the army, and still didn’t know “the facts of life.”14
The Epsteins had relatives in London, in St. John’s Wood and Marylebone; when he could, Brian went to his Aunt Freda’s apartment off Baker Street for Friday-night Sabbath dinner, shedding his army tunic in favor of an elegant suit, shirt and tie, spotlessly shiny black shoes and bowler hat with a furled umbrella. Returning to barracks late one night in April 1953, he was put on a charge of impersonating an officer. By New Year 1954, Brian had been seen by five army psychiatrists who concluded it would be best for everyone if this soldier was given an honorable discharge on “medical grounds.” On January 27, 1954, ten months earlier than due, he sprinted to Euston station and the train home.
Little by little now, Brian explored Liverpool’s other nightlife—a necessarily complex, secretive netherworld of diversion and danger. Every city had its hangouts for “queers” or “poofs”: this or that public toilet, specific areas of certain parks, or, for the bold, particular pubs or bars on a given night of the week. Brian peeled back the lid and joined in. What’s known is that he liked younger men, but the majority of his encounters were with men of violence, often working-class laboring types who might physically as well as sexually assault him, and sometimes only the first. The slang was “rough trade,” and Brian was a slave to it. He had an emotional compulsion to take risks, especially if he was drinking (Scotch was his favorite). He was often beaten, several times blackmailed, and would have very few meaningful relationships in his life, mostly torrid flings and one-night stands. He was a man of many companions destined always to be alone. He despised the way he was, sometimes really hating himself for it, and yet, for all the guilt and pain these moments brought, his appetite was rarely less than voracious. He was usually (to use his own words from a private letter) “hot for sex.”
This wasn’t all Brian did. He attended every concert by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, was a regular at every theater, and took up amateur dramatics. There was also a shift toward the performing arts at work: Harry wanted him to make a sideways move, literally, from Epstein’s to Nems, the shop they owned next door. As well as pianos and sheet music, Nems now sold household electrical appliances and records, and this sector of the business was strongly on the rise in postwar Britain. Nems needed a fresh mind and new energy, and so Brian began his first association with the record business, initially one of acquainting himself with the repertoire, the London companies and their traveling salesmen, ordering stock and bringing his design ideas into the window.
In December 1954, at EMI’s annual Christmas party inside the great Number 1 studio, Oscar Preuss picked up the microphone and announced his retirement, effective the following March. He was always telling his assistant “recording is a young man’s business,” and now that assistant took over Parlophone. At 29, George Martin became the youngest A&R chief in England. A further piece of Preuss advice would also echo in his protégé’s mind: “With artists, if you ever get any thanks, it’s a bonus.”15 George’s new salary wasn’t a whole lot better than before, but he needed whatever he could get. He and Sheena now had a daughter, Alexis; they’d also taken out a mortgage on a semidetached house—and because it was in Hatfield, twenty miles north of London, he had to buy a car. Funds were so tight, George had considered a job offer from Decca, and might have taken it had he not been promoted.16
As head of Parlophone, George Martin would have to cope with rock and roll and all the other “five-minute fads” (as everyone called them) certain to emerge from America. He’d also have to keep pace with technological change. EMI now issued some LPs as prerecorded tapes, and there was another disc format, the seven-inch extended-play (EP), which typically featured four songs and, like a miniature LP, sold in glossy picture sleeves with notes on the back. Then, on April 4, 1955, the day George took charge at Parlophone (he had the knack of good timing), EMI demonstrated the “Stereosonic” LP—records for people with two ears. Mass-market release of stereo was still some time away, but it was coming.
These changes were managed from central London premises rented solely for EMI’s record division, on the top floor of 8–11 Great Castle Street, just behind Oxford Circus. Abbey Road was left entirely in the hands of technicians and administrators, and the recording managers shuttled between the two places.
Other EMI changes were also afoot, including the appointment of a new chairman. Joseph Lockwood’s business background in international flour mills seemed unsuited to the rigors of running an electronics company with more than thirty thousand employees worldwide, but Lockwood was an industrialist of vision and vigor. One of his first duties was to complete EMI’s $8m (£2.8m) purchase of the American company Capitol Records, Inc., which went through in January 1955 to the shock of the music businesses on both sides of the Atlantic.
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sp; The takeover was reported in each country with local emphasis. Melody Maker enthused, “A new field is open for a greater distribution than ever before of EMI ‘popular’ records in America.” Billboard stressed that Capitol would “continue to be operated by present management.” And so it was. Though sold to the British in good faith by its founders, there always seemed to be corporate resentment in Hollywood that this hip label should fall into the hands of Limeys, with their sober suits, derbies, umbrellas and don’t you know, old chap. Capitol Records was American to its core, from its Washington DC logo (four stars orbiting the Capitol dome) to its array of illustrious sophisticated artists. The British were just overjoyed at this rare reversal of musical fortunes. The NME glowed that “the power of England in the American recording industry will be vastly increased. British personalities of interest to Capitol will [have] their discs released in the US …” This was notice that Capitol would have automatic first pick for America of any contractually available EMI record, a system known as “first turn-down option.” Turned out to be an apt name.17
In April 1955, as George Martin took up the reins at Parlophone, Harry and Queenie Epstein made a substantial investment in their eldest son. Brian was straining at the leash, wanting to hold a position of responsibility, to run things his way, so they opened a shop that he alone would manage, fully in charge of its design, policy, purchasing, sales and the hiring and firing of staff. This was Clarendon Furnishing, located in Hoylake, on the west side of the Wirral, and he stocked it with G-Plan furniture, Parker Knoll armchairs and bedding. It was a changing of the guard for the family businesses: Isaac had died in February and in his place Brian and Clive were appointed directors and shareholders, with Brian also company secretary. They were 20 and 18, and more than capable. The Hoylake & West Kirby Advertiser’s report on Clarendon’s VIP opening noted the shop’s layout, furnishing and decoration and said it “clearly indicates the influence of an Epstein with a pronounced artistic flair … and to this may be added a refined technique in salesmanship.”18
Clarendon returned a profit in year one, but its young manager remained restless. Outside work, Brian was becoming immersed in the stage, appearing in amateur plays and socializing with the actors at the Playhouse and Royal Court, the big theaters in the heart of Liverpool. He expressed regret to Playhouse actors Brian Bedford and Helen Lindsay that he couldn’t be like them, saying he’d left it too late to become an actor; they said he hadn’t—he could apply for a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the nation’s foremost theater school, in London. Brian decided he would.
All hell broke loose inside 197 Queens Drive when he told his parents. Clarendon had been designed as Brian’s baby, where he would finally settle and justify his worth. Now, after just nine months, he wanted to chuck it in and disappear off to London—to act!—discarding his responsibilities as manager, director, shareholder and company secretary. Harry was incandescent; why couldn’t Brian be like his younger brother Clive: steady, capable of staying the course? Even Queenie, Brian’s ceaseless defender, struggled to understand her son’s reasoning (though she soon came around to it).
The full details of what happened next aren’t known and probably never will be, but two documents, both dated February 21, 1956, survive to tell the meat of the story. The first is the RADA application form, sent with the prospectus Brian had requested by post a day or two earlier; the second is his handwritten Last Will and Testament, the existence of which exposes the intensity of events, a dramatic direction in this crisis about drama. It’s a single sheet of paper on which he bequeathed his “artistic possessions” (books, records, theater programs) to a friend, his clothing to the State of Israel, and the remainder of his estate to his family. He directed that mourning last no longer than seven days, and that Kaddish (the mourning prayer) not be recited in his memory. He ended by wishing that his parents and brother “know of my eternal love for them.” It’s the only will known to have been made by Brian Epstein, but as it wasn’t witnessed, it wasn’t legal; it remains today what it was then, a cri-de-coeur from a highly strung, emotionally raw young man with suicide on his mind.19
How the situation calmed isn’t clear, but Brian made no known attempt to kill himself, didn’t complete the application, and stayed on as manager at Clarendon. Harry had won the mind games … but the heart play was another matter: Brian kept the RADA documents at hand, and the thrill and pull of the stage grew ever stronger, especially when he spent his summer Sundays in a spacious flat in Gambier Terrace taking one-to-one acting lessons from Helen Lindsay. In September 1956, Brian initiated new correspondence with RADA, using the Hoylake shop address, and as a result—despite the domestic firestorm it must have rekindled—he arrived in London on the 19th to audition for academy principal John Fernald. He passed the exam and accepted an offered place on a two-year full-time course to start on October 1.
Brian had frittered his father’s trust and support to dedicate himself to studying the stage. Would he make the grade at last, after years of academic failure? Also crowding his mind was the subject he rarely mentioned: in London, any variety of thrills and dangers lay before him, closet worlds into which he could slip with anonymity. He rented an expensive flat in Bayswater, and (as far as his spotless dress sense would permit) tried to blend into capital life.
George Martin was in the St. John’s Wood studio most days, learning his trade on Parlophone’s panoply of recordings and, whenever he could, experimenting with tape. He produced much classical music (the London Baroque Ensemble and others), jazz (Humphrey Lyttelton, the Kirchin Band and many more), children’s music (Mandy Miller’s Nellie The Elephant left its imprint on a generation), vocal music (Eve Boswell, Edna Savage and many more), electric guitar (Bert Weedon), light orchestral music (especially Ron Goodwin, the most musically fruitful association of George’s career), Scottish music (accordionist Jimmy Shand was his top act), and also comedy and novelty records.
In November 1952, two years after joining Parlophone, George had produced a multilayered voice recording by the actor and wit Peter Ustinov; it wasn’t a hit, but not every issue had to be, and he was allowed to make further such records when he saw fit. When The Goon Show took off on radio, its voice artists came to the attention of record labels, and for three of them (Peter Sellers, Michael Bentine and Spike Milligan) that label was Parlophone, an ever-welcoming shelter for unconventional minds. George loved The Goon Show, its zany humor dovetailing with his own; together, he and its creators rose magnificently to the challenge of bringing eccentric musings to disc, records that the show’s legions of fans would enjoy time and again.a
George also had success with a singer who’d scored a rare British hit in America. That was in 1948, when Dick James was signed to Decca; by 1953 he’d switched to Parlophone and split his career into two elements: performing (stage and studio), when he wore a wig, and publishing (plugging for one of Tin Pan Alley’s best music men, Sydney Bron), when he was bald. George produced several records of jolly party medleys in which Dick sang old favorites and an audience of happy-clappy Londoners whooped in the background; none charted, but the genre was popular enough for James to have his own shows on Radio Luxembourg, Sing Song Time and Sunday Singsong with Dick James. Then, out of nowhere, in 1956, he suddenly scored an enduring British hit, singing the theme of the ITV serial The Adventures of Robin Hood. The recording needed the kind of problem-solving George was now doing on a regular basis. “I really wanted the ‘William Walton sound’ of all those arrows going through the air. I actually got an archer in and put microphones all the way down Number 2 studio and had him fire an arrow past them and into a target at the other end—and it sounded awful. In the end we got the right noise by jamming a wooden ruler on the end of a desk, and going ‘doinngg’ with an elastic band on a mike, and slowing it down.”20
After a few awkward moments in his early years, George mastered the record producer’s greatest challenge: how to bring the best out of artists. He be
came naturally good at tact, diplomacy and artful flattery, at letting singers and musicians think the great ideas he’d just planted in their heads were theirs. But it was always a win-some-lose-some job, the catalogs dotted with failures. George tried to produce R&B with the Southlanders, a London-based vocal group from Jamaica whom he signed to Parlophone on the industry-standard penny-per-record contract. He rushed them into Abbey Road in April 1955 to record “Earth Angel.” His wasn’t the only cover version of the US vocal hit by the Penguins—it was standard practice that several different recordings of the same song competed for sales. George’s production was fair and faithful but it lacked the qualities of the original and so typified almost all attempts, by all British A&R men at all record companies, to replicate what was unmistakably an American sound. You could get singers to sing and musicians to play the dots, and the studio equipment was sometimes worse and sometimes better, but a key ingredient—feel, soul, energy, vitality, all of them in shades—perpetually lacked in the covers. There’s really no better way to describe it than “they sounded British” … and you knew that could be bad.
The music that people called “pops” wasn’t quite George’s forte, but he had to stay tuned in. He kept close relations with publishers, who in turn had connections of their own, and by this method in early September 1956 came a hot tip: George should get himself down to Soho, to the 2i’s Coffee Bar, and check out a young cockney singer called Tommy Hicks. George felt the boy’s talent was mostly visual, of little use to him in the recording studio, but he did like the backing group and offered them another of those penny contracts … which was how George Martin became the first A&R man to sign a skiffle group.
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