by Peter Brown
chapter Three
Even if there were something to be ashamed of,
if it were true and it were known and it were published,
I would not complain. I am extremely fond of the truth ...
—Brian Epstein
A Cellarful of Noise
1
When I, Peter Brown, first laid eyes on Brian Epstein, he was no stranger in a strange land; he was an anomaly, a puzzlement to his family and a bizarre and hideous joke to himself. In the predominantly Irish-Welsh city of Liverpool, where the Nazis’ nightly bombing hardly seemed to temper the ingrained anti-Semitism, Brian Epstein was not only from one of the city’s most visible Jewish families, but he also kept a secret so dark and unheard of that for most of his life there wasn’t a single person with whom he could discuss it: he was homosexual. Now, while such things were more commonplace in the larger, more sophisticated cities in the world, in the grim, hardworking northern city of Liverpool, as the eldest son of a devout Jewish family, Brian Epstein thought himself a freak. Unable to find anyone like himself, degraded by what he saw as a long series of social and academic failures, filled with a gnawing sense of disappointment and defeat, Brian sought physical satisfaction in the saddest of ways.
One night, when he was twenty-five years old, he set out in his shiny new cream and maroon Hillman California automobile for a public lavatory he frequented in the Liverpool suburb of West Derby. Sitting behind the wheel of his beautiful automobile, Brian Epstein did not look like a young man who would know of such places. He was a handsome but slight young man with a patrician air about him. His wavy brown hair was kept perfectly trimmed and combed. He was usually dressed in a hand-tailored suit, Turnbull and Asser shirt, and a silk foulard about his neck. His imperious manner and elegant dress made him seem older than he really was, a callow twenty-five. As he had done many times before, he parked his automobile down the street from the circular concrete public loo, shut off the engine and waited, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel impatiently. He waited for a long time until a man appeared walking down the street. He was burly and older than Brian, dressed like a longshoreman. The man stopped for a moment outside the loo and then went inside. Brian locked his car securely and followed him in.
This time when Brian solicited the man at the dank urinal, he did not retire to the shadows of an unoccupied booth with him. Instead, Brian was severely and mercilessly beaten and left lying on the floor of the loo. His money, watch, and wallet were stolen.
Brian ran sobbing to his car and drove frantically to his family’s large, imposing home at 9 Queens Drive, Childwall, terrified at what he was going to tell his parents. Brian turned first to his mother, Queenie Epstein. Brian had long ago learned that he could confide and confess anything to his mother, and she would not only love and forgive him but persevere to find a solution. A tall, attractive woman of keen intelligence and indomitable spirit, there seemed nothing beyond her power to make things right for him. But this time the problem was beyond even Queenie’s ken. He had just finished telling her a slightly edited version of the incident when the phone rang in the lounge; it was Brian’s assailant from the public lavatory. The man had recognized Brian’s name as that of the son of a prominent family and suggested that his silence about the encounter was worth more than the watch or the wallet. In return for keeping his mouth shut about Brian’s proclivities, the man wanted money.
Queenie Epstein immediately rang up the family solicitor, Rex Makin. Makin was a small, spindly man with crooked teeth and a prosthetic ear, who had been living just next door to them for many years. Cynical and dour, Makin had handled certain legal chores for the Epstein family before: “Washing their dirty laundry,” as he put it. Queenie and Brian went to see him right away, and Brian shamefully told Makin his story. The solicitor was not the least bit surprised. He had already helped Brian out of trouble in similar circumstances in London. Anyway, Makin had always thought the Epstein family a little strange. “Hadn’t the grandmother thrown herself off the roof?” Makin asked. Makin insisted that the only solution was for Brian to go to the police and report the incident.
Now mortified beyond his wildest dreams, Brian repeated his pitiful story for the Liverpool police detectives, who avoided looking him in the eye as the tale progressed to its inevitable end. The detectives asked him to cooperate in setting a trap for the blackmailer. Brian was told to return home and wait for his antagonist’s phone call. He was to agree to pay the man whatever sum he wanted and to arrange a rendezvous with him as soon as possible.
Late the next night in the deserted Whitechapel business district of downtown Liverpool, Brian stood trembling in the shadows of a shuttered shop. A few minutes after the appointed time, the man from the loo appeared across the street and approached Brian. As soon as he demanded the money, Brian gave a prearranged signal to the detectives who emerged from their hiding places and arrested the man.
The ensuing court trial nearly destroyed Brian. It was of small consolation to him that he was referred to only as “Mister X” during the proceedings, an English judicial tradition to protect the identity of blackmail victims. With the help of Brian’s testimony, the blackmailer, who turned out to be a married dockworker with a criminal record and a predisposition to “fag-bashing,” was convicted of blackmail and sentenced to prison. As they led him from the courthouse, he swore vengeance on Brian when he was released. Brian, near physical and emotional collapse, was ordered to see a psychiatrist by the court, but Brian knew it was of no use. No one could figure out who or what he was, least of all himself.
2
Brian Epstein was the great pride of the union of two wealthy Jewish business families. His mother, Malka Hyman, was the pretty and vivacious daughter of the rich and social Midlands family that owned the famous Sheffield Cabinet Ltd., a mass producer of middle-priced dining and bedroom sets. Educated at a Catholic boarding school, the Yiddish name Malka—literally Queen—was anglicized to Queenie. Despite her parochial education, she remained a devout Jew and like a good Jewish girl, when she was eighteen years old, she married a prominent Jewish bachelor from the north—a man eleven years her senior. Harry Epstein was also from a wealthy family in the furniture business. His grandfather, Isaac Epstein, was a Polish immigrant who opened his first furniture store in Liverpool at the turn of the century. Due to the easy credit terms, many struggling Liverpool families had a chair or sofa or piano that was at least partly still owned by I. Epstein and Sons. By the early 1930s, when Harry and Queenie were married, the stores had expanded to a larger building on Walton Road and incorporated the North End Music Store (NEMS), which sold sheet music and instruments. As Queenie’s dowry the couple were presented with an imposing five-bedroom house in Childwall, the best suburb of Liverpool, on a broad, tree-lined boulevard called Queens Drive.
It was into this grand house, with thick carpets and attentive servants, warm fires, and a sense of superiority, that Brian Epstein was born on September 19, 1934. From the start Queenie had eyes for no other. Although she would love her second child, Clive, born twenty-one months later, he never held for her the same fascination as Brian. In Brian’s tastefully decorated nursery, with his nanny and his expensive toys, no outside harm, not even the German blitz, seemed to be able to intrude. When the bombings started, he was whisked off to another beautiful house in the relative safety of Southport. He developed into a spoiled, moody, anxious child, his mother’s little darling and the incarnation of Little Lord Fauntleroy. His taste for elegance and grand style emerged early, and even as a little child he loved dressing up and going to expensive restaurants. He soon learned that if something was less than perfect, Queenie could make it so with the wave of her hand. When Brian was six, Queenie discovered that he had a slight squint in one eye and took him to the hospital to have it surgically corrected, although it was during one of the heaviest bombing periods in Liverpool. A friend of Queenie’s asked, “The bombs are falling, what are you worried about a squint for
?” But Queenie said she couldn’t stand it. It made Brian less than perfect, and she saw it every time she looked at him. In the hospital Queenie sat by his bedside all night, hovering over him protectively as bombs fell all over the city. When the hospital refused to provide a bed for her, she slept sitting up in a hard-backed chair placed at Brian’s side.
At the age of ten he was expelled from the Liverpool College, an exclusive private school, for drawing obscene pictures. Queenie defended her artistic son by claiming he was only drawing the frontispiece of a dance program, but she was asked that he be removed anyway. Secretly, she was happy to have him leave; she was positive that Brian was being expelled because he was Jewish. She suspected that the school had to keep their quota down. Indeed, Queenie saw symptoms of anti-Semitism everywhere. It was a common excuse when things did not go well with the outside world. She instilled this paranoia in Brian, and it became the leitmotif of his life; whenever Brian felt different because of his homosexuality, he equated it with anti-Semitism, and reacted violently to both.
A string of schools and unhappy departures followed, until Brian had attended seven schools in all by the time he was fifteen. It wasn’t until he was enrolled in Wrekin, a school in Shropshire, that he took a liking to dramatics and seemed happy for a time. But it was also from Wrekin that Harry and Queenie received a letter from him that said, “I know you may not be very pleased with this, but I have decided to leave school to become a dress designer.”
“You can’t imagine,” Queenie said, “the effect a letter like that had on Harry. He was so upset.” Queenie, nevertheless, stood staunchly by her son and insisted that Harry make inquiries into the possibility of an apprenticeship for Brian with a top Parisian designer. The venture quickly proved beyond the Epsteins’ influence, however. Harry, exasperated, gave Brian an ultimatum that Queenie was happy for him to accept: Brian was coming home, where he belonged, to work in the family furniture store on Walton Road.
For Brian it was a fate worse than death. At sixteen he was a thin, insolent, pink-cheeked young man who saw himself condemned to life as a furniture salesman for £5 a week. He hated everything about the shop, the old-fashioned, sturdy furniture and the dowdy, credit customers on Walton Road to whom he had to be pleasant and charming. Worst of all he had to put up with the zaydeh, Isaac Epstein, his grandfather, who still arrived to open the store every morning at six. Epstein had built the store by his sweat and blood, and he wasn’t about to let any grandchild—especially one who wanted to become a dress designer—tell him how to run his business. One morning Epstein arrived at the store to find that Brian had placed all the furniture in the windows with their backs showing, because it was “fashionable,” and Brian soon found himself working at the Times Furniture Company, where his father secured him a job safely away from his grandfather. He wasn’t fated to be there long in any event. On December 9, 1952, he received notice to report for the national service.
The army tried to incorporate Brian, but he seemed to only irritate it, like sand turning to a pearl in an oyster. After basic training in Aldershot, Queenie and Harry made some calls and arranged for him to be stationed in London at the smart Albany Barracks on Regent’s Park. This also located Brian close to Queenie’s sister, his Aunt Freda, who lived in London. Brian would report to Aunt Freda’s for dinner every Monday night and on Tuesday morning Queenie would call for a complete report on his progress. On Friday nights, Queenie happily arranged for Brian to have Sabbath dinner at his grandmother’s London home. He was once confined to barracks for impersonating an officer, but it wasn’t an intentional offense. He returned to the barracks one night in his cousin’s grand car, dressed so elegantly in his handmade suit and bowler hat that he was saluted by all the guards. When it was discovered it was Epstein—the only private not to make officer candidate training—he was brought up on charges. No matter; in less than ten months the army made a major discovery about Brian that precluded his further service as far as they were concerned. Brian phoned Queenie to say he was being discharged for medical reasons. Queenie, worried about his health, rang up the officer in charge and demanded to know on what grounds her son was being discharged. The officer replied evasively, “Psychiatric grounds.”
“But what is exactly wrong?” Queenie insisted.
The officer’s voice lowered somberly, “Oh, the poor, unfortunate man ...”
The final irrevocable truth that Brian was homosexual shattered Queenie.
In her mind there was no use denying whose fault it was; it was hers, and she would pay dearly for it all the days of her life. Harry, who was less prepared to be understanding, let alone share the blame, drew closer to his younger son, Clive, who was successfully serving in the army. Queenie made a proclamation: from then on, whatever Brian wanted was his. They would move mountains to make him happy, to help him find his niche.
On his return from the service they opened for Brian his own branch of the family store in Hoylake, where he was allowed to sell modern furniture from London and display it with the backs to the window. Lo and behold, much to the credit of Brian’s ingenious marketing devices and good taste, the store became an overnight success. Within a year profits were approaching those of the Walton Street store. The Epsteins breathed a sigh of relief and were just settling into a sense of security with him when Brian suddenly announced he had another farfetched scheme; he wanted to act. He had always loved the theater, and recently he had made friends with some of the players at the Liverpool Playhouse, which was a noted repertory theater. One Saturday night after a performance, in a bar frequented by the actors, Brian Bedford, then a young star, had casually encouraged Brian to go to acting school. That was all the suggestion he needed. In just weeks Brian quit the Hoylake store and auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, perhaps the most selective of all British acting schools. Brian surprised even himself when he was accepted. Queenie and Harry saw Brian off at the train station with heavy hearts.
Brian was a dedicated acting student with some talent, but his teachers found him irrationally emotional. There were times when he was doing a scene that he would get so carried away he would break down into uncontrollable sobs. Although on the whole he seemed to blend in easily with the other students, he found that he did not like the world of acting, let alone other actors. After spending a fortnight in Stratford with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he became completely disenchanted with the profession. “They were really frightful,” he wrote later in his autobiography, “and I believe that nowhere could one discover such phoney relationships nor witness hypocrisy practised on so grand a scale, almost as art.”
Nevertheless, Brian stuck with RADA for three terms, and might have even gone back for a fourth, if he hadn’t run into a little embarrassing trouble. He had been observed by a policeman in a public park, who had followed him into a public loo where he was arrested for “importuning.” When Brian called to break the news to Queenie, she was stunned that anything this horrible touched their lives. Rex Makin was dispatched to London at once, and the solicitor quickly and quietly settled the legal problem and sent Brian home. Brian spent a few weeks in Liverpool but insisted on returning to London to attend another semester at RADA. On the Sunday night before his departure, at a family dinner at the Adelphi Hotel, one of Brian’s favorite spots, Queenie begged him to stay home in Liverpool, and on the verge of tears Brian finally relented.
His decision to rejoin the family business happened just when Harry was expanding the stores again. With Clive home from the service, he was opening another division of NEMS in the city center on Great Charlotte Street. Brian even arranged for singing star Anne Shelton to appear at the grand opening. Clive was in charge of the appliance department, as he had requested, because of the booming new business in TV sets. Brian was to run the small record department on one side of the first floor. Brian loved music and had already worked part-time in a record store in London when he was attending RADA. He took to this new challenge with unexp
ected gusto. The record industry was also expanding at a giant rate due to the invention of new record players and improved recordings. The sudden skiffle and beat music craze had created a large, new buying audience in teenagers. Since promotion and display were his forte, and he had an uncanny knack of picking hit songs, he felt he had found his niche, for a time. He invented his own inventory system using different colored strings and folders to keep the store well stocked, and he kept immaculate records. He prided himself on having the most extensive stock in the North, and slowly, but steadily, the record department began to branch out. It went from two to four to ten employees by the end of the first year and had pushed Clive’s TV sets into a small part of the building before taking over two complete floors. To his parents’ enormous pleasure and not a small amount of pride, the record division turned into a substantial portion of NEMS income.
Brian’s personal life still remained bleak. He had few friends and none that Queenie really approved of. I was actually a friend of his older brother, Clive, and had heard much about Brian from him. We were introduced at the birthday party of a mutual friend, where Clive and Brian arrived in black dinner jackets after attending their parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary at the Adelphi Hotel. Brian had a standout personality; it was obvious that he was very special from the start. Yet despite all his social aplomb and convivial conversation, I remember thinking that if one scratched the surface one would find a very unhappy man. When Brian heard that I was the manager of the record department of the Lewis department store just across the street from the Great Charlotte Street NEMS store, Brian became intent on hiring me away. He would visit me almost every day in the Lewis record department, trying to lure me across the street to NEMS, while keeping a careful eye on my merchandising techniques. Finally, he offered me a much higher salary plus a handsome commission to boot if I took the job. My parents, who were middle-class Roman Catholics who lived in Cheshire across the Mersey, thought my going to work for the Epstein family a disastrous move. I had completed my service in the Royal Air Force and a management training program at Lewis’; my corporate future seemed assured. Here I was giving up a solid job in order to toil for small Jewish shopkeepers.