by Peter Brown
I was almost immediately brought for an audience with Queenie and Harry. Although Harry was distant, and I had to lie to him about my age because he didn’t think twenty-two was old enough to be a store manager, Queenie and I liked each other instantly. She was imperious yet warm, a special combination of Jewish mother and monied Englishwoman. She was very well read and just as well spoken. In turn, I could see she was favorably impressed with my own good manners and seemed most delighted that what she mistook for a West End accent belied my childhood in Bebington. My first week as manager of the NEMS record shop I became something of a hero with the family. I spotted a young shoplifter putting a record under his jacket and chased him out the door and down the street, where I collared him and dragged him back to the store by the scruff of his neck. “I just apprehended this man,” I announced coolly to the assembled employees. When Queenie later heard the story she nearly applauded, and soon I became a trusted personal friend of the family as well as an employee.
Brian was a great pleasure but also a great puzzle. He was frequently depressed and unhappy and often drank too much. He began to have minor car accidents, which upset Queenie enormously. His mercurial temper was as unpredictable as it was sometimes vile. His temper tantrums were infantile at best. One moment he’d be sweet and charming, as no one else could be, and the next moment some little thing would set him off into a red-faced, screaming fit that made people run for cover. Worse was Brian’s icy, acid coldness when something personally offended him. There was nothing as horrifying as Brian’s silence.
One night after work we went to have a few drinks at the local pub, and Brian told me his big secret. He told me the story of the man he solicited in the men’s room and the subsequent blackmail attempt. He was very disturbed about all this because he said that soon the man was going to be let out of jail. He was obviously petrified that the man would make good his threats for retribution and come after him. I told Brian I thought it was unlikely and not to worry, but the man’s release began to haunt him. “What if?” he kept saying. “What if?”
Queenie saw all the warning signs of Brian’s disintegration and decided to send him away on an extended holiday until he got his perspective back. This vacation coincided with the time Brian’s blackmailer was going to be let out of jail. In early autumn of 1961, Brian went by himself to the south of Spain for six weeks. When he returned to Liverpool that October he seemed like a man on a precipice, waiting for something to happen, terrified, fascinated, alone.
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It was not long after, on October 28, that a young lad named Raymond Jones, dressed in a leather jacket and tight jeans, walked into the Whitechapel branch of NEMS about three o’clock in the afternoon. Brian liked the look of the boy, and instead of letting a salesperson help, he approached the boy himself.
“There’s a record I want,” Jones said. “It’s called ‘My Bonnie,’ and it was made in Germany. Have you got it?”
“Who’s it by?” Brian asked.
“You won’t have heard of them,” Jones replied. “It’s by a group called the Beatles.”
A little research by Brian soon uncovered that this was a single recorded in Hamburg by Tony Sheridan, who had befriended the Beatles on their second Reeperbahn trip. Sheridan had a brief burst of popularity in England as a rock star, appearing on the only TV pop-music show of the time, “Oh Boy.” He had recently fallen on hard times and wound up a Bruno Koschmider employee at the Kaiserkeller. In Hamburg he recorded a single for the Polydor label, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” backed with “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The Beatles were asked to play backup as “The Beat Brothers” and were paid £25 each for the session. Brian also learned that the “Beat Brothers” played just around the corner every day at lunchtime at the Cavern Club. Since the Cavern was only 200 yards away from the front door of NEMS, and as he had never been there, he decided to go over and take a look himself.
On November 8, with his usual style, Brian phoned ahead to request a VIP admission to the club, not so much to save the shilling admission but because he was afraid of being turned away at the door for lack of a leather jacket and tight jeans. Dressed in a suit and tie, he gingerly descended the eighteen greasy stone steps down into the Cavern Club. Beneath the street level an incredible scene unfolded before him. The three arched brick tunnels that comprised the club were a subterranean pit of writhing teenagers. At least 200 youngsters were crowded into the narrow passageways, dancing, shouting, wolfing down a soup and sandwich lunch served out of the Cavern kitchen, while they listened to the rock and roll being performed on the stage.
There in the center tunnel on a raised platform was a sight that galvanized him. It was in the most specific way a personification of his secret sexual desires. On stage were four young men dressed in leather pants and jackets. They played good time rock and roll and joked with each other with macho camaraderie. Brian stood in the shadows at the rear of the club, transfixed, until their forty-five-minute set was over. He fell first for the handsome, moody drummer, then for the boyishly pretty guitarist, then finally for the tall, skinny one who bobbed and squatted as he recklessly strummed the chords, nearly tearing his pants. Then, in a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment, he heard the mellifluous voice of the disc jockey, Bob Wooler, announce that Brian Epstein was in the club. He said that the owner of NEMS, the city’s largest record store, had dropped by for a visit. The news was greeted with a mixture of applause and catcalls, and Brian self-consciously sank further into the shadows. He managed to pluck up his courage enough to push his way through the rowdy crowd to the bandroom, a tiny cell behind the stage where he tried to introduce himself to the band members. He said hello first to George Harrison, who sarcastically asked, “What brings Mr. Epstein here?” But Brian himself didn’t know.
Back at the record shop all Brian could talk about were the Beatles. He ranted and raved about them to anyone who would listen. They were wonderful, he said, just wonderful. The music was the best he ever heard of any beat group, loud and crazy and driving, and they were so much fun to watch, there was some infectiously happy feeling about them. Within a few days he started popping back down into the Cavern Club to watch them. Sometimes he went alone, sometimes with an employee of the Whitechapel Street store named Alistair Taylor, who was surprised one day to hear himself introduced as Brian’s “personal assistant” in an effort to impress the band. For to impress them seemed to be the only way to get their attention.
After their initial meeting, it became clear that Brian and the Beatles had nothing whatsoever in common, and the boys would only pay cursory attention to him as the owner of the big record shop. He was six years older than the eldest of them, a vast difference to them at the time, and they came from opposite ends of the social and economic scale. He spoke differently, looked differently, and had different interests. But he could impress them with his position as the Epstein scion, and with his shiny new Ford Zodiac automobile, and by ordering a mind-boggling 200 copies of the song “My Bonnie” by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers and plastering their name across the window of his record store in letters a foot high. Yet one question remained unanswered: What on earth did he want with them? In the deep core of his soul, only Brian knew the answer. He wanted John.
Harry and Queenie knew nothing of Brian’s new infatuation. They were away on a trip to London when Brian first discovered the Beatles and returned home to find him more agitated and excited than they had seen him in years. He sat them down on a sofa in the living room and put a record on the phonograph. Out came a terrible, incomprehensible sound. Then came the shocking news; Brian wanted to manage this noise, a rock group called the Beatles. Harry was furious with him for weeks. Just when he thought Brian had settled down with the record store, he was off on another farfetched scheme that would take him away from NEMS, and just when the store was so successful too! Brian promised it wouldn’t take much time away from NEMS, but no one really believed him. Queenie sighed with resignation an
d gave it her blessings, with reservations. She knew best it was no good arguing with him. When Brian got an idea into his head, there was no stopping him.
Brian next went to Rex Makin for legal advice. Makin, who thought he was inured by now to Brian’s wild schemes, found his proposal to manage the Beatles preposterous. What did Brian know about managing a beat group? It was ridiculous, he proclaimed, and the Epstein boy was hopeless.
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Brian wasn’t hopeless; Brian was obsessed. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t be dissuaded by what others saw as so futile a pursuit, it was that he couldn’t be dissuaded. His fascination for the Beatles, part sexual, part showman, had transformed itself into a near-religious experience for him. Something seemed to come over him when he just mentioned their names. When Brian went to see Allan Williams to check up on them, Williams noticed that Brian not only blushed, he sweated when he talked about them. “He was hypnotized,” Williams said. He warned Brian that the Beatles were thieves who had ripped him off for £15 per week commission. “My honest opinion, Brian, is this; don’t touch them with a fucking bargepole.” But Williams’ badmouthing had no effect at all.
Brian arranged his first formal meeting with them on December 3, 1961. They were asked to come to the Whitechapel NEMS at four-thirty with Bob Wooler as their adviser. Brian had fantasized the meeting in his head for hours, like a well-rehearsed play. He imagined the four young men would be ushered through the store into the lift and up to his modern office on the third floor by his “personal assistant,” Alistair Taylor. They would find Brian sitting behind his immaculate desk looking important and in control, the picture of a smart businessman. After his assistant served coffee and tea, Brian would announce his desire to manage them. Then they would discuss a contract. Brian was prepared to promise them a recording contract from a London record company. He didn’t think it would prove a very difficult task, considering the importance of the large retail record business NEMS did with the record labels. He expected the boys to be so impressed that they would agree to sign management contracts immediately.
But four-thirty came and went, and there were no Beatles. It was a Wednesday and early closing, and all the employees went home and left Brian in the store alone. After a time it got dark out, and Brian stood in the shadows of the large appliances, peering anxiously out the window. Finally, after an hour, when Brian had decided he was being stood up, John arrived with Bob Wooler. They had obviously come by way of several pubs and were quite happy. Pete Best and George didn’t arrive until even later, and Paul was still missing. Brian, trying to contain his temper, asked George to phone Paul’s home and find out what was wrong. It turned out that Paul went home after their lunchtime Cavern gig and was still cleaning up. “He’s having a bath,” George informed Brian candidly.
Brian flushed. “This is disgraceful,” he proclaimed angrily. “He’s very late.”
“And very clean,” George added.
It soon turned out that the recalcitrant but hygienic Paul McCartney was only one of the many impediments to implementing Brian’s fantasies. Paul was, from the start, the most skeptical and questioning of Brian, a situation that only deepened as the years passed. Paul was very competitive by nature and keenly aware of any edge John might be gaining over him in the group. It wasn’t hard to notice that Brian stammered and averted his eyes when he spoke to John, and this worried and irked Paul, especially because he always considered himself the attractive one.
Paul’s father was equally suspicious of the “Jew boy” who wanted, it turned out, 25 percent of the boys’ hard-earned wages. Brian cleverly requested a personal audience with Jim McCartney. He found that selling himself and his dreams for the Beatles was far easier than selling some of the furniture in the Walton Street store. The senior McCartney’s reservations soon melted in the face of Brian’s warmth and persuasiveness.
The hardest nut to crack, however, was Aunt Mimi. There was nobody as tough as Mimi. She had heard all about young Mr. Epstein with his fancy suits and his expensive car and his money and passing fancies, and she didn’t mind letting Brian know about it either.
“It’s all right for you if this group turns out to be just a flash in the pan. It won’t matter,” she told him when he went to visit her at Mendips. “It’s just a hobby for you. If it’s all over in six months it won’t matter to you, but what happens to them?”
Brian shook his head. “It’s all right, Mrs. Smith,” he assured her passionately. “I promise you, John will never suffer. He’s the only important one. The others don’t matter, but I’ll always take care of John.”
Six weeks later, at a table at the Casbah Club, Brian and the Beatles signed a formal agreement that Brian had written himself with the aid of a sample contract he had purchased through the mails. Rex Makin had proved too contrary to help make up the contracts for him, so Brian simply mailed away for a standard one. In fact, the contract wasn’t really valid; Paul and George were both under twenty-one and needed a guardian’s signature to make it legal. And in all the excitement of signing this oddly marriagelike document, Brian forgot to sign his own name.
Once Brian took up with the Beatles, everyone at the store noticed a drastic change in him. At night his elegant suits would disappear into the closet and out would come newly purchased black turtleneck sweaters and a black leather jacket that was an imitation of the boys’ clothes. Brian couldn’t have looked more inappropriate in these outfits, for his elegance and polish showed right through the teenage disguise. For a while he even tried combing his hair forward like the Beatles, until he realized they were laughing at him behind his back. He began to pick them up in his car and drive them to jobs, allegedly in charge, but really just tagging along with them, fascinated by their world.
On one of these nights he learned from where the boys got their seemingly boundless energy. Their amphetamine habits had not ended with their Hamburg days, and, save for Pete Best, all the boys were ingesting powerful pharmaceutical diet pills they bought on the black market. Desperate to be accepted as one of the boys, Brian started taking them, too. Queenie couldn’t help but notice when he arrived home late at night that his eyes were bulging and glassy and that he couldn’t stop chomping on his tongue or licking his lips.
However the Beatles might have changed Brian’s appearance and nocturnal habits, they didn’t affect him in spirit. Within weeks of their contract signing they began to receive typed memos from him about their stage act, written in a brisk, businesslike tone, much like the memos received by the employees of the NEMS record stores. While it was understood that Brian would have no say over the boys’ music, he insisted that they refashion their stage image. Brian was, after all, best at showmanship, and the boys were hardly professional looking. What might be entertaining to a crowd of hooligans on Matthew Street would certainly turn off the large audiences Brian had in mind. Brian insisted, for starters, that they neither eat nor drink on stage, although he didn’t seem to be able to stop them from smoking. There was to be no further horseplay, either, no affectionate arm punching or inside jokes and mumbled dialogue. From now on they would know exactly what songs they were going to play and in what order, before they went on the stage.
Brian even insisted, much to John Lennon’s revulsion, that they forsake their leather and cowboy boots in order to wear identical suits. Although this was a brilliant stroke on Brian’s part, developing a striking visual image that was to become a trademark for them, John hated the idea and tried to convince the group not to do it, telling them it was selling out. Suits and ties were the antithesis of the Beatles’ public identity. Surprisingly, Brian found an ally in Paul. Paul, as it turned out, had a good sense of showmanship himself, and furthermore, in his very bourgeois way, he cared about what people thought. Most of all he understood appearances and public relations. With Paul’s encouragement the group gave in, and Brian ordered them gray lounge suits with velvet collars from a Liverpool tailor. Now, as far as he was concerned, they were all ready to
record.
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Early in Brian’s explorations to secure them a recording contract, he wrote a letter to a record reviewer on the Liverpool Evening Echo named Tony Barrow, asking him to mention the Beatles in his column, since, according to Brian and the Mersey Beat music paper polls, they were the most popular group in Liverpool. Barrow wrote back saying he couldn’t mention them because they had not recorded in England; however he did recommend Brian to someone at Decca’s Artists and Repertoire department. At Decca, the mention of NEMS, the largest record retailer in the North, got Brian instant attention of a sort; a young assistant named Mike Smith was sent to Liverpool to hear the group play. Smith was impressed enough with their performance to offer them an audition in Decca’s West Hampstead studio.
The boys were ecstatic at the news and confident that fame and fortune were the next easy step. The audition was scheduled for New Year’s Day of 1962, and early on a snowy New Year’s Eve, they piled into the back of Neil Aspinall’s van and set off to London. Neil had never driven to London before, and he got lost in the heavy snowstorm. The boys huddled together for warmth in the back of the frigid van for ten hours before they arrived at the hotel Brian had booked for them, the Royal on Woburn Place, at a cost of twenty-seven shillings a night for bed and breakfast. The boys spent New Year’s Eve wandering around the freezing streets, taking in the sights, dreaming of the audition the next day and of what 1962 might bring. They couldn’t have imagined.