When They Were Boys

by Larry Kane

  In those days, an alleged scandal would have destroyed the boys, especially in the puritanical 1960s of America.

  What would have happened in this unfortunate and erroneous close call if the minds had not moved quickly, if headlines had overwhelmed the group, if a phony report of “trouble” backfired?

  It is in those moments, when the forces of human nature can overwhelm the big picture, that you have to vividly appreciate the Beatles’ handlers, led by Brian Epstein.

  Over the years, I have argued and laughed with dozens of press secretaries to mayors, governors, and even presidents. In truth, I have never met anyone quite as classy, direct, and protective of his clients than Tony Barrow. He set a standard that few have gotten even close to.

  When it came to expertise with press and messaging, the boys were so fortunate to have not one, but two masters of the art, both as different as night and day. The second man was more suave and Beatle-like than Barrow. He had a different style, but they both shared one common gift: total loyalty. Together, their impact on the Beatles’ success was impressive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  PEN PAL #2—DEREK TAYLOR

  “I tell you, Larry, that this is the greatest band ever. In the past, now and forever, as Brian says, people will still be listening to them in the next century.”

  —Derek Taylor, speaking to me on the Beatles’ chartered American Flyers airplane, August 1964

  “I’ve always had a connection with Derek. In a way, Larry, he was encouraging to me. . . . I think he understands where I came from . . . if you know what I mean. He is really a friend.”

  —George Harrison, to me during the 1965 tour of America, where Taylor was replaced by his colleague, Tony Barrow

  HE LIVED A LIFE OF EXCITEMENT AND DRAMA, but it was what Derek Taylor did in the early 1960s that made his mark—proof of how what some key members of the press witnessed and wrote created the imagery that allowed the Beatles to prosper at such an accelerated pace. The fact that two journalistic giants later traded in their typewriters for flak jackets to protect and serve the Beatles became even more meaningful. Tony Barrow was first to join Epstein’s team, followed by Derek Taylor. The latter was press officer in America in 1964, while Barrow covered the home front and the rest of the world. In a strange turnabout, Barrow covered the 1965 tour and Taylor moved to America and became an independent press agent.

  In 1966, in a lounge at the Deauville Hotel in Miami, Derek Taylor and I reunited over a few drinks, and lots of talk. Taylor was probably the smoothest and most entertaining reporter, news professional, and communications executive I had ever met. While Tony Barrow fought for and protected the Beatles forcefully and without fingerprints, Derek Taylor was effusive and blunt. Sometimes, to some of the Beatles, he was a little too blunt. But while he could be a bit on the wild side, he was fantastically entertaining—though “entertaining” is a pure understatement. While Tony Barrow was intense and absolutely serious back at the home office in London, or on the 1965 and 1966 tours, Taylor was a show within the show. And the show continued on that spring evening in ’66.

  “Larry, I tell you, the Byrds may be bigger than the Beatles.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “Really? How could that be?”

  “Just listen to the music, and watch them.”

  “I doubt it, Derek.”

  “I know. But just watch.”

  One wonderful talent that Derek Taylor possessed was his skill as an illustrative writer. And his writing abilities and mastery of the language made him a dynamic promoter throughout his career. In the next year after our meeting in Miami Beach, he managed to create the imagery that the Byrds were indeed a decent challenger to the Beatles’ early legacy, even though they really were not. He subsequently helped create the image of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys as a developing musical icon, and practically made the early career of the eccentric musical artist Harry Nilsson. The rest of Taylor’s remarkable career had him joined with such high-level groups as the Rolling Stones. Such were the talents of the smooth, extremely well-dressed, and strikingly handsome Derek Taylor, a man whose words, along with those of the distinguished Mr. Barrow and the demonstrative and prolific king of the home front, Bill Harry, created the early spark for the boys. There is no question in my mind that the words of Derek Taylor, Bill Harry, and Tony Barrow catapulted the Beatles. Taylor may have had a fleeting public relations affair with the Byrds, but in his life, it always came back to the Beatles.

  He was a most interesting man.

  If Derek Taylor could sing, his looks alone might have made him a pop icon. Of course, he was in room 1742 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, a room packed with musical and other celebrities, when John Lennon put to music the song “Give Peace a Chance,” a song that was played over and over again by antiwar activists in the early seventies. It appears that Taylor was singing, but it doesn’t really matter. He used his expertise, now back in the Beatles sphere, to publicize and uniquely promote one of the most familiar peace songs of all time. The date was June 1, 1969, and Taylor was now with the Beatles’ new Apple Corps. He told me then that the Beatles were “on their way to being the all-time standard for music,” his beloved Byrds notwithstanding.

  When Apple became embroiled in legal warfare in the seventies, Taylor moved on to even more groups. Once again, he came back to the nest, resuming work for Apple Corps in the 1990s until his death in 1997. In between those assignments, he did everything you could possibly imagine in the music business, including, much to my surprise, a short stint as a radio reporter in the Bahamas, visiting the Beatles as they filmed the movie Help! in February 1965. I was also there, doing the same job for my station in Miami. Sadly, Taylor, who had ghostwritten Brian Epstein’s biography, helped George with his own national newspaper column, and supported the boys through thick and thin—a lot more thick than thin—got a rude welcome. He told me about it, and along with Beatles roadie and friend Malcolm Evans, we commiserated in a bar on Bay Street in Nassau, the first time I had seen him since he resigned as Beatles press officer at the end of the 1964 tour.

  “Paul was a shit, pure fucking shit to me,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s a long story, so piss off, Larry, and get your own interviews.”

  “I will.”

  “Fuck off. But on the other hand, can I use some of your interviews?” Taylor was now a “reporter,” and Paul didn’t like it.

  “Of course!” I answered. “You can borrow any of my interviews.”

  When I emphasized “borrow,” he laughed and hoisted another drink.

  I laughed very hard, and so did Mal Evans.

  Paul was irritated because Taylor was using his knowledge of the boys to acquire interviews and dig up stories. There is an irony to that point of view.

  In one of his wonderful books, As Time Goes By, Derek, still hurt after all these years, wrote about his encounter with the Beatles during an assignment for KRLA radio in Los Angeles to raise money for his hoped-for public relations and marketing company.

  “Paul was very mean in the Bahamas. I mean, mean,” Taylor recalled.

  Who is to blame him for feeling that way? Taylor remembered Paul saying, “Bloody hell, Derek. You with a tape recorder asking us questions?”

  And what about John’s reaction?

  “I took John first . . . ‘caustic’ John, who was really nothing of the sort. He pulled a couple of desultory put-downs and then gave me as good a tape as you’ll get if you’re asking questions like, ‘Whereja buy your boots?’”

  George gave him a warm interview, talking about a wedding he attended; Ringo talked about marriage, and Paul. As he always did, Paul came around, giving Taylor an interview on songwriting. As Taylor remembered, “Paul decided not to be mean any longer, guessing correctly that life was bad enough without rubbing my nose in it. . . .”

  But Taylor felt uncomfortable about his assignment for KRLA. For all the swagger and charm that I ha
d witnessed Taylor display while traveling with him, he was emotionally devoted to the boys, a devotion that lasted until he died.

  It was, after all, Derek Taylor who defied conventional wisdom and wrote a column in the Manchester Daily Express about the Beatles’ performance at the Odeon Theater. As an “older man,” in his thirties, Taylor shocked his bosses with his writing of the young group. If he liked them, would other adults fall in line? The piece was a big catalyst in their success. It was Taylor whose pen was mightier than the power of all those early promoters. He didn’t help the Beatles get a recording contract, like Tony Barrow did, but, in love with their music and style, the extremely honest pressman chronicled and fanned the flames of their dramatic rise. He eventually made his peace with Paul McCartney, and with the help of Neil Aspinall, worked for Apple until his death.

  But back in Nassau, with him as a journalist again, we all understood what was happening. In that location, John and George were especially helpful. George had admired Taylor as a passionate friend from the beginning, and in Nassau made sure he got all the interviews he needed.

  One of the reasons Taylor had resigned as their press officer after the famous 1964 summer tour was that he had a falling-out with Brian Epstein, who felt that Taylor had become too close to the boys, and had a bit too much power. Taylor also realized that becoming “one of them,” as he had, brought a familiarity that could also breed contempt. And although he was the happiest human being in public, Paul McCartney was the self-appointed emotionless conscience of the group when it came to complaining about friends trying to exploit their success. Never mind that Derek Taylor practically put them on the map with his detailed, super-descriptive journalism for the Manchester Daily Express.

  And the man had ups and downs—with the most notable down being the falling-out with Epstein, who hired him to join his organization in 1964, and selected him to ghostwrite Epstein’s own autobiography, A Cellarful of Noise. There was a friction-filled relationship with Paul McCartney, whom he really admired. John was always respectful. George was really his friend, to the end. And toward the end, Taylor understood that the biggest part of his nonfamily life was the boys. It’s an irony, though, that they rode to triumph partly on his words. And the words of Derek Taylor, the reporter, will tell you all you need to know.

  In his collector’s-item book of 1984, Fifty Years Adrift, with George Harrison as editor, I found, along with some mentions of me (a gratifying ego boost), some extraordinary gems, including a nod to his wife, Joan, from the spring of 1963.

  “Joan’s recall of the events leading up to the ‘Night Our Brains Caught Fire’ [i.e., the first time they saw the Beatles] is more exact than mine. She first heard of the Beatles in late 1962 from her teenage sister Diane who still lived in Merseyside. Of all of the groups, Diane said, it was the Beatles who stood out. Indeed I had her say that many times before they became famous. Then Joan saw them for herself on Granada TV. . . . ‘They were astounding,’ [she said, adding that] they seemed so confident and appealing.”

  Taylor added:

  “There was nothing about them in the national press. . . . Time passed. The Beatles’ second single, ‘Please Please Me,’ went to number one. The event was not front-page news, nor were the Beatles. . . . To the west . . . Mersey Beat, a newspaper edited by the estimable Bill Harry, had everything covered; but we in Manchester were not going to be left out of this for much longer.”

  In several months, Derek Taylor would see it for himself.

  The Beatles had made an earlier appearance at the Manchester Playhouse in 1962, the night Pete Best was attacked with the scissors, the night Paul McCartney’s usually warm and generous dad Jim scolded Pete for taking attention away from the boys, presumably because he became a victim of attack.

  But their biggest date in Manchester was yet to come—May 30, 1963—as part of a national tour with American star Roy Orbison and Liverpool’s Gerry and the Pacemakers. The setting was the venerable Odeon Theater, and Derek and members of his family were there. Writing for the Daily Express, Taylor shocked his readers and his bosses with his review. The editors thought that, at the age of thirty-one, real adulthood, Taylor would be unfazed by the Liverpool music craze. The editors were wrong.

  In his book, Taylor recalls the night:

  “This beguiling and beguiled postwar generation of teenagers was about to see the greatest group of entertainers the world had ever seen. . . . Two hours later, it was over bar the screaming. Joan and I knew that something of extraordinary power had been acted out before our eyes. Went to the telephone and in a rush of blood and words to the head, I dictated the review without a note, just as it came, and they printed all but one paragraph of it.”

  The actual review, headlined “Derek Taylor Gaily Crashes Through the Liverpool Sound Barrier,” became a dynamic moment in the boys’ career. It was read throughout the nation on May 31 and after. It was written with the same “bite” and “edge” that Taylor displayed a year later as press chief for the boys and traveling companion to me and a lucky few on that insane 1964 North American tour. But who knew at the time that Derek’s words, vision, and expertise would lead to something else. The review was at once skeptical but prophetic. It read, in part:

  BECAUSE OF THE CITY OF LIVERPOOL, POPULAR MUSIC, AFTER YEARS OF TURMOIL AND UNSPEAKABLE RUBBISH, HAS BECOME HEALTHY AND GAY AND GOOD AGAIN. THE LIVERPOOL SOUND CAME TO MANCHESTER LAST NIGHT AND I THOUGHT IT WAS MAGNIFICENT . . . INDECIPHERABLE, MEANINGLESS NONSENSE. . . .

  THE SPECTACLE OF THESE FRESH, CHEEKY, SHARP YOUNG ENTERTAINERS TO THE SHINY-EYED TEENAGE IDOLATERS IS AS GOOD AS A REJUVENATED DRUG FOR THE JADED ADULT. . . . THE BEATLES AND GERRY AND THE PACEMAKERS WERE A FAIR-SIZED SENSATION. . . . THEY HAVE IN ABUNDANCE THE FUNDAMENTAL GOOD HUMOUR OF THEIR NATIVE CITY. . . . IT WAS REALLY THE BEATLES WE HAD GONE TO SEE. . . . WHEN THE NO-LAPELLED, SHINY BLACK SUITS AND THESE BLACK ROMAN HAIRCUTS APPEARED TO A CASCADE OF OUTRAGEOUS PRAISE FROM THE COMPERE [EMCEE], THE CINEMA WENT WILD. NOBODY COULD HEAR THEMSELVES TRYING TO THINK. THE ACT WAS LARGELY DROWNED, BUT IT DIDN’T MATTER AT ALL. IT WAS MARVELOUS, MEANINGLESS, IMPERTINENT, EXHILARATING STUFF.

  Taylor knew the music world would never be the same. He began covering the Beatles on a regular basis, and the column he wrote on Brian Epstein was another headliner. Epstein was formal to Taylor’s casual; careful to Taylor’s candid; and somewhat shy to Taylor’s brash command of the language. But Taylor was fascinated by Epstein’s intuition, and almost overnight turned the former retailer into a management sensation.

  On June 20, 1963, Taylor wrote in the Express, “Epstein, the brain behind the Beatles . . . Epstein knows a hit when he hears one, and twenty months earlier he heard such a hit [from the Beatles].”

  Taylor profiled the unlikely pop master, who at that point had signed the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas.

  Taylor wrote many stories about the boys, but perhaps his most significant piece, now read around the world, published on January 15, 1964. Dateline: Versailles: “As midnight struck in Versailles . . . the Beatles conquered the town, and by implication, France.”

  Next was the world. And after France, the United States was waiting.

  By the spring of 1964, Derek Taylor was a personal assistant to Brian Epstein, and in the summer he joined the Beatles on tour. The reporter suddenly became the man who protected the boys from other reporters. His relationship with them lasted thirty-four years in all.

  His most significant impact, though, was in the words he wrote—how he phrased them—and his wry but illustrative description of the boys and their music.

  When I think of Taylor, I think of what George shared with me one night: “Derek is the most honest person. We’ve always been close, always will be. . . . He taught me so much, some of it surprising, about life . . . things like the royal family’s original softness toward Hitler. . . . He taught me to just be myself . . . which I always tried to be.”

  Derek Taylor was a master
ghostwriter, especially for George. And during his early friendship with George, he learned quickly that George was more than just a musician. While John and Paul may have discounted George’s input, Taylor discovered early on that George was a heavy-duty thinker.

  During one of our soul-searching conversations on the meaning of life, and the meaning of the Beatles, Taylor made a memorable point.

  “Just remember,” he said, “[George] has enormous intellectual curiosity; he wants to know everything. I won’t go into detail, except to say that he has critiqued some of my writing attributed to him. That’s always a risk, but it’s worth it when you can have a candid talk and understand exactly what that person means. George may be the youngest Beatle and all that, but he is beyond his years in his values, and his pursuit of the truth, and I might add quite candidly, his ability to [be] direct and sometimes painfully honest.”

  George always had fond memories of Taylor, whom he helped profile in their joint book, Fifty Years Adrift. Taylor is an easy man to remember, a distinct personality, a man with a wonderful sense of the language and a pure instinct for when to intervene, as I remember from one of my first experiences with the boys.

  When I think of Taylor, I recall the time I met John for the first time. John, looking me up and down, asked me if I was a “nerd” from the fifties. I called him a “slob.” As I left the room, dejected about my first encounter with the boys’ founder, Taylor said, “Well, that was a fucking piss!” I laughed hard, then realized that I had erred. Moments later, John ran out into the corridor, hugged me, and apologized—very un-John-like.

  I will forever believe that it was Taylor who sent him out to make things right.

  Derek Taylor had another rare and important talent: he could calm down both the boys, and an audience of thousands, at the same time. His only unsuccessful attempt at this enterprise was his attempt to stop 7,000 fans from storming the stage in Vancouver, British Columbia, in August 1964. But a month later, in Cleveland, he was successful in addressing the audience. Frightened Cleveland police officials, with no real reason, surrendered to the hysteria of the crowd and shut down the concert. The Beatles were angry in the dressing room; the crowd was ready to explode. Taylor talked both City Hall and the boys into resuming the show. Then, in his smooth and charismatic way, he walked up to the microphone, addressed the crowd, and soothed them with a soft warning that they had to calm down so the Beatles could come back on stage.