Yet he was never quite at ease with them, always a little nervous of going into their dressing room unless to impart some further astounding piece of news. Even after all this time, for all his triumphs, a barbed comment from John could still cut him to the heart. George Martin remembers such a moment, late one night at Abbey Road studios while the Beatles and Martin were working on a track that stubbornly refused to come out right. “Brian appeared in the control room with one of his boyfriends—and did something I’d never seen him do before. When John had finished a vocal track, Brian switched on the intercom and said, ‘I don’t think that sounded quite right, John.’ John looked up at him and in his most cutting voice said, ‘You stick to your percentages, Brian. We’ll take care of the music.’”
The publicists he employed tended to bear the brunt of his possessiveness where the Beatles were concerned. Brian Sommerville’s tenure came to a stormy end on the first American tour when he committed the sin of being quoted by name in a news story about the band. Brian screamed at him, then tried to make him sign a written oath of anonymity in all future dealings with the media. Sommerville refused, dissolved his freelance arrangement with NEMS, and went off to read for the bar.
In his place Brian took on Derek Taylor, the Hoylake-born Daily Express reporter who had ghostwritten George Harrison’s articles from Paris. Among the Fleet Street scrimmage Taylor had caught Brian’s eye with his Italianate good looks and droll, idiosyncratic speech. He joined NEMS in April 1964, initially as Brian’s personal assistant. “I suppose it was because he fancied me that I got the job,” Taylor admitted, “even though, in all the time I knew him, he never so much as laid a finger on my knee.”
Earlier in 1964, Brian had agreed to write his autobiography for a London publisher, the Souvenir Press. Taylor’s first NEMS job, even before he had quite left Fleet Street, was to ghostwrite Brian’s life story on the basis of one weekend with him and a tape recorder at the Imperial Hotel, Torquay. The result was the evasive yet strangely honest self-portrait that he called A Cellarful of Noise, but those in his inner circle retitled A Cellarful of Boys.
As the Beatles’ press officer, for the first of three terms, Taylor stood in the firing line of Brian’s proprietorial obsession. “I’d been told he could be cruel. I only realized it when I came to organize a Fab Four press conference. Brian didn’t want it to work. If I made a mess of it, even though the Beatles would be in that mess, he’d be happy—because I’d gained no control over them. He said, ‘Go ahead—but this is doomed. I look forward to speaking to you about it afterward.’ I joined in April; here he was in May, treating me with massive cruelty.”
In 1964, during the Beatles’ second American tour, Brian met Nat Weiss, a pale, cautious New Yorker who until then had earned his living as a divorce lawyer. Over the next three years, Weiss became to Brian what a few male friends, like Joe Flannery and Peter Brown, were—an adviser, a confidant, and with increasing frequency, a means of rescue.
The Brian who revisited Nat Weiss in 1965, however, was still the languid, immaculate young Englishman who loved New York and its arrant luxury, who bought clothes extravagantly up and down Fifth Avenue, who had a weakness for the Waldorf Hotel, French toast, and American chef’s salads, and whose large intake of alcohol, especially cognac, seemed to produce only greater euphoria. “When he was high,” Weiss says, “he’d pile the furniture up. He’d put chairs on top of tables and then more chairs on top, just to see the effect. Moving furniture was always a thing with Brian.
“But however high he was, he’d never talk about the Beatles. I’ve seen him at parties when people tried to broach the subject. Brian would suddenly change—it was as if an icy shutter had come down.
“Anything he ever told me was in the strictest confidence, over lunch or dinner. To Brian, the relationship with the Beatles was something mystical—he himself used that word. He believed there was a chemistry between the five of them that no one else could understand. They weren’t a business to Brian: They were a vocation, a mission in life. They were like a religion to him.”
Weiss came as close as anyone did to Brian in those three tumultuous years. His memory is deeply affectionate, admiring, and perplexed. For with Weiss, as with even his most intimate companions, Brian Epstein defied understanding. “He wasn’t a Jekyll and Hyde character—he was Jekyll and Hyde and about twenty other people besides.”
He was, on one hand, the ice-cool young tycoon who sat in Walter Hofer’s office, saying nothing, only listening, while big brash New York promoters bludgeoned him with their bonhomie, but at the first inconsistency politely interrupting, “but I thought you said a minute ago….” He was the businessman whose integrity seemed born of an earlier age, whose handshake was as good as a contract, who treated the unknown teenage masses of Denver or Cincinnati with the same scrupulous fairness as customers in his family’s Liverpool shop. “He always insisted that concert promoters should never take advantage of the fans—that tickets always had to be kept as cheap as possible.”
But always there was the other Brian, contradicting each strength with a weakness, each cool-headed triumph with a peevish, destructive temper tantrum, each provident care and precaution with a reckless and fearful risk.
There was the Brian who, with the whole world at his feet, spent time and energy in buying up Mersey Beat, the little Liverpool music paper, simply for the pleasure of settling old scores among local musicians and promoters. There was the Brian who, unable to adjust his mind from Liverpool shopkeeping values, attempted to woo people like Nicky Byrne and George Martin into his employment by promising them “a thousand a year.” There was the Brian who, as paper millions whirled around him, hardly realized what tangible millions were slipping through his grasp.
The Beatles’ 1964 American tour, though buoyed up on cash advances larger than any in entertainment history, had eventually done little more than cover its gigantic overheads. To make matters worse, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service had become uneasy about all the dollars that, reputedly, were to be removed from the country. Under a longstanding Anglo-American tax treaty, the Beatles’ tour earnings were liable only for British income tax. The U.S. authorities nonetheless obtained a New York court order, freezing one million dollars in concert proceeds while “clarification” was sought.
Still worse was the position with Seltaeb, the American merchandising company of whose projected multimillion-dollar earnings from Beatles buttons, masks, ice cream, and more than 150 other items, NEMS Enterprises’ share was fixed at 10 percent.
In August 1964, the original ludicrous Seltaeb-NEMS contract was renegotiated. The Beatles’ royalty from goods in their image rose to 46 percent. Relations between NEMS and Seltaeb’s English president, Nicky Byrne, deteriorated sharply in the process. They deteriorated still further when Byrne’s lawyers informed him that some American manufacturers were turning out Beatles merchandise on licenses granted not by Seltaeb in New York but by NEMS direct from London.
As a further complication there was strife within Seltaeb among Byrne’s young English partners. Lord Peregrine Eliot, after six months of “good lunacy” as he describes it, received a distinct impression that neither the Beatles nor Uncle Sam had been paid the sums due to them and that, under tax treaty law, Uncle Sam might seek to annex his Cornish ancestral home, Port Eliot. So, while Nicky Byrne was in London, Lord Peregrine and Malcolm Evans, another Seltaeb partner, instituted court proceedings against him. They claimed that Byrne had failed to pass on Beatles royalties while at the same time spending $150,000 for his own “comfort and benefit.” The comforts alleged included hotel bills running into thousands of dollars, two Cadillacs and chauffeurs on twenty-four-hour standby, and charge accounts for his girlfriends at costly Fifth Avenue stores.
At the same time NEMS began a lawsuit against Seltaeb for alleged nonpayment of fifty-five thousand dollars in merchandise royalties. Nicky Byrne entered a countersuit claiming breach of contract and damages of five million dollars.
The NEMS-Seltaeb dispute entered the pretrial stage of a legal epic destined to last three years, accumulate three tons of documents, and dissipate fortunes that no one can ever accurately compute. For the confusion over licenses had caused panic among America’s litigation-wary retailers. Woolworth’s and Penney’s instantly canceled orders together worth seventy-eight million dollars. The total of business lost among the lawsuits, in that one year alone, must be closer to one hundred million dollars.
NEMS Enterprises, meanwhile, had swollen to literally unmanageable size. For Brian, while on the one hand struggling to contain the Beatles phenomenon, continued to sign up any new act that caught his increasingly capricious fancy. Sounds Incorporated; Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers; Paddy, Klaus and Gibson; and the Rustiks—each in turn received the now familiar NEMS treatment of new suits, stylish press handouts, and if fortunate, a Lennon-McCartney song. It did not occur to Brian that his eye could be at fault; that he mistook mere competence for Beatles-size talent; that often his new discoveries only obtained record contracts on the strength of what he had discovered before.
Nor did Brian now have the assiduous energy of eighteen months ago. The arrival of Peter Brown from Liverpool in 1965 allowed him to delegate much day-to-day routine to the slim young man who, in so many ways, became his surrogate presence. He had also persuaded his other Liverpool friend, Geoffrey Ellis, to quit the insurance business and join NEMS, ultimately as a director. The arrival of Vic Lewis, an established London agent, completed the transformation from one-man company to multifaced, impersonal organization.
The change was felt most keenly by the Liverpudlians who had followed Brian to London, and now found his attention withdrawn from all but the Beatles and Cilla. Tommy Quickly, his intended solo sensation, lost hope of ever seeing the Top Twenty. Billy J. Kramer put on weight, unreproached. The Fourmost bemoaned their lack of songs to record. The Big Three so hated the prissy image that Brian had given them, they were publicly threatening to beat him up. Gibson Kemp, of Paddy, Klaus and Gibson, supplemented his weekly fifteen pounds NEMS salary by working as an office cleaner.
It was partly this accumulating discontent that led Brian, during 1965, to move away from NEMS’s Argyll Street offices to a small command post of his own on Stafford Street, near Piccadilly. There he planned to devote himself only to top-level management—in other words, the Beatles. The move was made with elaborate secrecy: Only Peter Brown and Geoffrey were supposed to know his new address. “Brian spoiled that,” Geoffrey Ellis says, “by immediately ringing up his twenty closest friends and telling them where he was.”
With him to Stafford Street he took Wendy Hanson, the high-powered, ebullient English girl whom he had wanted as his personal assistant since she had worked for him briefly in America the previous year. Wendy had subsequently come to Europe “because of a man in Paris”; the man having proved difficult, she found herself able to accept Brian’s offer. She remained with him, despite many attempted resignations, until the end of 1966.
Her job in principle was to provide anything a Beatle wanted, from new Asprey’s luggage for Ringo to a Coutt’s bank account for Paul; from Jane Asher’s birthday cake at Maxim’s in Paris, to the whole of the Harrods store kept open after hours for the Beatles as had only been done hitherto for royalty. There was also the continuing job, for which Wendy’s experience among turbulent operatic tenors and prima donnas had only half-prepared her, of trying to organize Brian.
“We were in Nassau while the boys were filming Help!; it had all got a bit dull, so Brian decided to go to New York for the weekend. Pan Am couldn’t seat us together on the flight, which made Brian furious. There and then he wrote a letter to Pan Am, saying, ‘The Beatles will never use this airline again.’ When we got to New York there were, I promise you, twenty Pan Am officials, bowing and scraping on the tarmac.
“The next morning we were supposed to leave for London. Pan Am sent their own limo to the airport to fetch us. I was downstairs in the lobby with all my bags—no Brian. I waited and waited. Still no Brian. Eventually, I went up to his room. There he was, still in bed with not one of his thirteen suitcases packed.
“All the way to the airport the limo driver was in radio contact with Pan Am: ‘We’re just crossing the river,’ I could hear him saying. ‘We’re five miles from Kennedy…’ They got us on to the flight with literally seconds to spare—in fact, they threw our bags into the compartment after us. Then, as we were taxiing along the runway, Brian looked at his watch. ‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Half a minute late in taking off. Typical.’”
The move to Stafford Street, far from concentrating Brian’s mind, presaged a deterioration that, for the moment, only Wendy Hanson noticed. Wendy, increasingly, found herself left alone with the hot line the Beatles used to communicate their wishes and whims. When they asked for Brian she would have to admit he had not been in to the office that day.
The trouble was partly insomnia, inherited from his mother and fostered by London’s extravagant night haunts. A relentless gambler, he was known to lose up to twelve thousand pounds in one roulette or chemin de-fer session at the Curzon Club. The price was a small one for the company of waiters, croupiers, the rolling ball, the click of cards from the shoe. At dawn or later, dosed with pills on top of the night’s brandy, he might, if he was fortunate, fall asleep. The sleep became ever more difficult to penetrate from the office where, at 4:00 or 5:00 P.M., he would still have not made an appearance.
The trouble, above all, was an emotional life into which fame and money had brought no fulfillment. It was the helpless heart, still lost to any loutish rough trade boy: the beatings-up, the thefts and petty blackmail. It was the pimply young Guardsmen who left Chapel Street at dawn; the steel-hatted construction worker calling to see him at the New York Waldorf at 5:00 A.M. It was the fear, reborn each horrified morning, that the police, the press—but, most frightful of all, the Beatles—would find out.
That the Beatles had not yet found out remained a hallucination with Brian, despite grins exchanged behind his back, and despite John Lennon’s occasional brutal puncturings of the masquerade. “What shall I call this book of mine?” he had wondered aloud after finishing A Cellarful of Noise. John, fixing him with a merciless eye, replied, “Queer Jew.”
Despite this underlying malaise the Beatles’ 1965 American tour seemed once more to confirm Brian’s power to take the Beatles beyond even their wildest dreams. On both their previous two tours they had hoped to meet their idol Elvis Presley and thank him in person for his cordial welcoming telegram. But the visits had been too short and their schedule too insanely crowded for anything to be worked out. This time around it happened that when they hit the West Coast in August Elvis would be in Hollywood, shooting one of the three films he was obliged to make each year. All four entreated Brian to move heaven and earth, if necessary, to procure them an audience with the King.
A meeting was arranged between Brian and Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, at the Colonel’s permanent office at Paramount Studios, which was exotically furnished with mementoes of his personal symbol and totem, the elephant. The crafty old carnival huckster offered his pale young British visitor a lunch of pastrami sandwiches, little suspecting how many times his name had been taken in vain to spice up fictitious phone messages for Brian in Birkenhead pubs.
Colonel Parker being amenable to Elvis meeting the Beatles, their roadie Mal Evans was dispatched to finalize arrangements with Joe Esposito, Elvis’s road manager and head honcho of his protective bodyguard, the legendary Memphis Mafia. “Mal was a huge Elvis fan,” Esposito remembers. “He turned up at the studios all dressed up in a suit and tie. When Elvis said ‘Hi’ to him and shook his hand, Mal was a nervous wreck.
“We sent cars to fetch the Beatles and bring them to the house in Bel Air where Elvis was living. I rode over in one car with George and Ringo; in the other one were John, Paul, and Brian. It was all supposed to have been a secret, but the Colonel had tippe
d off one of the radio stations, and when we arrived there were hundreds of screaming kids outside.
“When we showed the Beatles into the living room Elvis was in his bathrobe and playing a bass guitar. All four of them were tongue-tied to meet him… even John could hardly speak. Finally Elvis said, ‘Well, if we’re just going to sit here looking at each other all night, I’m going to bed.’”
“That broke the ice a little bit and they started playing roulette together—all but for George, who got high as a kite on grass out beside the pool.”
The ’65 tour included the Beatles’ greatest performing triumph—one that still found Brian apparently center stage and in full control. It occurred on August 23, when a helicopter containing the Beatles, Brian, and Tony Barrow tilted down through the New York twilight and the pilot pointed out Shea Stadium, though they could already hear the roar of it, and see the flashes of unnumbered cameras pointed hopefully into the sky.
Brian was there at the New York Mets’ baseball field, to witness the concert that, though it grossed $300,000, earned only $7,000 for its promoter, Sid Bernstein. He is there in the film that was made, standing near the stage, nodding his head in time a little jerkily, looking out to the bleachers at fifty-five thousand people—in seats kept cheap at his insistence—then back to the four figures for whom fifty-five thousand voices are screaming, with their military-style khaki tunics, their hot foreheads, and still unwearied smiles.
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