Lennon

by Tim Riley

  To Lennon, here was a man who had been around the block a few times, in more ways than Lennon might have comprehended; and for all the talk of how Epstein’s affection for Lennon transcended the music, Lennon’s return “attraction” to Epstein was a complicated mix of desire, ambition, uncertainty, and arrogance. His conditioning told him that “Jews make money!”; his overconfident sexuality made him uneasy but also flattered to be fussed over and gazed at. Here, finally, was an older man who openly adored Lennon, and spoke of promoting him and his music.

  Epstein’s effect on the band could be felt immediately. He obsessed over his initial contract with “the boys,” and pushed all four to sign it even when he knew that no court would honor it, with three band members under twenty-one. Just as Colonel Tom Parker visited Gladys Presley in Memphis to ingratiate himself with Elvis, Epstein, like a gentleman caller, courted Beatle parents, bringing Mimi Smith chocolates and impressing Jim McCartney with his sincerity. Epstein knew these locals harbored a reflexive anti-Semitism and that he would have to work doubly hard to win their favor. Ironically, his ethnicity worked to his advantage. “My dad,” McCartney remembered, “when he heard about Brian wanting to manage us, said, ‘This could be a very good thing.’ He thought Jewish people were very good with money. This was the common wisdom,” McCartney remembered.16

  The Beatles’ ambivalence about signing became evident when they gathered to meet Epstein to ink their first formal contract: retold with various details by Hunter Davies, Peter Brown, Ray Coleman, and others, the prime elements seem to be the long wait they made Epstein endure in his office before arriving, and once three of the four of them were there, having to ring up McCartney, who was at home taking a bath. “This is disgraceful!” Epstein spurted, “He’ll be very late!” “Late . . . but very clean,” came Harrison’s response. Peter Brown has Lennon dragging Bob Wooler along and spontaneously introducing him as “Dad,” which gave the tardiness a wry, formal edge, as if Lennon were self-consciously pitting his latest father figures against each other to see how they measured up.

  Alistair Taylor remembered that first agreement, which amounted to a boilerplate for similar contracts of the era, until the final clause. “The first contract was effective from 1 February 1962 for a five-year period. But the Beatles and Brian were each able to give the other three months’ notice if things went wrong. Brian was on 10 per cent of the Beatles’ income up to £1500, then Brian’s percentage increased to 15 per cent. I don’t think there has ever been anyone in the history of pop music who’s had a fairer contract than the Beatles. Brian’s percentage went up to 25 per cent in later contracts.”17 Consider the unguarded tone of that quote: no sooner has Taylor pronounced Epstein the fairest man in show business than he relates how heavily the later Epstein encroached on the Beatles’ enormous earnings. If Epstein’s sincerity in the beginning is unmistakable, his overreach during 1966 and 1967 is equally undeniable.

  Even before he left his signature famously blank on that first contract, Epstein had begun pounding pavement. He settled “the boys’ ” equipment debt at Hessy’s music shop, and had them “all doffed up” at Horner Brothers, the classiest hairdresser in town, to manicure their already distinctive haircuts. “John grinned that his Aunt Mimi would think he had turned over a completely new leaf,” Taylor recalled.18

  If the Beatles hadn’t made an indelible first impression on Epstein at NEMS, they certainly made one when they visited his family home in Woolton. Somehow underscoring the classic gay trope, “Eppy” still lived there, devoted to his mother, Malka, nicknamed “Queenie.” “I saw the boys coming . . . on a Sunday morning when I was in my garden,” attorney Rex Makin, a neighbor of the Epsteins, recalled. “They came and they looked what we term in Liverpool a set of scallywags—untidily dressed and all the rest of it and not quite the thing for the genteel atmosphere of the part of Queens Drive where we lived.”19 Both father and mother were tolerant but suspicious about their son’s latest obsession. He should be happy enough as the most successful retailer in the north; why this sudden interest in pop music, which he had so long considered beneath him? A scheme like this could end in embarrassment and failure, upsetting the family’s careful reputation.

  Within weeks, Epstein had “packaged” the Beatles, so his ideas formed quickly: How best to translate this raw energy into the all-round entertainers needed to please the BBC set, the middle classes, the Sunday-night TV audience? “Lose the leather, gum, ciggies and swearing, tidy up the hair, perhaps, but its length was somehow intriguing . . . and put them in matching suits. That should do.” Did such ambitious thoughts run through his mind? Or did he simply gape at the spectacle, follow the heat and noise of the Cavern’s underground temple as it carried him to some new, unknowable place?

  Brian Epstein’s impact on Lennon’s professional life was second only to George Martin’s. Of course, Epstein came first, and his enthusiasm persuaded Martin to hear the band after a string of industry refusals, so you could argue that his impact was larger. And Lennon’s relationship with Epstein trailed his partnership with McCartney in terms of male intimacies. He knew McCartney longer and won a place in pop history with their songwriting collaboration; but, knowingly and unknowingly, he may have trusted Epstein more, at least at the beginning. Epstein took on the role Lennon had looked for in vain in Allan Williams: that of the elder male figure who would manage all his affairs, from bookings to housing, to let him concentrate on music. McCartney was always a peer first, and a younger peer at that; Epstein drove a fancy car and ran his own business. Lennon looked up to Epstein’s self-sufficiency and success even as he exploited his personal insecurities and belief in the band. Lennon was never as close to George Martin on a personal level; and Epstein brought the added complication of being privately gay yet relatively open about his affection for Lennon the man. Lennon had already denied talk of his bond with Stu Sutcliffe, which prompted even Sutcliffe’s sister to speculate a physical intimacy. And art school had certainly put him in touch with queer life, which was half of how young macho men built themselves up, through ridicule and disdain. Epstein brought experience and sophistication to the band’s ideas about gayness, even though they cackled about him behind his back.

  Epstein’s affection for Lennon seems to have been an open matter to everybody, even Lennon, who enjoyed ribbing him even more than he did McCartney or Harrison. Epstein’s torment was to blush easily, and Lennon delighted in “taking the piss” out of him, just to watch his face go red. He could be cruel with his anti-Semitic remarks, although, like his “Sieg heil!” salutes and goose-step marches in his Hamburg act, they’re naïve pronouncements of rebellion. There’s ample evidence that Lennon was perfectly tolerant of Epstein’s homosexuality and his ethnicity.20

  Lennon himself spoke frankly about the topic: “Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated—but it was a pretty intense relationship.”21 (How many rock stars refer to their managerial relationships as unconsummated?) From his end, Epstein seems to have been extremely insecure about his feelings for Lennon, which tilted between romantic enchantment, affectionate listening, and sincere personal devotion. Lennon described a more platonic love affair, which can be even stronger and last longer than sexual relationships, where the “love” was subsumed into the professional “marriage.” In Lennon’s circle, Epstein became a new boundary to bounce off of, a close friend who doubled as a bumper car into which Lennon rammed his macho bluster.

  Epstein’s heritage, background, and troubled history of not fitting in comprised a charged, charismatic personality, the kind of agent gifted at recognizing genius in others, exploiting it, then envying the notoriety he had helped them win. With every strength came a flaw: he gave show business its biggest act ever, but ultimately sold them out for a relative pittance; he did deals that brought EMI and his clients vast fortunes, but left them poised to lose their most valuable asset—the Lennon-McCartney publishing fortune. As the pivotal link between Liver
pool and the world, Epstein broke the Beatles wide open, but he was never a full-fledged member of the band, and in late 1966 he was distraught at their decision to stop touring. He confided in several people that he felt his role marginalized.

  For all the short-term solutions he got right, however, he got several larger, long-term deals done terribly wrong. In the most immediate sense, Epstein steered the Beatles out of their regional market, but he was also the greenest of managers in terms of the critical contracts they engaged in as they took the world’s stage from 1962 to 1964. Within a month of their meeting, he had Decca A&R man Mike Smith travel up from London to hear their set at the Cavern, and began booking shows in proper clubs like the Kingsway in Southport and Manchester’s Oasis.

  When he gets painted as a meticulous shopkeeper who excelled at window displays, Beatle historians reduce his role to some hoary, outdated gay cliché. Still, he approached the Beatles as both a manager and a tailor. His visual frame was exactly what they needed at this point to get over, in direct conflict with what Lennon, Sutcliffe, and McCartney had assembled without him: from Epstein’s vantage point, their shoddy stage presentation distracted from the music. (“We looked like four Gene Vincents—only younger,” McCartney would say later on.)22 But in dressing up the Beatles, Epstein also dressed up rock ’n’ roll, which tells just how much he heard in their sound.

  Epstein removed the leather, ciggies, curse words, and pissing about between songs. Presenting the band in suits and ties, tightening up their set pace, he insisted on punctuality and a minimum of audience interaction (which reveals just how loose and abiding this rapport was). Where the Hamburg Beatles personified rock ’n’ roll animism, complete with leering jokes, German gibberish, toilet seats, and Nazi baiting fueled by nationalist revenge, Epstein overlaid his version of what a respectable show-biz outfit might look like: ties, combed hair, and natty jackets—only at the humid Cavern did Eppy allow vests. He had them clip all their loose guitar strings, which splayed from the ends of their guitar necks like so many overgrown toenails. In short, he spiffed them right up into the prevailing norm needed to impress the London show-biz establishment.

  In hindsight, this brief, pre-Beatlemania period, this Epstein package, gave the Beatles a schizoid personality: the music stayed fierce while the image softened. Lennon would famously regret his capitulation to Epstein’s makeover, but at age twenty-one his ambition told him to swallow his pride and play along. The unintended consequence of his sardonic grin and obdurate stage stance rattled the very frame he’d been put in, and offset McCartney’s boyishness with a forbidding irony. The tension must have been jarring: Were these hoodlums in suits? Did they still run with knives? In one of their first professional photography sessions, where they posed around Liverpool bomb ruins, they exuded brash naïveté, an utterly serious cunning, and were at once lofty and down-to-earth, grandly ambitious and beyond status-mongering.

  Far from “selling out,” as Lennon most feared, the tailoring only added to their menace. The matching suits didn’t fool teenagers; they simply made their tough expressions, especially Lennon’s, seem arch and vaguely coy. The bangs and creeping-over-the-ears locks stayed: all by itself, this signaled defiance, and an eccentricity that synced up eerily with their sound. And topping jackets and ties, the haircuts assumed a surprising formality; rather than subdue them for television, their matching uniforms made them seem untamable. To hear them during this period was to witness the coming together of a sublime, two-headed musical ensemble, Lennon angling off McCartney; but the visual effect alone conveyed tension and intrigue. You had the sense, many fans remember, that these early Liverpool years were precious, that this town could not long contain these personalities, let alone their music.

  What most historians miss in Epstein’s doting makeover is that it was almost all visual. Theories abound about the precise source of their haircuts, and those bangs host an array of influences. Just before they met Epstein, in October 1961, Lennon used his twenty-first-birthday money, a cool hundred pounds from his aunt Harrie in Scotland, to hitchhike to Paris with McCartney. There they ran into Jürgen Vollmer, their Hamburg mate, on the street. One story has Vollmer giving them the new haircuts they returned with. Considering they attended a concert by Johnny Hallyday and found a crowd of French teens sporting the look, this makes sense. It also makes for a logical extension of their German-art-crowd identification in Hamburg and the haircut Astrid herself wore and gave Sutcliffe. But Bob Wooler had some insight on this as well:

  Brian put the Beatles into suits and he liked the idea of a Beatle haircut. Joe Flannery [another Merseyside manager] carries a photograph of his mother and says, “Look at her haircut. John liked my mother and copied her hairstyle.” It’s not impossible, but you could just as easily say it came from watching the Three Stooges. My theory is that Stu and Astrid saw the Peter Pan statue by George Frampton in Sefton Park. This was erected in 1928 and Peter Pan has a Beatle haircut, a Beatle bob if you like. She gave Stu that haircut and the rest followed on from that.23

  According to Liverpool historian Spencer Leigh, “Epstein’s biggest triumph was in leaving the Beatles’ music alone.”24 Long before Lennon told him to get lost in the studio (with his famous retort “We’ll look after the music”), Epstein sensed the musicality dripping off their personalities. Through trial and error, Lennon and McCartney gained leverage over their audition set lists as time and experience proved them right. This became another layer of how strong personalities vied for control.

  Even though Epstein’s personal rebellion included a polished ruling-class accent, he brought all the show-biz establishment’s provincial prejudice into play. But in a curious way, he also joined with the band’s outsider rock ’n’ roll identification simply by turning himself into their advance man. Part of his refrain, however, courted sneers: his boys were going to be “bigger than Elvis,” which by then was laughable hype, the worn-out, shooting-too-high, never-gonna-happen line that desperate agents rehearsed to slamming doors. “Bigger than Elvis” became Epstein’s ruse, his dare, his personal mantra—and his epitaph. Finally, the Elvis line became the knife Epstein twisted into the pop industry before it instinctively twisted back. Most of the A&R people he met with seemed intrigued at how such a dapper, well-heeled retailer reeled off such fervent gospel about some beat group from up north.

  Epstein began calling his record-label contracts with a simple ploy: he told them he wanted to arrange new discounts on his wholesale rates. He had invested enough in his reputation as the north’s most successful record retailer to turn it into leverage as he approached London labels. Once face-to-face, however, he neatly dismissed this idea and played his record. He urged his listener to filter out the singer on “My Bonnie,” Tony Sheridan, and focus on the backup band. Reluctantly, the label suits listened, if only to avoid being rude to a crucial link in their supply chain. Epstein’s approach had the dual effect of setting the client at ease when he was poised to drive a hard bargain and putting them at a disadvantage when listening to Epstein’s wares—a new gambit in his dealings. It was a clever approach that was in all ways polite and gentlemanly: how could anybody take offense at a prized retailer dismissing new margins on his stock?

  His first trip to London with the “My Bonnie” single carried two goals: to secure a recording audition and to convince Polydor to release the single in Britain. His first call was to Decca, described by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham in his indispensable sixties memoir, Stoned:

  Taciturn businessmen controlled Decca, with an apparent aversion to style reflected in the ruthlessly staid Decca offices. They did not even appear to like or listen to pop music—they could have been selling baked beans for all they cared. Their interest was in the tins. . . . The UK business turned a blind eye to the reality of America. The British recording establishment wishfully hoped the Furys and Wildes would all disappear and we’d return to the pre-hula-hoop safety of lush Mantovani.25

  Among Epstein�
�s many letters was one to Tony Barrow at Decca, who wrote under the pseudonym “Disker” for the Liverpool Echo from his office in London. When they met in person, Barrow politely told Epstein that he only covered new records, not live scenes; but he alerted Decca chief Dick Rowe to the fact that an important client was peddling a band, and Rowe gave him an appointment to maintain courteous business relations.

  “My Bonnie” wasn’t the greatest calling card, and Epstein got the industry runaround wherever he went. Epstein was far too generous in assuming that A&R stooges had ears anything like a retailer’s. Instructing the men in suits to listen to the band behind Tony Sheridan was way too much to ask: in those days, the front man was the act. Familiar with stalling techniques, most labels pointed out that the band probably had a German contract that would need investigating before they gave serious consideration. EMI passed the record along to several staff producers, who all declined. But when Epstein called back at Decca, a suit named Mike Smith expressed enough interest to schedule a trip to the Cavern to hear the Beatles live. This all happened as November 1961 became December, because Smith was in the Cavern audience on December 13 to hear the Beatles, and everybody was aware of a London talent scout in their midst. Bob Wooler even made an announcement from the stage.

  So within weeks Epstein had convinced the band that his skills were advancing their cause: not even a month had passed from his first hearing them and he brought in a Decca man to hear their live set. By many accounts, Smith visited on the same day the Beatles signed their management contract—the one Epstein himself didn’t sign. When Alistair Taylor asked Epstein about this, he replied that he “didn’t want the Beatles to feel tied to him in any way.”26 Almost exactly a year later, after they had recorded their second single, Epstein signed his first legally sound contract with them, which hiked up his fee to 25 percent of all earnings.