26

The Beatles started 1963 playing modest gigs such as the Wolverham Welfare Association dance at the Civic Hall in Wirral (14 January) and a Baptist church youth club party at the Co-Operative Hall in Darwen (25 January). On 4 April, well into spring, they performed an afternoon concert for the boys of Stowe School in Buckinghamshire.

But their popularity was speedily growing. In March their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, had only been prevented from reaching number 1 in the UK charts by the continued popularity of Frank Ifield’s ‘Wayward Wind’ and, latterly, Cliff Richard’s ‘Summer Holiday’. But in May ‘From Me to You’ became their first single to reach number 1, and their debut album, Please Please Me, also went to number 1, where it was set to remain for the next thirty weeks.

By the end of that month, they had appeared for a second time on national television, singing ‘From Me to You’ on the children’s programme Pops and Lenny, accompanied by Lenny the Lion, the distinguished glove puppet. Furthermore, they had been given a new radio series on the BBC, Pop Go the Beatles. The corporation’s Audience Research Department estimated that 5.3 per cent of the population, or 2.8 million people, had listened to the first episode, with audience comments ranging from ‘an obnoxious noise’ to ‘really with-it’.

But fame comes with drawbacks. Paul had originally planned to celebrate his twenty-first birthday at the McCartney family home in Forthlin Road, but it soon became clear that fans might prove a hazard. So the McCartneys switched the party to his Auntie Jin’s house, across the Mersey in Huyton, where there was plenty of room for a marquee in the large back garden, and privacy was assured.

The birthday party took place on 21 June 1963. Guests included the three other Beatles, John’s wife Cynthia, Paul’s brother Mike, Mike’s two friends Roger McGough and John Gorman, John’s friend Pete Shotton, Ringo’s girlfriend Maureen, the disc jockey Bob Wooler, Gerry Marsden, Billy J. Kramer and any number of musicians. Paul was particularly delighted when the Shadows came through the door. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said to Tony Bramwell, who worked for Brian Epstein. He then thought about it for a second, before adding, ‘But we’re sort of like one of them now, aren’t we?’

‘Yeah, only bigger,’ replied Bramwell, who remembered Paul giving him a doubtful look, ‘as if I was pulling his leg’.

Paul’s new girlfriend, the seventeen-year-old actress Jane Asher, was also there. They had first met two months before. Cynthia was very taken with her: ‘She was beautiful, with auburn hair and green eyes. Also, although she had been a successful actress since she was five, she was unaffected, easy to talk to and friendly.’

Paul’s dad Jim played old-fashioned numbers on his piano, and, later, the up-and-coming band the Fourmost took to a makeshift stage. Their bass player Billy Hatton had struck the deal. ‘Paul offered to pay us the usual rate for this kind of job, but as we were going to the party anyway, we said we would do it for just one and fourpence halfpenny each.’

As the party progressed, Pete Shotton spotted John in a corner, ‘nursing a Scotch and Coke and looking glum as could be’. John seemed pleased to see Pete, and together they drifted into the garden. Over more drinks, John enjoyed pointing out the various pop stars present. ‘Cliff Richard might even show up tonight,’ he added, before going off to get yet another refill.

Pete set off to find a loo. On his return, everything had changed. ‘When I emerged from the WC … the party seemed to have been somehow transformed from a celebration to a wake. Something, obviously, had gone terribly wrong.’

Bob Wooler, the Cavern MC, was lying on the floor, with blood everywhere. Apparently he had been teasing John about his recent holiday in Spain with Brian Epstein, and John had taken his revenge. ‘A well-drunk John punched Wooler for taunting him,’ recalled Tony Barrow in his autobiography. Another of Epstein’s assistants, Peter Brown, added more detail, saying that ‘in a mad rage and obviously very drunk’, John had started ‘pummelling’ an unnamed guest; it had taken ‘three men to pull John off, but not before he managed to break three of the man’s ribs’.

Tony Bramwell remembered that ‘John saw red. He assaulted Bob, breaking his ribs and ending up with a bloody nose himself.’ Shotton took it a step further: ‘John responded by knocking Bob to the ground and repeatedly clobbering him in the face with, I believe, a shovel. The damage to Bob’s visage was so extensive that an ambulance had to be summoned to rush him to hospital.’

In her second autobiography, written forty-two years after the event (she failed to mention the incident in her first), Cynthia Lennon wrote: ‘John, who’d had plenty to drink, exploded. He leapt on Bob, and by the time he was dragged off Bob had a black eye and badly bruised ribs. I took John home as fast as I could and Brian drove Bob to hospital.’ Cynthia claimed to remember John telling her, ‘He called me a queer.’ Others, though, have suggested Wooler said something more insidious, like, ‘Come on, John. Tell us about you and Brian in Spain. We all know.’

Thirty-six years later, Rex Makin, the Epstein family’s solicitor,1 gave an account in which he deftly avoided mentioning Brian Epstein or the Spanish holiday, and suggested that Wooler had come on to John: ‘Everybody had a lot to drink and John Lennon thought or perceived that Wooler had made a pass at him, whereupon he socked him and broke his nose and gave him a black eye.’

The Beatles’ biographers also offer radically different versions of the same event. Hunter Davies, who gave Epstein and the Beatles copy approval for his authorised 1968 biography, wrote that ‘John picked a fight with a local disk [sic] jockey,’ and quoted John saying, ‘I broke his bloody ribs for him. I was pissed at the time. He called me a queer.’

Other biographers have tended to take it a stage further. ‘Without warning, John exploded,’ wrote Ray Connolly. ‘Lashing out, he began to batter Wooler’s face and body with both his fists and a stick … He went berserk, to the extent that when he was pulled off Wooler, the inoffensive and much older man had to be quickly driven to hospital by Brian, where he was treated for bruised ribs and a black eye.’

In his 1981 biography of the Beatles, Shout!, Philip Norman described the party as ‘a typical Liverpool booze-up, riotous and noisy’. He mentioned that ‘John Lennon got into a fight with another guest,’ but didn’t say who it was, or what the fight was about. Norman was more forthcoming in his 2016 biography of Paul, disagreeing with Connolly that Wooler was inoffensive, and instead describing him as ‘notoriously sharp-tongued’. In his account of the fight, Norman had John ‘raining punches viciously on Wooler’s head and body’, but offered no assessment of the injuries. However, in his 2008 biography of John, he stated that Wooler ‘suffered bruised ribs and a black eye’.

In his 2005 Beatles biography, Bob Spitz had John beating Wooler ‘viciously, with tightly closed fists. When that didn’t do enough damage, he grabbed a garden shovel that was left in the yard and whacked Bob once or twice with the handle. According to one observer, “Bob was holding his hands to his face and John was kicking all the skin off his fingers.”’ According to Spitz, Wooler was taken away in an ambulance with even more injuries: ‘a broken nose, a cracked collar bone and three broken ribs’.

Do I hear any advance on a broken nose, a cracked collarbone and three broken ribs? Inevitably, the most excessive bid was submitted by Albert Goldman, the most merciless and hyperbolic of all John’s biographers:2 ‘John doubled up his fist and smashed the little disc jockey in the nose. Then, seizing a shovel that was lying in the yard, Lennon began to beat Wooler to death. Blow after blow came smashing down on the defenseless man lying on the ground. It would have ended in murder if John had not suddenly realized: “If I hit him one more time, I’ll kill him!” Making an enormous effort of will, Lennon restrained himself. At that instant three men seized him and disarmed him. An ambulance was called for Wooler, who had suffered a broken nose, a cracked collar-bone, and three broken ribs. Lennon had broken a finger.’

All in all, no other event in the lives of the Beatles illustrates more clearly the random, subjective nature of history, a form predicated on objectivity but reliant on the shifting sands of memory.

So a table of the final tally looks like this:

No one seems to doubt, though, that the following day Wooler contacted Rex Makin, who decided to act for both parties, eventually negotiating a £200 payment to Wooler and an apology. Word soon reached the press about the incident. In charge of damage limitation, Tony Barrow got in touch with John, who was bullishly unrepentant. ‘He told me gruffly, “Wooler was well out of fucking order. He called me a bloody queer so I battered him … I wasn’t that pissed. The bastard had it coming. He teased me, I punched him. Of course I won’t apologise.”’ Barrow then dutifully ‘trimmed and toned and spun’ this unpromising material, so that the next day’s Sunday Mirror reported:

Guitarist John Lennon, 22-year-old leader of the Beatles pop group, said last night, ‘Why did I have to go and punch my best friend? … Bob is the last person in the world I would want to have a fight with. I can only hope he realises that I was too far gone to know what I was doing.’

Recuperating in hospital, Wooler received a conciliatory telegram from John: ‘REALLY SORRY, BOB. TERRIBLY SORRY TO REALIZE WHAT I HAD DONE. WHAT MORE CAN I SAY?’ As it happened, each word had been dictated by Brian Epstein.3

What exactly happened in Spain? Most people agree that when Julian was three weeks old, Brian took the unusual step of taking John on a Spanish holiday à deux. In her first autobiography (1978), Cynthia says that when John asked her if she would mind, ‘I concealed my hurt and envy and gave him my blessing.’ In her second (2005), her memories have altered; now, when John asks her if she would mind, there is no mention of hurt or envy. ‘I said, truthfully, that I wouldn’t.’

The implacable Albert Goldman, on the other hand, states that John only got round to seeing his newborn son a week after his birth, and then, ‘turning to Cynthia, informed her bluntly that he was going off on a short holiday with Brian Epstein’. In the Goldman version, far from acquiescing, ‘Cynthia was outraged by his astonishing news.’ Goldman adds that John was indifferent to Cynthia’s feelings, saying: ‘Being selfish again, aren’t you?’ He appears to have lifted this version of events from Peter Brown’s waspish memoir The Love You Make (1983), though it seems unlikely that Brown himself was privy to John and Cynthia’s discussion.

So, did they or didn’t they? The simple truth is that no one knows, but everyone thinks they know, or at least they want everyone else to think they know. Cynthia covers the matter in two sentences. Pooh-poohing the gossip, she says that after John came back from Spain, ‘He had to put up with sly digs, winks and innuendo that he was secretly gay. It infuriated him: all he’d wanted was a break with a friend, but it was turned into so much more.’

Of the Beatles’ employees, Alistair Taylor and Tony Barrow agree with Cynthia that nothing sexual occurred. Taylor claims that ‘in one of our frankest heart-to-hearts John denied it’. ‘He never wanted me like that,’ he told Taylor, adding, ‘Even completely out of my head, I couldn’t shag a bloke. And I certainly couldn’t lie there and let one shag me. Even a nice guy like Brian. To be honest, the thought of it turns me over.’ Barrow says, ‘John made it abundantly clear to me that there was no two-way traffic along this route … I don’t believe that the relationship between Brian and John became a physical one in Spain or elsewhere. I believe John’s version, which was that he teased Brian to the limit but stopped short when they came to the brink.’

On the other hand, Tony Bramwell claims John told him that he finally allowed Brian to have sex with him just ‘to get it out of the way’. But Bramwell adds that John may have been lying. ‘Those who knew John well, who had known him for years, don’t believe it for a moment.’ However, Peter Brown begs to differ, painting an unfeasibly vivid picture, as though lifted from an airport novel: ‘Drunk and sleepy from the sweet Spanish wine, Brian and John got undressed in silence. “It’s OK, Eppy,” John said, and lay down on his bed. Brian would have liked to have hugged him, but he was afraid. Instead, John lay there, tentative and still, and Brian fulfilled the fantasies he was so sure would bring him contentment, only to awake the next morning as hollow as before.’4

Pete Shotton was closer to John than the others, and less given to speculation. He writes that when John and Brian went away ‘tongues began wagging all over town’. On John’s return, Shotton teased him – ‘So you had a good time with Brian, then?’ – only for John to respond quietly, ‘Actually Pete, something did happen with him one night … Eppy just kept on and on at me. Until one night I finally just pulled me trousers down and said to him, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Brian, just stick it up me fucking arse then.” And he said to me, “Actually, John, I don’t do that kind of thing. That’s not what I like to do.” “Well,” I said, “what is it you want to do then?” And he said, “I’d really just like to touch you, John.” And so I let him toss me off … So what harm did it do, then, Pete, for fuck’s sake? No harm at all. The poor fucking bastard, he can’t help the way he is.’

So much for John’s associates. Small wonder, then, that his biographers are also divided. Epstein’s biographer Ray Coleman insists nothing sexual occurred: ‘Since the death of Epstein and Lennon, many with no access to, or observation of, both men in their lifetime have peddled the assumption that Brian and John had a sexual liaison. This is despite the lack of any evidence, despite firm declarations of John’s heterosexuality from Cynthia and many other women, and despite the statement by McCartney that he “slept in a million hotel rooms, as we all did, with John and there was never any hint that he was gay”. Coleman argues that Epstein ‘would never have risked so profoundly changing his relationship with them, individually or collectively’. He adds that ‘Epstein was not a predator,’ though there is in fact plenty of evidence to suggest that he was.5

In his biography of John, Ray Connolly judges Pete Shotton to be honest, so believes his claim that John said he had let Brian masturbate him. ‘But was John telling the truth? It was well known to those around him that he was keenly heterosexual. But he loved to shock, too. Did he invent a homosexual experience for the fun of it, or, perhaps, did he just exaggerate the incident after Brian made a pass at him? Both are possible. But, equally, as all his life he would be eager to experience anything new, was he curious about homosexuality? When Brian came on to him, did he simply want to know what it was like to be touched by another man?’

Bob Spitz is convinced ‘something happened’, but is unsure what: ‘In the privacy of their room, after an evening of drinking and sporting about, Brian initiated something that led to physical contact.’ Though Spitz peppers the relevant passage with conditionals – ‘if John participated in some sort of homosexual act, it follows that …’ ‘Curiosity may well have gotten the better of him …’ ‘He may have been experimenting …’ – he concludes on a note of certainty: ‘Away from home, in a beautiful resort with a man – certainly a father figure – who was devoted to taking care of him, John was relaxed and open enough to let it happen unconditionally.’

True to form, the relentless Goldman thinks there is no question about it: ‘He and Brian had sex.’ Quoting Shotton’s book as evidence, he argues over the details: ‘Brian told Peter Brown the real story: he had given John a blow job. Lennon couldn’t afford to acknowledge that sort of intimacy because it would stigmatise him for life.’ Yet, as we have seen, Peter Brown was in fact much more circumspect, saying only that Brian had ‘fulfilled his fantasies’.

Having already gone too far, Goldman then goes miles further, asserting, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that ‘John and Brian did not confine themselves to a single sexual experiment in Spain. They were sexually involved for the balance of Brian’s life, and their relationship was a controlling one, with John playing the cruel master and Brian the submissive slave.’

Philip Norman labels Goldman’s book, not unfairly, as both ‘malevolent’ and ‘risibly ignorant’. In his biography of Paul, Norman judges the idea of a sexual encounter between John and Brian possible but not proven, adding that ‘Years later, he told a close friend he’d had sex of some sort with Brian, “once to see what it was like, the second time to make sure I didn’t like it”.’ But in his biography of John, Norman offers a different account, this one from Yoko Ono, with whom he had conducted a series of interviews over three years: ‘Years later, John finally came clean about what had happened: not to anyone who’d been around at the time, but to the unshockable woman with whom he shared the last decade of his life. He said that one night during the trip, Brian had cast aside shyness and scruples and finally come on to him, but that he’d replied, “If you feel like that, go out and find a hustler.”’ Norman adds that ‘Afterward, he had deliberately fed Pete Shotton the myth of his brief surrender, so that everyone would believe his power over Brian to be absolute.’6

Perhaps it is best to leave the last word to Paul. ‘In an earthquake, you get many different versions of what happened by all the people that saw it,’ he observed, decades later, of the Beatles phenomenon. ‘And they’re all true.’

1 In 1967, Makin was to make all the arrangements for Epstein’s funeral. Some credit him with inventing the term ‘Beatlemania’.

2 Goldman (1927–94) wrote The Lives of John Lennon (1988), in which he portrayed John in a uniquely unflattering light, even going so far as to suggest he was a murderer. Goldman died of a heart attack in an aeroplane on the way to London, following a heated argument with flight attendants about having his seat upgraded. ‘Goldman looked like Truman Capote and sounded like Bette Davis,’ wrote his Daily Telegraph obituarist. ‘He was not a modest man: “With the counter-culture,” he declared, “I had found a great field that needed a great mind like mine to explore it.”’

3 The telegram was sold at Sotheby’s in 1984 for £550. In 1980, shortly before he died, John spoke of ‘hitting him with a big stick, and for the first time I thought, I can kill this guy. I just saw it on a screen: if I hit him once more, that’s going to be it. I really got shocked. That’s when I gave up violence, because all my life I’d been like that.’

4 The memoirs of former Beatles office staff share this strange quality of divine omniscience with the memoirs of royal housekeepers and valets.

5 Those who have claimed Epstein made passes at them include Pete Shotton, Larry Kane, Pete Best and the Liverpudlian comedian Freddie Starr (1943–2019), who was then singing with a group called the Midniters. Given to exaggeration, Starr is the only one to talk of a struggle: ‘I started punching his upper arms, which startled him, because it bloody hurt. He quickly backed off and composed himself.’

6 Yoko also told Philip Norman that ‘from chance remarks’ John made, she gathered that he had thought of having an affair with Paul, but Paul had not wanted it. ‘Around Apple, in her hearing Paul would sometimes be called John’s Princess,’ writes Norman. Yoko also told him that she had once heard a rehearsal tape with John’s voice calling out ‘Paul … Paul …’ in a strangely subservient, pleading way. ‘I knew there was something going on there,’ she remembered. ‘From his point of view, not from Paul’s. And he was so angry at Paul, I couldn’t help wondering what it was really about.’