Mr. X Mr. XOn a hazy Saturday evening in September 1961, Bob Wooler climbed aboard the 500 Limited bus bound for Liverpool center and spied a familiar face. George Harrison was seated about halfway back, steadying a cardboard envelope on his knees. As Wooler settled in next to him, George slipped a record sleeve from the package in one neat motion. “Look at this. I’ve just received it today,” he gushed, fingering it as one might a precious heirloom. Wooler examined the single: a near-mint copy of “My Bonnie” by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers.* So, it was finally released, Wooler mused. The band had jabbered about nothing else since returning from Hamburg, to the point that Wooler actually dreaded its arrival. Nevertheless, he was impressed, seeing it in the flesh. “Up until then, none of the Merseyside bands had made a record,” he recalls, “so it was quite an achievement.”
Determined to make an event of it, he begged George for the record. “Let me play it tonight,” he cajoled, but George squirmed reluctantly. The copy had just arrived from Hamburg,* and the other Beatles had yet to see it. With uncharacteristic aggressiveness, Wooler dismissed the argument with a wave. “They’ll have plenty of time for that,” he said. “Anyway, we’re all [appearing] at Hambleton Hall tomorrow night, at which time I’ll return it.” He also schemed to borrow it for lunchtime sessions at the Cavern, which the Beatles now headlined almost exclusively.
Like others on the scene, Wooler sensed a breakthrough in the making and wanted to capitalize on it. “The local pop scene,” as he saw it, “was ready for a star.” Rock ’n roll was no longer simply a weekend dessert in Liverpool; it had become part of the essential daily diet, with lunchtime and evening shows a staple of everyday life. You could almost set your watch by it, a rhythm to the musical intervals that dovetailed with meals, commuting, work, and sleep. No one looked to the States or even to London for the latest hot sound. Why bother? Liverpool had everything they needed.
And it was the Beatles who defined the scene—maybe too much for its own good, Wooler thought. “The Beatles were difficult,” he recalls, “and so unprofessional onstage—smoking, swearing, eating, talking with one another. They considered themselves lords unto themselves.” One day, the Beatles played the Cavern wearing jeans. Jeans spelled trouble; anyone wearing them was turned away at the door. In no time, the band had attracted the attention of Ray McFall, who demanded that Wooler discipline the Beatles. During a break Wooler reluctantly delivered Ray’s message in the bandroom. “Go and tell him to get fucking well stuffed!” John snapped. From opposite angles, Paul and George converged, launching similar tirades. Wooler backed out of the room to symphonic abuse. Lords unto themselves.
The scene had somehow bought into the Beatles’ cheek. Their whole renegade attitude had caught on, and not only with fellow musicians. With rock ’n roll, as with nothing else in their lives, the fans cared as much about the attitude as the music. They were looking for a mind-set, a way of looking at things that pressed past the music itself into issues of identity—personality, looks, character, and originality. While stars such as Elvis and Buddy Holly had given them the music and the look, attitude remained uncultivated. Teddy boys had come the closest to defining a cultural outlook, but they proved too extreme. The Beatles, on the other hand, managed to push the envelope without hurting anyone. Violence wasn’t part of their agenda. Their music was loud, in-your-face loud, their stage presence disorderly and impolite. Anyone who disapproved could “get fucking well stuffed,” but that was the extent of their defiance. They were rebels, not anarchists.
And yet Wooler was determined to hasten their stardom, no matter how rudely they treated him. He plugged their record relentlessly—at dozens of dance halls on the weekends, numerous times a day at the crowded Cavern, to anyone, in fact, who would listen—even though it wasn’t available anywhere in the United Kingdom. “Buy the record, folks,” he’d implore. “Make sure you ask for it at your favorite record shop. If they don’t have it, insist that they order it, and make sure that they get it for you.” But local retailers, who concentrated on sturdy sellers like Anthony Newley, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, and instrumentalists, had no interest. According to Wooler, “There was only one record store that took any interest in it and that was… [the NEMS] shop in Whitechapel.” North End Music Stores had a record department that was unmatched for its eclectic selection of music, thanks largely to the exuberance of its demanding manager, a tightly strung aesthete named Brian Epstein. The wellborn son of retail magnates from the upper crust of Liverpool’s Jewish community, Brian had little in common with the teenage riffraff who infested his store like crows. Although only six years older than John Lennon, Brian comported himself in a way that bespoke a man in his contented forties. And not out of some sort of pretense: he belonged to that segment of his generation which subscribed to refinement and discipline and maintained its manners during the periodic upheavals of rebellion. Raised as a gentleman, he wore immaculately tailored suits, spoke the King’s English with a crisp, polished clip, and led conversations with his chin raised to convey the superiority he keenly felt among commoners.*
Indulging an alliance of passions, his adolescent heart beat furiously for all things musical, except rock ’n roll, which he abhorred. He was a connoisseur of serious music, spanning theater, opera, and symphony—an erudite, cultured, and opinionated enthusiast who “lived for Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Sibelius.” Although as a child Brian apparently showed little interest in playing an instrument, he had a box at the Liverpool Philharmonic from the age of twelve, and soon after acquired a collection of the Brandenburg Concertos, whose score he knew by heart.
Rock ’n roll had begun to ring up substantial sales for NEMS, making it a genre he could no longer afford to ignore. But as a listener, he wouldn’t give it the time of day. “The closest Brian ever got to rock ’n roll was ‘Volare,’ ” recalls Peter Brown, a friend and protégé who oversaw the NEMS shop on Great Charlotte Street.
He was born on September 19, 1934, during the denouement of a crisp Yom Kippur afternoon while his father and uncle davened, as ploddingly as they polished furniture, in the crowded sanctuary of the Green Park Drive Synagogue, not too far from their homes. The Epsteins were lions of Liverpool’s resurgent Jewish community: merchants, philanthropists, pillars of society, a long way up the ladder from their hardscrabble beginnings. In fact, Brian’s paternal grandfather, a furniture maker named Isaac, an émigré from the village of Hodan, Lithuania, arrived in England in the wave of immigration of the 1890s at the age of eighteen, with nothing except for the provisions of his trade and the forbearance of his wife, Diana. From the beginning, Isaac proved extremely talented, and there was plenty of work to keep him busy. Isaac offered customers a selection of his own handcrafted staples along with varied consignment pieces, and after a decade of struggle and sacrifice, he succeeded in opening a modest furniture shop that offered easy credit to families, and thus rather quickly attracted a solid clientele.
Isaac’s third child, Harry, an equally enterprising but very affable man, had hardly finished school before joining his father’s business on Walton Road, in the north end of the city. Renamed I. Epstein & Sons, it featured showrooms of well-crafted goods ranging from bassinets to bedroom suites and served families of all social and economic strata. Harry and his brother, Leslie, watched their father with curious, admiring eyes. Restlessly, they expanded into an adjacent shop (North End Music Stores) and then another and another, the unfolding empire consolidated under the catchy NEMS logo. More than anyone, Harry recognized the opportunity for growth, diversifying the company with home furnishings and appliances.
It took a momentous marriage to solidify NEMS’ primacy. Queenie Hyman (the nickname was given to her as a child, being that Malka, her given name, was the Hebrew word for queen),* although eleven years Harry’s junior, was his partner in every respect—a capricious but capable wife born of aristocratic self-possession, whose family owned the highly esteemed Sheffield Veneering Company in the heart of the Midlands. A slim, dark-haired beauty, Queenie was educated at a Catholic boarding school, to which she applied herself with ungrudging tenacity; she had no intention of letting down in front of non-Jews. Among her firmest convictions, along with her fierce Jewish faith, was the treachery of Gentiles, most of whom she viewed as closet anti-Semites. It was a prejudice, however irrational, that remained with Queenie throughout her life—and that was subsequently passed down to Brian—despite the unshakable power of Liverpool’s Jewish community, the oldest, most unified, and prosperous of its kind outside of London.
Unquestionably, Queenie filled the empty spaces in Harry’s life. She ran an orderly and immaculate house, cultivated a social circle from among Liverpool’s most prominent Jewish families, and was an instinctive hostess who entertained with grand style and élan. “She knew what it meant to be a lady,” says a longtime friend of the family. What’s more, Queenie loved culture. She filled the living room with beautifully bound books and china figurines. A profusion of tasteful if innocuous art landscaped the walls. And she nurtured a passion for fine music, becoming an influential theater and symphony patron, amassing a library of records that was even more voluminous and diverse than that of her own parents. To accommodate her grandiose designs, the Epsteins built their dream house in 1934, the year following their marriage. It was a comfortable eleven-room stone residence, with a vaulted entrance, five high-ceilinged bedrooms, and a magnificent alcoved parlor in back, well situated on a lovely wooded property in Childwall, one of the suburbs undergoing rapid upscaling.
While Brian was still very young, Queenie began indoctrinating him in the things that captivated her most, playing him scores of gorgeous music—from concertos by Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, and Bach—as he lay in his crib. “She put so much emotion into his fairy tales that you thought she was auditioning for the West End,” says a neighbor. “And by the time Brian was five, he could recite a favorite story giving it the same dramatic emphasis as Queenie.”
Normal child play didn’t seem to interest him. He wasn’t particularly athletic or sports-minded, like other boys his age; there was no fascination with dinosaurs, tree forts, or family pets. He rarely played with his brother, Clive, who was almost two years younger. Brian was happiest, his relatives say, when among adults, having adult discussions. To an unnatural degree, he kept up with community chatter—what families argued about, who wasn’t on speaking terms, how people were managing personal crises. His aunt Stella recalls that when she babysat for her nephew, Brian would often ask after her friends, an expression of the most profound interest pasted on his tiny face. “Tell me, Auntie,” he would inquire, gazing at her earnestly, “how is Mrs. Abromowitz? What’s become of lovely Mrs. Shapiro’s son, Harold?” Listening to Brian, Stella thought, “he sounded like a little old man.”
But the little boy in him was frighteningly neglected, an oversight that was devastating to Brian’s development. “Queenie treated him as an equal,” says Rex Makin, a solicitor who lived next door and represented the Epsteins, and later Brian, in a professional capacity. “And this, among other things, made him a very volatile person. He was subject to terrific mood swings, no doubt, to a great degree, because of frustration.”
To make matters worse, the physical geography of Brian’s life was every bit as unstable as the treacherous emotional terrain. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1940, exacerbated by Germany’s relentless bombardment of England, sent northerners scrambling to provide security for their families in areas deemed unlikely targets for bombs. Most Scousers remained rooted at the mercy of the unpredictable nightly air raids, but anyone with the resources escaped the harsh realities of war. The Epsteins were only one of hundreds of families who fled Liverpool for relative safety, moving in with relatives in Southport, just thirty miles up the Lancashire coast but a world apart. On the one hand, the move brought them immediate and effective security, but for Brian the sudden change proved a catastrophic force in his development.
Unlike Liverpool, where he participated in his parents’ active social life and accompanied them to the city’s finest restaurants, Southport was sleepy and unsophisticated—a fringe of tiny, cramped homes bordering the sea. It was the most unlikely place in the world for a boy in love with all the symbols of society.
Upon returning home, in 1945, Brian was disoriented, in more ways than one. He was already “one of those out-of-sorts boys who never quite fit,” and his grades, which were notably inconsistent, slipped even further. He ping-ponged from school to school, angry and unmotivated, unable to focus on his studies or to make friends. Two schools in Southport dismissed him for laziness and poor performance. A residency at Liverpool College ended shortly in his expulsion, along with a stinging censure from the headmaster, branding him a “problem child.” The next stop, at a coeducational prep school, proved even more disastrous—and ever brief. Brian lasted a only month, blaming his strident failure to conform on anti-Semitism. That may indeed have contributed to his discomfort (owing to a strong residue of postwar resentment in the North), but in fact it was only a smoke screen for a deepening alienation of a much darker and devious nature.
“It was at this school… that I can first remember my feeling for other male persons and a longing for a close and intimate friend,” Brian confessed in the pages of a private handwritten journal. As he had grown up in genteel surroundings and under Queenie’s indulgent spell, there was nothing in the way of stimuli to test the inchoate feelings that had always eluded him. Now, undercurrents of homosexuality welled to the surface, coinciding with his own intensifying adolescence. He found it difficult to disguise his preference for other boys. The facade of “normalcy” began to crumble, replaced by fears of inadequacy and dread. No doubt he was unprepared for a confrontation of this sort. Certainly there were no role models to admire, no peers from whom to seek counsel. For a boy who had always been pampered and provided for, he was wildly unsuited to handle such a complicated matter. “Indeed,” he later admitted, “no one had explained to me the facts of life.”
While Brian struggled to cope with the nature of his sexuality, his parents, oblivious to any emotional turmoil, continued shipping him around to a string of less-than-illustrious boarding schools. He spent short, ineffectual terms at “benevolent academies” such as Beaconsfield and Clayesmore, and finally two years at the trivial Wrekin College, in Shropshire, where, out of resignation, despair, or simply an effort to fit in, he joined the track team—called the Colts—to uniformly disastrous results. In a diary entry that year he wrote: “I tried very hard. But did not succeed. I think I was rather insignificant.”
As he approached his sixteenth birthday, Brian sent a long, unflinching letter to Harry, describing his frustration and alienation at school. He poured out his heart, confiding his lack of interest in academics and, in an unexpected turn of events, announcing his intention to become a dress designer and the wish to train in London. A portfolio of eight drawings, each on an individual piece of lined notebook paper, was attached as evidence of his potential—fashionably drawn evening dresses in the style of Chanel, crisply tailored, with asymmetrical collars and calf-length hems. If one overlooks the informal presentation, the drawings themselves display a real gift: a fine precision of line and sensitivity to shape, rhythm, and detail. Harry, a relative recalls, “went up the pole.” In all the years, through the fitful cycle of schools, Brian had barely acknowledged his interest in drawing, much less fashion. The whole proposal sounded so outrageous, so confounding. Harry, after all, expected his son to follow him into the family business, not undertake some poncey scheme designing dresses.
Instead of writing back, Harry and Queenie turned up at Wrekin a week later to lay down the law: it “was impossible” to give Brian’s request their blessing. Furthermore, “it would be stupid,” they advised, “to give up going into the family business and [the] security [that provided].”
Predictably, Brian was incensed. “In a rage of temper,” he threatened to leave school at the end of term, when he turned sixteen. A furious argument ensued, in which his parents demanded that he stay and sit exams, but he refused to listen. “I was stubborn,” Brian admitted later, after dropping out of school, but by that time he realized his obstinacy and its steep price. Without a high school diploma or any visible means of support, the path of his destiny became narrowly clear. A month later, following a summer of unfolding depression, he surrendered to fate and reluctantly “reported for duty” at the family furniture store in Liverpool.
Much to Brian’s surprise, the furniture trade wasn’t the living hell he’d imagined it to be. Seeing an opportunity to perform a task without fumbling—an opportunity, moreover, to win some respect from a much-esteemed man like his father—he seized it with the unmitigated energy of someone on a mission. At the family shop, he could reinvent himself in the image of a young, savvy salesman. As such, he threw himself into the job, bringing more excitement to it than perhaps was called for. He took “a keen interest in display work and interior decoration” that often strayed beyond the scope of necessity. The window sets he redressed were stagy and eye-catching, though somewhat radical and unnerving to the shop’s provincial customers. His grandfather Isaac was neither amused nor tolerant of his grandson’s verve. He demanded that Brian toe the line—his line—and when this met with sulky disapproval, Brian was apprenticed to a rival firm across town.
When he returned to NEMS six months later, it was a gracious, more cooperative Brian Epstein, licked into shape perhaps, but no less ambitious. Not only did he seem to understand his role, he appeared to grow into it—and with appreciable delight. Brian learned how to interact with people in such a way that, while often obsequious and subtle, conveyed the impression of immense refinement. He conducted himself with courtly authority. Even when he helped someone, he assumed a dignified air that placed customers twenty years his senior in a position of subordinacy. Much of that force of personality can be ascribed to heritage. Brian never forgot what class he came from—and how it ennobled him. There is a saying that every Englishman knows his place, and if he forgets, there is always someone there to remind him. Brian Epstein knew his place, and he knew how to remind people of its power.
In December 1952, on the cusp of a new year and all that it promised, Brian was drafted, as a clerk, into the Royal Army Service Corps and eventually posted to the Regent’s Park barracks in London. It was a shock of immense consequences. Overnight, every personal stride he’d made came undone. From the very start, military life was an evolving disaster. The charmed life of a privileged furniture heir, concerned only with the expedience of sales and service, had not given Brian the tools that soldiering required. He had learned to conduct himself with authority, not subservience. But military discipline was the least of Brian’s troubles. For years Brian had been able to deny—or suppress—what he called his “latent homosexuality.” There was nothing in his pervading attitude that compelled him to either acknowledge or act on it. Or perhaps he’d become adept at masking his indecisiveness as indifference. Once in the army, however, it all rushed to the fore. “Within the first few weeks,” he wrote, “I met all sorts of young men who little by little revealed the strange homosexual life in London. [And] I became aware of homosexuals wherever I went.”
Oddly, this realization made Brian more alone and “confused” than ever. Having no one with whom he could share his feelings or even glean the facts of life—his life—he became unnaturally high-strung, panicked. His fellow cadets must have sussed out his secret, inasmuch as they ostracized him from their inner circle. Officers, he recalled, “mercilessly” picked on him. Depressed, fretful, insecure, Brian must have radiated weakness. About the same time, he was robbed on a midnight train from Liverpool, an obvious target for bullies and predators.
In his autobiography, Brian invents a dramatic version of his subsequent premature discharge from the army. He claims to have returned to base one night in a fancy car and dressed in a three-piece suit, whereupon the guards mistook him for an officer. In the fading light, they threw him a crisp salute, for which he was remanded to solitary confinement.
Such was the story he decided to tell in 1964, when homosexuality was still a criminal act. In fact, his discharge was a much simpler affair. Sometime before the first of the year, he plunged into a deep depression that left him all but immobilized. Fearing a breakdown, army psychiatrists began delving into Brian’s past and, when they hit upon the source of his disorder, recommended early discharge, which was issued “on medical grounds.”
Brian was understandably relieved. He was no longer a misfit in uniform. Finally, he could get back to Liverpool and concentrate on his career. His old job at NEMS was waiting for him; in his absence, brother Clive had joined the firm.
Once back in Liverpool, Brian was no longer able to ignore his adult feelings. Without a great deal of caution, he plunged into the shadow world of “homosexual life and its various rendezvous.” It must have been a lonely, frightening experience, not at all like today’s accommodating scene, with its sense of community and support groups. The conditions in Liverpool were absolutely degrading, giving rise to solitary, clandestine assignations in seedy haunts that, however intimate or satisfying, he was unable to reconcile. “My life became a succession of mental illnesses and sordid unhappy events,” he concluded in a haze of confusion.
At twenty-one, he was appointed a director of NEMS, but even an endorsement of that magnitude failed to bring some clarity to his life. He lived in terror that someone would discover his dark secret, that it would embarrass—even destroy—his family. By September 1956, that pressure became too much for Brian to bear. Without any warning, he packed, gave notice at work, and left home for an extended visit to London. He’d arranged to meet a friend there for the pursuit of undisclosed leisure, but before the first day was out a familiar incident recurred. He was robbed again; this time, all his personal effects were stolen—his passport, birth certificate, checkbook, wristwatch, all the money he’d brought with him. Afraid to tell his parents the truth, he wangled a job as a department-store clerk until he earned enough to cover a ticket back to Liverpool. He intended to stay only long enough to grab some clothes and cash a few checks, but he was made so distraught by the experience that he suffered a near-physical collapse.
It was during subsequent treatment by the family psychiatrist, he recalled, that “I confessed everything to my doctor.” It all came pouring out—the robberies, the homosexuality, the sordid trysts, the self-loathing. To alleviate the crushing anxiety, the doctor suggested to Brian’s parents that he leave Liverpool as soon as possible. In the course of analysis, it was discovered that Brian yearned to be an actor. His parents, who considered the acting profession barely a notch above window dressing, were in no mood to oblige. But now, with the doctor as his advocate, Harry and Queenie allowed him—quite reluctantly—to audition for a place in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Incredible as it may seem, Brian impressed the school’s no-nonsense director, John Fernald, who admitted him for the forthcoming term, in the late fall of 1956. Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, and Susannah York had graduated just ahead of Brian and won instant recognition. His own class boasted a galaxy of young meteors whose names would light up the West End’s marquees in a few years. Brian was mesmerized by the energy of the work, but by the spring of 1957, the gilt had worn off the novelty. “The narcissism… and the detachment of the actor from other people” left him cold. Besides, instructors had marked him as “a second male lead” with little chance—or talent enough—for greater stardom. Still, he might have stayed on at RADA and graduated had not the edge of self-destruction prevailed, rerouting the course of his life.
Loneliness was partly to blame. Stranded in London between semesters, Brian found part-time work at a bookshop, but there was no one around with whom he could spend those difficult chunks of downtime. On the evening of April 17 he took in a play at the Arts Theatre Club, then stopped for coffee at a nearby bar. Depressed, he took the tube home to Swiss Cottage. It was late, approaching midnight. Coming out of the station, Brian stopped in a public lavatory, where he encountered a tough-looking young man framed in the doorway. They gave each other the once-over. Something unspoken passed between them. They played cat and mouse for five minutes along a deserted stretch of Finchley Road while Brian worked up the nerve to make a move. Another man appeared out of the darkness. Two of them! He hadn’t anticipated that kind of situation. Brian’s “mind went in great fear”; he began sweating profusely. Frantically, he paused in front of a drugstore window for—what? To allow his suitors an opportunity to introduce themselves? To brush up casually against them? He wasn’t sure. It was their move, but when it finally came, it wasn’t the move Brian expected. They were undercover cops. “[And] after a few minutes,” he recalled, “they arrested me for ‘persistently importuning.’ ” Miraculously, a family solicitor helped bury the arrest and quietly return Brian to Liverpool, where he slipped into a routine of work and seclusion. A few months later another disturbance occurred that in many ways mirrored the London incident. This time, he got involved with an ex-guardsman named Billy Connolly, who was on probation for his involvement in the death of a friend. An encounter between them on the docks turned violent. In the course of it, Brian was badly beaten and his expensive watch stolen.
The plot got complicated a few days later when Connolly called, demanding money in exchange for the watch—and his silence. Brian confided in his solicitor, who promptly marched him around to see detectives at the Dale Street station house. “They arranged for a drop,” the lawyer recalls. “The man was to call at Brian’s shop at a certain time for the watch to be redeemed and the money handed over.” It all came off like a charm; Connolly was apprehended, “proper restitution was made.” But it was customary, when a person was robbed in this manner, to protect his identity in the press by providing a generic alias, “Mr. X.” And while Brian’s anonymity was preserved, enough people knew the details so that the unfortunate label dogged him for years to come.
The only positive—and, to Brian, heartening—thing to come out of this was the support of his family. There has always been speculation about whether they knew he was gay. It was never acknowledged by either Harry or Queenie, but, in fact, both these episodes left no doubt of their awareness. There had been shame aplenty to warrant their rancor, even estrangement. And yet, readily enough, they rallied to his side. Harry, especially, found compassion for his son. Those close to the family felt that “he was oblivious” to Brian’s homosexuality or that he chose to ignore it rather than confront a subject outside his grasp. And yet, it was Harry who steadfastly came to his son’s emotional rescue, Harry who supported Brian through each successive mess.
What’s more, it was Harry who now decided that Brian needed some kind of stabilizing influence to ensure against his son’s further unhappiness. Brian was already beating himself up over the Mr. X affair. To keep his son’s spirits up, Harry suggested expanding the small record department they’d opened in the Great Charlotte Street store and letting Brian manage it in any way he saw fit. Clive, in turn, would take over the appliance department, thereby establishing a clear division of responsibility.
The result was an unqualified success. In no time, Brian built the record department from a nook in the ground floor into a solid, full-scale enterprise that challenged NEMS’ much larger and more well established competitors. It wasn’t location or floor space or special pricing that did the trick as much as it was Brian’s wide-eyed ambition. Instead of stocking a selection of current hits and staples, as was the custom among Liverpool’s retailers, he resolved to carry every record in print on demand, so as not to have to special-order one when a customer requested an obscure title. That meant keeping a huge inventory on hand, as well as a system for constantly updating it. Had he bothered to run this scheme past Harry, it is likely to have been dismissed as too speculative or grandiose. But as he was promised free rein—and seeing as his parents were reluctant to dampen his happiness—no effort was made to check the hasty growth, and as a result, the department expanded and flourished.
More important, Brian seemed to thrive in his new role. No one worked harder or showed more determination. Every minute of his day was given over to the demands of his precious record department. He ordered every record himself, stayed in contact with the major distributors in Manchester, trained and supervised the young staff, and handled the books. Along with Peter Brown, he even worked the counter on a regular basis. John Lennon’s boyhood friend Mike Rice, who worked at Martin’s Bank, where NEMS had its account, recalls how Brian was always at the store, always working no matter what the time of day. “My girlfriend and I would usually stay late in Liverpool, and walking past NEMS, we always saw him slaving away. It became a joke between us. We’d phone each other late at night and say, ‘I’ve just been past the record store and—he’s still there!’ ”
By the end of 1960, NEMS had become “the most important record outlet in Liverpool, if not the whole North of England.” Teenagers thronged the three stores each day to stay in the swing of things. Says Brown: “There was really no radio [for them] to listen to; the BBC didn’t play rock ’n roll and Radio Luxembourg was spotty. So, if these kids wanted to hear new music, they had to come in[to NEMS] and listen to it.”
Promoters were encouraged to put up posters in the stores, while NEMS always handled tickets to local events and sponsored transportation. For a teenager in Liverpool, NEMS was the pipeline for reliable information. Someone hanging out there always knew what was going on. And if all else failed, you could always go there to pick up a copy of Mersey Beat.
Mersey Beat was the brainchild of John’s art school mate Bill Harry, who’d been pasting up magazines since he was old enough to hold a pencil. Frank Hesselberg commissioned him to start a newsletter reporting on the local club scene, which they called Frank Comments. It folded after a few issues, but Harry wasn’t deterred. He made further half-baked attempts with Storyville and 52nd Street, to keep tabs on the jazz movement, but with dwindling financial support, they both lapsed into a precipitate decline.
He scrounged up another £50 from a friend and persuaded his girlfriend, Virginia, to leave her accounting job at Woolworth’s. Together, they rented attic space in a building on Renshaw Street, near the art college, and with a single Olivetti typewriter began compiling material for the first issue. Mersey Beat, which made its debut on July 6, 1961, broke no new ground as far as appearances went, looking too much like a dense student newspaper. But its copy leaped over a cliff. No one in the North had devoted more than a line or two to rock ’n roll, and here was a whole magazine full of the stuff. A grainy picture of Gene Vincent grinning graced the cover, along with an article about “Swinging Cilla,” a local, throaty-voiced girl named Cilla White who sang on and off with the Dominoes, Hurricanes, and the Big Three.* And most peculiar, and perhaps just the irreverent edge Harry was striving for, a disjointed piece of nonsense called “Being a Short Diversion on the Dubious Origins of Beatles” as “Translated from the John Lennon.”
Harry cranked out a print run of five thousand and hit the streets running. Most newsagents and bookshops agreed to sell his funky rag, but only one or two copies each. (He split the cover price – threepence a copy—with the retailer.) At the Whitechapel branch of NEMS, Harry asked to see the manager and was shown directly into Brian Epstein’s office. “He looked extremely smart, was very polite, talked posh—everything about him was precise and impressive,” Harry recalls. “Straightaway, he agreed to take a dozen copies of [Mersey Beat].”
Brian was waiting when Harry returned the next week to collect the receipts. “I can’t understand it,” he told Bill, pointing to the empty paper bin near the counter. “They sold out in a day. Next time, I’ll take twelve dozen copies.” Harry was stunned, but not as much as Brian was when the second issue sold out. Harry arrived at NEMS at noon with the next allotment and kids were queued up, waiting for it. He had a phenomenon on his hands.
“The next week,” Harry recalls, “[Brian] invited me upstairs to his office and offered me a sherry. I thought: how civilized of him.” Civilized indeed, but with an underlying purpose. “He wanted to know all about what was happening—who was buying the newspaper and what the music scene was like in Liverpool.” The front page was devoted to a breaking story: BEATLES SIGN RECORDING CONTRACT! accompanied by an Astrid Kirchherr photograph of the band. “This is actually in Liverpool?” Brian marveled, thumbing through Mersey Beat. “Who are all these groups?” He couldn’t get over it.
When the third issue appeared, it carried a new column—“Record Releases by Brian Epstein of NEMS”—that flaunted his newly acquired enlightenment about Liverpool’s beat music scene, gleaned almost verbatim from the pages of Mersey Beat. Eventually, he got around to the question that would change everything. Sitting owl-eyed across from Bill Harry, he held up a page of Mersey Beat and wondered: “What about these Beatles?”
Legend has it that Brian stumbled inadvertently over the Beatles when folk hero Raymond Jones confronted him at the NEMS counter sometime on October 28, 1961, and demanded a copy of “My Bonnie.” In his autobiography, Brian wrote: “The name ‘Beatle’ meant nothing to me…. I had never [before] given a thought to any of the Liverpool beat groups then up and coming [sic] in the cellar clubs.” It made for nice copy later, when the press began to call, but as far as the truth went, it was hogwash.
Epstein knew all about the Beatles from his careful scrutiny of Mersey Beat, and what that didn’t tell him, Billy Harry did. What’s more, there were posters plastered everywhere around NEMS announcing various Beatles appearances. “He would have had to have been blind—or ignorant—not to have noticed their name,” Harry contends. Besides, his salesgirls knew the Beatles and made a fuss over them when they came into the store.
A month or two later, interrupting a routine inventory at NEMS, Brian confronted an unsuspecting Alistair Taylor. “Do you remember that record by a band called the Beatles?” he asked out of the blue. Taylor had, indeed; “My Bonnie” enjoyed an embarrassment of sales and was constantly on reorder. “They’re playing at this place called the Cavern. We ought to go see them.”
Without further delay, Brian phoned Bill Harry at the Mersey Beat office. “The Beatles are at the Cavern,” he said. “Could you arrange for me to go and see them?”
What an odd request, Harry mused. No one needed help getting into the Cavern, especially for a lunchtime session; all you had to do was stand in line and pay the shilling. But he recognized Brian’s appetite for protocol. A call to Ray McFall, placed by an intermediary such as Bill, would set Brian apart from the hoi polloi. With his perfectly sculpted hair, his blue, pin-striped suit furling like drapery, and of course a black, calf-skinned briefcase clutched rather powerfully in his hand, he’d stride into the club as if he owned the place.
Any suspicions Harry had about Brian Epstein’s motives were no longer in doubt.
In early October, shortly before John’s twenty-first birthday, he had received a £100 gift from his aunt Elizabeth (whom John called Mater) in Scotland and had taken off with Paul for a spontaneous two-week jaunt. A letter from Stuart had indicated that their exi buddy Jürgen Vollmer now lived in Paris, working as an assistant to photographer William Klein. When John and Paul turned up unannounced outside his tiny hotel on the rue de Beaune, Vollmer was thrilled to see them, delighted that they had come, as they’d explained, to hang out and soak up whatever it was that made him unique. One of those idiosyncrasies was his groovy clothing. Even in Hamburg, they’d known of Vollmer’s frequent excursions to the Paris flea markets, where he put together that wardrobe. Now, they encountered him wearing bell-bottoms a good five years before the rest of the world would catch the trend. That look wouldn’t fly in Liverpool, where sailors were derided unmercifully for their flared legs. But the Beatles bought corduroy jackets, wide-striped “grandfather” shirts, and the sleeveless sweaters that were staples of the Left Bank exis.
“I showed them all the places where I hung out with the artistic crowd,” Vollmer remembered. They couldn’t take their eyes off these people, who seemed so exotic and fascinating, even more so than the colorful Hamburg natives. Finally, after a few days on the prowl, John and Paul asked for a special favor. “We want our hair like you have it,” they said.
In a room at the back of the Hôtel de Beaune, John and Paul sat patiently, nervously, on an unmade bed while Jürgen took a pair of scissors to their greasy manes. According to Vollmer, “I cut their hair [so that it was] more to the side, [although] forward nevertheless, until it looked like mine.” Hardly bowl-shaped, it was sleek and soft-looking, swept to one side, with the hint of a tail that bounced delicately on their shoulders. The Beatles had always possessed half of the equation. Now the whole package was in place.
No one was more surprised than Alistair Taylor when Brian invited him to see the Beatles at the Cavern. He’d been in that dungeon before—“dozens of times”—when it was a jazz club. “We both detested pop music,” Taylor recalls. “The music was totally alien to us. Even though we’d sold all those records [of “My Bonnie”], neither of us played it, nor particularly liked it.”
Brian had no idea how to get to the Cavern, even though it was two hundred yards from NEMS. And once inside, he was awestruck. “It was nothing like what we’d expected,” Taylor remembers. “The place was packed and steam was rolling down the walls. The music was so loud, we couldn’t hear ourselves think.” Both men were uncomfortable in ways that had nothing to do with the physical surroundings. “We were way out of our element. We were both in suits and ties, everyone was staring at us. We were very self-conscious.”
To make themselves less conspicuous, Brian and Alistair took seats near the back. Both men sat stiffly, with their hands folded across their chests. And the band—why, they were shocking, disgraceful. “They could barely play,” Taylor says, “and they were deafening and so unprofessional—laughing with the girls, smoking onstage, and sipping from Cokes during their act. But absolutely magic! The vibe they generated was just unbelievable.” Halfway through the set, he glanced over at Brian and noticed they both were doing the same thing: tapping their hands on their legs.
Afterward, the Beatles disappeared into “a broom cupboard” at the side of the stage. Brian looked reassuringly at Alistair. “Well, that’s it,” he said. “We’ll go have some lunch now. But… let’s just go and say hello to them.”
As Epstein and Taylor made their way to the front, Bob Wooler announced their presence and asked the kids to give them a hand. Wooler didn’t know Brian, other than having seen him “hovering around the counter at NEMS,” but he sensed this Cavern appearance was something significant. Only a few days before, while negotiating a fee for the Beatles with promoter Brian Kelly, Wooler got a taste of the band’s surging popularity. Discussing a contract, Kelly had grumbled bitterly about paying their £10 7s. fee. “Then, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Brian, but they want double that from now on. I’ve been told they’re going for fifteen pounds.” Kelly was irate. “I’m not going to pay those fuckers fifteen pounds!” he screamed. “They’re not worth it.” Wooler disagreed: “You’ve got to book them, Brian, and you’ll have to pay them what they want.” And Kelly did.
No one so much as got up to greet Epstein when he edged inside the bandroom. They knew who he was, however, having drawn his ire on several occasions for loitering in NEMS’ listening booths. George decided to give him a friendly tweak. “And what brings Mr. Epstein here?” he asked, smirking and thickening his Scouse accent.
Brian didn’t notice—or wouldn’t give George the satisfaction. Flashing his tightest, most professional smile, he replied: “We just popped in to say hello. I enjoyed your performance.” He introduced Alistair, who nodded stiffly. “Well done, then. Good-bye.” And they left.
Neither Brian nor Alistair said a word to each other all the way to Peacock’s, in Hackins Hey. Both men were puzzling over the bizarre experience, and besides, their ears were pounding: neither of them could hear. The restaurant was crowded. It was a businessman’s hangout and a welcome sight; it went without saying, they felt more comfortable around people who looked and acted their age. After being seated and ordering drinks, Brian asked Alistair for his opinion. Taylor, a notorious yes-man, was honest. He thought the Beatles were “absolutely awful,” but admitted there was something “remarkable” about them, something he couldn’t quite put into words.
Brian’s reaction made Alistair uncomfortable. “He stared at me for the longest time, with a tight little smile on his lips,” Taylor remembers. “It seemed like he was going to burst. Finally, he blurted out: ‘I think they’re tremendous!’ ”
Taylor found this admission “very odd.” Brian wasn’t at all the kind of person who showed emotion in front of the help, especially over something as superficial as a rock ’n roll band. It wouldn’t be the proper thing to do. But as they talked more about the Beatles—and that was the only thing they discussed throughout lunch—a consensus arose that the band, and even pop music in general, had something extraordinary to offer, something they’d overlooked before and that now demanded their involvement. “We laughed at how both of us had been converted—like that—to the pop world,” Taylor recalls. It felt refreshing, they admitted, to have been among kids who were intoxicated by music. And all that power and excitement—while neither man professed to understand it, they’d been nonetheless moved.
They were still laughing and a bit flushed from drink when Brian called for the check. Then, out of nowhere, he grabbed Alistair by the arm and said, “Do you think I should manage them?”