John would never be able to recall the precise moment he saw Brian Epstein for the first time. Had it been in the NEMS record shop? As Brian was the manager of this branch of his family’s firm, he was always there, so John might have been at least peripherally aware of him as he browsed through the records. Or had he spotted him standing at the back of the Cavern on 9 November 1961? If he had, Brian in his expensive suit would have stuck out among the lunchtime crush of kids. Most likely John and the other Beatles only fully realised Brian’s interest when, a littler later, Bob Wooler announced his presence over the tannoy system and asked the Cavernites, as the fans were now calling themselves, for a big hand for him.
‘And what brings Mr Epstein here?’ George is reputed to have asked the young shopkeeper in that smiling, slightly insolent style that he had picked up from John.
Brian Epstein didn’t tell him. He hadn’t decided yet. He was nervous. The Beatles were a pretty intimidating gang to approach. He needed to make some enquiries. A few days earlier a fan, possibly called Raymond Jones, had walked into his shop and asked for the Beatles’ recording of ‘My Bonnie’. The Beatles may have been disappointed with the recordings they’d made with Tony Sheridan in Hamburg, but Stuart had sent them a copy of ‘My Bonnie’ and they couldn’t help but talk about it. It was, after all, their first appearance on a proper record. After that, word had inevitably got around.
Most record shops would have sent Raymond Jones away telling him that ‘My Bonnie’ hadn’t been released in Britain, and that he would have to go to Germany to buy it. And that would have been that. But Brian Epstein, or ‘Mr Brian’ as he asked his staff to call him, had, in the last few years, built up his business by meticulously noting and pursuing every customer’s request. And when a couple of days later he received two more requests for ‘My Bonnie’, he was intrigued enough to ask Bill Harry for a little more information on these Beatles. Bill had pointed him towards the Cavern.
In the small world culture that was pop music in Liverpool, Brian had met Bill when the ex-art college student had approached him for financial backing for Mersey Beat. He hadn’t given it, but he had agreed to sell copies of the newspaper in his shop, to compile a ‘Liverpool Top Ten’ based on record sales at NEMS, and to write a record review column. He had grown up as a lover of classical music, but his job was inevitably drawing him ever closer towards pop.
The legend is that he’d never heard of the Beatles before the Raymond Jones enquiry. But, not only were there regular advertisements in the classified columns of the Liverpool Echo for the Beatles’ appearances around Merseyside, Mersey Beat was now also regularly publishing John’s column on one page and Brian’s own pop reviews on another. So, he could hardly have been totally unaware of them. That said, the world that Brian inhabited was much different from that of the Beatles.
To John, Brian seemed at first to be an uncomplicated, posh, rich young man who owned a top-of-the-range Ford Zephyr Zodiac, and who, in his conservative suits, ties and polished shoes, was an uncool-looking twenty-eight years old. But when, over the next few months, more aspects of Brian’s life were revealed to him, it became increasingly clear that ‘uncomplicated’ was nowhere near a valid description. Brian Epstein was, in fact, a very complicated man.
Brought up in a Jewish family in the comfortable suburb of Childwall by his father, Harry Epstein, and mother, Queenie, he had one younger brother, Clive. Privately educated, he went unsuccessfully through seven different schools, before at sixteen he’d given up on education without any qualifications. Initially his ambition had been to become a dress designer, but his father thought that wasn’t a very manly job. So he was sent to work in one of the Epstein family’s furniture shops as a salesman and window dresser. National Service had broken into that when he was eighteen, until, charged with impersonating an officer, he was examined by psychiatrists, found to be psychologically unsuitable to live a soldier’s life and kicked out of the army. A year at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London had followed, before he’d decided he didn’t like the social life of drama students. Back in Liverpool, he was given a family job and put in charge of the record department at NEMS in Whitechapel. He never missed a performance of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and lived with his parents.
The Beatles were culturally a world away from him, but, from the first time Brian made his way down the steps into the fug of the Cavern, he was mesmerised by them. Some have surmised that his interest in the group was sexual, that he saw in them, and in John in particular, rough trade. That has to be possible. In an age when homosexual acts were illegal and could be punished by imprisonment, he might have been turned on by a group of unruly boys in black leather jackets. He did like good-looking working-class boys, and he had the scars, mental as well physical, to show for his pursuit of some of them.
But, it’s more likely that it was the Beatles’ spark, humour and cheek that attracted him. Up on the stage they seemed to be having such a good time together, as they sang and played and bantered with the audience. And, unlike him, they appeared to be supremely confident in who they were. He may have been quite well off, but he wasn’t happy, trying to hide his homosexuality behind a going-nowhere relationship with a girlfriend. Selling records had, for the past five years, been his only success in life, and, at a time when pop was beginning to boom, he had indeed been successful. But now his job was beginning to bore him. He needed something bigger.
Then, there they were, the group that no one wanted to manage. Could he manage them, he wondered, as he brought friends and colleagues to see them? Could he even be a manager? He wasn’t sure. It took him a month to decide what to do, and to enquire of others what a manager actually did and how he did it. Allan Williams was never one to mince words. ‘My honest opinion, Brian, is don’t touch them with a fucking barge pole.’ The Beatles would let him down, as they had let Williams down.
Brian listened, but just kept going back to the Cavern. It wasn’t simply that he was in love with the Beatles. He wanted to have their recklessness, their joie de vivre and enthusiasm for the music they played, their couldn’t-care-less backchat with the fans, and their arrogance at being in a very special gang.
By the end of the month he’d made up his mind, and he invited the group to a meeting in his office above his shop. For some reason, the Beatles, possibly drunk after an afternoon in the Grapes, were being silly and nothing was decided. Nevertheless, Brian persevered. Calling another meeting with them on 3 December, he became cross when Paul didn’t turn up. Paul, he was informed, was taking a bath.
‘This is disgraceful. He’s going to be very late,’ he complained.
‘Late. But very clean,’ countered George, deadpan.
Eventually Paul did arrive and Brian nervously made his pitch, admitting candidly that he was new to management, to which, according to him, the Beatles jokily replied that they were, too. He was surprised when he discovered that they were splitting only £15 a gig between the four of them, and promised he would get them more. And they were surprised when he, as manager, said he would want 25 per cent of their income. It seemed a lot, but, he was so keen, they accepted it. The only thing that concerned them was the music. Would he interfere in what they played? No, he replied, he would not. But their stage act would need to be tidied up if they were going to get on to television. That meant no eating, chewing gum, smoking or swearing on stage and no repartee with the first couple of rows of fans, because the kids at the back couldn’t hear and felt left out.
John would later put it this way. ‘Brian was trying to clean our image up. To us, Brian was the expert . . . Fucking hell! It was a choice of making it, or still eating chicken on stage. We respected his views.’
As in all the big decisions, the other Beatles deferred to John. And he made his mind up instantly. ‘All right, Brian, manage us,’ he said. At which Brian took them across the road to a pub to celebrate their new partnership. When, later, Brian came to assess the difference between John and Paul, he would shrewdly write: ‘Paul has the glamour. John has the command.’
Talking to Rolling Stone in 1970, John would say this of the meeting. ‘It was an assessment. I make a lot of mistakes, characterwise, but now and then I make a good one . . . and Brian was one.’ Not that he didn’t have some misgivings about having to wear a suit and a tie when on stage. This amused Mimi enormously. ‘John came home in a right old mood, banging around,’ she would remember. ‘I thought, “Ha-ha, John Lennon, no more scruffs for you.”’
John would later come to reflect, almost bitterly, on how he had been turned, in his phrase, ‘into a performing flea’ and how ‘we became famous by compromise’. They were ‘playing the game’ in order to get ahead. But at the time he embraced the game with little outward rebellion. He wanted to be rich. ‘All right,’ he would say to himself, ‘I’ll wear a suit. I’ll wear a fucking balloon if someone’s going to pay me.’
Having reached an agreement with the Beatles, Brian set to work getting their parents onside, which was necessary as three of them were still under twenty-one and needed an adult to sign their contracts. Jim McCartney was very pleased, being from a generation that reckoned that all Jewish people must be good at business. He even had a piano bought from NEMS in his front room. For her part, Mona Best was canny enough to see that Brian could do more for her son and the Beatles than she could. She and Pete had been taking care of the Beatles’ Liverpool bookings in, according to road manager Neil Aspinall, a primitive, ad hoc way, with dates scribbled down in a diary or on the back of an envelope, and pay divided, cash in hand, at the end of every gig. So, it was probably a relief to hand that part of the business over to Brian, who would prove a demon at meticulous organisation. But Mona had another reason for stepping back – something that was soon going to be occupying her life more than somewhat.
As always, George’s parents wanted whatever was best for their boy, so it was only Mimi whom Brian really had to charm, and he quickly discovered that she was as forthright as her nephew. As she would admit later to biographer Hunter Davies, at first she worried that Brian would ‘have finished with them in two months’ time and gone on to something else, while John and the others wouldn’t even have got started’. Brian promised her that he would ‘look after John’.
Then he told her that he thought John was very talented and that the Beatles were going places, ‘I was flabbergasted,’ Mimi would remember. ‘I thought the only place John was going was the Labour Exchange.’
Had Brian’s efforts been unsuccessful, that might well have been John’s destination, but, unlike any other possible manager in Liverpool, Brian had, by virtue of his shop, contacts with the big record companies in London. He wasn’t just thinking about managing a popular Liverpool band. He was dreaming on an altogether bigger scale.
In truth, the union of Brian Epstein and the Beatles at that moment was a marriage made in heaven. George Harrison summed up their situations perfectly in The Beatles Anthology: ‘We needed somebody to elevate us out of that cellar, and he needed somebody to get him out of that hole he was in. It was mutually beneficial.’
Brian described his side of the agreement almost gratefully when he was interviewed by Kenneth Harris in the Observer two years later. ‘My own sense of inferiority evaporated with the Beatles because I knew I could help them and that they wanted me to help them and that they trusted me to help them.’
EMI didn’t show any interest when he approached HMV and Columbia, the two big labels there. But Decca got back quickly, sending a representative, Mike Smith, up to Liverpool to see the Beatles in the Cavern. Smith liked what he heard and saw, and in mid-December confirmation arrived that the Beatles had been booked for an audition at Decca in London on 1 January 1962.
After so many years believing that they were invisible to the London music powerbrokers, the Beatles were thrilled to bits. The year was ending on another high, too. Bill Harry had privately told John that the Beatles had beaten friendly rivals Gerry and the Pacemakers in a Mersey Beat readers’ popularity poll, and would be named, on the front page of the next edition in the New Year, as the top group on Merseyside.
It didn’t matter that the Beatles had bought dozens of copies of Mersey Beat so that they could vote for themselves. Gerry and the Pacemakers had probably done the same.