John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  But in 1961, a twenty-seven-year-old, especially one of Brian’s social standing and sophistication, had no affinity with pop music or teenage culture. His involvement was purely that of a conscientious retailer, ending as soon as NEMS put up its CLOSED sign; in private, he listened almost exclusively to classical music and was an ardent devotee of opera, ballet, and the theatre.

  By his own later account, it was not until October 28 that a customer order for the Beatles’ pseudonymous Polydor recording with Tony Sheridan (which the deejay Bob Wooler had been dutifully plugging all over town) finally woke him up to their existence. His version was that, having been unable to trace the record through NEMS’s usual supply channels, he discovered with surprise that they were a Liverpool group, playing daily and nightly—and now sometimes all night—just a stone’s throw away. He paid a visit to their Cavern lunchtime show and, overwhelmed by the blazing talent that met his ears and eyes (something William’s Old Barn productions could never be accused of), realized that his destiny was to become their manager.

  In fact, Brian had never seen a pop group play live before, so could not have known how different this one was, or could be, from any other. But he happened to be feeling bored with the retail trade and sensed a use for his creative talents beyond just window-dressing his shop. Most compellingly, in four sweating, skylarking black-leather-clad boy musicians he saw his secret vice made available in an utterly blameless and harmless form: rough trade without the bruises.

  For someone of his class and background even to contemplate going into pop management was highly unusual. Managers of this era were by definition proletarian gamblers, the natural heirs to door-to-door con men and street-corner three-card monte tricksters. But Brian was already wealthy, sporting the tailor-made suits and driving the luxury cars of which every down-at-heel Mersey hustler dreamed. Thanks to public school education and his RADA training, he spoke in smooth, modulated tones without a trace of Liverpudlian. Though only six years John’s senior, he seemed much older; part of the generation sworn to fight against pop, not nurture it. His first exploratory overtures sent a wave of excitement through the Beatles’ circle, even cool-headed Paul McCartney talking in hushed whispers of the “millionaire” who was interested in them.

  Despite the trouble that Brian took to hide his sexual orientation, most people on the Liverpool music scene were fully aware of it. Not long previously, his cover had almost been blown when a more than usually vicious blackmail attempt by one of his dockland pickups left him no choice but to go to the police. A trap had been laid—of necessity in the NEMS shop itself, after hours—and the blackmailer brought to trial, with Brian giving evidence under the pseudonym Mr. X. Many more people around the city than he ever dreamed knew about this horrible episode. Many who did not still guessed his secret instantly, for all the impeccable straightness of his appearance and manner. As several friends whispered to John or Paul in typically vivid Scouse argot: “You’d have to be galloping past on a wild horse with soap in your eyes not to know he’s queer.”

  On December 3, Brian invited the Beatles to a meeting in his office above the NEMS shop to discuss the terms on which he might take over their management. Unfortunately, they refused to treat the encounter with due reverence, turning up very late accompanied by Bob Wooler (whom John facetiously introduced as “me Dad”) and sidestepping all their nervous and increasingly flustered host’s attempts at serious business talk. Things were different, however, at a second meeting between just the four of them and Brian on December 10, fortuitously the day after a disastrous foray with Sam Leach down south to Aldershot, where they had ended up playing to just eighteen people. The burning question, put by Paul, was whether being adopted by Brian would mean changing the kind of music they played. On being assured that it would not, John spoke for the others without bothering to take a vote: “Right then, Brian…manage us.”

  Three of the four were under twenty-one, so could not sign any legal papers without their guardians’ consent. Before going any further, therefore, Brian had to visit the McCartney, Harrison, and Best homes in turn, setting out his intentions—and allaying some instinctive prejudice against him as a Jew. Only John was of age and able to sign on his own account. But Brian still had to call at Mendips and square things with Aunt Mimi; indeed, he recognized Mimi as by far the most important target in his charm offensive. “There was a knock at the door,” she remembered, “and standing there was this smart young man…he had a clean white shirt on and a tie, and he said, ‘Hello, I am Brian Epstein,’ and my first impression was ‘You’ll do.’ He was very direct…‘I want to manage John and the group’…and I made him a cup of tea and he said he wanted to reassure me that everything would be fine and that he’d look after John.

  “I was flabbergasted because [Brian] told me he thought John was really talented and that [the Beatles] were going places…and I thought the only place John would be going was the employment exchange. He was very educated, very polite, knew his p’s and q’s, came from a good family, so I knew he meant well. He said that whatever happened, he’d always take care of John. I think I must have said I would agree or something…it turned out they’d already agreed to him being their manager, but John had wanted my approval, I suppose…. He always wanted to know what I thought.”

  Brian’s immediate objective was to get the Beatles a recording contract, a task in which he foresaw no great difficulty. As a leading record retailer, he enjoyed cordial relations with all the major London labels; via their sales departments he could get straight through to talent scouts and producers, with NEMS’s importance as a client adding weight to his petition. By Christmas he had contacted Polydor and—on the promise of a substantial order from NEMS—persuaded them to release Tony Sheridan’s “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” in the United Kingdom in January, its backing now correctly credited to the Beatles, not the Beat Brothers. He also quickly found sympathetic ears at one of NEMS’s foremost suppliers, the mighty Decca organization. Decca valued his custom enough not merely to listen when he said he had a group potentially “bigger than Elvis” but to send a producer named Mike Smith all the way to Liverpool to see them at the Cavern. Against all expectations, Smith liked what he heard, and reported positively back to his superiors.

  A formal audition took place on New Year’s Day 1962—back then not a public holiday—at Decca’s studios in Swiss Cottage, North London. It was an occasion destined to top the list of Great Music Industry Blunders forever afterward, but in fairness the Beatles that day could hardly have looked less commercial. The playlist—chosen by Brian to show off their versatility—was a mixture of R&B stompers like “Money” and “Memphis, Tennessee,” soft pop like “Take Good Care of My Baby” and “To Know Her Is to Love Her,” cocktail-time ballads like “Till There Was You” and “September in the Rain,” and crusty old standards like “Besame Mucho” and “The Sheik of Araby.” Rather than impressing Decca, this created confusion: were they R&B, pop, country, middle-of-the-road, or old-fashioned music hall? Three Lennon-McCartney compositions, “Like Dreamers Do” and “Love of the Loved” by Paul and “Hello Little Girl” by John, passed almost unnoticed amid the motley. As a final perverse twist out of focus, they did Leiber and Stoller’s “Three Cool Cats,” a comic variation on “Three Blind Mice” sung by George with ad-libs by John as Speedy Gonzales (“Hey, man, save-a one chick forr me…”). Fifteen tracks were recorded in a single take each, on two-track mono, without editing or overdubbing, the whole session wrapping in little more than an hour.

  Despite some initial positive signs, Decca notified a formal rejection just over three weeks afterward. The official reason—comparable with Hollywood predictions in 1927 that talkies had no future—was: “Four-man guitar groups are on the way out.” John, rightly, blamed Brian’s choice of material and vowed it would be the last time anyone told the Beatles what to play. “We were good,” he insisted later. “At least, we were good for then.”

  Pending further init
iatives in London, Brian set about organizing the Beatles with the same meticulous efficiency that he applied to his NEMS record stock. Where “the Boys” (as he instantly took to calling them) were concerned, expense seemed to be no object. His first act was to pay off the backlog of installment debts on their equipment, including John’s long-discarded Hofner Club 40 guitar. Press announcements for Beatles gigs ceased to be wordy small-type “Woolertins” and became display ads with elegant black rules, calling them Polydor Recording Artists and trumpeting their official ascendancy to Liverpool’s number one group, as confirmed on January 4 by a readers’ poll in Mersey Beat.

  Before a gig, their driver, Neil Aspinall, would receive lengthy typewritten instructions from Brian about where, for whom, and for how long they were to play, stressing the need to be punctual and professional and give the same unstinted value onstage that he gave over the counter of NEMS. Every Friday, each Beatle received a detailed summary of the past week’s earnings and disbursements as if the sums involved were thousands of pounds rather than just tens. The public, don’t-give-a-damn John pretended to find all this bureaucracy ridiculous, but the secret, organized side of him was impressed, as he would eventually admit. “We were in a daydream before [Brian] came along. We’d no idea what we were doing. Seeing our marching orders on paper made it all official.”

  Brian was less assured when it came to dealing with the tough, often uncouth local promoters on whom the Beatles depended for regular work. Recognizing his own inexperience, he sought help from a tall, soft-spoken young man named Joe Flannery, with whom, years before, he had had an atypically happy and stable love affair. Though now managing a rival group, Lee Curtis and the All Stars, fronted by his younger brother, Flannery agreed to help out with the Beatles behind the scenes. It was a decision prompted partly by love of Brian, partly by the good impression John made on him at their first meeting. “One night when my brother’s group and the Beatles were both on at the Iron Door, our bass amplifier broke down, so I had to ask the Beatles to lend us theirs. I went upstairs to their dressing-room which was just a big empty space, littered with great lumps of broken masonry. I asked Paul about borrowing the amp, but he told me I’d have to speak to John. ‘Sure, man,’ John said. ‘The show must go on.’”

  Flo Jannery, as John dubbed him, became a part of the Beatles’ support team, negotiating their fees on Brian’s behalf and acting as a supernumerary fixer, adviser, and driver. “I’d often have to pick up John from his auntie’s, though she never let me in further than the bottom step of the front stairs. Sometimes he’d come out onto the top landing and beckon me up to his room without her knowing.

  One of the Beatles’ favorite after-gig recreations was an American-style tenpin bowling alley in Tuebrook. If no lane happened to be free, they would hang out at Flannery’s flat in nearby Gardiner Road. On these visits, John would always be drawn to a hand-colored photograph of Flannery’s mother, Agnes, as a pretty young woman in the 1920s, with her hair styled in a bulbous golden bob. “He was fascinated by that picture of my mother,” Flannery remembers. “He always loved French women, and he used to say she looked just like Leslie Caron.” It was Agnes, with her gold bangs, so her son believes, who inspired the true Beatle Cut, as opposed to the prototypes created by Astrid Kirchherr and Jurgen Vollmer. “John came in one time and went straight to the picture of my mother, the way he always did. He said ‘I’ve been thinking it over. That’s the way we’re going to have our hair.’”

  In hindsight, a simple explanation would be given for Brian’s interest. With his unerring knack of fancying the wrong person, he had fallen in love with John. Paul may have been prettier, Pete Best more Hollywood handsome, George more dewily boyish. But it was tough-looking Teddy Boy John, with his black leather jacket and dagger-toed boots, who unwittingly ticked every box in a middle-class homosexual’s fantasy of rough trade. As it happened, even John’s feelings about “queers” and “arse bandits” ran second to his ambition for the Beatles. Years later, he would admit he had been ready to do anything that might help persuade Brian sign up the group—and indicated as much. But, from a mixture of innate decency and crippling shyness, Brian refused to take such advantage of him.

  There was also an affinity between the two of them that had nothing to do with sex and everything with class. Notwithstanding their difference in age, and religion, both had much the same half-timbered suburban background, John in Woolton, Brian in just half-a-social-notch-higher Childwall. And, despite their common rejection of formal education, both had cultural interests far beyond NEMS’s record basement or playing rock ’n’ roll at the Cavern. At all events, John was the only Beatle that Brian knew socially: he would often be invited to the substantial Epstein family home in Queens Drive, just as Brian continued visiting Mendips even after Aunt Mimi’s support was in the bag. “John and Brian became very interested in each other,” Mimi would remember. “But not in any sordid way. That makes me sick to hear anything like that. What people don’t realise and only I know is that Brian and John both had a great love of art. They would talk for hours on end about art and paintings, and would go to the galleries together. Brian was an intellectual, and I think John found someone he could talk about things to on the same level.”

  Despite his youth, Brian was a deeply paternal character who by rights should have married and raised a family. All those hitherto ungratifiable impulses to be provident and protective—and indulgent—he now poured into managing the Beatles, treating them not as his clients but as his children. This approach worked most powerfully on the one who, behind a carapace of toughness and independence, had longed for such a presence in his life since his Uncle George’s death six years earlier.

  However, while being impressed, even awed, by what Brian was doing and promised still to do for the Beatles, John resolutely refused to show him any awe or even undue respect as a person. After their first meeting, he took to calling him “Eppy,” a habit picked up by the other Beatles and ultimately by staff at NEMS. Brian hated the nickname for undermining his carefully nurtured executive gravitas but, even more, for suggesting the comical femininity of some butch maiden aunt. “The Beatles never talked to Brian about being gay,” Joe Flannery says. “They certainly never mocked him about it, to his face. But John had ways of letting him know that they knew: he’d do little gestures, roll his eyes or mimic the way Brian spoke. Worst of all for John was if he pretended he wasn’t…for instance, if he talked about “one of my girlfriends,” which he did actually have. Then John wouldn’t care what he said to deflate him. And, with the way Brian felt about John, there was nobody else in the world who could hurt him quite so much.”

  Brian at this point saw no more future in Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting than did the pair themselves. His objective was to turn the Beatles into a nationally successful stage act, which under 1962 rules did not just mean appealing to teenagers but also being unthreatening and showbizzy enough to get onto grown-up television and radio. And, even with his limited grasp of youth culture, he knew there was only one possible example to follow. “Brian took them all to see the Shadows play at the Empire,” Bill Harry says. “He told them that if they wanted to make it, that was how they’d got to be.”

  In other words, everything that had made their name on Merseyside—everything, indeed, that first attracted Brian to them—would now have to go. Instead of fooling around onstage as they did at the Cavern, drinking, smoking, eating, and trading banter with friends or foes in the audience, they must be as formal and restrained and carefully choreographed as the sedate strummers of “Apache” and “Wonderful Land,” smiling politely, moving minimally and ending each number with a unified, humble, and grateful bow. And instead of the allover black leather that signified rock ’n’ roll in its grubbiest outcast years—and, to many, still recalled Hitler’s Gestapo—they would have to wear Shadows-style, showbiz-style matching suits.

  John, at first, was appalled even to think of giving up the rebel persona h
e had worn like a battle honor for all these years, and being smarmed and groomed and goody-goodied as Brian proposed. Richmal Crompton’s William, forced to don an Eton jacket for a dancing lesson, could not have been more outraged. “He came home in a right old mood, banging around,” Mimi remembered. And eventually it came out. Brian had decided they should wear suits—and, worse than that for John, they had to wear ties, too. I don’t think [he] had worn a tie since he was at art school…. I thought ‘Ha ha John Lennon, no more scruffs for you.’…I thought it was hilarious.”

  John made a brief attempt to organize resistance, but when he found no takers, principle yielded to pragmatism. “[Brian told us] ‘Look, if you wear a suit, you’ll get this much money’ and everyone wanted a good, sharp suit…we wanted a good suit even to wear off stage. ‘Yeah, man, all right, I’ll wear a suit—I’ll wear a bloody balloon if someone’s going to pay me.’”

  Brian therefore ordered four identical Italianate suits in gray brushed tweed, which—this being Brian—did not come from some multiple outfitter like Burtons or Hepworths but from a bespoke tailor in Birkenhead at £40 apiece. After some out-of-town previews, the new look was formally unveiled at the Cavern in March, the Beatles playing one set in their leathers, then coming back later in suits. To mark the watershed moment, Brian had their portrait done by a wedding photographer for whom a “group” normally consisted of bride, groom, and assorted relatives. John, in his brushed tweed jacket, round-collared shirt, and tie, mostly communicates all the joie de vivre of a police lineup. But, according to Paul, being dressed in a modish outfit that hadn’t cost him a penny was less traumatic than he’d expected. “Check the pictures. John’s not scowling in all of them.”