Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  “Can you imagine?” I said to Jack Good. “The blind junkie in Kingsway, singing “Busted Again” to a gin-soaked barroom queen. It’s like a documentary all on its own, Jack.”

  “My dear boy,” said Jack. “Mr. Charles probably wanted a little fresh air to clear his head. The pink gins Rediffusion serves up are pure rocket fuel. He probably asked, ‘Where am I?’ and they said, ‘The Waldorf.’ To a black American, that’s like saying you’ve made it.”

  I started to get more and more into television, mostly with the exchange bands, devising shows for them and handling the deals. For me, it was a fast track to an exciting new medium. Very few of us, including those who worked full-time for the BBC and independent television, had any real idea what we were doing, but that didn’t seem to worry us at all. Nine months after I was first involved with television, Dick Clark telephoned me from Hollywood.

  “Can you give us some segments for Where the Action Is?” he asked.

  I had never heard of it. “No problem,” I said, writing the name down. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “We were thinking of fifteen-minute slots each week on the British scene. Action is the top U.S. pop show so you’ll get plenty of exposure.”

  “Sure, we can do that,” I said, resolving to ask Jack Good, who recently had returned from a year in Hollywood and was producing Shindig, a show that was quickly overtaking Dick’s, for advice. Not only did Jack clue me in, but he asked if we could do clips for Shindig as well.

  I hired space in what is now the Nikon Building, and for two days a week turned it into the Warham Green TV Studios. We got stars like Sandie Shaw, the Walker Brothers, Donovan, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Moodies, the Small Faces, the Yardbirds—whoever had a record on the charts that week.

  We got a little mobile video unit and were off and running. Videotape was brand new, the equipment heavy and chunky and the videocassettes like suitcases, but I learned how to use it in order to produce and direct as if I’d done it all my life. We worked in studios, or on the Embankment, or outside the Festival Hall or in the Albert Hall, drawing small clusters of interested onlookers who thought we were shooting movies. We could have shot movies, we could have made Gone with the Wind, that’s how confident we were. It was truly wonderful, thinking up ideas and just doing it, not worrying about that negative word “can’t.” We could and did. We had a ball going to all the events and being a part of them as our cameras turned.

  Freshly shaved and shampooed at his barber’s, Trumpers, looking a real toff for his television appearances. Brian would go: “And now here we are by the River Thames. Direct from London it’s the Yardbirds singing their latest hit, ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.’ ”

  Then he’d stand aside and look puzzled as they launched into the raunchy little number with its amusing but smutty lyrics. We’d shoot it and off it would go on the plane to America where it was converted into NTSC format and inserted into Shindig or Where the Action Is. We used to do loads of clips in an eight-hour day, at a total cost of about one thousand dollars. Brian would get two hundred and fifty dollars per clip. The Americans really took to them, especially Dick Clark. It would have been incredibly lucrative if Brian had had any idea about what to ask for the clip, but even at two hundred and fifty dollars each, it still made a lot of money. A few months later, Hullabaloo, another American pop show, was launched and we supplied them with segments as well. As we gained in experience and enterprise, we went on to make entire programs for American television, such as, Where the Action Is, specials and The English Scene.

  It was a magic time, very cutting edge for a twenty-one-year-old to be involved in during the swinging sixties. We started to have fun making classic little documentaries, shooting everything from the Richmond R&B Festival with the Animals, Long John Baldry’s Steam Packet, The Who, Rod Stewart and the Stones to Gerry Marsden’s Ferry Across the Mersey, a marvelous little film that showed what Liverpool and the Mersey Sound was all about. It was released in the States through United Artists, a company that Brian and the Beatles developed a special relationship with. It was the kind of film the Beatles would have liked to appear in because Liverpool remained very close to their hearts. It was the place to which we all returned like salmon, year after year for Christmas.

  Tragically, very few of these original videos exist. We had no idea that at some stage in the future they would be pop history. Gold dust. When they were finished with, they were wiped and reused.

  11

  Brian’s place down in the country in Rushlake Green, Sussex, was a joke around the office because its address was Black Boys Lane. All the papers grandly called it “Brian Epstein’s country mansion,” but Kingsley Hill was more a big cottage with roses round the door and some very nice grounds. It had been the secret retreat where Churchill met with his chiefs of staff during the war. Brian got up to a lot of nonsense down there, of course. Rent boys. Pills. Acid. Apart from the paranoia caused by drugs, Brian was deeply troubled. He was always in terror that one of his rent boys would spill the beans, but he was secure to some extent because “buggery” was still illegal, punishable with a very long prison sentence. Therefore, he believed that his rent boys wouldn’t talk or they, too, would get sent down. But rent boys were often used by the police to turn Queen’s Evidence against clients—immunity—and Brian often had to pay large sums to blackmailers. Guilt-ridden, always fearful that his understanding mother would one day open the newspaper and read some shocking exposé about her son, everything got on top of him. Brian couldn’t cope. The odd nervous breakdown was followed by visits to the Priory, an exclusive private clinic just outside of London where film stars and sheiks went.

  I don’t know what Brian got up to sexually. As far as I was concerned, he was camp, but not depraved, as were many men in his immediate social circle. He was modest compared with his close chum, Lionel Bart, the camp writer and composer of the West End smash hit, Oliver. Brian had first known Lionel—who was born Lionel Begleiter in Bart’s hospital—through the Tommy Steele connection. Lionel was in Tommy’s skiffle group, the Cavemen, and had co-written their big hit “Rock with the Cavemen” with Mike Pratt, star of Randall & Hopkirk (deceased). With Mike, he had also written “Butterfingers” for Tommy Steele, and Cliff Richard’s number-one hit, “Living Doll,” as well as big themes like “From Russia with Love.” For a man who couldn’t read or write music and hummed the tunes into a tape recorder, it was remarkable that one or another of his songs were in the top twenty for three years and he won more Ivor Novello awards than any other songwriter. Brian had given him the idea for his last hot stage show, Maggie May, which was set in Liverpool. They had so much in common, they could have been brothers had it not been for the fact that Brian was middle class and posh and Lionel an unrepentant Cockney. When he wrote “Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be,” it was the way he spoke.

  Lionel had two houses: the so-called Grand House, behind the ABC in the Fulham Road, and a mews pied-a-terre behind South Ken Station. The Grand House was exactly that, stylish and elegant, a place to entertain in a formal way. The mews pad was like a debauched miniature chateau. It was small, yes, but every inch reflected sybaritic bad taste. No space was wasted, which was more than could be said for the guests. There were two-way mirrors everywhere, the toilet was a king-sized throne. It was a crushed-velvet Sodom and Gomorrah. Satin and silk orgies were going on all about you. Celebs and TV stars were being shagged in the corner as you walked in a room. Blowjobs in the kitchen. It was all going on, day after day, every night of the week when Lionel wasn’t writing or rehearsing, and sometimes while he was. Brian’s homes weren’t like that. They were discreetly tasteful, everything just so. While things could be pretty wild down in darkest Sussex, you’d never stumble into an orgy in Brian’s London home. Even if he had the odd guardsman or rent boy overnight, you’d never find a thing out of place in the morning. When his mother and father, Queenie and Harry, used to come down from Li
verpool to visit with their son, they always stayed at the Carlton Tower, just around the corner from Brian’s home, not in case they saw something, but because there simply wasn’t enough room at his London place.

  Brian was coming up to his thirtieth birthday, long past the age at which a nice Jewish boy was to be married. His family back in Liverpool started to put the pressure on. They were Jewish, traditional. Both his parents said they wanted to see him settled down with children before they died, so he looked around for a potential bride. She had to be Jewish, of course. That’s when he went to one of Alma Cogan’s little soirees with the Beatles, met her mum, Fay, and for the first time he looked at Alma with marriage in mind. He knew her reasonably well. We had all met her shortly after everybody came down from Liverpool, when she appeared with the Beatles on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Two years older than Brian, she seemed ideally suited to be his wife. She was intelligent, attractive and funny, and in her private life dressed well and conducted herself demurely. She was a nice girl, nicely brought up and still lived with her mother and sister, Sandra, in a flat in Kensington High Street. Added to this, she was wealthy and successful in her own right. Most of all, she was Jewish.

  Alma wasn’t one to go out and about. She didn’t hang out, or lig. She used to go to Danny La Rue’s club occasionally where Danny, the kitsch queen of transvestites, reigned supreme. That was the sort of camp showbiz place that Alma favored when she did go out on the town, flaunting her trademark style of huge bouffant frocks with up to two hundred and fifty yards of net in the underskirts and a beehive so high Noel Coward had once asked her to remove her hat. She didn’t go to parties. Instead she hosted “at-homes” that were lavishly catered. At one end of the big room would be a table groaning with a magnificent buffet and at the other end would be the piano and a radiogram. The furnishings were contemporary, very chichi, with settees that had that kind of squared-off look that wasn’t very comfortable to sit on, though as I remember it, there were a couple of squashy armchairs you could relax in. Mostly we sprawled on the carpet. It was the kind of place where anyone, whatever their status, felt entirely at ease.

  You could drop in to have a cup of tea anytime with the Cogans, but their proper parties were more formal and there was always a telephoned invitation. Brian discovered that John and Paul were regular and frequent visitors to the flat and he instantly asked to be put on the guest list.

  “Of course, darling,” Alma said, and after that Brian was always at these intimate showbiz parties. Guests were a mixture of up-and-coming young British stars like Michael Caine, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and older, established stars, like Richard Burton, Liz Taylor, Bob Hope, Judy Garland, Peter Sellers, Dirk Bogarde, Cary, Grant, Danny Kaye and Sammy Davis Jr.—the list is endless—they were all invited and dropped in when they were in town. I can remember people like Ethel Merman giving us amazing impromptu concerts. Sometimes Sinatra and Sammy would camp it up, while Dud played the piano. It was fabulous. I was always bumping into Sammy around London, particularly at a pub on Bruton Street, Mayfair. We’d drink his favorite brew, Guinness, and talk films.

  At Alma’s, innocent games like charades were played, or there would be singsongs at the piano. Alma used to say that some of the best concerts never to see the light of day happened in her living room, but such events were never recorded: cameras, journalists and tape recorders were strictly banned after a wire was discovered attached to a microphone, snaking down from the flat above—although often on a summer’s night passersby on the busy pavements below would hear the music floating though the open windows.

  At the legendary party Alma gave for Ethel Merman, pop legends like the Stones, Cliff Richard, Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney and of course the Beatles jostled with established icons like Chuck Berry. Paul sat on the floor at the feet of Noel Coward, quietly absorbing the scintillating conversation. For once, he was struck dumb when the Maestro said, “Young man, be satirical.”

  Brian was bowled over by this plethora of talent and wit and put a great deal of effort into being charming to Fay, a woman who insisted on smoking cheroots and wearing dark glasses in a room dimly lit by red lampshades.

  The friendly family atmosphere and privacy allowed John and Paul to relax and be themselves. They started calling Alma’s mother “Mrs. Macogie.” Paul developed a slight crush on Sandra, Alma’s younger sister, and started dropping in unannounced on his own. So too did John. After all, Alma had been a big star when the Beatles were nobody. Affectionately, John called her “Sara Sequin.” It was a bit like musical chairs—as Paul left, John would pop in, but the Cogans took it in their stride and Mrs. Macogie produced another pot of tea and another plate of sandwiches.

  Brian decided on a discreet courtship and arrived regularly to take afternoon tea with Alma and Mrs. Cogan, after which he would hurry away to Sussex with his male friends. He also had this thing about gambling which, strangely enough, none of us picked up on. Secretly, he went to heavy gambling clubs like Crockfords and lost huge amounts. We would have been startled had we known this, and certainly Alma would have been disapproving, perhaps more than about the homosexuality.

  But, ultimately, Brian dithered about so much that Alma lost patience with him. She suddenly announced that she was going to marry someone else, a dark-haired good-looking chap who was Brian’s double. Brian Morris was suitably Jewish and the owner of the Ad Lib. He was also the nephew of Al Burnett, who owned the Stork Club and had good showbiz contacts. Alma, Brian Morris, Ringo and Mo became close friends and I would often bump into them at the Ad Lib.

  “I can’t think what she sees in him,” Brian complained almost snippishly. Now that he had lost the perfect woman, he convinced himself that he was brokenhearted, but I detected a slight air of relief, the hope that his mother would ease off. However, she didn’t blame Alma and the pressure was soon back on. This time, Brian’s attention alighted on a completely different woman: Marianne Faithful. Her mother was Baroness Eva Erisso of the von Sacher-Masoch family, with castles and dungeons and a history, an Austrian dynasty that Brian found infinitely intriguing and instantly identified with. Marianne’s great-uncle, Count von Sacher-Masoch—after whom the word “masochistic” derived—had written the notorious Venus in Furs, and her father, Dr. Glynn Faithfull (Marianne dropped an L) had been a major in British Intelligence and worked as a secret agent. Oddly enough, he also invented a “sexual frigidity” machine, and after the war he had set up a progressive school, where the pupils didn’t have to do anything they didn’t want to do—in great contrast to his own daughter’s formal education in a convent.

  Marianne was fey and exceptionally beautiful, with probably the most luscious lips in London. She had been strictly educated, but under the surface she was Bohemian and believed in free love. She hadn’t yet started her infamous and long, passionate affair with Mick Jagger but, unknown to Brian, was having affairs with the likes of Gene Pitney and a host of others. Brian didn’t realize how promiscuous Marianne was because she had the face and the deportment of an angel. To him, she was a virginal schoolgirl and he appeared to romantically imagine that all he would ever have to do in the bedroom would be to brush her golden hair and lay out a Victorian nightgown.

  The baroness had come to see him at his office with Marianne in tow, to ask if Brian would represent her. I knew Marianne, of course, and we smiled at each other as she walked in, looking demure, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Brian was making up his mind about signing Marianne when two things happened. The first was that Andrew Loog Oldham snatched her from under his nose and signed her up himself; the second more crucial event where Brian’s wedding plans were concerned was that with no warning she suddenly married John Dunbar, a slightly built intellectual type who was an old friend and schoolmate of Peter Asher. As always, Brian mourned the loss and sought solace in Sussex. I had no idea if he had ever had normal hetero sex. No woman ever dragged him off to bed that I ever witnessed, but he did adore them. He loved everything tha
t was feminine about them. He loved their clothes, their hair, their makeup, their perfume. He enjoyed sending everyone vast bouquets of flowers and carefully chosen gifts. I think he probably did ask Alma and Marianne to marry him but I don’t know if he would ever have actually gone through with it had they accepted. Whenever things got raunchy and out of hand around us, he would make his excuses and leave. At times, he almost ran.

  A combination of overwork in Brian’s public life and overindulgence in sex and drugs in his very private life inside the closet led to his life careening out of control. We all knew it because of his erratic behavior, his mood swings, from euphoria to hysteria and, more frequently, to downright temper tantrums. Tormented and ill, once more he admitted himself to the Priory for a rest and to dry out. The problem was, he couldn’t let go long enough to do any good. Daily, he’d check out for a party or an opening, or to have tea with Ringo, then be driven back to the clinic at dawn, using it as a hotel that came with doctors and nurses.

  One major problem that had troubled Brian for years was the lawsuit he had initiated in an attempt to reclaim the Beatles’ merchandising rights. It troubled him not only because so much money had been lost—about £100 million, if his own estimates are correct—but chiefly because it showed up his own incompetence. When the Beatles had first been launched upon the world, none of us had any idea what merchandising sales represented, least of all Brian. He should have had an inkling because he was, after all, in retail. During the first tour, when I saw how girls rushed at the boys and tried to grab anything as souvenirs, I can remember tentatively suggesting to Brian that if we printed up some T-shirts we could make a few bob on the side. Brian was doubtful because he somehow thought it would detract from the Beatles’ image if they didn’t sell—and if they did sell, it might look like barrow-boy tactics, but in the end he agreed as long as they were “nice.”