The Beatles were rocking, smoking, eating, joking, drinking, charming, cussing, laughing, taking requests and answering back; they spoke local, looked continental, and played black and white American music with English color; John and Paul vied and gibed for attention, George smiled quietly to the side and sang from time to time, Pete drummed and kept his head down. It was another lunchtime session—and not one of their best. They were jaded, losing interest. But Brian saw enough to see beyond:
Their presentation left a little to be desired as far as I was concerned, because I’d been interested in the theater and acting a long time—but, amongst all that, something tremendous came over, and I was immediately struck by their music, their beat, and their sense of humor on stage. They were very funny; their ad-libbing was excellent.
I liked them enormously, I immediately liked the sound that I heard: I heard their sound before I met them. I think actually that that’s important, because it should always be remembered that people hear their sound and like their sound before they meet them. I thought their sound was something that an awful lot of people would like. They were fresh and they were honest and they had what I thought was a sort of presence, and—this is a terrible, vague term—“star quality.” Whatever that is, they had it—or I sensed that they had it.28
He was hooked, and his words illuminate ample causes. Perhaps too there was something else—for Bob Wooler was always certain Brian was “attracted to the Beatles physically.” Twenty years later, it would become received wisdom that Brian Epstein fell in love with John Lennon at first sight, his focus narrowing on the most aggressive of the four young men in tight-fitting leather. It was only one writer’s view—which he didn’t substantiate with evidence or quotes, an assertion based on an assumption—but it stuck because, given Brian’s taste, appetite and the sight that confronted him, the suggestion is plausible. As Wooler noticed, “John Lennon commanded the stage with the way he stared and stood. His legs would be wide apart—that was one of his trademarks, and it was regarded as being very sexual and very aggressive. The girls up front would be looking up his legs, keeping a watch on the crotch.”29
Suggestions that it was only homoerotic fantasy that drew Brian Epstein to the Beatles are distortion, however, and perform a malign disservice to both him and them. It may have been part of the mix, but he was, above all else, simply the latest in an ever-lengthening line of people seduced by the Beatles’ singular mix of talents: their sound, look, charm, charisma, honesty and humor. They were the complete and original package, and watching them made Brian feel—as it did so many others—elated, enthralled, mesmerized. Bob Wooler witnessed Brian Epstein’s Cavern visit and would crystallize it in eight words: “He came, he saw and he was conquered.”30
All this must have come as a complete shock, and he had to collect himself and remember he’d gone there with a purpose, to obtain information about “My Bonnie” so he could order copies and satisfy his customers. He spoke to George, who inquired—in that expressively querulous drawl, both sing-song and flat—“What brings Mr. Epstein here?”* Brian wasn’t only charmed, he thought George looked familiar to him. “George knew me from the shop, and I realized he was one of the lads hanging round. I said I would love to hear it [‘My Bonnie’]. George got a DJ called Bob Wooler to play it for me. Bob [announced] there was a rep of Nems in the Cavern.”
Though George would retain little memory of this initial encounter, he distilled his and the other Beatles’ earliest impression of Brian Epstein as “some very posh rich feller.” As first impressions go, it was the best one he could have made.31
Later than expected, Brian and Alistair went for their lunch—to the Peacock Buffet on Hackins Hey. It was just a quick bite now because Brian had a tailoring appointment at three and it was already well past two, but there was time enough for him to confide in his PA: he was thinking of suggesting management to the Beatles. It was that instant, like it always was with Brian. His life, as his family knew only too well, was a succession of impulsive passions, energetically devoured and then discarded. (It also suggests he’d found out the Beatles didn’t have a manager and wanted one.)
But Brian Epstein had never been so certain of anything in all his twenty-seven years. His conviction in the Beatles’ qualities was unshakable from the start. He loved, and he believed, and top of these beliefs—and it does appear that he thought this right away—was that they would be the greatest. “I knew they would be bigger than Elvis. I knew they would be the biggest in the world.”32
• • •
As Brian Epstein entered the Beatles’ lives, Sam Leach reentered. Chaotically busy at the start of 1961, the renegade promoter had been quiet of late—the Beatles hadn’t played for him since March—but now, as was his way, he was about to get hyperactive. Diving back in with an almighty splash, he staged Operation Big Beat.
His venue was the area’s biggest dance hall, the Tower Ballroom at New Brighton, Merseyside’s pleasure resort, just a short ferry hop from Liverpool. No other rock promoter thought to present shows here. The Tower itself (where George’s grandfather, John French, once worked as a commissionaire) had been an attempt to bring a touch of Eiffel’s Paris to the northwest English seaside; it was long dismantled, but a vast and splendid ballroom survived underneath as the centerpiece of an amusement park much loved by day-trippers, though an eternal “white elephant” in business terms, fading and rusting with every year. Leach presented five and a half hours of high-volume high-octane rock here, licked by (in order of billing) the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, the Remo Four and King-Size Taylor and the Dominoes. Streams of revelers were delivered in hired coaches that crawled through befogged Victorian streets at two miles an hour. While the attendance figure varied from one eyewitness to the next, Leach himself (in an Echo ad five days later) gave it as three thousand. Atmospheric photos were taken all evening by Dick Matthews. Suddenly active on the scene again, he definitively photographed the Beatles’ all-leather look of summer/autumn 1961 here and at Aintree Institute and in the Cavern.
Leach maintains that he struck a handshake agreement with John and Paul to “manage the Beatles.” It’s unclear when this happened—nothing was on paper, and the handshake was proverbial—but the promoter did hope to capitalize on his renewed association with Liverpool’s best group by somehow propelling them, with him, into the big time, and he hoped to do it by putting them on stage in London and getting all the top impresarios to drop by and be knocked out. He learned from Pete that the Beatles were free on Saturday, December 9, and told them he’d book a venue: the Beatles were going to conquer the capital. This would happen at the same time as they’d be proving their status in Liverpool. In the November 16 Mersey Beat, readers were given the chance to vote for their ten favorite acts in a Popularity Poll; forms had to be received by December 1. It’s said the groups bought multiple copies of the ballot issue and voted for themselves under assumed names; not taking any chances, the Beatles sent in at least a dozen, all with them at the top and Gerry and the Pacemakers at the bottom. As Paul would remember, “It was a tense moment, because we thought Gerry and the Pacemakers were definitely gonna take it off us. So we bought a few copies and filled them in. I’m sure Gerry bought as many copies as we did.”33
In these same days, Brian Epstein was showing recurring interest in them. With his “My Bonnie” inquiry satisfied, he was now dropping in to see the Beatles with his altogether different purpose in mind. The tailor measuring him for another new suit the afternoon of November 9 may have wrinkled his nose at the Aunt Sally smell clinging to this usually unsullied gentleman, but Brian was going back to the Cavern for more, and more. “I commenced to go around with them almost a week or so after having first met them,” he told the BBC two years later—suggesting this kicked off approximately the weekend of November 18–19.34 No details are known, but perhaps he saw them at Merseyside Civil Service Club or Hambleton Hall (most likely) or New Brighton Tower; h
e definitely saw them at the Cavern, catching lunchtime sessions and the odd evening date. Bob Wooler watched him from the shadows, unseen in the tiny cubbyhole from which he ruled the record deck and MC’s microphone: “Brian knew straight away he wanted to manage them, but he didn’t rush in as he needed a getting-to-know-you period first. He went to a couple of other venues to see what they were like and how they behaved, and he found them very animalistic.”35
The more he saw, the more he was sure. As he explained it, “I never thought that they would be anything less than the greatest stars in the world—and I mean that. I always knew they were going to be tremendous … I sensed something big, if it could be at once harnessed and at the same time left untamed.”36
He was a beginner, absolutely, but not an absolute beginner. He knew his decision to offer management to the Beatles was “largely impulse” but it wasn’t something of which he had no knowledge. “I had watched the careers of pop artists under various managements through my sales of records,” he said, and he also felt he had a grasp on the art of presenting music.37 At this precise moment, as he planned the Beatles’ management, the British chart included the year’s unlikeliest hit, the oddly metered sax/piano jazz instrumental “Take Five,” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Brian wrote about it in Mersey Beat and reflected thoughtfully that it was “a brilliant example of a disc being presented to the public at the right moment.”38
Brian believed it vital to swing his family and senior staff to his way of thinking; he would need their support in times to come—and he was also bursting to tell everyone what he’d found. Peter Brown, still running Nems’ record department at Great Charlotte Street, remembers Brian first mentioning the Beatles when they dined one evening in the grill room of the Corn Market Hotel, near the Pier Head. Brian then took him down the Cavern where Brown saw none of the attractions so enthusiastically described. “I thought it was hideous, full of a lot of nasty girls from Tate & Lyle. It was dark, small, sweaty and you couldn’t get a drink.”39 Like Brian before him, Brown recognized the Beatles as lads who hung around his shop; one rainy afternoon they’d come in wearing the Acker Bilk bowlers.
Brown, of course, wasn’t only a Nems manager, he was among Brian’s closest circle—not lovers, just good friends. So did Brian want to manage the Beatles to pursue them sexually?
For me personally at that time, Paul was the most attractive, with his baby-face, but Brian wasn’t drawn to his type at all. His type was a working-class boy who was a bit rough, unrefined, with a lot of attitude. John pretended he was rough trade, the Teddy Boy type, and this was certainly more interesting to Brian—but while I’m sure that liking the look of John was an element of Brian’s interest, I don’t believe for a moment that it was the motivation for him to want to manage them. Brian was far too honest to do that—that would be a Machiavellian thing to do and Brian wasn’t like that.40
Brian’s family approach began with his brother. He and Clive were unalike but always close, and Brian needed him to understand. Over lunch at the 23 Club, Brian explained how he’d discovered the greatest act in the world and how he believed he could propel them to the top. He probably blushed when he said it—he always went red when he said such things (though this never stopped him from saying them)—and Clive saw his brother’s enthusiasm, and that he wasn’t in it for the money. There’d be precious little of this to begin with. “He thought that if there was any money to be made it was just going to be a few pounds a week,” Clive would remember.41
Harry and Queenie Epstein were visiting relatives in London at the time, but as soon as they returned Brian took home a copy of “My Bonnie” (Nems had received stock from Germany) and played it to them. “Ignore the singer,” he instructed, “just listen to the backing group.” For a little under three minutes—from Sheridan’s German-sprechen waltz intro, to the die-away of the last beat—the luxuriously appointed lounge at 197 Queens Drive, Childwall, shook to the Prellies sound of five young Englishmen on stage in a suburban Hamburg hall. It’s hard to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Epstein liking it for even a moment, or being anything other than astonished when Brian announced, “They are going to be a big hit and I’m going to manage them.”42
They’d seen something coming, this much was clear from Brian’s behavior in recent months, but such a move was entirely unexpected. And yet these walls had witnessed innumerable shock waves before, going back to Brian’s childhood. As Harry rose to challenge him for what must have seemed (and was) the umpteenth time, Brian stemmed the tide by saying that managing the Beatles—if indeed they accepted his management—would entail little distraction from work, perhaps only two half-days a week (to begin with, at any rate). He would make up the time, and Nems would not suffer.
Further objection was futile: Brian had decided, and would not be budged. Queenie, as ever, pacified Harry, saying Brian must be given the opportunity to pursue his passions, even to the extent of getting mixed up with probably rough and working-class Liverpool boys who played rock and roll. Privately, there was surely that particular concern too—please God let Brian find what he was looking for and not make a fool of himself, or end up in trouble again, or back in court, or come to harm.
The Beatles knew they were being watched. Brian stood out a fuckin’ mile, not just in the Cavern but everywhere. He exhibited class: the finest suits and Italian shoes, jewelry, gold cigarette case and lighter, the smart overcoat, the foulard scarf—white spots on dark blue—which he tied like a cravat, and that crisp RADA voice. He started to speak to them after Cavern lunchtime sessions, just a few words. Paul told him if he’d been there the night before he’d have seen him signing an autograph on a girl’s arm. “I always seemed to miss their greatest moments,” Brian would reflect with genuine regret. It’s obvious that he was, from the start, a fan. He admitted it in an interview four years later—“I’m very much a Beatle fan, I’ve always realized this, right since I’ve known them.”43
They didn’t think he wanted to manage them, they just wondered why he was paying them such attention, and were flattered by it. They judged him by the standards ingrained in the population of a poor, working-class city that exhibited few signs of conspicuous success: the man was posh—said not in the usual accusatory Scouse sense, to keep an aspiring individual in his place, but because he actually was posh. He was cultured and refined, a gentleman not a scruff, an efficient and educated man of style who spoke like royalty, owned the shop they spent so much time in, drove a Ford Zodiac, lived in a big house and seemed to be rich. As John explained, “To us he was the expert. I mean, he had a shop. Anybody who’s got a shop must be all right. And a car. And a big house on Queens Drive … I mean, fuckin’ hell, you don’t care whether it’s his dad[’s house] or not, that means they’re it, aren’t they? So we thought he was it.”44
They knew he was “queer.” Brian would labor for months under the delusion they didn’t, but they did. There’d be many people in the months and years to come who’d not realize it, because their minds didn’t think that way, but the Beatles were hip to it, and it didn’t particularly bother them.45 Royston Ellis had told them one in four blokes was queer and they already counted themselves fortunate to have bucked that statistic. Brian manifestly was, though. Male grooming in Britain in 1961 just about—maybe for a few—extended to the use of underarm deodorant (the weekly bath washed away sweat, didn’t it?), but Brian was well scrubbed, shaved and aftershaved, deodorized, and so manicured he wore transparent varnish to give his nails a clean sheen. He had physical and vocal affectations, he was persnickety about lots of things, and then there was the way he walked—it wasn’t quite a mince but there was a daintiness that begged imitation, and surely got it.
When Brian invited the Beatles to a meeting at Nems Whitechapel on November 29, it was already clear they could shift records. A box of twenty-five “My Bonnie”s had arrived from Germany (a special import order placed via Deutsche Grammophon’s London office) and once he’d put some aside for Raymond Jones and
others who’d ordered it, and kept back maybe five more, the rest went on general sale. As Alistair Taylor would remember, “Brian stuck up a notice in the window of Nems saying BEATLES RECORD AVAILABLE HERE and literally within hours we’d sold out. So we rang up and I think we ordered another fifty.”46
The meeting was fixed for early afternoon, after the Beatles’ Cavern lunchtime session. The two-hundred-step walk was halted after ten when they stepped into the Grapes. They didn’t step out again until closing time, and arrived at Nems tardily, and with Bob Wooler in tow. “They asked me to go to the meeting—’Come along and see what you think of this feller.’ They didn’t know if he was going to be a con man. There were a lot of con men around. John introduced me [to Brian] as his dad, which threw everybody, including me.”47 Wooler would recall the Beatles wearing leather jackets and jeans, and that formal introductions were made by the classical counter on the ground floor. He was personally embarrassed the Beatles had turned up late and lubricated, and Brian—a pathological stickler for punctuality—would not have been impressed either. But he wasn’t going to be distracted by it. There was much he wanted to say, so he started.
Pete says he was struck by Brian’s timidity and hesitant delivery; he noticed him “choosing his words carefully, unsure if they’d be flung back at him.”48 The Beatles got his drift the moment Brian asked about their management arrangements. They told him about Allan Williams (though not necessarily all the details) and Pete said he ran the bookings.
Brian also asked how the “My Bonnie” record had come about … and then explained why he wanted to know. He’d taken the liberty, unasked, of starting a process likely to lead to an audition for a British record company. If this interested them, it was vital he first establish the extent of their commitment to Kaempfert. Brian asked whoever had the contract to bring it into Nems by the following day because he was going down to London and wanted to take it with him. He’d already fixed some record company appointments for Friday, December 1.
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