Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  Chapter 8

  A Man You Must Believe

  Among Lennon’s tangled bonds with older men, echoing in the gaps left by Alf Lennon and George Smith, his relationship with Brian Epstein may be the most daunting, intriguing, and quixotically inspired—second only to his friendship with the only slightly older Stuart Sutcliffe. But Epstein’s influence on Lennon is at once simpler and more complicated than prevailing myths explain. A closeted gay man whose Jewish family had triumphed in local retail, Epstein was just six years older than Lennon, and had recently given up on his own show business aspirations after a depressing year at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Harry Epstein, his father, raised his sons, Brian and Clive, to take over his successful appliance stores. But Brian, the elder, had proven a troubled prospect, jumping from school to school, failing in the army, and utterly disinterested in inventory and receipts.

  When asked if he was born in Liverpool, Epstein famously replied, “Yes. I’d say it was essential,” and he meant this more poetically than intended. His homosexuality troubled him from his earliest school days, hardly surprising for a sensitive boy born in England in 1934. And every Jew in British culture suffered keen prejudice, far worse than in America. “Brian was a bit different to many friends because he did have this slightly curious background,” remembered his friend Geoffrey Ellis. “He’d been an unhappy child at school, he’d had an unhappy period in the army, which he’d left rather prematurely to the relief of both sides, and he was really still trying to find his feet at that time.”1 No wonder Epstein took pride in his BBC English: as a Jewish outsider with an unmentionable secret, he had had to work extra-hard to perfect his trustworthy, “acceptable” public façade.

  Epstein’s creative streak led him down several vocational dead ends, frustrating his father’s expectations that he, as the elder son, “grow up.” It took a good while before Epstein was ready, however, to settle for his father’s expectations. His stint at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art came only after years of what his parents felt was indulgence, and it was their final favor to him, his last chance to turn his creative impulse into something worthwhile. His father disdained the theatrical profession, so when Brian soured on London’s cliquish theatrical scene, he had to hold to his end of the bargain: “When I left RADA,” he remembered, “I was determined to throw myself into the family business and make an increasing and lifelong success of it. It was 1957—I was twenty-three and full of resolve to do well for my own and my parents’ sake. My brother Clive had now joined the firm and my father hoped for great expansion.”2 His father misjudged the son’s ambition: soon after taking the reins, he lapped his brother by creating the most successful music-retailer storefront in Britain—and launching the most famous act in show business history.

  The main Epstein furniture store was in Walton, expanding to a Charlotte Street address in downtown Liverpool in 1957. Two-thirds of this space was electrical appliances, “white goods” like washers and dryers, managed by Clive. Brian was given the upstairs floor for music. When he finished with it, it was filled to bursting with records, with album covers papering the ceilings and crowded listening booths where teenagers gathered to listen and socialize.

  To his father’s surprise, the music business quickly outpaced appliances, to the point where they needed to open a second music shop devoted entirely to records. When the Whitechapel store opened in 1959, Epstein booked Britain’s biggest pop star of the day, Anthony Newley, for an in-person appearance at the grand opening. A former child screen star who had graduated to adult roles, he had recently crossed over into singing: his top-ten hits included “I’ve Waited So Long” (from his popular movie Idol on Parade) and “Personality.” Newley was the kind of all-round entertainer Epstein would groom his Beatles to be: pop records would be a launching pad for him to the upper tiers of film, TV—The Strange World of Gurney Slade—and clubbing.

  Epstein made his way down the Cavern steps on November 9, 1961—one month after Lennon turned twenty-one.3 There are several slants to this famous story, the most likely being that one Raymond Jones had made his way into the NEMS shop at the end of October to request a record by the Beatles. (How apt that the first retail request for a Beatle record came from a guy. Jones, like a lot of Cavern regulars, had heard Bob Wooler hawk the disc in between Beatle sets. On a return visit, Epstein informed him that he would happily order the record, which was probably German, by which time two more requests—from women—had come in.

  The story captures Epstein’s nose for trends, his marketing knowledge, and his rock ’n’ roll blind spot. As a retailer, he was a classical snob who used his pop sales to support deep stock in symphonies, trad jazz, and bebop. But he tracked down the Polydor import of “My Bonnie,” featuring Tony Sheridan backed by “the Beat Brothers,” and ordered twenty-five, which sold out immediately, and then fifty more. In his 1964 memoir, A Cellarful of Noise (ghostwritten by press agent Derek Taylor), Epstein claimed he hadn’t yet heard of the Beatles, yet this seems highly implausible. For some reason, Epstein wanted his Beatlemaniac readers to believe that he didn’t read anything in Mersey Beat except his own ads. This belies several solid business tactics that had already made NEMS a runaway success: if he didn’t scour Mersey Beat for ads and local shows by the bands whose records he was selling, what did he think his record buyers were listening to at their own clubs? Colin Hanton doubts Epstein’s premise: “Well, it’s like the story where he asked someone to take him to the Cavern ’cause he didn’t know where it was,” he remembered. “But the guy who owned the Cavern was his next-door neighbor.” Epstein had even hired the Swinging Blue Jeans to play for his twenty-seventh birthday party there. “He must have known about it,” Hanton insists.4

  The muddled circumstances surrounding Epstein’s discovery even led his assistant Alistair Taylor to claim (much later) that it was he who invented Raymond Jones, and put it in the NEMS log as a customer requesting a Beatle record, in order to draw Brian’s attention to the local phenomenon. This is vanity: as the clerk who advised his boss on jazz titles, why wouldn’t Taylor have simply ordered up the record himself, played it for Epstein, and told him the Beatles were a Cavern staple? In retrospect, Taylor drew himself a smaller role by fibbing than he may have actually performed. Spencer Leigh went so far as to publish a photograph of Jones in his book, The Best of Fellas: The Story of Bob Wooler.

  And Bill Harry, Mersey Beat’s editor, maintains he had been chatting up Epstein about the Beatles as part of his newspaper’s success. “Epstein took advertising in Mersey Beat,” Harry said. “He asked me to arrange for him to go to the Cavern. In his book he comes up with this thing about a guy coming into the shop and asking for ‘My Bonnie’ but he’d been discussing the Beatles with me for months already.”5

  If Epstein really hadn’t heard of the Beatles by that point, he clearly should have: in Mersey Beat’s debut issue, which sold swiftly in the NEMS shop, Lennon’s piece appeared on the front page. The second issue featured the blaring headline BEATLES SIGN RECORDING CONTRACT (regarding the German Polydor sessions with Sheridan). As editor, Bill Harry aimed to cover the entire scene, but he was clearly a fan, and touted the Beatles at every opportunity.

  By issue three, Epstein himself was a columnist, contributing a dashed-off tip sheet about pop releases like Presley’s “I Feel So Bad,” Bobby Rydell’s “The Fish,” and Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again.” Epstein’s prose, by the way, bespoke bleached-out taste: Peggy Lee’s “Mañana” is dubbed “superb,” while Del Shannon’s “Hats Off to Larry,” his September follow-up to April’s number-one “Runaway,” is merely “bright.”6 Also in that issue, he mentions George Martin’s pop act Matt Monro, who had a new single, “Love Is the Same Everywhere.” Just below his copy was a Cavern calendar listing the Beatles.

  Epstein was simply too proud to miss the Cavern scene for which his shop supplied material. Alistair Taylor reports how Epstein had an “amazing talent” for sniffing o
ut hits. Record labels began to follow his moves: if he ordered five hundred copies of a record for his two shops in Liverpool, labels ordered more pressings. Taylor remembered several instances of Epstein’s ear tuning into hits long before they even hit radio, including Ray Charles’s “Georgia on My Mind,” his first UK hit, in December 1960, and John Leyton’s “Johnny, Remember Me,” which hit number one in August 1961. Taylor recognized the Beatles as the leather-clad “scallywags” who frequented the shop to monopolize listening booths with their notebooks. Epstein was not the kind of man who would miss such things.

  He also paid attention to Taylor and his clerks. Taylor and others recall NEMS stocking the entire Blue Note catalog, then in its postbop heyday (featuring established scions like McCoy Tyner, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and Jimmy Smith, with free-jazz radicals like Eric Dolphy on the horizon). Liverpool jazz collectors must have worshipped at Epstein’s feet. Taylor recalled:

  He wasn’t a hard taskmaster, but he wasn’t easy. He could be awkward and he was a real stickler that everything had to be right. After all, he was running the best record store in the northwest of England. Then it became the north of England. Then it became the whole of England. He was the first man to stock the whole of the Blue Note jazz catalogue. Because he knew I loved jazz, he invited me to share a box at the [Liverpool] Philharmonic Hall to hear Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk.7

  In his taste for bop titans like Monk and Blakey, Taylor was an adventurous jazz buff, outpacing the trad-jazz types who had frequented the original Cavern. He was among the Europeans who were these Americans’ main support: Monk was becoming a revered figure, and Greenwich Village devotees were arguing about his heavyweight status even as John Coltrane passed through his band in 1957. Taylor was the kind of stuck-up jazz hound Lennon derided because of their disdain for rock ’n’ roll’s “simplicity.” Still, Epstein had enough pride in his business sense to trust Taylor’s judgment, attend jazz concerts, and appreciate the improvisations he heard, even if his own sensibility tended toward late-romantic sincerity. His ear was sophisticated enough to tell the difference between pedestrian and progressive, and it’s crucial to Lennon’s story. He was enough of a classical buff to call himself a “Sibelius hound,” which is roughly like saying you’re a proud somber fart: except for maybe the high religiosity of Bruckner, Sibelius is the least humorous of all the romantic symphonists. There’s reason to believe that the Epstein ear enjoyed Lennon’s dismissal of jazz, knowing that the brash confidence of such a shrewd rock ’n’ roller could only help advance the popular style.

  When Epstein finally made his way down Mathew Street, from the proper shop district through the winding alleyways crowded two centuries before with slave traders, he found the beehive-and-leather crowd queued around the corner. (In his mind, of course, this was the after-hours district he cruised for pickups. The lunchtime scene was supposedly new to him.) In his uniquely British biography, Alan Clayson claims Epstein had already caught the Beatles in Hamburg, become intoxicated with their look and sound, and feared getting caught up in a dangerous obsession. More likely, he felt snobbish about pop and probably rock, but shrewd about how trending styles supported folk, classical, and jazz. And like any good retailer, his ears constantly sought next season’s hits.

  There are Liverpudlians who remember well the day Brian Epstein came down into the Cavern: his natty suit, neatly folded breast-pocket handkerchief, and combed-back hair made him stand out like a teacher among truants, a suit among bohos. “He came in with his red tie,” one observer remembers. “Everybody knew who he was, and Wooler even made an announcement, so there was this strange self-consciousness in the air about his appearance. It was as if the schoolmaster had come down to take a look round.”8 The Beatles, like their Cavern audience, recognized “Eppy” as the slick (read: Jewish) manager of Liverpool’s largest and best local record store.

  Did Lennon’s aggressive stance and menacing grin trigger a surge of feeling in Epstein? Or was it simpler than that: did his business instincts kick in as the dank surge of the crowd surrounded him and he began to smell potential? There was certainly a bit of both. To underplay the homosexual attraction would dismiss part of his truest nature. But to overemphasize his crush on Lennon trivializes his equally strong ambition to be a show-business player.

  He approached the stage after their set and found the Beatles imperturbable. “What brings Mr. Epstein down the Cavern, then?” George Harrison drolly asked him, as if Epstein were hopelessly out of place. The way he stood out there made Epstein feel even more painfully self-conscious than usual. He stood baffled by how his ears suddenly trumped his eyes. These disheveled, grotty teenagers, smoking and swearing at their own audience, jolted the self-proclaimed “dapper” retailer. Maybe, too, he saw the band as rough trade, the kind of trouble that tempted him in the gay underground. Taylor also claimed that his lunch with Epstein after their first Cavern outing brought a firm offer of half ownership in the future management business that suddenly had formed in his mind. This was probably a Taylor fiction: Epstein had never managed an act before, never even spoke of such a notion, and it’s doubtful that if he had wanted a partner, he’d have turned to a subordinate. At the same time, the story speaks to some of Epstein’s tactics, especially his tendency to reveal his position and discuss figures way too early in negotiations. Perhaps, on some level, Epstein felt what he had heard was so big he simply couldn’t handle it all by himself, and he had already learned to trust Taylor’s ear through Thelonious Monk.

  Even discounting Taylor’s self-flattering firsthand account, Epstein’s reaction to the Beatles was instantaneous; after introducing himself to them after their set, he invited them up to his NEMS offices for a meeting. “It was very awe-inspiring, being let into this big record shop after hours with no one there,” McCartney remembers. “It felt like a cathedral.”9 There, from behind his desk, Epstein proposed acting as their manager and told them he was certain he could promise them a recording contract, or at the very least tend to their bookings and secure them better fees. How different this was from the strip-club pretensions of Allan Williams, whom they had to beg for work: the shopkeeper of the area’s most successful record store was approaching them about management. From Epstein’s vantage point, here was a chance to fuse himself with the most macho of young men to compensate for his effeminacy. A deep, subliminal sexual attraction would find expression through a professional relationship. It took him about a week to win over their skepticism.

  Although he was only twenty-seven at the time, even to the haughty young Lennon Epstein had an air of success, of a grown-up who knew what he was about. He drove a sleek yet genteel Zodiac, Ford’s luxury variant of its sporty Zephyr. McCartney remembered this as decisive: “The big impressive thing about Brian was his car. He had a bigger car than anyone we knew.”10 After Epstein made his pitch, “there was a pause,” Alistair Taylor wrote. “The four Beatles—John, Paul, George, and Pete—exchanged glances. Then John said, emphatically, ‘Yes.’ He exhaled a sigh of relief. ‘We would like you to manage us, Mr. Epstein.’ ”11

  Living a secret life as a homosexual in this era meant scrambling around in a shameful rat maze. A covert yet thriving subculture, the gay underworld promised a tragic and painful existence, and Epstein grappled with a double whammy, Jewishness and sexual preference, an almost unimaginable handicap then compared with today’s perspective. But even in this narrow realm, Epstein created a unique persona for himself. He developed keen social skills to cope with all the homophobia, and an even more intricate private self among his peers.

  “There’s lots of beliefs amongst tough men that so-called poofs or pansies and people like that have a harder time,” recalled club owner Yankel Feather. “There were slack-arsed trimmers, as the Liverpudlians called them, around the clubs and the odd sailor would come in, but it wasn’t always the poofs who were the passive ones and it wasn’t always the sailors and the slack-arsed trimmers who were the tough ones.”12


  The flip side of Epstein’s finesse was his taste for rough trade, the seedier type he trolled for one-night stands with near the docks. Alistair Taylor described a typical encounter:

  One night, he’d left my house about ten o’clock for wherever he was going. By about a quarter to midnight he was back on my doorstep. He left my house in a beautiful white shirt . . . and when he came back on my doorstep it was a brilliant red. He’d been knocked about so much that he didn’t even come back in his car. . . . [Some] person had left him in this state. I bathed him. I got him right. He stayed the night and went back home or wherever he went the next morning looking reasonably good.13

  Long before he met Lennon, Epstein trafficked in a network of secrets and back-alley trysts that always threatened to erupt into blackmail. In an era not as far removed from Oscar Wilde’s as a contemporary reader might think, Epstein was accustomed to duplicity in both personal and business affairs. In fact, pop music and theater would have been about the only two professions to account for any openness at all in terms of sexual preference. His father’s business could have been brought down by such scandal. His friend Geoffrey Ellis recalled that Epstein “behaved sometimes in a way which was very dangerous, and he was conscious of this. In some ways, he sought out danger. It gave him a thrill, but of course led him into many very awkward situations from time to time. I think deep down he didn’t want to be homosexual but paradoxically he enjoyed his homosexual experiences very much indeed.”14

  The duality of Epstein’s personality was the first thing most took note of. As Cynthia Powell described him:

  A very complex character was Brian. He was a most generous man, thoughtful to the point of embarrassment at times, shy and gregarious at the same instant, but if John ever refused him a request he could behave like a spoilt child and throw tantrums, even stamping his feet with frustration, tears in his eyes. And no one could frustrate Brian more than John. I think he reveled in his power to make Brian squirm and lose his temper, even though he admired Brian as manager and godfather to our son.15