The Love You Make

by Peter Brown

  Brian Epstein was bent on proving otherwise, but all along it had been an uphill fight. The EMI-owned record company in America, Capitol Records, was routinely alerted at the first signs of chart activity on “Love Me Do” but didn’t show any interest in releasing the song in the United States. When the Beatles’ second single, “Please Please Me” became number one, George Martin personally recommended the single to a Capitol Records executive in New York. Martin received a polite note in return saying, “They won’t do anything in this market.” Now free to take the single to another record company in the U.S., Brian subsequently pitched “Please Please Me” all over the American market, but nobody “heard” the Beatles happening in America. It was beach music they wanted. Finally, Brian managed to sign the single to a small record label in Chicago called Vee Jay, whose claim to fame was that it had once been the label on which the Four Seasons recorded. True to the predictions of the bigger record companies, “Please Please Me” died on the vine with sales of only a few hundred copies. The next single, “She Loves You,” an immediate number-one hit in England, was also turned down by all the major record companies and was signed to an even less well known label than Vee Jay, this one called Swan. “She Loves You” also vanished the moment it was released.

  Thus the elegant Englishman with the clippings under his arm was determined to make a beachhead in America. The trip would be short but crucial. He would have to convince a major record company to take them on, and he would have to book the right venue to present them to the American public. The only glimpse of them had been on a few seconds’ worth of footage on Jack Paar’s NBC series, “Prime Time.” Television was, naturally, the right way to present them to a country as vast as America. The Beatles’ appearance on “Sunday Night at the Palladium” had proved the power of television to Brian when record sales quadrupled the next day. In America, Brian set his sites on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” the top-rated entertainment TV show in 1963.

  Not surprisingly, Ed Sullivan was willing to negotiate for an appearance by the Beatles on his show. Sullivan was a keen-eyed showman and impresario. He knew the potential of giving the Beatles their first American exposure, even if as a curiosity. Sullivan remembered, first of all, their return to England from their Swedish concert the previous autumn. Sullivan—along with Prime Minister Edward Heath—was at Heathrow and had his trip interrupted by their tumultuous arrival. He was impressed that this “gimmick” was not only still around but had a string of number-one hits in their homeland. His London sources were full of Beatles’ exploits, and the time seemed ripe to book them.

  A meeting was arranged in Brian’s hotel suite with Sullivan’s son-in-law, Bob Precht, who produced the show. Precht explained diplomatically that Sullivan would be interested in signing them for one appearance but only as a sort of a novelty item. Brian was astonished; he intended for them to headline. Indeed, Brian would have it no other way. They wanted to appear on the Sullivan show because he was the best, but they were the best too, he explained. The deal that Brian and Precht finally struck was rather extraordinary. The Beatles would headline not one, but two shows on consecutive Sundays, February 9 and 16, 1964. For each show they would receive, in toto, $3,500. Even with Sullivan paying the airfares—which were arranged as a promotional consideration on the show—the $7,000 fee wouldn’t cover expenses. Brian, in effect, had signed them to headline but had to float the trip to the tune of some $50,000.

  Now, with a signed contract from Ed Sullivan in his pocket, Brian went to Capitol records. At a meeting with the director of eastern operations, Brown Meggs, Brian played their newest single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which, he said, had been produced specifically with the “American sound” in mind so that it would appeal to the U.S. market. Brian insisted that coupled with their appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, the new song could break as big in America as it had in England. But Meggs was not as positive, and reluctantly, he agreed to release “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on a limited basis in January of 1964, a month before their appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. Brian couldn’t have been happier with the timing.

  Brian returned home to England a satisfied man that mid-November of 1963. It was just a week before Lee Harvey Oswald would lay America wide open to his boys. For the first of many times, the American dream was shattered by an assassin’s bullet. In a country that seemed so invulnerable to harm, everything was lost in a single moment. December and January in America would be months of grim mourning. The funeral dirges that played relentlessly on American radio stations faded into the soft yet still-sad Christmas carols of the season. By January the nation wanted desperately to hear something happy, to find a diversion, some distraction from the morbid tragedy that had intruded into our lives. America needed a tonic. Little would anyone have expected it to be a pop group.

  3

  Back in Liverpool the money started pouring into NEWS with a ferocity that was at first stupefying. What was originally thought to be hundreds of thousands of pounds in grosses was turning out to be millions. Millions! The Beatles’ families couldn’t even understand what that meant at first, not in Woolton or the Dingle or the NEMS stores, which I (Peter Brown) was then managing for the family. It was estimated that the first year the Beatles would sell £6 million worth of albums in the United Kingdom, skyrocketing EMI’s profits that year by 80 percent. Even with the Beatles’ miniscule royalty rates, all of them would be rich men in a year, particularly John and Paul, who were making many times more than George and Ringo on their songwriting royalties.

  Yet as the boys became paper millionaries, a new, equally extraordinary problem presented itself to them; they were in a 94 percent tax bracket. Quite simply, 94 percent of the Beatles’ earnings were owed to the British Inland Revenue Service. The mathematics were disheartening; they took home only 6 percent of every pound, after which Brian took his 25 percent cut.

  It became quite clear to Brian that if he and the boys were going to grab any money at all in what might be just a few fleeting moments of great prosperity, he had better grab it in cash, and cash meant touring. Thus Brian kept them out on the road in a series of one-night stands, often in grinding five-week stretches at a time, without a night off. Brian found that most promoters were so anxious to book the Beatles—a guaranteed sell-out show—that £1,000 in cash in a brown paper bag passed discreetly in the manager’s office on the night of the performance was not too much to be expected. Brian was no stranger to this system of “brown paper bag” money. As early as the Beatles’ last trip to Hamburg, Horst Fascher reportedly gave Brian 1,000 marks under the table for the Beatles to appear at his club. This brown paper bag money was later distributed to the Beatles after Brian had removed his customary 25 percent cut, a fact revealed here for the first time. In later years, when they were on world tours, Brian would often deposit the cash in local banks and return for it on subsequent trips. In the beginning, Brian obliquely explained to the boys where the money was coming from. Characteristically, they forgot about it. It was never mentioned by any of them again in all the years to come, although the practice was continued up until they stopped touring for good.

  Brian seemed to figure that a few hundred thousand pounds under the table was justified because of the millions they were already paying the government through legitimate means, particularly when overseas money started coming into Great Britain. The accounting firm for NEMS, Bryce-Hamner, knew nothing about the brown paper bag money. They were a conservative, rather uninventive company that had a few show business clients, but none of the financial magnitude of the Beatles. Yet Brian decided to turn the Beatles’ finances over to them, under the personal consultation of one of the firm’s senior partners in their London office, a Dr. Walter Strach. Strach was a tall, imposingly grave man in a black waistcoat, who was given the urgent task of finding a legitimate tax shelter for the income. In the meanwhile, the best advice was to spend some of it. They were certainly entitled.

  All this time they still li
ved in Liverpool at their family homes, and it was generally decided that it was high time the whole organization was moved to London where the action was. Brian moved first to smooth the way for the Beatles. Brian had already been renting a two-room office in London, and now he took a lease on a large suite of rooms in a building on Argyle Street, just next to the Palladium Theater. He made a very cheery announcement about this at NEMS and then individually invited all his key staff to move to London with him. Many did, including the telephone operator, Laurie McCaffrey, and secretary, Barbara Bennett. I remained in Liverpool to run the family NEMS stores.

  In London Brian found himself a spacious, two-bedroom penthouse in Wadham House, a modern building on Williams Mews in Knights-bridge. Brian decorated the flat himself with dramatic wall-to-wall white carpet and heavy black leather furniture. The west wall of the flat was a series of floor-to-ceiling sliding glass panels leading to a small terrace that overlooked the tiled rooftops of the town houses across the way. A black manservant named Lonnie was hired to cook Brian’s meals and pack his bags for his constant traveling. A red Rolls-Royce was ordered from a Park Lane dealership, customized with a vanity case in the armrest in which Brian could keep a monogrammed brush and mirror to make sure his hair wasn’t mussed on arrivals. When the red Rolls arrived, Brian hired a young Cockney lad he fancied named Reg to drive it for him.

  Paul needed no London accommodations; he simply moved in full-time with the Ashers at Wimpole Street. George and Ringo roomed together in a small flat on Green Street. It wasn’t long before their fans discovered the address of the Green Street flat, and the boys were forced to move out. In a mixed blessing, Brian found them the duplicate flat to his two floors below him in Wadham House. The building was chosen for convenience and security, but Brian was always worried that one night George or Ringo would stop upstairs to borrow a cup of sugar and notice that Brian often invited only boys to his parties. Aware that Brian felt this way, Ringo and George would arrive at Brian’s door unexpectedly, just to tease him. The sudden presence of two Beatles in Brian’s flat would often bring all activity to a complete halt.

  John’s move to London was more perplexing than the rest; what to do about Cynthia and the baby? They had recently moved out of the £5 bedsitter and back to her mother’s house in Hoylake. John hoped that if she were out of sight, she would be out of mind, but with the Fleet Street press now fascinated by the minutiae of the Beatles’ personal lives, it was soon ferreted out that he was married. John vigorously denied this rumor when approached in interviews, and a carload of Fleet Street reporters set out to prove him a liar. It wasn’t hard to ascertain Lillian Powell’s Hoylake address from some ne’er-do-well, and a veritable division of reporters and photographers descended on Trinity Place. Half a dozen of them actually slept in a car in front of the house, waiting for Cynthia to emerge. She waited nearly a week before she ventured outside, when she wheeled Julian to the greengrocer in his carriage. She was secretly photographed by hidden photographers with telephoto lenses. Inside the grocery store two reporters approached her and demanded to know if she was John Lennon’s wife. Terrified that she would be blamed for spoiling John’s ruse, Cynthia insisted she was her own twin sister and that the photographs were worthless. The compassionate grocer tried to back up this ridiculous story, but it was transparently a lie. The next morning Cynthia peeked at the newspapers with dread. There on the front pages of several national papers were photographs of her pushing Julian in his Silver Cross pram.

  John was furious. He viewed the revelation of his marriage as a terrible personal embarrassment. “Walking about married,” he said. “It was like walking about with odd socks on, your fly open.” Mostly, John was just worried that the girls would stop chasing him. They didn’t.

  It was Brian, curiously, who prevailed on John not to be too hard on Cynthia. Since the secret was out, they might as well make the best of it. A married Beatle with an adorable baby son was wholesome enough for their image—as long as none of the newspapers pointed out that Cynthia was obviously pregnant before John married her. It was a fairly easy computation to make, but one never addressed by the press when discussing John’s marriage or Julian.7 It was the beginning of an extraordinary period of tolerance and discretion by Fleet Street, heretofore accorded only to members of the Royal Family. In a sense, the editorial wisdom was that the Beatles’ popularity was too good a story in itself to besmirch. This philosophy kept them safe from scandal for many years to come.

  It was decided that John should take Cynthia and the baby with him when he moved to London. They took a trip to Paris together first, their only real honeymoon, and when John went to London the next time he brought Cynthia with him to look for an apartment. The first people she met in London were the Beatles’ official photographer of the moment, Bob Freeman, and his wife. A top London fashion photographer, Freeman had shot the distinctive album cover for their second LP, the one with half their faces in dark shadows. He was now in the profitable position of supplying most of the fan photos of the Beatles for the Beatles Monthly Fan Club Magazine, which had a circulation of over 100,000. At Cynthia’s first meeting with the Freemans it was mentioned that a maisonette directly above their flat was becoming available. Since Cynthia knew no one in London, the proximity of the photographer and his wife just downstairs seemed important to her, and John rented the flat sight unseen. Cynthia was less happy about moving to London after she saw their new place. It was the top floor of a sixth-floor walk-up on Emperor’s Gate, just off the Cromwell Road. The gloomy flat was in a run-down Georgian building situatedjust across the street from a large student hostel. The view from the apartment windows was of dingy rooftops and the West London Airlines Terminal.

  Cynthia tried to make the best of it and began to decorate and clean, but it was only a few weeks before John’s new address leaked out, and the building was besieged by fans, particularly the girls who lived in the student hostel across the street. Cynthia was accosted daily on the front steps of the building or faced with the constant indignity of signs hung out of the hostel windows, welcoming her husband home or bidding him goodbye in the morning. She began to resent the fans, and her isolation in the big city increased. One night shortly after they had moved in, on one of the many nights that John was away on the road, the airlines terminal building burned down. Cynthia stood at the window, holding Julian in her arms, watching as the rooftops around her were consumed by flames. Both she and the baby were crying hysterically. None of it was happening the way she had planned, but at least she was a secret no more.

  chapter Six

  America is at our feet! Could anything be more important than this?

  —Brian Epstein in a phone call to Peter Brown

  1

  When the Beatles exploded in America, the force of the blast nearly knocked them over. “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” released on December 26, had leaped onto the Billboard record charts at number forty-five by January 18, a feat that made the recalcitrant executives at Capitol Records sit up and take notice. It was assumed that the few minutes of film of Jack Paar’s show had sparked minimum interest. Yet a week later “I Want to Hold Your Hand” leaped to the number-three spot, and the following week it was number one. The Beatles, who were performing a three-week stint at the Olympia Theater in Paris, to bad reviews, received the news in a telegram. They were informed that within five days the song had sold 1.5 million copies. Even in a country like America, where a hit record was expected to peak at 200,000 in sales, the figures were enormously out of proportion. If sales continued, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” would sell two million copies in another month. A companion album, Meet the Beatles, was rushed into American record stores as fast as it could be pressed, and overnight it became the fastest selling LP in American recording history.

  It was early on the morning of February 7, 1964, that Brian and the Beatles and a small entourage of aides set out for America to appear on the Ed Sullivan show and a double-header concert at Carn
egie Hall that had been subsequently booked for Lincoln’s Birthday, a federal holiday. The entourage consisted of a newly hired press representative, Tony Barrow, who wrote the “Disker” column in the Liverpool Echo; Neil Aspinall, who had become as important as any member of the group; Dezo Hoffman, the official photographer; and a road manager and bodyguard named Mal Evans. Evans was a kindly but menacing-looking young man. Mal had been a telephone repairman in Liverpool when he met Neil and the boys at the Cavern Club, where he sometimes worked as a part-time bouncer. One night the previous winter, when Neil Aspinall had come down with the flu and was unable to drive the boys to London for a radio interview, Evans substituted for him and since had slowly been incorporated into the inner circle. Although Evans never reached the “brotherhood” level of Neil Aspinall, he became an omnipresent member of their day-to-day lives for the rest of the time the Beatles were together.

  There was another, unexpected member of the entourage: Mrs. John Lennon. In an invitation that absolutely amazed her, Cynthia had been asked to accompany John in her official capacity as wife. Cynthia was terribly pleased yet somehow afraid that the invitation had been instigated by a recent odd incident. She didn’t quite understand the connection, but she decided she didn’t want to examine it too closely. One evening while John was away and Cynthia was home alone with Julian, there was a loud banging on the door of the Emperor’s Gate flat. It was an unexpected visit from a young couple she and John saw socially. They had apparently been arguing, and the wife was sobbing. Her husband pushed her into the flat, where she landed on the floor. “Tell her!” he shouted at his wife. “Tell her!” But the woman only sobbed and said nothing. Later, when John returned home and Cynthia asked him about the incident, he responded only with an icy stare. The next thing she knew she was being whisked out of London on her way to America.