by Peter Brown
The evening of the Beatles’ double Carnegie Hall performance was especially festive in New York, since it was also Lincoln’s birthday and a school and bank holiday. The sold-out show was another triumph, attended by the usual celebrities and VIPs. After the second show Brian left the theater with concert promoter Sid Bernstein and walked through the snowy Manhattan streets to where Madison Square Garden then stood on Eighth Avenue and Fifty-second Street. Bernstein told Brian he had no doubt that the Beatles could sell it out. He was so anxious for Brian to try, he offered to donate $5,000 to the British Cancer Fund if Brian allowed him to book and promote the show. But Brian preferred to wait. He told Bernstein that his boys would fill bigger halls than Madison Square Garden. Bernstein reminded him that there hardly were bigger halls than Madison Square Garden.
“Then we’ll book football stadiums,” Brian promised. “We’ll fill the largest arenas in the world.”
3
On February 22 Brian and the Beatles left for England from America, a scant fifteen days after they had left. The Beatles were now the entertainment rage on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe and Japan could not be far behind. In terms of statistics, they were clearly bigger than the biggest, Mr. Presley. The day after they left the United States, they became the cover story of Newsweek magazine. It was pointed out that the Beatles were barely out of their teens—John was the oldest at twenty-four-and that their twenty-eight-year-old manager, who had been the manager of a record store eighteen months previously, was one of the most admired businessmen in the entertainment industry and at least as famous as his wards.
But what did that mean to the troubled young man who sat in the first-class section of a BOAC jet on the way home, a double Cognac in his right hand, his stomach filled with prickly burrs of anxiety? Brian was most unhappy at the way things were turning out, things the Beatles weren’t even aware of. First, he had begun to depend heavily on amphetamine pills to keep his energy up, which made his temper short. Although the Beatles themselves were taking just as many pills as Brian during the U.S. trip, it didn’t seem to affect them as badly. He had a temper tantrum with the press agent, Tony Barrow, and had almost fired him, and he had shouted at each of the Beatles at one point or another. And he was beside himself over business mistakes—one that could cost them millions of dollars, as much as $50 million.
Soon after the Beatles appeared on “Sunday Night at the Palladium,” Brian’s office was besieged with offers for merchandise licensing and personal endorsements. Within a few weeks he received offers to manufacture Beatle embossed belts, balls, balloons, bedspreads, beanies, buttons, cookies, candies, cards, pencil sharpeners, towels, toothbrushes, aprons, record holders, scrapbooks, TV trays, all manner of clothing, and, of course, a Beatle wig. Brian knew nothing about personal endorsements, as few people did in 1963. What he did know was that he didn’t want the Beatles to look cheap or as if they were cashing in on their popularity. He decided that the Beatles would refuse all offers for personal endorsements, no matter how much money was offered, but that licensing agreements could be made as long as the product was of the finest quality. Brian would have no Beatles guitars with cheap plastic strings falling apart just a week after purchase and no Beatles lunch boxes that would rust with the first leaky tuna sandwich. Beatle merchandise would be costly but first quality.
In the beginning Brian’s office handled the merchandising requests, deciding which would be honored and which denied, but Brian soon became bored with perusing dolls and rubber boots and began to look around for someone to take care of the matter for him. He made some inquiries around London for a solicitor. Brian wanted an attorney who would be a confidant as well as a legal advisor, and he was always referred to the firm of one David Jacobs. Of course, Brian had already heard of David Jacobs, the flamboyant celebrity attorney whose exploits were carefully covered by the Fleet Street press. Jacobs’ clients included Diana Dors, Judy Garland, and Laurence Harvey, and he was frequently photographed, not at his desk, but in expensive restaurants or getting out of a limousine on the arm of some international movie star. He was perhaps best known for the large money award he won against the Daily Mirror on behalf of American pianist Lee Liberace. A Mirror journalist had written that when Liberace entered the room, he was not sure if a man or woman had arrived.
This was certainly a most appropriate case for Mr. Jacobs, who stood over six feet two inches tall and was heavily made up, at all times, in bright orange stage makeup. His hair was combed back in a dramatic wave and dyed an unnatural jet-black color, like shoe polish had been painted on it. His makeup was sometimes so thick that it caked in the summer when it was humid. It was joked that David Jacobs often mesmerized judge and jury not only with his legal expertise but because of his dazzling court performance in full makeup.
David Jacobs adored the young Brian Epstein and took him under his wing. The two men were similiar in many coincidental ways. Their families were both in the furniture business, both were born and bred of money, and both had doting Jewish mothers. Both were homosexual. David Jacobs became Brian’s chief solicitor. From then on all legal decisions and contracts would be made with David Jacobs’ advice, and it was Jacobs’ law office that took over the task of sorting out the merchandising offers. Jacobs assigned the chore to a young lawyer in his office, but the task soon overran the space as the waiting room began to fill with Beatles combs and cereal bowls. Jacobs finally advised Brian to set up a completely separate company for the merchandising end, from which Brian and the Beatles would simply take a percentage of the profits, while they did the work. Jacobs said he knew of someone who would “take the merchandising business off their hands,” which is exactly what he did.
His name was Nicky Byrne, and Jacobs knew him primarily through social circles. He admired Byrne because he gave wonderful parties, and Jacobs, who loved parties, considered himself an expert.10 At one fabled gala a grand piano and pianist were pushed out the front door and down the streets. Byrne’s ex-wife, Kiki, was a well-known London skiwear designer who ran a chic boutique in Chelsea. Byrne had once been a partner in a club called the Candor Club, so he knew all about show business, Jacobs contended. Byrne agreed to take on the job of merchandising and formed a partnership with five friends, none of whom Brian or Jacobs knew. His other partners were all in their twenties, and one of them was allowed to buy a 20 percent share in the business for only £1000. The business was incorporated under the name of Stramsact in Great Britain, and Seltaeb—Beatles spelled backward—in America.
Byrne had his own solicitors make up the agreement between Seltaeb, Stramsact, and NEMS. David Jacobs had Brian’s power of attorney in the matter and was prepared to sign the contracts in his absence. The one point still unnegotiated in the contracts was simple: the percentages to each of the parties. Now Brian and Jacobs knew there was a lot of money to be made in merchandising, but no one knew exactly how much. A little bit of research would have turned up the fact that Elvis Presley-licensed soft goods had grossed over $20 million in 1957 alone. If Nicky Byrne got 10 or 15 percent of the Beatles licensing, he and his partners could be very, very rich.
David Jacobs casually asked Nicky Byrne what percentage he wanted. Byrne glibly suggested 90 percent for himself, expecting Jacobs to start bargaining. Jacobs nodded. “Well,” he said, “10 percent is better than nothing,” and he signed the contracts.
Brian had never studied the finalized agreements, nor thought about the terms until he had a meeting with Nicky Byrne in New York. Byrne had recently moved to America to run the company there. Byrne looked rather prosperous in his long coat with a luxurious astrakhan collar to help him brave the New York winter. He was also full of himself. He claimed that he had helped fill the New York airport for the Beatles’ arrival by bribing the crowd to show up with promises of dollar bills and free tee shirts. Brian dismissed this; he had already learned that everyone was taking credit for the Beatles’ success, from Bob Wooler to Sid Bernstein. Then Nicky presented him with
a check, collected funds from merchandising, for $9,700. Brian was delighted. It was an unexpected $9,700 and after all, he had agreed to three appearances on the Ed Sullivan show for what had averaged out to be $2,400 an appearance. This would help offset some of the losses.
“How much of this do I owe you?” Brian asked Nicky Byrne, smiling.
“Nothing, Brian. That’s your 10 percent,” Byrne said.
Brian still didn’t quite understand, except that he was to keep the entire $9,700. “That’s marvelous, Nicky. How do you do it?”
Nicky explained that he had already collected over $100,000 and that after expenses there was $97,000, of which Nicky was keeping eighty-eight grand. And that was only the beginning, Nicky jovially told him. Nicky had already been offered half a million dollars for his share of Seltaeb by the Columbia Pictures Corporation, with Ferrari automobiles thrown in for all the partners, according to Nicky. He disclosed that they were all living quite comfortably at the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue and that they had offices on the best block of Fifth Avenue. Nicky was allegedly employing the services of two limousines on twenty-four-hour call and had hired a private helicopter to ferry businessmen to and from the airport.
When it dawned on Brian what had happened, it started to make him physically ill. He couldn’t think of it without wanting to vomit. As each revelation was made, he got angrier and angrier. One of the first deals that Byrne had made was with the Reliant Shirt Corporation for the privilege of manufacturing Beatles tee shirts for which they would pay $100,000. Brian at first thought this sum was ridiculously inflated, until he learned that in only three days the Reliant company had sold more than one million tee shirts, and the money had been earned back three times over. REMCO, one of the largest and best-known toy manufacturers in America, had bought the licensing to manufacture dolls. They had produced 100,000 dolls already and had orders for half a million more. The Beatles wig was such a popular item that the Lowell Toy Corporation couldn’t produce them fast enough, although their factories were manufacturing them at a rate of over 35,000 a day. The Wall Street Journal, in an analysis of the Beatles’ business impact, estimated that by the end of the first year of their success more than fifty million dollars worth of Beatles products would be purchased in America, and that was surely only the beginning if they managed to sustain their popularity.
It took a long, long time for the magnitude of it to sink in. Nicky Byrne’s personal income alone, Brian estimated, could add up to five million dollars. Brian was sick. They had given it away! An incomprehensible sum signed away for nothing! He wondered what the Beatles would say when they found out. He decided it was best they know nothing about it, for the time being, and plotted to keep it from them. The task of getting it back began to gnaw at him. It was his first major failure, and for all the good success, he felt a fool.
chapter Seven
The Sixties were not so much a decade, an era, an epoch, as a very long happening.
—Peter Evans Goodbye Baby & Amen
1
It had a touch of the naughty nineties of Paris, the decadence of prewar Berlin. It had a sprinkling of the glamour of Hollywood in the forties and the sexual passions and peccadilloes of la dolce vita in the fifties. It was like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel rewritten by Ian Fleming. Like all good dramas, it had a.beginning, a middle, and an end. It was the single most important creative period in modern history, irrevocably changing all that followed it in fashion, music, and mores. Yet it wasn’t until 1967, when it was nearly halfway over, that Time magazine gave it a name, “Swinging London.”
Peter Evans, in his wickedly snide commentary on the era called Goodbye Baby & Amen, suggests that Swinging London started at precisely 11:03 A.M. on the morning of March 22, 1963, when John Dennis Profumo, the Minister of War, rose in the House of Commons to lie about his association with call girl Christine Keeler. “There was no impropriety whatsoever,” he said in his famous speech. “I shall not hesitate to issue writs for libel and slander if scandalous allegations are made or repeated outside the house.” On June 4 Profumo issued a statement saying he had lied to his colleagues and was resigning as both Minister of War and as a member of Parliament. Three days after Profumo resigned, Dr. Stephen Ward was arrested for “living off the improper immoral earnings” of Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. The ensuing trial, with testimony of orgies in high places and two-way mirrors, destroyed the government. On August 3, Stephen Ward took an overdose of Nembutal and died. On October 2 Harold Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister from a hospital bed at King Edward VII Hospital, where he was confined for a prostrate operation. Anything Goes, Swinging London was then formally inaugurated the following week by the Beatles’ appearance on “Sunday Night at the London Palladium.”
For all its creativity and real excitement, Swinging London was something of a joke, a capricious prank on the old guard. The leaders of this revolution were the so-called new aristocracy, who came from the working classes. In fact, it was so important to have a modest background in Swinging London that socially active, born aristocrats shed their titles in order to be accepted, and one up-and-coming rock star, Mick Jagger, pretended to be from the tough East End, when in fact he was rather well off. David Bailey, the handsome, blond photographer who epitomized the era, was the son of a tailor. Terrance Donovan, another popular photographer, was the son of a lorry driver. The most popular new actors, Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, spoke with Cockney accents and were the sons, respectively, of a fish porter and a tugboat captain.
There was a general aversion to anything faintly conventional. Indeed, even the professions that were venerated had changed. For the first time in modern history, being a male hairdresser was an esteemed and envied position. At Christmas of 1965, David Bailey immortalized the Swinging London set in a published collection of oversized photographs. The cast of characters included, generically, two actors (Caine and Stamp); eight pop singers (John and Paul and Jagger included); one pop artist; one interior decorator; four photographers; two managers of pop groups (including Brian Epstein); one hairdresser (Vidal Sassoon); two photographers’ designers; one ballet dancer (Rudolf Nureyev); three models; one film producer; one dress designer; one milliner; one discotheque manager (Brian Morris of the Ad Lib); one creative advertising man; plus the murderous underworld twins, the Kray Brothers.
The fashion and cosmetics business dubbed what was happening a “youthquake,” and it was certainly in fashion and grooming that the changes were most apparent. A young designer named Mary Quant had single-handedly revolutionized the look in women’s clothing with what she called the miniskirt, unleashing upon the world an unobstructed view of legs of all sizes, shapes, and attractiveness. A narrow side street named Carnaby Street was now the center of fashion excitement, spewing out new designers from its many shops every week. Long hair for men, a trend directly attributable to the Beatles, was de rigueur. To be considered attractive one needed to be very thin, very pale, very bored, and exclusively British. Candy-striped shirts were in vogue for a time, as was driving an E-Jag, but no trend seemed to last more than a few weeks. Two new, eye-boggling geometric art forms, called Pop Art and Op Art, assaulted the eye from the walls of every smart gallery in Mayfair.
Sex, too, was very different, as were morals. Sex was “free,” talked about frequently in public, indulged in only slightly less frequently, and all without the shame or messy guilt of the fifties. Kenneth Tynan said “fuck” on television, and homosexuality was legalized among consenting adults. Everything was very casual but had an edge of the outrageous to it. When David Bailey dumped model Jean Shrimpton to marry Catherine Deneuve, he wore a sweater and she smoked at the ceremony. Best man Mick Jagger wore jeans. “David Bailey makes love daily” became the nursery rhyme of the Chelsea set. Stores were no longer shops but “boutiques,” and the esteemed form of comedy was satire; the targets were pomposity and tradition.
There were new words too, like pow! and Zap! and gear and grotty. Everybody smoked,
cigarettes by the packfuls, then marijuana. Eventually LSD came along and crystalized it all. As the Swinging Sixties progressed, the drugs got harder—heroin was chic—and a lot of people were arrested or died. It was thought to be a compliment to be called “decadent,” and the suicide rate was peaking. It was more of a sparkler than a full fireworks show, but it was a beautiful bright burst. When the Beatles returned to London that winter, this was the Swinging London they came to lead, as easily as monarchs returning to their ancestral seats of power.
2
On March 2, less than two weeks after their return from America, the Beatles began work on their first feature film, tentatively entitled Beatlemania. Brian had arranged this deal six months before, when the idea was as dangerous as it was glamorous. Music exploitation films of the fifties and sixties were inevitably cheap-looking and moronically scripted, usually of the Beach Blanket Bingo genre. But Elvis had made movies, and successful ones, too, so Brian decided the Beatles would make one. Anyway, Brian’s showman’s mentality couldn’t resist the lure of the silver screen, with his boys thirty feet high. Now that was Brian’s idea of show biz.
At the time the Beatles had made the deal, at the beginning of their success, they had been in a vastly different bargaining position than they were just a few months later on the first day of production. The previous October Brian had been approached by an American film producer named Walter Shenson who had the financial blessings of United Artists in asking the Beatles to appear in their own movie. Brian happily agreed to a meeting with Shenson and Bud Orenstein, the United Artists executive in Great Britain. Although Brian didn’t realize it at the time, U.A. was less interested in making the movie than they were in releasing the soundtrack album; even if the movie was a flop, United Artists would almost certainly make a profit from record sales.11
