by Peter Brown
As the corporate size of NEMS grew, so did the roster of NEMS-MANAGED acts. NEMS had become so large and confusing that many of the original Liverpool groups, who had put their personal faith and trust in Brian, were growing increasingly unhappy with the third-level assistants assigned to oversee their careers. During the first year of NEMS’ success Brian had paid them all a fair amount of attention, enjoying the grooming process and playing Svengali. But it didn’t take long for him to realize that they were only mediocre talents compared to the Beatles, and one by one they fell by the wayside, languishing from inattention, or quit, expendable baggage on the Beatles train: Billy J. Kramer, Gerry and the Pacemakers. The Big Three, Tommy Quickly.
Only Cilla Black’s starlight did not seem to fade in Brian’s eyes. Although her professional success to that point had been limited, based solely on her cover version of the songs of others—particularly Paul’s “Love of the Loved”—her association with Brian and the Beatles had kept her prominent in the recording business, and Brian still had faith in her future as a star. For anyone who ever saw Brian and Cilla together, it was quite obvious that his faith in her had nothing to do with her talent. Brian simply loved Cilla. She was warm, she was funny and dependent, and she was “safe.” She was happily in love with her boyfriend, a handsome blond Irishman named Bobby Willis, whom Brian also adored. Somehow, with Cilia, Brian managed to break through a barrier that existed between him and most women. Whatever it was, Cilia remained one of the few people in Brian’s life with whom he felt completely comfortable, and he continued to pursue her career with great devotion.
As if NEMS hadn’t become complicated enough, another scheme Brian implemented that year was to open his own car dealership, Brydor Auto, in Houndslow, Middlesex. Over the past year Brian and the Beatles and other NEMS artists had spent a small fortune on expensive autos, and Brian decided that if he owned his own car dealership he and the Beatles could get exotic cars at wholesale prices, while he made a huge profit from cars sold to other rock stars who would certainly flock to Brydor’s showroom simply because Brian owned it. Lo and behold, this dubious hypothesis turned out to be absolutely correct, and Brydor became a thriving business. Brian asked another old Liverpool chum, Terry Doran, to run the dealership for him, and the name Brydor was a combination of their names. Doran had sold automobiles in Liverpool, and he became, auspiciously, “a man from the motor trade.”
Through Brydor Brian purchased, in addition to the red Rolls-Royce he already owned, a silver Bentley convertible and a black mini-Cooper. Ringo purchased two minis, a Land Rover, and a Facel Vega, which, he bragged to the press, he could afford to buy but not spell. George Harrison drove an E Jaguar, then a white Mascrati, like James Bond. He grew tired of the Maserati when it only had 4,000 miles on it and gave it back to Terry Doran to put up for sale. John finally passed his driver’s test and bought, on a lark, a green Fcrrari and a Mini Minor, which stood in the garage at Kenwood next to his Rolls. The Ferrari was returned to Brydor with only 1,000 miles on it. Neil Aspinall, as a Christmas gift from the boys, was given a gray 2.4 Jaguar.
Still, Brian felt the need to expand his holdings, and on April 5, 1965, he took a lease on the Saville Theater, a cavernous legitimate theater with plush, red velvet seats and scalloped gold boxes adorned with gilt balustrades. Located on Shaftesbury Avenue, on what they called the “wrong side” of Charing Cross Road, the theater was to be run under Brian’s personal direction. Brian intended to present a compendium of promising young playwrights and the best of rock music. His financial plan was for the rock performances to subsidize the quality theater. His first production was the West End premiere of James Baldwin’s Amen Corner, which although a critical flop was a prestigious beginning. Amen Corner was followed by a sold-out Sunday night concert by the Four Tops. Once, when the director of another production took ill, Brian took over the direction of the show himself until the director returned.
Unfortunately, we were soon to realize that the rock concerts—although almost always sold out—couldn’t possibly offset the cost of a theatrical production, particularly with Brian’s deal on the Saville Theater. He had leased the Saville, perhaps in an unconscious, self-destructive gesture, from his old, imagined adversary, Bernard Delfont. Because Brian was too grand to haggle, he signed an agreement in which running and rental costs of the theater were so high it was never possible to make a profit.
In its three years of existence, the Saville became one of the most important places to be seen by the Swinging London set. Every Sunday night was a de rigueur event at which the reigning pop figures, designers, fashion models, and assorted luminaries assembled to show off the latest fashion in clothes and behavior. The center of attraction was the “royal box,” from which Brian and the Beatles could watch the performance. This large, gilt-painted box, which hung out over the audience to the right of the stage, was furnished with long, modern sofas upholstered in striking leopard-skin prints. Behind a velvet curtain there was a small anteroom filled with fresh flowers. Along one wall ran an elaborately stocked bar and a refrigerator filled with Moët & Chandon. The box had its own private street entrance down the block from the front-door crowds. Brian and the Beatles would alight from their limousines and be inside the theater in a matter of seconds, before the fans even realized they were there. The assembled audience would glance expectantly up at the box, waiting for the arrival of Paul and Jane Asher or John or George or, often, the esteemed and popular young entrepreneur and starmaker himself.
Yet something all too predictable was happening to Brian now that fame and fortune had become daily realities. They weren’t enough. He still felt disappointed. The satisfaction of success proved as fleeting as his first few waking breaths each morning. As with the furniture store in Hoylake or RADA or the record stores, Brian was getting bored. All the theaters and car dealerships in the world could not ease his malaise. Even his love for John Lennon, which had spurred him on during the most discouraging periods, was now flattened and transformed into the same kind of fatherly protective love he felt for all the Beatles.
At night, when the Beatles were off with their wives and girlfriends, after his friends and the staff had gone home, Brian was left to face himself. Speedy from a variety of rainbow-colored biamphetamine pills he’d purchased on the black market, more than a little drunk, he would often read through the night with an insomnia he said he had inherited from Queenie. Indeed, both of them read voraciously at night, devouring four or five biographies in a week. The doctor Brian had been recommended to in London, Dr. Norman Cowan, began to prescribe the barbiturate Seconal for him. One or two of these jam-red capsules would usually put him out at dawn, and he would awake groggy and unhappy late in the afternoon. A handful of illicit biamphetamine tablets would follow and put Brian back in the rut. Dr. Cowan, a married, middle-aged practitioner of sterling reputation, had no idea about Brian’s amphetamine use in the beginning of their professional relationship. When Brian finally admitted this to him, Dr. Cowan insisted he stop using the pills, as they were a serious threat to his health. Brian convincingly promised he would never take another one, but, naturally, he only began to take more and more as his tolerance to them increased.
On the nights he was so speedy he needed some action, he would drive his silver Bentley convertible to the Cleremont Club in Berkeley Square. The doorman would keep the car right in front of the white Georgian town house, so all who passed would know the Beatles’ impresario was inside. Brian would pass the night playing chemin de fer or baccarat, drinking vintage brandy, smoking a cigar, and nibbling on his collection of pills in a never-ending effort not to be too high or too low. On such a merry-go-round it was easy to lose heavily at the gambling tables; and lose he did, an average of £5,000 a week but often as high as £17,000 in a night. Because of his secrecy about his losses, the total amount is incalculable, but it was certainly several hundred thousand pounds.
To fuel his gambling fever, Brian began to draw heavily on h
is NEMS personal account, but after only a few months this began to alarm the staff accountants, and Brian had to find another, less noticeable, source of income. He fell into the habit of phoning Terry Doran at Brydor and inquiring if any cars had been sold and paid for. If there was any appreciable sum in the till, Brian would drive out to Hounslow himself in the late afternoon and commandeer the checks or cash. When Brian’s brother Clive made periodic trips to Brydor to check the books and sales records, Doran loyally never mentioned the tens of thousands of pounds that Brian had drawn and deleted from the books.
Sometimes when the Cleremont Club had closed, and Brian still could not face going home, he would drive to another gambling club, the White Elephant, for one last drink. Then at dawn he would drive the silver Bentley along the Mall, hoping to spy an off-duty guardsman but more often than not going home alone.
Despite his elan and money and newfound celebrity, Brian was still drawn to the most dangerous and unfulfilling of liaisons, which he knew could be his undoing one day. That day arrived in the spring of 1965, when Brian met and fell in love with an American boy living in London named Dizz Gillespie. Dizz was an aspiring actor-singer in his early twenties, with dark hair, mischievous eyes, and an impish, upturned nose. Brian was so taken with him he seized upon Dizz’s phantom acting career to play Svengali. Brian had this act down pat. He signed Dizz as a NEMS artist and arranged for a new wardrobe. A press announcement was sent out, and Dizz’s picture appeared in several London papers as Brian’s new discovery. Using the excuse that Dizz was a NEMS artist, Brian paid many of his debts and began to dole out a small allowance from his own pocket.
Naturally, all of Brian’s friends warned him against being used by this boy. “He may be manipulative,” Brian said, “but he’s different than most. There’s something special about him, something that I can’t name.”
Perhaps it was Dizz’s capacity for violence. Dizz and Brian would spend many evenings at Brian’s Wadham House flat, ingesting large amounts of uppers, Tuinals, and cognac. More often than not these drugged, drunken nights ended in some sort of unhappy confrontation. They ran from simple arguments to all-out fistfights, which included breaking vases and mirrors. One night, unhappy with Brian’s largesse, Dizz worked himself into a rage. When Brian ordered him out of the house, Dizz raced to the kitchen, grabbed the largest knife he could find, and held it to Brian’s jugular vein while extracting an additional sum of money from Brian’s wallet.
Brian stopped seeing Dizz after the knife incident, but it was no use; he only pined away for the boy, lovesick over him. One afternoon I arrived at Brian’s flat to find Queenie and Harry Epstein on their way out. They had made the trip down from Liverpool because they thought Brian sounded depressed over the phone and were horrified at what they found. Hung over from a drug and booze binge the night before, unable to face the day, Brian confessed to them about his love for Dizz Gillespie. Queenie insisted he take a long holiday in the south of France to forget the boy. That afternoon Brian and I packed our bags and set off for Cap d’Antibes, leaving London and Dizz Gillespie temporarily behind.
On our return to London, Brian decided to rid himself of the Wadham Street flat where he had experienced so much unhappiness with Dizz. Within a few weeks he purchased a £64,000 brick Georgian town house at 24 Chapel Street, just off Belgrave Square. This was a lovely five-story building, with private garage, small servants’ quarters, formal dining room, and a roof garden. To keep himself busy, and his mind off of Dizz, Brian threw himself into redecorating the house from top to bottom, with the tasteful advice of Kenneth Partridge.
5
On June 15, 1965, the Beatles’ names were included on Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s Birthday Honours List. The Beatles were to receive the accolade of Member of the British Empire, or MBE. This is the lowest rank of the Order of Chivalry, an award usually presented to philanthropists, but still an astonishing honor for a rock group or anyone in their midtwenties. “Can there be anything more important than this?” Brian asked. There was some slight surprise that Brian himself had not been named for an MBE, since he was virtually synonymous with the Beatles to the British people. He took it for granted that he had been left out because he was Jewish and a homosexual, an accurate assumption. George thought to point out Brian’s exclusion by noting to reporters that MBE could have stood for “Mr. Brian Epstein,” and Princess Margaret, on the day of their investitures, observed the same thing.
Paul, George, and Ringo were thrilled at this great honor, but not John Lennon. He hated the idea of receiving an MBE. The royals and the class structure of England had always been among his favorite targets, and the thought of joining their ranks filled him with an angry guilt. When he was first informed of the honor in a personal letter from the Queen’s spokesman, he was so disgusted he threw the letter in a pile of fan mail and never answered it. Weeks later, after a worried Buckingham Palace queried Brian on John’s disposition in the matter, Brian insisted that a letter be sent graciously accepting in John’s name.
It infuriated John all the more when the announcement of the Beatles’ entrance into the realm of the titled was greeted with revulsion by many older MBE recipients. Author Richard Pape returned his award to Buckingham Palace, as did an army officer who told the press he was sending his MBE back because he didn’t want to share the honor with “vulgar nincompoops.” Hector Dupuis, a member of the Canadian House of Commons, also offered to return his medal. George told a reporter in an interview, “If he doesn’t want his medal he had better give it to us, then we can give it to our manager, Brian Epstein.”
John was less diplomatic. Army officers, he said, get their awards for “killing people. We received ours for entertaining.... I’d say we deserve ours more.” John also pointed out that money was the real reason they were given the award. “We were given the MBE for exports, and the citation should have said that... if someone had got an award for exporting millions of dollars’ worth of manure or machines everyone would have applauded. Why should they knock us?”
The following fall one of the largest and youngest crowds in history surrounded Buckingham Palace on the day of their investiture, crying “God save the Beatles!” The Beatles giggled their way through the elaborate rehearsal and ceremony, just as they had giggled their way through the filming of Help!, high on grass. On the day of the investiture itself, John secreted several joints in his boots. Just before the ceremony they retired to a small toilet off a private anteroom and smoked a joint among them, trying to expel the smoke through the small window. John had brought along an extra joint in the hope of running into Prince Charles, then sixteen and undoutedly a Beatles fan. Charles was nowhere to be found, however, and history will never know what might have happened if the two had met that day.
chapter Ten
Nothing, and I mean nothing, was ever normal for any of us again.
-Neil Aspinall
1
In August of 1965 John’s Aunt Mimi made a rare trip to London for the opening of Help! and stayed with John in Weybridge. Mimi had acknowledged John’s success with grudging pride but let him know that being famous didn’t make him too grand for her to give him a piece of her mind. She had reservations about John’s fame and all it brought, not the least of which was the notoriety it had caused her. Mimi still lived in the neat house on Menlove Avenue, all alone with a cat. The house had now become the primary stop of the Liverpool tourist trade, and Mimi was subjected to journalists and fans ringing her front doorbell all hours of the day and night demanding to know if this was really John’s house and if she was really John’s Aunt Mimi.
John begged her to move out on many occasions, offering to buy her any house she wanted, or to at least let him redecorate Mendips for her. But Mimi only smiled at him. “Why should I? You silly little sausage, there’s no need to lift me out of the mire.”
The morning after the premiere of Help! John and Mimi were eating breakfast when John said, “Okay, I’m going to find you a ho
use. Where would you like it?”
Mimi for want of something better to say, said, “Bournemouth,” a picturesque, seaside town. John called up his chauffeur, Les Anthony, and told him to get maps for Bournemouth. They left within a half hour. Rumseys, the local real estate agency, was happy to provide them with a selection of available homes. Mimi finally found one she liked, a white bungalow with an unobstructed view of Poole Bay. When she found out the owners were still living in it, she was too embarrassed to go and see it with them there, particularly because John was dressed in jeans with holes in them, a jacket one size too small, and a yachting cap. “This house is far too smart to just land on them like this,” she said.
“This is just a ha’penny little bourgeois house, and if you’re not careful you’ll get a mind to match,” John warned her. He got out of the car himself and rang the front doorbell. When the owner and his wife found John Lennon standing on the front doorstep they couldn’t do enough for him. Mimi and John toured the house. Her favorite part was the terraced backyard with steps that led down to the waterway where she could watch the ocean liners go up and down the bay.
“Do you like it Mimi?” John asked her. “If you don’t, I’ll have it myself.” He rang his accountant at Bryce-Hamner and bought it for her on the spot. Unenthusiastically, Mimi subsequently sold her house on Menlove Avenue for £6000 but never spent the money, as if one day she might have to return there. She never did, because there was never any going back.
2
Summer always Seemed to revive Brian’s spirits. Summer was touring time, and the tours kept him busy with a sense of daily purpose. While the Beatles excluded him from the studios and their film work, the tours were Brian’s speciality. He looked forward to tending his flock as they set out around the world for a second time. They began in June with a European tour, starting with a triumphant sold-out appearance at the Palais des Sports in Paris, which was broadcast nationally in France. From there they went on to give concerts in Lyons, Milan, Genoa, and Rome, where Brian disappeared and missed the Beatles’ plane when it took off for the south of France. They played the Cote d’Azur, Nice, and Madrid, where Brian reappeared, sporting a black eye and a story about bumping into a closet door.
