Best of the Beatles (4 page)

As every Beatle book tells you, Brian Epstein’s interest in the Beatles began when an 18-year-old lad, Raymond Jones, ordered a copy of ‘My Bonnie’ from NEMS. I wondered why Raymond Jones had not come forward to claim his part in the Beatles story. Now I knew the reason. There was no Raymond Jones.

Alistair Taylor worked in NEMS and was Brian Epstein’s personal assistant. He tells me. “I am Raymond Jones, and Brian Epstein never knew that. Brian would only order a record if there was a firm order in the book. We kept getting asked for ‘My Bonnie’ but no-one had ordered it. I put the release in the order book and made up a name, ‘Raymond Jones’, and then we set out trying to find it. We rang Polydor in Germany who told us that we had to buy a box of 25. I bought one myself and I told Brian that Raymond Jones had been in for it. Brian put a note in the window saying, ‘Beatles record here’ and within the day the rest had gone. We kept shipping in boxes of them and Brian rang Polydor in London and suggested that they released it over here. They as good as told him to get lost.”
(Pinocchio-time, I’m afraid. I was misled here: the true story of Raymond Jones is in the Postscript.)

In July 1961, Bill Harry started a local newspaper about the music scene in Liverpool. He called both the music and the newspaper
Mersey Beat
. By now there were 300 groups on Merseyside so there was plenty to write about, with the Beatles being the predominant local group. NEMS sold the newspaper and Harry asked Epstein to review pop singles and original cast albums on a regular basis. All writers check out their column in print to see how it looks on the page, to see if there are any misprints and to boost their egos. Therefore, I am certain that Brian Epstein would have looked through
Mersey Beat
to find out what was going on. The newspaper was so heavily Beatle-oriented that he must have seen their name.

Also, the Beatles used to go to NEMS to hear, and occasionally buy, records. They would disrupt staff by requesting repeated plays in the listening booths so that they could scribble down lyrics. More than once, Brian Epstein had told them to move on.

The evidence suggests that Brian Epstein knew who the Beatles were. Maybe not. He appears to have been surprised when he discovered that the group who had recorded ‘My Bonnie’ were playing regularly at the Cavern, which was only 200 yards away in Mathew Street. He decided to check them out during the lunch hour on 9 November 1961 with Alistair Taylor, who recalls, “We looked out of place in our white shirts and dark business-suits. The Beatles were playing ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Twist and Shout’ but we were particularly impressed that they included original songs. The one that sticks in my mind is ‘Hello Little Girl.’”

As a result of that, Brian Epstein decided that he wanted to manage the group with Alistair Taylor as his personal assistant. His brother, Clive: “Brian told me about his visit to the Cavern but I didn’t take much notice at the time. After all, we had some very successful stores on Merseyside and we were expanding into the suburbs. It wasn’t until the spring of 1962 that I took the whole thing more seriously. We had dinner at the 23 Club in Hope Street and he wanted to form a company to manage artists and to promote concerts. At the time I was single and so the idea of some extra activities outside business hours interested me. Also, it was a useful way of diversifying. It became a matter for the whole family as he wanted to use the NEMS name. After careful consideration, my father decided that it was not for him and we decided that NEMS Enterprises should be a company jointly controlled by Brian and myself.”

Their former manager, Allan Williams, is magnanimous. “I’ll be fair and say that Brian Epstein was the best thing that could have happened to the Beatles.”

On 31 August 1961, Bob Wooler, in
Mersey Beat
, described the Beatles as the stuff that screams were made of. “People were always asking me about this group, and I knew they were remarkable, magic even. The only Beatle
that I mentioned by name was Pete Best. The girls at the footlights would be looking beyond the front line to this guy on drums, and there was a charisma about him that I found fascinating. The poster for Jane Russell in
The Outlaw
described her as ‘mean, moody and magnificent’, and I applied that to Pete Best.” It stuck.

Pete Best: “The first time I read it I started laughing, but the fans would say, ‘It’s Pete, he’s mean and moody, he must be because it said so in print.’ I don’t think I was. It was more that I was into playing the drums and laying down a rhythm; I’d put my head down and flail away. If it looked like I was mean or moody on stage, it wasn’t through me trying to be like that personally. It was a case of putting so much into the music.”

Promoter Ron Appleby: “When Eppy took the Beatles over we had a dance at the Kingsway in Southport and we were charging 2s 6d (12 and a half pence) before eight and three shillings (15p) afterwards. Brian Epstein decided that everyone who came into the dance before eight o’clock would be given a photograph of the Beatles. When I saw him at half-past nine, he was hopping mad because the girls were ripping the photograph up and sticking the part with Pete Best on to their jumpers. Pete Best was certainly the attraction with the girls.”

Pete Best: “I used to be embarrassed about it to be quite honest. I used to come home and find girls on the path with a sleeping bag or someone looking at you from behind a tree. I didn’t know what to do. I’d say, ‘Hello’ or ‘I’ll send you out a coffee in a minute.’ I took it in my stride and didn’t think too much about it. I thought, ‘If they’re doing this for me, then they are doing it for the group.’ If I got more screams on stage than somebody else, it wasn’t a case of that’s one for Pete at the back. It was a case of ‘That’s good for the Beatles’ – that’s all I was concerned about.”

John Lennon biographer, Paul Du Noyer: “The stereotype of the rock ’n’ roll manager is Colonel Tom Parker who was a complete crook, and that seems to be all too common in rock ’n’ roll management. Even people who don’t think that Epstein was a brilliant businessman will always concede that he was a very honest man. He certainly never tried to cheat the Beatles.”

But he did try and change them. Clive Epstein: “They weren’t entirely happy about being put into shirts and collars and suits – this was not the way they appeared in Hamburg, and when Brian sent them to a tailor in Birkenhead, they were far from happy. This was not their style. Nevertheless, it was right because the mums and dads who became Beatle fans liked to see four boys looking clean and tidy in their suits.”

Tony Sanders of Billy J. Kramer’s original group, the Coasters: “They didn’t need Epstein, he gave them a lot of bad advice – he had them wearing suits, singing the likes of ‘I Remember You’, which wasn’t their style and he destroyed the band as it was.”

Bill Harry adds, “John gave me some photos from Hamburg which included him going on stage with a toilet seat around his neck. As soon as Brian took them over, he asked for them back. He put everything into a plastic image. He sanitised them. They had their hair done at Horne Brothers, got their suits on the Wirral and had Dezo Hoffman pictures. John preferred the raw, aggressive image of the Rolling Stones and Brian had taken that away from them. I was in the Grapes one night when Brian Griffiths of the Big Three told Epstein to argue with the two lawyers at the end of his arm. Epstein had been giving this wild, aggressive rock band Mitch Murray jingles.” Would John have been happier as a member of the Rolling Stones?

Paul Du Noyer: “Brian Epstein did a lot for their
presentation. I know they hated being put into suits but that seems to be what it took to take them on to the next stage commercially. It did get them a record deal; it did get them to EMI and George Martin. That’s where history really starts to move forward for the Beatles.”

Where did the mop-top hairstyles come from? Okay, it could have been a mop. Eppy might have picked one up from a cleaning lady at NEMS and said, “That’s what I’m going to do with the Beatles.” But I don’t think so.

Brian Epstein’s friend and Liverpool manager, Joe Flannery, has a photograph of his own mother from the 1930s – she has what looks like a Beatle haircut. “John Lennon liked my mother very much,” he confides, “and they based their hairstyles on this photograph.” Again, unlikely.

Watch any 1940s film by those madcap comics, the Three Stooges, and look at their hairstyles. Pure Beatles. Could it be? No, I don’t think so.

What about Marlon Brando in the 1953 film
Julius Caesar
? Hamburg photographer Jurgen Vollmer: “I wanted to look like Marlon Brando in
Julius Caesar
even though I hadn’t seen the movie at that time. I was still in school and I told the barber that I wanted my hair just like that, but he talked me out of it. That was the last time I went to the barber – up to this day, I always cut my hair myself.”

Jurgen had his brushed-forward style when he met the Beatles in Hamburg. “They thought it was funny. I moved to Paris in late ’61 and John and Paul visited me there and they wanted to change their clothes. I took them to a flea market and they dressed in the style that I had, corduroy jackets and turtle-neck sweaters. They wanted my haircut so that is when I cut their hair.”

In another variation, Astrid Kirchherr gave the boys their haircuts. “All my friends at art school used to run
around with what you would call a Beatle haircut. My boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, had this style and Stuart liked it very much. He was the first one who had the nerve to get the cream out of his hair and he asked me to cut his hair for him.”

Whatever the reason, Pete Best never succumbed. Astrid Kirchherr: “Pete’s got very curly hair and it wouldn’t have worked. Even if he wanted it, I could not have cut his hair that way.”

Allan Williams: “I thought the Beatles were a right load of layabouts. I think Eppy only took them on because he was homosexual and they appealed to him.”

Brian Epstein’s biographer Ray Coleman: “There are several areas concerning Brian’s private life. Although the homosexuality was crucial to his life, the crucial factor was that he was available for work 24 hours a day. A married man couldn’t do that. It was more than just another job to him. He didn’t have other priorities and he had money too.”

Sexual freedom was practised, indeed encouraged, around the Reeperbahn in Hamburg and so the Beatles met many homosexuals and transvestites while in Germany. Hence, they would not have been concerned about Brian Epstein’s gayness when they signed their management contract on 24 January 1962, although he was acting for them before that date. Epstein was only too aware that the practice was illegal in the UK – even in private between consenting adults – but he was not totally discreet. His personal Men-Love Avenue was a bachelor flat at 37 Falkner Street, Liverpool 8.

Alan Sytner, founder of the Cavern and manager when it was a jazz cellar, had known Brian Epstein since his schooldays. “He got expelled from Liverpool College and several other schools, which is really hard to do. I believe
he was expelled for his homosexuality. His mother told him that the schools were anti-semitic, but they weren’t, as I saw a Plymouth Brethren expelled for the same thing. Brian was brought up to believe that he was something special and he developed a superior attitude. He went to school in Cambridge so he gave the impression that he had been to Cambridge.”

An art school colleague of John Lennon’s, Ian Sharp, knew Eppy’s preferences. “I was involved in amateur dramatics at the time and I could recognise gay people. Billy Hanna introduced me to Brian Epstein, who was definitely camp by Liverpool standards. They were friends and they went to London together, and they also knew Yankel Feather who was outrageously camp and ran a club, the Basement, opposite the Mardi Gras and next door to the Unity Theatre.”

Ian Sharp was talking to John and Paul in the Kardomah café and, a week later, he was surprised to receive a letter from the solicitors, Silverman, Livermore and Co. With Ian Sharp’s permission, it is reprinted here for the first time:

“We have been consulted by Mr Brian Epstein who instructs us that on the 21 February last in the Kardomah Café, Church Street, Liverpool you uttered a certain highly malicious and defamatory statement concerning him to two members of the Beatles. We are instructed that in the course of a conversation you said, ‘I believe Brian Epstein is managing you. Which one of you does he fancy?’ The unwarranted innuendo contained in that remark is perfectly clear and is one to which our client takes the gravest possible exception, and the damaging nature of which has caused him considerable anxiety and distress. He is not prepared to tolerate the utterance of such remarks by you and we accordingly have to require that we receive, by return, your written apology together
with an undertaking that this or similar remarks will not be made by you in the future. We have to make it perfectly clear to you that should we not receive your apology and undertaking, as requested, then our client has instructed us to take such steps as may be necessary to protect his good name and character.”

This revealing letter shows that the Beatles were made aware of Epstein’s sexual preference, if they hadn’t known it already and that Epstein was so annoyed that he was prepared to call Ian Sharp’s bluff by resorting to legal action. Also, why should this conversation have been repeated to Eppy and why was Ian Sharp shopped?

Ian Sharp, who works as the actor/director Richard Tate, comments: “I didn’t call Eppy gay maliciously, I was joking about it in an art-college kind of way. I thought that John would have known about it but he must have confronted Eppy with the information. I could have changed the course of musical history by standing up to Eppy and saying, ‘Bugger you, it’s true, I’m standing by what I said,’ but of course I didn’t. I was 20 years old and living with my parents and I panicked. I wasn’t used to receiving letters like that and I withdrew the allegations immediately and never mentioned it again. Ironically, years later, I played Sidney Silverman in a production about Craig and Bentley.”

In 1964 Brian published his autobiography,
A Cellarful of Noise
, but he couldn’t discuss a cellarful of boys. Paul Du Noyer: “He couldn’t be honest about his boyfriends in his autobiography, and that is quite touching. Homosexuality was illegal and it would also have been commercial suicide to admit it. It would have taken a very brave man to have proclaimed what was going on his life.”