Paul McCartney (19 page)

One night, they went to a concert by France’s only rock ‘n’ roll star, Johnny Hallyday, paying an astronomical seven shillings and sixpence (35p) each for seats at L’Olympia theatre, little dreaming they themselves would soon top the bill there.

Every cool young Frenchman seemed to have the combed-forward hairstyle which Astrid Kirchherr had given Stu Sutcliffe in Hamburg and which John and Paul had previously derided. Jürgen had one, too, and was as handy as Astrid with barber’s scissors, so one day in his room at the Hotel de Beaune they asked him to shear off their Teddy boy quiffs. It was only a tentative version of what would become the Beatle cut but it transformed their faces, making John’s more challenging and mocking, Paul’s even rounder and more baby-innocent.

Actually the Beatle cut can be found adorning numerous historical figures from Julius Caesar to Napoleon. Much later in life, Paul would claim that, for him, its true begetter had been an icon of the art world, the painter, designer and film director Jean Cocteau.

Cocteau’s 1959 film The Testament of Orpheus was a fantasy about that mythic minstrel of ancient Thrace, full of beautiful young men with Beatle cuts millennia before their time. Indeed, Orpheus was a musician who sang and played his stringed instrument with such maddening sweetness that young women fought literally to tear him limb from limb. Sound familiar?

‘Oo, Vi, give me legs a comb’

Brian Epstein’s discovery of the Beatles is always portrayed as the luckiest accident in entertainment history. One day in November 1961, so the story goes, a teenage boy walked into the record department which 27-year-old Brian ran in the basement of NEMS, his family’s central Liverpool electrical store, and asked for a single called ‘My Bonnie’ by the Beatles.

Brian had never heard of the group or the record, but offered to order it for his young customer. In the process, he found that these Beatles were not foreigners, as he’d assumed from their weird name, but Liverpudlians who had made the track in Germany as backing musicians to Tony Sheridan. His curiosity aroused, Brian decided to go and see them at a Cavern club lunch-time session, only at that point realising that the Cavern was just a couple of hundred yards from his shop. So the young businessman in his bespoke suit ventured gingerly down the 18 steps–and stumbled on pure magic.

In reality, Brian was well aware of the Beatles long before he visited the Cavern. His record department thronged with their fans and also sold Mersey Beat, the local music paper whose pages they dominated (and to which he himself contributed a record column). He’d taken Mersey Beat’s editor, Bill Harry, out to lunch twice to pick Harry’s brains about them and sent his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, to the Cavern ahead of him to check them out. Taylor’s advice was grab them before anyone else could.

Nor was it relevant that Brian had no qualifications for managing a pop group beyond an interest in theatre and a flair for design and presentation; nor that the still largely blue-collar world of pop was at the furthest possible extreme from his own genteel middle-class one. In Britain’s nascent music business, almost every manager was a social cut above his artisan artistes, with little or no understanding of youth culture. Those first impresarios were making up the rules as they went along: Brian’s, uniquely, would be all about quality, value for money and good taste.

Uniquely, too, he was not motivated primarily by money; the Epstein chain of NEMS shops generated all he could ever want. His needs were more complex and rooted in a private life as troubled as it was privileged. The elder son of highly respectable Jewish parents, he was gay in an era when sexual acts between males were a crime punishable by imprisonment as well as an offence against his religion. To compound his feelings of guilt and self-loathing, he was drawn to casual sex in its riskiest forms–soliciting in public toilets or kerb-crawling the Liverpool docks, where entrapment by the police and ‘queer-bashing’ gangs were continual hazards. His daily life as a dapper, sophisticated man-about-town had a dark underside of shame, fear and violence.

His epiphany at the Cavern therefore had little to do with the Beatles’ music. In their all-over black leather, they were four delectable bits of juvenile ‘rough trade’; a quadruple fantasy he could enjoy without his usual shame or fear of grievous bodily harm. He was to love them in a platonic, almost paternal way, calling them ‘the Boys’ until well after they became men, and dedicating himself to their welfare and protection.

But he was in love with just one. Not with Paul, the most obviously attractive, but with John, whose tough-guy exterior hid a middle-class upbringing not unlike Brian’s own, and who’d needed an all-protecting father figure since the age of six. So, yet again, a back seat for Paul–one which this time he took with some relief.

On the Beatles’ side, there was never any doubt that being managed by such a prominent local businessman, for whatever reasons, would be a major step forward. But, as lords of the Mathew Street underworld, they had developed a super-sized attitude from which even their most career-conscious and punctilious member was not immune. When an exploratory meeting with Brian was arranged at the NEMS store after hours, Paul failed to turn up. George telephoned 20 Forthlin Road to ask what had happened to him and learned he was taking a leisurely bath. Brian blushed with irritation–an unfortunate trait he had–and spluttered, ‘He’s going to be very late.’

‘But very clean,’ the deadpan George pointed out.

At further meetings which didn’t clash with Paul’s bath-time, Brian set out what he’d do for the Beatles if they put themselves in his hands: firstly, secure them a contract with a major British record label rather than an obscure West German one, then make them nationally famous. It was all pure bluff–and in the end, of course, incalculable understatement.

Paul was the one who questioned Brian most closely, asking if the plan involved changing the music they played or the way they played it. Reassured that they’d be left just as they were (a false promise, it would turn out), he deferred to John for the final verdict, delivered with typical Lennon directness: ‘Right, Brian. Manage us.’

Although there were already two people with managerial claims on the Beatles, neither stood in Brian’s way or tried to take any share of them. Allan Williams willingly gave them up without a penny but–still fuming over his unpaid Hamburg commission–advised Brian not to touch them ‘with a bargepole’. Mona Best, Williams’s successor, acknowledged that Brian could do more for them than she ever could, and was content with the benefit which would accrue to her son.

As Paul, like George and Pete, was under 21, Brian couldn’t put him under contract without his father’s consent. Jim McCartney offered no objection, believing in the popular stereotype of Jewish people as ‘good with money’. It helped, too, that the McCartneys’ upright piano, on which Jim showed Paul his first chords, and on which he wrote his very first songs, had come from the Epstein family’s original NEMS shop in Walton.

Living on the fringe of Liverpool’s underworld as they did, the Beatles knew all about Brian’s secret gay life and quickly guessed his fixation on John. (Strangely, none of their families ever seemed aware of any of it.) Although John hadn’t a gay bone in his body, he took malicious pleasure in playing up to Brian, pretending to lead him on, then rebuffing him as cruelly as only John knew how. John wasn’t the only Beatle to arouse Brian’s ardour: Pete Best has since claimed to have been propositioned by him on a car journey to Blackpool while John and Cynthia were sitting in the back. But never once would he show the tiniest flicker of attraction to Paul.

‘I think Brian felt a bit guilty because he ought to have fancied Paul, but didn’t,’ a former NEMS employee recalls. ‘That always seemed to make him a bit uneasy around Paul and try extra hard if he ever had to do anything for him.’

Soon after Brian’s takeover, Mersey Beat announced a readers’ poll for the most popular of Liverpool’s 350-odd bands. Like many others, the Beatles sent in dozens of voting slips nominating themselves and putting their greatest rival, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, last on the candidates list. Rory’s band in fact received more votes but Bill Harry let the Beatles win by a landslide. Their picture occupied the upper half of Mersey Beat’s front page, in their Hamburg black leather suits (of which numerous Cavern habitués, girls as well as boys, now wore copies). Once again, Paul’s surname was spelt ‘McArtrey’.

In this heady atmosphere, a management contract was drawn up between John Winston Lennon, James Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Randolph Peter Best, binding them to NEMS Enterprises, a company newly created by Brian, for five years at a commission of 10 to 15 per cent. Though all four ‘boys’ signed the document, he himself forgot to do so, making the whole exercise pointless. Not until the following October would a proper contract be sealed, giving him 25 per cent. At Paul’s instigation, the boys tried to beat him down to 20 per cent, but he argued the extra five was for the expenses he’d incur–on his crusade to make them ‘bigger than Elvis’.

Their entourage, such as it was, also became absorbed into NEMS Enterprises. Apart from their driver/roadie, Neil Aspinall, this consisted of just one other, a droll teenager named Tony Bramwell, who’d known George since childhood–and had been one of the many babies delivered by Paul’s mother. Bramwell followed them around to all their gigs, so ubiquitous that John nicknamed him ‘Measles’, and would carry their guitars for them. ‘I’d been doing it for nothing for months,’ he recalls. ‘Now Brian offered to pay me to do it.’

Brian’s first step was to make the Beatles run as efficiently as his record department at the family store. The smallest and lowest-paying of their gigs were now treated like Royal Command performances; before each one, they and Neil Aspinall would receive a detailed briefing, typed on Brian’s headed notepaper, giving the address of the venue, the promoter’s name, the rendezvous times with Neil and the duration of the performance. Every week, the NEMS wages clerk would make up regulation pay packets for them, each containing £20, which were hand-delivered by Tony Bramwell.

Brian also personally took over their promotion, designing lavish display ads for the Liverpool Echo and other local papers, and posters heralding the coming of ‘Mersey Beat Poll Winners! Polydor Recording Artists! Prior to European Tour!’ [i.e. Hamburg again]. ‘Just billing them as Polydor recording artists instantly raised the level of their gigs,’ Bramwell says. ‘Now they weren’t playing church halls any more, but Top Rank ballrooms.’

While keeping his promise not to interfere with their music, Brian (going back on that promise to Paul) revolutionised the band’s stage-presentation or, rather, lack of it, decreeing there was to be no more onstage smoking, eating, clowning or backchat with the audience. Drinking, of course, couldn’t be prevented, but between sets they must no longer adjourn to the nearest bar, where trouble–usually involving John–was always liable to start. Instead, Neil would bring them drinks and sandwiches backstage. So from here on the black-leather Cavern scruffs had a Green Room.

Brian’s final target was those Hamburg-bought outfits which, ironically, had been one of the band’s main excitements for him in the first place. It happened that Cliff Richard’s Shadows, now a successful act in their own right, were appearing at the Liverpool Empire. Brian took John, Paul, George and Pete to the show, then told them that if they wanted to make it, they must wear the same kind of dapper matching suits.

Paul has always been portrayed as Brian’s ally in smartening up the Beatles and so robbing their stage performance of an excitement and authenticity that only their Cavern audience fully experienced–the first step in the ‘selling out’ that John would condemn so bitterly in retrospect.

Paul certainly was all for going into suits, indeed had already made some sketches of a possible Beatles stage uniform. But John at that point was just as hungry to succeed by whatever means it took; he later admitted he would have worn ‘a balloon if someone [was] going to pay me’. Besides, as Tony Bramwell points out, the suits Brian provided weren’t ‘tatty, flash stuff like other bands wore onstage’, but tailor-made, in ‘grey brushed tweed’, costing £40 apiece, the equivalent of £1000 today. Nor did he object when Brian–supported by Paul–said they should end every show with a deep bow in unison like actors taking a curtain-call.

Brian was not working totally blind. Early on, he enlisted the help of Joe Flannery, a fellow member of Liverpool’s clandestine gay community with whom, some years earlier, he’d had an atypically happy, stable relationship. Flannery already managed a band, Lee Curtis and the All Stars, fronted by his younger brother. ‘I met up with Brian only about a week after he’d started managing the Beatles,’ he remembers. ‘It was at the Iron Door club [the Cavern’s main rival, in Temple Street]. My brother’s group needed to borrow a bass amp, so I asked Paul for a loan of his. But he just nodded at John and said, “Ask the boss.”’

After late gigs, the Beatles would often crash out at Flannery’s comfortable flat in Gardner Road. ‘When they’d sleep in my sitting-room, I noticed there was a pecking-order. John always had the couch while Paul made do with two armchairs pushed together.

‘I used to have a part-Norwegian housekeeper named Anne, who’d stay late to make them sandwiches, helped by her very attractive 17-year-old daughter, Girda. Paul took a fancy to Girda and would always be in the kitchen chatting to her. One night, her mother pointed the breadknife at him and said. “You shouldn’t be out here. Get back in the sitting-room where you belong!”’

Flannery negotiated bookings with the tougher promoters who would have been put off by Brian’s genteel accent. He also joined in Brian’s little subterfuges to impress the Beatles–like telling him in front of them that Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was calling long distance from America.

But Brian was very far from being all bluff. Thanks to NEMS’s reputation as one of the north’s largest record retailers, he was able to get the Beatles an audition with the mighty Decca label almost immediately. A Decca producer named Mike Smith came up to Liverpool, saw them at the Cavern and was sufficiently impressed to offer them a studio audition on 1 January 1962.