The Love You Make (12 page)

His decision to rejoin the family business happened just when Harry was expanding the stores again. With Clive home from the service, he was opening another division of NEMS in the city center on Great Charlotte Street. Brian even arranged for singing star Anne Shelton to appear at the grand opening. Clive was in charge of the appliance department, as he had requested, because of the booming new business in TV sets. Brian was to run the small record department on one side of the first floor. Brian loved music and had already worked part-time in a record store in London when he was attending RADA. He took to this new challenge with unexpected gusto. The record industry was also expanding at a giant rate due to the invention of new record players and improved recordings. The sudden skiffle and beat music craze had created a large, new buying audience in teenagers. Since promotion and display were his forte, and he had an uncanny knack of picking hit songs, he felt he had found his niche, for a time. He invented his own inventory system using different colored strings and folders to keep the store well stocked, and he kept immaculate records. He prided himself on having the most extensive stock in the North, and slowly, but steadily, the record department began to branch out. It went from two to four to ten employees by the end of the first year and had pushed Clive’s TV sets into a small part of the building before taking over two complete floors. To his parents’ enormous pleasure and not a small amount of pride, the record division turned into a substantial portion of NEMS income.

Brian’s personal life still remained bleak. He had few friends and none that Queenie really approved of. I was actually a friend of his older brother, Clive, and had heard much about Brian from him. We were introduced at the birthday party of a mutual friend, where Clive and Brian arrived in black dinner jackets after attending their parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary at the Adelphi Hotel. Brian had a standout personality; it was obvious that he was very special from the start. Yet despite all his social aplomb and convivial conversation, I remember thinking that if one scratched the surface one would find a very unhappy man. When Brian heard that I was the manager of the record department of the Lewis department store just across the street from the Great Charlotte Street NEMS store, Brian became intent on hiring me away. He would visit me almost every day in the Lewis record department, trying to lure me across the street to NEMS, while keeping a careful eye on my merchandising techniques. Finally, he offered me a much higher salary plus a handsome commission to boot if I took the job. My parents, who were middle-class Roman Catholics who lived in Cheshire across the Mersey, thought my going to work for the Epstein family a disastrous move. I had completed my service in the Royal Air Force and a management training program at Lewis’; my corporate future seemed assured. Here I was giving up a solid job in order to toil for small Jewish shopkeepers.

I was almost immediately brought for an audience with Queenie and Harry. Although Harry was distant, and I had to lie to him about my age because he didn’t think twenty-two was old enough to be a store manager, Queenie and I liked each other instantly. She was imperious yet warm, a special combination of Jewish mother and monied Englishwoman. She was very well read and just as well spoken. In turn, I could see she was favorably impressed with my own good manners and seemed most delighted that what she mistook for a West End accent belied my childhood in Bebington. My first week as manager of the NEMS record shop I became something of a hero with the family. I spotted a young shoplifter putting a record under his jacket and chased him out the door and down the street, where I collared him and dragged him back to the store by the scruff of his neck. “I just apprehended this man,” I announced coolly to the assembled employees. When Queenie later heard the story she nearly applauded, and soon I became a trusted personal friend of the family as well as an employee.

Brian was a great pleasure but also a great puzzle. He was frequently depressed and unhappy and often drank too much. He began to have minor car accidents, which upset Queenie enormously. His mercurial temper was as unpredictable as it was sometimes vile. His temper tantrums were infantile at best. One moment he’d be sweet and charming, as no one else could be, and the next moment some little thing would set him off into a red-faced, screaming fit that made people run for cover. Worse was Brian’s icy, acid coldness when something personally offended him. There was nothing as horrifying as Brian’s silence.

One night after work we went to have a few drinks at the local pub, and Brian told me his big secret. He told me the story of the man he solicited in the men’s room and the subsequent blackmail attempt. He was very disturbed about all this because he said that soon the man was going to be let out of jail. He was obviously petrified that the man would make good his threats for retribution and come after him. I told Brian I thought it was unlikely and not to worry, but the man’s release began to haunt him. “What if?” he kept saying. “What if?”

Queenie saw all the warning signs of Brian’s disintegration and decided to send him away on an extended holiday until he got his perspective back. This vacation coincided with the time Brian’s blackmailer was going to be let out of jail. In early autumn of 1961, Brian went by himself to the south of Spain for six weeks. When he returned to Liverpool that October he seemed like a man on a precipice, waiting for something to happen, terrified, fascinated, alone.

It was not long after,
on October 28, that a young lad named Raymond Jones, dressed in a leather jacket and tight jeans, walked into the Whitechapel branch of NEMS about three o’clock in the afternoon. Brian liked the look of the boy, and instead of letting a salesperson help, he approached the boy himself.

“There’s a record I want,” Jones said. “It’s called ‘My Bonnie,’ and it was made in Germany. Have you got it?”

“Who’s it by?” Brian asked.

“You won’t have heard of them,” Jones replied. “It’s by a group called the Beatles.”

A little research by Brian soon uncovered that this was a single recorded in Hamburg by Tony Sheridan, who had befriended the Beatles on their second Reeperbahn trip. Sheridan had a brief burst of popularity in England as a rock star, appearing on the only TV pop-music show of the time, “Oh Boy.” He had recently fallen on hard times and wound up a Bruno Koschmider employee at the Kaiserkeller. In Hamburg he recorded a single for the Polydor label, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” backed with “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The Beatles were asked to play backup as “The Beat Brothers” and were paid £25 each for the session. Brian also learned that the “Beat Brothers” played just around the corner every day at lunchtime at the Cavern Club. Since the Cavern was only 200 yards away from the front door of NEMS, and as he had never been there, he decided to go over and take a look himself.

On November 8, with his usual style, Brian phoned ahead to request a VIP admission to the club, not so much to save the shilling admission but because he was afraid of being turned away at the door for lack of a leather jacket and tight jeans. Dressed in a suit and tie, he gingerly descended the eighteen greasy stone steps down into the Cavern Club. Beneath the street level an incredible scene unfolded before him. The three arched brick tunnels that comprised the club were a subterranean pit of writhing teenagers. At least 200 youngsters were crowded into the narrow passageways, dancing, shouting, wolfing down a soup and sandwich lunch served out of the Cavern kitchen, while they listened to the rock and roll being performed on the stage.

There in the center tunnel on a raised platform was a sight that galvanized him. It was in the most specific way a personification of his secret sexual desires. On stage were four young men dressed in leather pants and jackets. They played good time rock and roll and joked with each other with macho camaraderie. Brian stood in the shadows at the rear of the club, transfixed, until their forty-five-minute set was over. He fell first for the handsome, moody drummer, then for the boyishly pretty guitarist, then finally for the tall, skinny one who bobbed and squatted as he recklessly strummed the chords, nearly tearing his pants. Then, in a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment, he heard the mellifluous voice of the disc jockey, Bob Wooler, announce that Brian Epstein was in the club. He said that the owner of NEMS, the city’s largest record store, had dropped by for a visit. The news was greeted with a mixture of applause and catcalls, and Brian self-consciously sank further into the shadows. He managed to pluck up his courage enough to push his way through the rowdy crowd to the bandroom, a tiny cell behind the stage where he tried to introduce himself to the band members. He said hello first to George Harrison, who sarcastically asked, “What brings Mr. Epstein here?” But Brian himself didn’t know.

Back at the record shop all Brian could talk about were the Beatles. He ranted and raved about them to anyone who would listen. They were wonderful, he said, just wonderful. The music was the best he ever heard of any beat group, loud and crazy and driving, and they were so much fun to watch, there was some infectiously happy feeling about them. Within a few days he started popping back down into the Cavern Club to watch them. Sometimes he went alone, sometimes with an employee of the Whitechapel Street store named Alistair Taylor, who was surprised one day to hear himself introduced as Brian’s “personal assistant” in an effort to impress the band. For to impress them seemed to be the only way to get their attention.

After their initial meeting, it became clear that Brian and the Beatles had nothing whatsoever in common, and the boys would only pay cursory attention to him as the owner of the big record shop. He was six years older than the eldest of them, a vast difference to them at the time, and they came from opposite ends of the social and economic scale. He spoke differently, looked differently, and had different interests. But he could impress them with his position as the Epstein scion, and with his shiny new Ford Zodiac automobile, and by ordering a mind-boggling 200 copies of the song “My Bonnie” by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers and plastering their name across the window of his record store in letters a foot high. Yet one question remained unanswered: What on earth did he want with them? In the deep core of his soul, only Brian knew the answer. He wanted John.

Harry and Queenie knew nothing of Brian’s new infatuation. They were away on a trip to London when Brian first discovered the Beatles and returned home to find him more agitated and excited than they had seen him in years. He sat them down on a sofa in the living room and put a record on the phonograph. Out came a terrible, incomprehensible sound. Then came the shocking news; Brian wanted to manage this noise, a rock group called the Beatles. Harry was furious with him for weeks. Just when he thought Brian had settled down with the record store, he was off on another farfetched scheme that would take him away from NEMS, and just when the store was so successful too! Brian promised it wouldn’t take much time away from NEMS, but no one really believed him. Queenie sighed with resignation and gave it her blessings, with reservations. She knew best it was no good arguing with him. When Brian got an idea into his head, there was no stopping him.

Brian next went to Rex Makin for legal advice. Makin, who thought he was inured by now to Brian’s wild schemes, found his proposal to manage the Beatles preposterous. What did Brian know about managing a beat group? It was ridiculous, he proclaimed, and the Epstein boy was hopeless.

Brian wasn’t hopeless;
Brian was obsessed. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t be dissuaded by what others saw as so futile a pursuit, it was that he couldn’t be dissuaded. His fascination for the Beatles, part sexual, part showman, had transformed itself into a near-religious experience for him. Something seemed to come over him when he just mentioned their names. When Brian went to see Allan Williams to check up on them, Williams noticed that Brian not only blushed, he sweated when he talked about them. “He was hypnotized,” Williams said. He warned Brian that the Beatles were thieves who had ripped him off for £15 per week commission. “My honest opinion, Brian, is this; don’t touch them with a fucking bargepole.” But Williams’ badmouthing had no effect at all.

Brian arranged his first formal meeting with them on December 3, 1961. They were asked to come to the Whitechapel NEMS at four-thirty with Bob Wooler as their adviser. Brian had fantasized the meeting in his head for hours, like a well-rehearsed play. He imagined the four young men would be ushered through the store into the lift and up to his modern office on the third floor by his “personal assistant,” Alistair Taylor. They would find Brian sitting behind his immaculate desk looking important and in control, the picture of a smart businessman. After his assistant served coffee and tea, Brian would announce his desire to manage them. Then they would discuss a contract. Brian was prepared to promise them a recording contract from a London record company. He didn’t think it would prove a very difficult task, considering the importance of the large retail record business NEMS did with the record labels. He expected the boys to be so impressed that they would agree to sign management contracts immediately.

But four-thirty came and went, and there were no Beatles. It was a Wednesday and early closing, and all the employees went home and left Brian in the store alone. After a time it got dark out, and Brian stood in the shadows of the large appliances, peering anxiously out the window. Finally, after an hour, when Brian had decided he was being stood up, John arrived with Bob Wooler. They had obviously come by way of several pubs and were quite happy. Pete Best and George didn’t arrive until even later, and Paul was still missing. Brian, trying to contain his temper, asked George to phone Paul’s home and find out what was wrong. It turned out that Paul went home after their lunchtime Cavern gig and was still cleaning up. “He’s having a bath,” George informed Brian candidly.