The Love You Make (13 page)

Brian flushed. “This is disgraceful,” he proclaimed angrily. “He’s very late.”

“And very clean,” George added.

It soon turned out that the recalcitrant but hygienic Paul McCartney was only one of the many impediments to implementing Brian’s fantasies. Paul was, from the start, the most skeptical and questioning of Brian, a situation that only deepened as the years passed. Paul was very competitive by nature and keenly aware of any edge John might be gaining over him in the group. It wasn’t hard to notice that Brian stammered and averted his eyes when he spoke to John, and this worried and irked Paul, especially because he always considered himself the attractive one.

Paul’s father was equally suspicious of the “Jew boy” who wanted, it turned out, 25 percent of the boys’ hard-earned wages. Brian cleverly requested a personal audience with Jim McCartney. He found that selling himself and his dreams for the Beatles was far easier than selling some of the furniture in the Walton Street store. The senior McCartney’s reservations soon melted in the face of Brian’s warmth and persuasiveness.

The hardest nut to crack, however, was Aunt Mimi. There was nobody as tough as Mimi. She had heard all about young Mr. Epstein with his fancy suits and his expensive car and his money and passing fancies, and she didn’t mind letting Brian know about it either.

“It’s all right for you if this group turns out to be just a flash in the pan. It won’t matter,” she told him when he went to visit her at Mendips. “It’s just a hobby for you. If it’s all over in six months it won’t matter to you, but what happens to them?”

Brian shook his head. “It’s all right, Mrs. Smith,” he assured her passionately. “I promise you, John will never suffer. He’s the only important one. The others don’t matter, but I’ll always take care of John.”

Six weeks later, at a table at the Casbah Club, Brian and the Beatles signed a formal agreement that Brian had written himself with the aid of a sample contract he had purchased through the mails. Rex Makin had proved too contrary to help make up the contracts for him, so Brian simply mailed away for a standard one. In fact, the contract wasn’t really valid; Paul and George were both under twenty-one and needed a guardian’s signature to make it legal. And in all the excitement of signing this oddly marriagelike document, Brian forgot to sign his own name.

Once Brian took up with the Beatles, everyone at the store noticed a drastic change in him. At night his elegant suits would disappear into the closet and out would come newly purchased black turtleneck sweaters and a black leather jacket that was an imitation of the boys’ clothes. Brian couldn’t have looked more inappropriate in these outfits, for his elegance and polish showed right through the teenage disguise. For a while he even tried combing his hair forward like the Beatles, until he realized they were laughing at him behind his back. He began to pick them up in his car and drive them to jobs, allegedly in charge, but really just tagging along with them, fascinated by their world.

On one of these nights he learned from where the boys got their seemingly boundless energy. Their amphetamine habits had not ended with their Hamburg days, and, save for Pete Best, all the boys were ingesting powerful pharmaceutical diet pills they bought on the black market. Desperate to be accepted as one of the boys, Brian started taking them, too. Queenie couldn’t help but notice when he arrived home late at night that his eyes were bulging and glassy and that he couldn’t stop chomping on his tongue or licking his lips.

However the Beatles might have changed Brian’s appearance and nocturnal habits, they didn’t affect him in spirit. Within weeks of their contract signing they began to receive typed memos from him about their stage act, written in a brisk, businesslike tone, much like the memos received by the employees of the NEMS record stores. While it was understood that Brian would have no say over the boys’ music, he insisted that they refashion their stage image. Brian was, after all, best at showmanship, and the boys were hardly professional looking. What might be entertaining to a crowd of hooligans on Matthew Street would certainly turn off the large audiences Brian had in mind. Brian insisted, for starters, that they neither eat nor drink on stage, although he didn’t seem to be able to stop them from smoking. There was to be no further horseplay, either, no affectionate arm punching or inside jokes and mumbled dialogue. From now on they would know exactly what songs they were going to play and in what order, before they went on the stage.

Brian even insisted, much to John Lennon’s revulsion, that they forsake their leather and cowboy boots in order to wear identical suits. Although this was a brilliant stroke on Brian’s part, developing a striking visual image that was to become a trademark for them, John hated the idea and tried to convince the group not to do it, telling them it was selling out. Suits and ties were the antithesis of the Beatles’ public identity. Surprisingly, Brian found an ally in Paul. Paul, as it turned out, had a good sense of showmanship himself, and furthermore, in his very bourgeois way, he cared about what people thought. Most of all he understood appearances and public relations. With Paul’s encouragement the group gave in, and Brian ordered them gray lounge suits with velvet collars from a Liverpool tailor. Now, as far as he was concerned, they were all ready to record.

Early in Brian’s explorations
to secure them a recording contract, he wrote a letter to a record reviewer on the
Liverpool Evening Echo
named Tony Barrow, asking him to mention the Beatles in his column, since, according to Brian and the
Mersey Beat
music paper polls, they were the most popular group in Liverpool. Barrow wrote back saying he couldn’t mention them because they had not recorded in England; however he did recommend Brian to someone at Decca’s Artists and Repertoire department. At Decca, the mention of NEMS, the largest record retailer in the North, got Brian instant attention of a sort; a young assistant named Mike Smith was sent to Liverpool to hear the group play. Smith was impressed enough with their performance to offer them an audition in Decca’s West Hampstead studio.

The boys were ecstatic at the news and confident that fame and fortune were the next easy step. The audition was scheduled for New Year’s Day of 1962, and early on a snowy New Year’s Eve, they piled into the back of Neil Aspinall’s van and set off to London. Neil had never driven to London before, and he got lost in the heavy snowstorm. The boys huddled together for warmth in the back of the frigid van for ten hours before they arrived at the hotel Brian had booked for them, the Royal on Woburn Place, at a cost of twenty-seven shillings a night for bed and breakfast. The boys spent New Year’s Eve wandering around the freezing streets, taking in the sights, dreaming of the audition the next day and of what 1962 might bring. They couldn’t have imagined.

Brian, in the meanwhile, traveled to London on the train in a first-class coach and spent a warm New Year’s Eve at his Aunt Freda’s. He met up with the boys the next day at the Hampstead studios. The band was exhilarated and frightened. They felt alien in the still, clinical environment of the studio. They sang fourteen songs in sixty minutes for several anonymous men in the control booth on the other side of a glass window. Their voices cracked from nerves, and they sang most of their numbers slightly off tune. All their playing was frightened and stiff, with Pete Best the worst, mechanical and plodding at the drums. The stark, foreign quality of the studio took away all the energy and personal excitement of their performances. To make matters their very worst, only three of the fourteen songs they sang were original McCartney-Lennon compositions. Brian insisted on this. He said he knew the record market best and that Decca wanted to hear cover versions of established hit songs. The Beatles sang songs like “The Sheik of Araby,” “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “Till There Was You,” and ended with a raveup on “Besame Mucho.”

Brian returned to Liverpool later that day confident that it was just a matter of time before they were offered a recording contract. He was outraged to learn that Decca had turned them down cold. When he sheepishly told the Beatles the news they were furious with him, convinced that Brian had blown their one big chance by insisting they play standards. Brian, desperate to recover face, set out the next day for London to see Dick Rowe, Decca’s head of A&R. Rowe wouldn’t see him, however, and he ended up with Beecher Stevens, the general manager of wholesale sales. Brian demanded that Decca reconsider their decision, threatening Stevens by withholding all orders from NEMS for Decca products. Then, changing tack, he even personally offered to purchase 3,000 copies of any single Decca recorded with the Beatles, but no was no.

This first defeat brought home a stunning reality to Brian: managing a rock group would not be an easy task; he’d better get used to not getting his way; the Decca rejection was likely to be the first of many. In the next few short months he made hundreds of phone calls, wrote volumes of correspondence, and paid dozens of personal visits, only to wind up at the same dead end. Each week brought another polite rejection from another important record company. Decca, Pye, Phillips, Columbia, and HMV all said no. John half joked that they’d wind up recording on the Woolworth label, but Brian didn’t think that was funny. Each rejection was like another pin in another balloon. All the while there was a Greek chorus waiting behind him, led by Rex Makin, intoning his failure at this, his latest caprice. At times he felt so disgusted he considered giving up the Beatles and going back to RADA.

Yet each time he began to falter, each time he was willing to concede defeat, his resolve was renewed by John Lennon. He was dazzled by John, by his looks, by his wit, even by his cruelty. In John’s presence Brian was giddy and lightheaded. When John spoke, Brian looked away, not daring to gaze directly into his eyes lest his lovesick look expose what he thought was his secret. John was sardonically amused at the power he had over Brian and didn’t hesitate to use it to be manipulative or mean. This, in turn, fueled Brian’s masochism and made him desire John even more. Late at night, drunk and high on amphetamines, Brian would break down into tears about something John had said to him. Cynthia remembers Brian stamping his feet and scowling when John disagreed with him, which was frequently. Another passion might have burned itself out, but the eternal hope that one day Brian might consummate the relationship kept this one smoldering.

Brian thought his biggest impediment to seducing John was where to do it. Brian still lived at home with his parents. That spring, without letting anyone know, he rented a “secret” flat on Faulkner Street and furnished it modestly. This was to be the lair into which he would lure John, but whenever John stopped by he was always encumbered by another member of the band. Brian began to think that it was being in Liverpool that made John seem inhibited and indisposed to the possibility. He decided that if he could just get John out of town alone he would succumb to his advances. Brian made a standing offer to John to take him to Copenhagen for the weekend. This Copenhagen offer became common knowledge around the Cavern, and eventually people started teasing John about it. Yet, somehow it was still Brian’s fantasy that no one knew he was homosexual, let alone that he was in love with John. After the first few months everybody had some little piece of gossip about him. Neil Aspinall’s sister had heard something about him through a friend, and she soon told Neil and Neil told John. The very next night, high on pills, John blurted out that Neil accused Brian of being “queer.” Brian indignantly stormed outside to where Neil was unloading equipment. “Why did you tell them I’m queer?” Brian demanded. “It’s a lie!”

Neil, who was known for cutting through the bullshit, northern style, was not cowed. “You are queer,” he told Brian, continuing to unload.

Brian almost swallowed his tongue with anger. “I am not!” he raged.

“Are too!”

The issue was never settled to Brian’s liking, but he managed to convince himself there was at least some doubt. There wasn’t. Years later Paul admitted, “We were more confused by it than turned off. We really didn’t know what it meant to be ‘gay’ at the time.”

Naturally, it did not please Brian to discover that he had a rival for John’s attention. From the moment he heard about Cynthia Powell, Brian was prepared and eager to dislike her, but upon meeting her backstage at a show his antagonistic feelings disappeared. She turned out to be magnanimous and sweet and very unthreatening. He could even see why John liked her so much. And as far as competition went, Brian realized that Cynthia’s hold on John was even more tenuous than his own.

On April 13
the Beatles were scheduled to return to Hamburg for an appearance at the Star Club, the Reeperbahn’s latest and largest nightclub. Brian, to impress Liverpool fans, grandly billed the seven-week German stint as a “European tour” and in a show of style paid for the boys to go by plane. Queenie and Harry, continually exasperated at his largesse, were positive he would never see the plane fare back from the promised profits. Now they were even less happy to learn that Brian was to accompany the Beatles to Hamburg.

On April 10, the day of their departure, two telegrams arrived from Astrid Kirchner in Hamburg. Stu had been ill; Stu had died. Stu had died in her arms in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. For many of his friends in Liverpool the news was of small surprise. On his occasional trips back home to visit his family, it was obvious something was terribly wrong with him, but nobody could figure out what it was. The previous Christmas he was so pale and thin he was virtually transparent, like a holograph. His headaches had become paralytic, his behavior was erratic, and he was seeing double. He had all the symptoms of a brain tumor, yet specialists in both Hamburg and Liverpool could find nothing wrong with him.

It wasn’t until two years after his death that a probable cause was discovered. Stu’s mother, Millie, donated his body to scientific research. In examining the exposed skull and brain, pathologists discovered a small tumor previously invisible on the X rays. It was caused by a small traumatic depression in the skull, probably the result of a good, hard kick to the head by a Teddy Boy’s steel-tipped shoe.