Epstein

Brian Epstein:

PETE BROWN: ‘He had driven back to London and we don’t know what happened after that. I mean he stayed up all night and the next day the house-man called me and said that he was still in his room and he was concerned that there was no sign of life’.

LONNIE TRIMBLE: ‘It was Sunday August the 27th 1967. I switched the television on and it was announced that he was dead and I cried, like other people that I knew had cried.

PAUL McCARTNEY: ‘My feeling is that he would wake up in the middle of the night and think “Why am I not sleeping? I haven’t had my sleeping pill” – in a drowsy state, so take a couple more. Since then of course it’s become legendary and there’s millions of rumours like did he kill himself, was he killed and who did this and that.’

VOICE OVER NAT WEISS: ‘He certainly was in a very positive state of mind, he’d made plans for the future. I’d spoken to him two days before and he was anything but suicidal.

JOHN LENNON: ‘He was just such a beautiful fellow, you know, and it’s terrible INTERVIEWER: What are your plans now LENNON: ‘Well we haven’t made any. I mean it’s only just – we’ve only just heard, haven’t we.

BRYAN BARRETT: ‘The two strange expressions he used to me, prior to his death, which on reflection did mean something which was ‘Beware the Idea of March’ – this must have been three weeks to a month before he actually died and ‘I feel as though I’m Svengali that’s created a monster.’

MARIANNE FAITHFUL: ‘He had such immense charm – immense. I mean actually his strongest card. If say you’re measuring him up against somebody like Robert Stigwood or Andrew Oldham, Brian Epstein’s strongest card is that he actually cared for the community he served, which was this group of free spirits, ranging from Mick Jagger to Joe Orton to Edward Bond to Bill Gaskell, to everywhere you could possibly go. Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, everybody, it was all connected. And somebody like Robert Frazer was doing in the art world – Brian was going to be the synthesising force, with the help of The Beatles of course. He needed them.

PAUL McCARTNEY: ‘We totally believed in him, thought he was a great man.

I don’t think we ever questioned his judgement – his judgement was very sound. If anyone was the fifth Beatle it was Brian.’

Voice JL I was pretty close to Brian because if somebody‘s going to manage me I wanna know them, you know, inside out and it appeared when he told me he was a fag and all that and I introduced him to pills you know – which gives me a guilt association for his death – and to make him talk, you know, to find out what he’s like.

‘Though I didn’t seek it, fame has overtaken me and this is not always pleasant. I believe in democracy but I also like to see one man clearly in charge, answerable to himself for his own mistakes. There are penalties, the chief of them in loneliness for ultimately I must bear the strain alone - not only in the office or the theatre but at home in the small hours. I am the one who suffers the most, for I hold myself responsible. It isn’t the money that worries me; it’s the failure, partly because of my youth, partly because of my provincial origins’

EPSTEIN: one

‘My father Harry was the eldest of six children. There were eighteen years between him and his young sister Stella. He fulfilled his father Isaac’s dream of settling successfully in business in England.

‘My father was born in Lithuania in a village called Hodan and he came over here when he was probably about eighteen or nineteen, somewhere round there. He had a furniture shop and eventually he bought another shop that was next to the furniture shop and then he made a way through so you could get from one shop to the other…

Caption: The first Epstein family store – two separate shops knocked together in Walton, far from the Liverpool city centre.

Here’s a picture of Queenie and Harry on their wedding day. Two page boys and two bridesmaids. I was one of those.

Brian was born on Yom Kippur, which is the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

‘They built their home for themselves [on Queen’s Drive]…a detached house with five bedrooms and plenty of living rooms.

I am an elder son, a hallowed position in a Jewish family and much was expected of me.

My mother Queenie, still the loveliest woman I know, was intensely proud that her firstborn was a boy; and when, twenty months later, my brother Clive arrived, the Epstein’s looked like being a happy and promising little family unit.’

‘Queenie was very close to the boys. She really loved them. They were a very happy family. It looked in those days that the Epsteins were a golden family, quite like a fairy story. Unfortunately, later on things became very sad.’

‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ with archive footage

REX MAKIN: ‘He had immense affection for his parents and his brother and he didn’t consciously want to upset them. He was elegant, fastidiously so, and he had a very great presence. He was good-looking, well-mannered. He was temperamental, volatile. He could be very effusive or he could be very taciturn. He felt himself a square peg in a round hole for a long, long period and wanted to escape from the background which he’d been brought up in.’

My parents despaired many times over the years and I don’t blame them. Throughout my school days, I was one of those out-of-

sorts boys who never quite fit, who were ragged, nagged and bullied and were beloved of neither boys nor masters. At the age of ten I had already been to three schools and had liked none of them.

My father, an uncomplicated man, had been a solid and successful grammar school boy and he found it difficult to know why I was so wretched a pupil. Recently, referring to a diary I kept at the time, I found I had written in reference to the forthcoming term, at yet another, my ninth school: ‘I go only for my parents’ pleasure’. But I don’t condemn or blame my parents for this, or anything else concerning my upbringing. Their wrongdoings were committed unknowingly but with the best intentions and with love and devotion’.

STELLA CANTER: The family expected Brian, I imagine, to go into business, follow on to his father’s footsteps as Harry has done but that wasn’t to be because …Brian was not interested in that sort of thing.

He would have liked to have been a dress designer. I didn’t know this at the time. I found out much later. I think that Queenie and Harry must have gone up the pole. This wasn’t their scene at all.’

This caused a great deal of distress. For the masters at Wrekin College, my last public school, nothing could be less manly than dress designing. Although I knew good design from bad, though I could create dresses and draw them, though to be a dress designer was all I wanted to be, I accepted my fate and dutifully went to work in the family business I began to study all the various aspects of retail furnishing. I was and still am very interested in the way things should be displayed. How things should be designed and how they should be presented and I have a self-devouring passion for quality.

I placed chairs in the windows with their backs to the window shoppers. ‘Backs of chairs in view /’ Unheard of! Yet in every home you see the backs of chairs in the fireside pattern. Indeed you cannot enter a room without seeing the back of a chair.

I was very keen on splayed legs. They were just on the way in at the time because slowly the post-war austerity hang-over was diminishing and buyers were reluctant to return to the ugliness of the 1930ish

design.

JOE FLANNERY ‘They were like nobility to me.

Brian’s father was in the retail furniture business and my father made furniture [for him]. That’s how we knew each other. We liked stage shows, musicals, musical films. Brian and I would discuss how our feelings were different. First of all you notice that you don’t discuss girls so much and you discuss leading players. You’re more attracted to a star.

# Then you realise that you’ve got to be honest as possible but at the same time the people you don’t want to hurt are your parents.

In those days you were a queer and it wasn’t a very nice thing to hear about yourself because you know that you’re not queer in your head. You do resent that and you try and fight what you’re being called. Brian and I realised we were breaking the law to be gay. We knew of people who were taken away to a place called Rain Hill which is about ten miles outside Liverpool. It was a loony bin, a lunatic asylum and there was no way I was going there. There was no way I wanted Brian to go there.’

I was settling down. The designing of the store was becoming my responsibility and, all in all, my mother and father were really quite pleased with their Brian.

The future seemed firm and bright and assured. But on December 9th 1952, a letter came to tell the pleased-with-himself young son and heir that he was to present himself for a medical examination for the army.

Several of the public-schoolboys who had shared my moans in the first few weeks were snatched away to become officer cadets but naturally - for the army is not always wrong - I was not included. I cannot imagine anything worse for morale than Lieutenant Epstein in charge of a platoon of men under heavy mortar fire.

And within ten months of joining the army, my nerves became seriously upset. I reported to the barracks doctor who seemed quite alarmed and after a long, fruitless talk about my problems and the need for 'facing-up' and 'pulling myself together' he referred me to a psychiatrist. And with remarkable unity they decided that I was a compulsive civilian and quite unfit for military service [and] I was no use to the army nor it to me, with which view I readily agreed.’

YANKEL FEATHER: ‘I don’t think he had a clue who he was – no I don’t think he liked being who he was, but I think he had every intention of altering that… like he created the Beatles, I think he also had plans for himself. The sort of people who wanted to mix with were the darling people, people at the Playhouse Theatre, people who were going to be big stars.

Duke of Burgundy/Henry V ‘Should not in this best garden of the world Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?

Alas, she hath from France too long been chased, And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps, Corrupting in its own fertility.

Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart, Unpruned dies; her hedges even-pleach'd…’

‘Even so our houses and ourselves and children Have lost, or do not learn for want of time, The sciences that should become our country; But grow like savages,—as soldiers will That nothing do but meditate on blood,— To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire And everything that seems unnatural. ‘

Actress Helen Lindsay: This is the speech I chosen for Brian for his audition for RADA because it embodies his maturity beyond his years, his soulful quality and his air of dignified and quiet authority.

By night I was seeking escape in the cool and cultivated dusk of the front stalls of Liverpool Playhouse. The Playhouse was home to a brilliant group of younc actors and actresses including Brian Bedford and Helen Lindsay, designers and writers, plus a settled, soon-tobe-solid furniture salesman from Walton called Epstein.

‘There was a sort of wistfulness about him. He wanted to what he perceived was a charmed circle. He was obviously bored to death with the furniture business and he thought we inhabited a magic world and he wanted to feel part of it.

He asked me, quite out of the blue when we first started to work together on choosing the audition piece, that was obviously uppermost in his mind, a crucial question: ‘When you first met me or when I come into a room, are you aware that I’m Jewish.’ I said ‘No. Are you worried about the fact that people might think you’re Jewish’ and he said ‘Well I think I’d like to do Henry the Fifth and will they think I should never choose Henry the Fifth because I’m Jewish’.

I said there are very cogent reasons why you shouldn’t choose Henry the Fifth.

Brian, I simply don’t see you as a man of action. I don’t see you as a soldier.’

OVERLAY OF HENRY V SPEECH

Wednesday evening I saw a play at the Arts Theatre Club and after a quiet coffee after the play I took a tube home to Swiss Cottage When leaving the tube at Swiss Cottage Tube Station, I saw a young man staring hard at me, who I will refer to as ‘X’.

Then I saw X go into the lavatory. I followd him. After approximately one minute I know he turned his face to glance at me and then walked out and waited outside. I followed. He loitered. I loitered.

After several minutes passed, I took a hold of myself and decided that what I was doing was very dangerous and stupid and I walked away towards home. I turned to look back and see that he was not following me. He nodded his head. He stood looking pathetically at me. I crossed to him

Hi I said Hello he said What are you doing out so late? I asked Nothing Much. You? Nothing Long silence Know anywhere to go? I asked No.Do you?

There is an open field along the road Along there?

Yes It’s rather dangerous. I have to be home early I said

Alright, he said I left him, and walked hurriedly away along Harbon Road.My mind was in great fear and turmoil I looked back and saw X with another man following me on the other side of the road. I walked on quickly, forgetting where I was going. After a few minutes they arrested me for PERSISTENTLY IMPORTUNING.

When he gave evidence after I pleaded guilty in court, he included: “persistently importuning seven men�.

I believe that my own will power was the best thing with which to overcome my homosexuality.

The damage the lying the criminal methods of the police and consequently capturing me, leaves me cold, stunned and finished.

If I am remanded or given a prison sentence, please telephone my father Harry Epstein at Liverpool North 3221. I must apologise for my writing which I realised is difficult to read. I was unable to procure a typewriter and my hand is nervous

Geoffrey Ellis: ‘Originally, when he lived with his family, he had wanted to present the image of a normal person. It didn’t really work because he already knew – and I believe that his family knew from very early days – that he was homosexual.

When he lived in London and perhaps particularly when he visited America - he was fascinated by the American homosexual scene in the 1960s – he behaved sometimes in a way which was very dangerous, and he was conscious of this. In some ways he sought out danger. It gave him a thrill but of course led him into many very awkward situations from time to time. I think deep down he didn’t want to be homosexual but paradoxically he enjoyed his homosexual experiences very much indeed.

So after the end of my third term at RADA, I returned home for the vacation nursing a secret decision never to leave home again and hiding a sense of inadequacy which was almost complete.

Brian epstein: two

The family business went from strength to strength. In 1959 we opened a store in Whitechapel, in the centre of Liverpool. It had a small record department and I was put in charge of that.

REX MAKIN: ‘My offices in the centre of the city occupy a space which used to be used by Brian Epstein for his offices. This was the beginning of Brian’s entrepeneurial skill.’

It was opened by Anthony Newley and though I was still shy of stars I persuaded a Decca representative to introduce us. Newly was an exceedingly friendly, diffident young man, very modest and easy-going and we got on well.

He spent a day with me and my family just relaxing, without pretensions, and I recall thinking this was how a star should behave. In fact it is precisely the way my artistes behave, when they are permitted by press and public.

I was determined to be known as the record-dealer who had everything the customer wanted – hit-songs, small sellers, specialist records – the lot. I established a foolproof system in showing when a record pile needed renewing. This meant we never ran out of any given disc. I turned no-one away with a “Sorry. We don’t have it.”

ALISTAIR TAYLOR: Brian said do you ever watch a programme called Compact’, which was about a magazine, ‘cos he said oh you know I’ve got this press blurb here and there’s a guy called John Leyton whose going to be singing this song. So I heard it and I thought it was absolutely diabolical, right. And I said, forget it, I said one copy in each shop, that’s all. So he said, put it on. I’d like to hear it. Brian just stood there – and he said right, we’ll have let me see, two hundred and fifty, three hundred. I just looked at him. I said Brian, you’re joking. And of course it roared away and we were the only shop in the North West to have copies of it.’

[Music: John Leyton – Johnny Remember Me]

PAUL McCARTNEY: ‘My initial impression was it was just a shop we went into to gaze and admire all the beautiful record covers and occasionally to buy a record. NEMS stood for North end Music Stores and Brian’s Dad, who was Harry, had once sold a piano to my Dad, which I still have, so there’s a family connection before I even knew him. So for people who like to think things are fated, there we are, you know, it was even before I knew him.’

The ceiling was lined with LP covers and it was like Wow how did he think that one up. Because no other record shop had them

‘Saturday afternoon it would be packed and we had turntables behind the counter where we would play records and there were a row of booths. All the kids used to come in and Brian used to tolerate it, as a lot of them never bought anything.’

VERA BROWN: ‘We just wanted to listen to music.

You’d ask for a certain record to come on. There’d always be a couple of friends there you’d meet. It was like a meeting place. We didn’t have any money. If one person bought a record out of about ten they were lucky. I suppose other people brought records but the people I was with didn’t.’

‘This where all the classical stock was kept in long racks and downstairs which we can’t down now. Down there in Brian’s old office, he had an office on the top floor but he had his own office obviously for running the shop we actually signed the first contract with The Beatles.

‘And we had two great windows of course and Brian’s great, great secret was he didn’t just put new records into the shop, he made displays of them.

There’d be cocktail glasses and a chair. He created a picture. He’d make it like a theatrical set.’

To write at all, I found it very necessary to consume five whiskies before putting pen to paper. Of course I’d planned writing for a long time. This was the big let-out - the only way to rid myself of humdrum, dreary, godforsaken suburbia.

The thing is to get away. Away from it all! I fancy Rome and that is the reason for writing. See, whenever I plant ‘Rome’ in the text you’ll know why. Incidentally I should say that I want to live there in the greatest luxury for some considerable time. To learn the language, live Italian and just to add myself to that very attractive utterly ridiculous little group that call themselves, or at least named by newspaper Hickeys, as the International Set.

‘I thought at that time that he was the sort of person I should get to know because he was rich, he was attractive, he was intending on

going places. He was wearing monogrammed shirts and going to the Plage for his holidays and mixing with all that he called the better people.

He was not a happy person but then it would take an unhappy person who was sure of himself with all those illusions of grandeur – maybe they weren’t illusions, maybe they were realities. It would take somebody as mad as that to have dreams, the dreams that he had, to accomplish what he did. It would take someone as strange as him.

‘This is my club, at least what’s left of it. Behind that door there’s a dark passage. We didn’t want anyone to know it was there so we kept it dark. Brian used to come here once a week. I had some very attractive young men coming in and there were a lot of waiters from the Adelphi. I bought most of the music from Brian and the music was good, so naturally he would come. He was presentable and he mixed in very well.’

‘Wherever homosexuals were they had to be secretive. There’s lots of beliefs amongst tough men that so-called poofs and pansies and people like that have a harder time. But it isn’t so because a lot of poofs and pansies are as tough as people can be in a tough city like Liverpool.’

‘He’d left my house about ten o’clock. By about a quarter to midnight he was back on my doorstep.

He left my house in a beautiful white shirt but when he came back on my doorstep it was a brilliant red. He’d been knocked about so much that he didn’t even come back in his car that night.

I bathed him. I got him right. He did stay the night and then went back home or wherever he went the next morning looking reasonably good. ‘

FACT BOX [‘The episode had traumatic consequences. Not content with beating him and stealing his car, Brian’s assailant contacted the Epstein’s demanding money to keep the story quiet. The family brought in the Liverpool police who arranged for Brian to go along with the blackmail scenario in an effort to capture the man. The blackmailer was arrested during the transaction and later sent to prison.’ – Geller book]

‘The whole blackmail situation happened just before I knew him so I could see the effect of it. I didn’t know about it for a little while until he felt comfortable enough to let me into this very, very embarrassing secret which I think was pretty well contained as a secret within Liverpool. But obviously there were some people that knew about it and he explained it to me and it had been a devastating experience, not only being beaten up and the blackmail but also the embarrassment to the family, to himself and the family, the whole situation.’

‘He had everything going for him. He was very successful in what he was doing and the record shop would have got bigger and we’d have got more and more and it would have become a small chain and that would have been a great achievement but that already lost its interest for him. There was an element of danger seeker and he had a gambling trait.’

GERRY MARSDEN: ‘Around Liverpool there would have been 40 skiffle bands, skiffle groups as we called them, and you’ve got to get into rock ‘n’ roll and suddenly Liverpool blossomed and a million groups played in Liverpool.

The nice thing was there was a lot of venues to play. We could play every night for six months at a different venue. All I wanted to do was continue playing. I used to work on the railways and I finished on the railways to go to Hamburg. I thought if I can earn a living as a musician because I love music. I don’t want to do anything else. That was all I wanted to do.’

Although by now I ran the biggest record store in the North West and although many of my clients were teenagers and although I believed I had an ear for a Top 20 hit, I wasn’t personally interested in pop music and had little idea of the burgeoning Liverpool pop scene. I’d just come back from a long holiday in Spain during which I had wondered how I could expand my interests.

By autumn 1961 the store was running like an eighteen-jewelled watch. It was showing good returns and the ordering and stocking systems were so automatic that I was, once again, becoming a little restless and bored. Life was getting too easy. And then suddenly and quite undramatically, an 18-year-old boy in jeans and a black leather jacket came into the store and said, “Have you got a disc by The Beatles?� His name was Raymond Jones.

‘Now this is still one of those myths. What in fact happened was that I got fed up with people, youngsters coming asking for the Beatles’ record – it was called “My Bonny” by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers. So I put a name Raymond Jones in the order book. We had to order 25 as a minimum, we had to import it from Germany.

Bingo! I bought one to cover Raymond Jones and so Brian did a hand-written notice in the window and it said “Beatles record available her”. And within an hour or so it sold out – all the rest of the other 24 had gone. So Brian says, let’s go and have lunch and we’ll drop in the Cavern and see this band. In fact we’ve been accused that we surely must have known they were from Liverpool, Well we didn’t. We weren’t interested in pop music. It was only in fact later that we suddenly thought we’ve seen them before in the shop.’

‘This is Matthew Street, it’s amazing. It’s full of The Beatles: the John Lennon Bar, the Beatles Shop, the Cavern pub but the one thing that isn’t here, ironically, is the original Cavern – it’s gone. This is where it was and where Brian and I walked down the steps that fateful day, November 9th 1961.’

Never in my life had I thought of managing an artiste or representing one. And I’ll never know what made me say to this eccentric group of boys that I thought a further meeting might be helpful to them and to me . But something must have sparked between us because I arranged a meeting at the Whitechapel store at 4:30pm on December 3rd 1961 – “just for a chat”. On that cold, grey afternoon in December in my office, I entered a whole new world.

‘Now they’re the Beatles and they’re very rich but if you saw them in my mothers’ house. They were just a scruffy bunch of boys and who’d look at them George sulking because I think he fancied our Joan and she was marrying Sam; John breaking eggs on beehives. They were just a scruffy bunch of boys. I wouldn’t bother with them. But then Brian stood out.

He looked like the real thing. He was handsome. He was tall he was immaculate and them in the background were saying he’s different.

‘I hadn’t had anything to do with pop management before, That day I went down to the Cavern club and heard the Beatles playing was quite a new world for me. I was amazed by this sort of dark, smoky, dank atmosphere, this beat music playing away and the Beatles were then just four lads on a rather dimly lit stage, somewhat ill-clad and the presentation left a little to be desired as far as I was concerned because I’d been interested in the theatre and acting for a long time. But amongst all that, something tremendous came over and I was immediately struck by their music, their beat and their sense of humour on stage and even afterwards when I met them. I was struck again by their personal charm.’

BEATLES CONTRACT PAUL McCARTNEY: ‘My Dad at that time, when he heard about it, he said this could be a very good thing. He though Jewish people were very good with money. This was the kind of common wisdom.

So he thought Brian would be very good for us because he’s very sensible, very charming and he was right. Having gone to RADA as we found out later, he was quite different from anyone on the Liverpool music scene. He was quite different from anybody else.’

‘I went to see a Liverpool lawyer friend Rex Makin to discuss management and to try to share some of my excitement about The Beatles. Makin, who had known me well over the years, said: “Oh yes another Epstein idea.

How long before you lose interest in this one?” - a justifiable comment, but one which offended me because I felt strongly and irrationally that I was going to be permanently involved with The Beatles.’

‘He had enthusiasms and sudden flights of fancy but he wasn’t really very stable, rather like a butterfly and of course butterflies are very colourful and don’t settle very long with any one object.’

‘Brian was the last person I would have said who would have made a manager or made a good manager. He was just selling records in a shop. Very nice, very well brought up, great family…I never thought Brian would have the strength to manage. It took a lot to manage The Beatles. John Lennon was no pushover, nor was Paul. He had the strength I never thought he had. It did surprise me a great deal.’

We’d been to the Knotty Ash Club for my sister’s engagement and The Beatles played there and Rory [Storm] and a few other groups.

Afterwards, as usual, we all went back to the house and Brian came along and quite a lot of people from the night.

Brian came over for the drinks – Brian liked a drink – and he stood by the bar talking to me for most of the night. Then he asked me to dance – I didn’t want to dance - and then he said, OK then if you won’t come over this side , I’ll come over that side and he ducked under the bar and got into the cloakroom with me and stayed there all night. To me Brian…was one of the sexiest fellas I’d ever met. People say ‘Oh well Brian was gay’. But he wasn’t very gay with me. He was just like any other man and more. When I first saw him, I thought he was very stiff, standoffish and superior.

In the shop Brian seemed like a man, like your dad shouting at you and superior. He had an attitude of superiority. In the house, I thought he was a very passionate loving person. He was like two different people. If there’s a third person involved – this gay person – I just say he’s one hell of a man to be able to please everybody.’

‘So we went back to Germany and we had a bit more money the second time so we bought leather pants and we looked like four Gene Vincent’s only a bit younger I think. And that was it and we just kept the leather gear ‘til Brian came along.’

‘It was a bit sort of old hat anyway – all wearing leather gear – and we decided we didn’t want to look ridiculous…and we didn‘t want to appear as a gang of idiots. Brian suggested that we just sort of wore ordinary suits. So we just got what we thought were quite good suits and just got rid of the leather gear.’

‘Brian’s father, would come in to the shop and I daren’t tell him ... Brian would say don’t tell Daddy …where I’ve gone. He’d been down in London. I used to think of all sorts of excuses [as to] where Brian was he was late back from lunch or got another business meeting somewhere. Harry wasn’t silly and he began to cotton on that Brian was away a bit too often.’

‘John and I used to wait at Clyde Street station in a little coffee bar called the Punch and Judy…for Brian arriving back from London. He’d come off the train and we’d take a look at his face to see if it was good news or bad. It was always bad. We’d have a cup of coffee and discuss what had happened. He would just say people aren’t generally interested. This is going to be a hard sell.’

Dear Mr White: As I am somewhat disappointed at not having heard from you with regard to the matter we discussed last week, I thought I’d write and attempt to impress you once again with my enthusiasm for and belief in the potential success of The Beatles. If I didn’t mention that they were so much better on reality than on disc it was because I may have assumed you’d heard it all before. Next week the group will be seen by A&R men from Decca. I mention this because, as you may appreciate, if we could choose it, it would certainly be EMI. They play mostly their own compositions and one of the boys has written a song which I really believe to be the hottest material since ‘Living Doll’.

He’d been completely rejected by everybody.

Absolutely everybody in this country had turned him down. They did rock ‘n’ roll standards, some of their own stuff, which wasn’t very good – ‘Love Me Do’ was the best – and things like ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ by Fats Waller so they had an enormous repertoire of stuff.

I was quite impressed with his devotion and his zeal for this group which made me want to see them. I hadn’t got a great deal to lose and of course when I met them and saw them and worked with them I got the same kind of feeling that he’d got – it was a kind of falling in love business…’cos they had this tremendous charisma which nobody else seemed to have recognised and I was puzzled by it but there we are.

‘In Liverpool he was living at home.

There was a point before the Beatles explosion where he got himself a small apartment in the centre of Liverpool not far from me. I know for sure that it was never a place where he was thinking of living…because it wasn’t furnished. If Brian was going to live there he would’ve [done] a whole job on it and he never did do that.

Very soon after he got it…John Lennon married Cynthia and she was pregnant or had had Julian, and he gave it to them to live in.

Voice of John Lennon: ‘Cyn was having a baby and the holiday was planned but I wasn’t going to break the holiday for a baby no matter how.

What a bastard I was. I just went on holiday and I watched Brian picking up the boys.’

‘You see we were just Liverpool guys so the word was “queer” not “gay”….we didn’t really have a problem with it. It was just something you made fun of – that’s the way it was. We didn’t actually know any… well we probably did but we didn’t talk about it.

The word was out that Brian was gay amongst people. The greatest thing for us was it didn’t really affect us in any way. I think we suspected that he might hit on one of us so I think in the early days we were slightly wondering whether that was his interest in us. But in my personal knowledge he didn’t.

I don’t actually know the truth of the John rumours. All I can ever say about that is I slept with John a lot, just ‘cos you had to sleep and you didn’t have more than one bed, and to my knowledge John was never gay…I suspected the John and Brian thing was a power play…’cos John was a very political animal.

John, I suspect, went away on that Spanish holiday number one ‘cos nobody went on holiday – I would have gone, anyone would have gone, offer of a free holiday – yes I’m there. Number two, I’m sure John took Brian aside and said hey if you want to deal with this group, I’m the guy you deal with OK? John was that kind of guy. Very sensible, very pragmatic. So I’m sure that was the main reason John went.

Now as to whether there was any sort of gay dalliance, I don’t know. I can’t tell you that. But I know that Brian was very straightforward with me about it.

We could talk about it quite openly, particularly [and] obviously once we got to know each other. He never hit on me at all. There was never any question of it at all. We lived so intimately together that there would’ve been one evening when he was sort of drunk so it would’ve been in his character to do that.’

Voice of John Lennon: We didn’t have an affair not an affair…I liked playing a bit baggy and all that. It was enjoyable. With those big rooms in Liverpool it was terrible. Very embarrassing. Fuck Knows.

‘The amphetamine time started around that time. He was introduced to them by the Beatles and other groups. I was sure some of Brian’s initial reasons for taking the amphetamines was to be part of the little group, part of the Beatles – to be cool, to keep up with them, to show that he was cool and hip. Also it did hep. He was under pressure and these stimulants did work. The amphetamines would keep you up late and then of course you would take the sleeping pills to sleep and then you’d wake up feeling pretty rotten as a result of the hangover from the sleeping pills and that would start the whole cycle off. It was a horrendous cycle.

Many other things had been happening in that first extraordinary year. I had become a full-blown manager of several first-class artistes. After The Beatles, I had signed Gerry and his Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas and a group called The Big Three. I was taking a close interest in a slim lively little thing called Priscilla White and I had half an eye on the star potential of the freckled lad named Quigley. It was, in fact, all happening.

NEWS REPORTER (OOV): Artists credit him with a unique judgement of what will be a hit and who will make it. Nearly all of them earn more than the Prime Minister.

INT: Can I talk to you about Brian Epstein?

GERRY MARSDEN: Oh certainly, yes.

INT: What does he mean to you, as a manager?

GERRY MARSDEN: Brian? Oh the money. No, serious though, he's er, done a lot for us, you know, tells all kinds what to do, and got made us those suits and everything, you know, and everything.

But even in our private lives he plays a hell of a lot, you know, does lots of things for us.

INT: What other things, apart from telling you what suits to wear and have you cut your hair, and that kind of thing?

GERRY MARDEN: Well you know, all sorts of little things you know. Any, if you have any money troubles or anything, got anything to do with money - you can always look to Brian and ask him what to do, or what not to do, and he'll always tell you, you know, as a pal.

‘So when Brian said to us, you know I've got a record deal for the Beatles, maybe I can get you one, we thought oh he's half crazy. OK let's make a record, at least we can tell our kids we made a record, and maybe that'll, can get us a few more quid, a few more jobs -never thinking for one second that we would become famous, if that's the word and that the Beatles would become the biggest thing since sliced bread. It was just Brian's great charisma, a foresight, he could see what was going to happen. We didn't know. The Beatles couldn't even know. Nor did London. London didn't know about Liverpool. They didn't know what was going to happen.’

BILLY J KRAMER: They used to do all our travel for us, they arranged our hotels, you know just about everything, and it was amazing 'cos no matter where we were in the world, Brian always made sure that we were taken care of financially. There would be like this registered envelope that would arrive every Saturday morning, with a cash float, and we would all each have a cheque for the balance of what we'd earned, to be sent to our accountants.

ARCHIVE REPORTER (00V): Billy J Kramer was another from the stable who gets a frenzied welcome from his public. Epstein says Kramer's good looks will take him to

the top. As no-one listened to the song, this is obviously important. The screams came in proportion to the antics.

He would come to see the show and he would critique it and he would really rip it apart then. I used to see different members of his stable on Juke Box Jury, and the Beatles would be on and Cilia Black would be on, and Gerry Marsden would be on it and I would ask Brian, I'd say why can't I do Juke Box Jury, and he says 'cos you don't speak well enough, your diction and the way you speak is terrible, and you need to have elocution lessons.

GERRY MARSDEN: He said he was trying to stop us talking like that alright, great to see yer. He said, Gerry nobody will understand what you're saying. So we had to try and be a bit more cosmopolitan in our in our accents, which I think we did.

JOHNNY GUSTAFSON: The Big Three was really I suppose a rhythm and blues band. We tried our best to be true to what we all liked. We just wanted to be rough and ready if you like, downhome rockers. Brian tried to single me out to be a front man with the tight trousers but I couldn’t really be a Jess Conrad type and sing Little Richard songs.

When I took on The Big Three, the group had a very good sound and I was most optimistic but there was a lack of discipline and this cannot be tolerated because it’s bad for business, awful for reputation and extremely bad for morale. I was sorry to lose them because the vocalist Johnny Gustafson, bass guitarist – now with the Merseybeats – is a very fine property, strong musically and physically and very good-looking.

‘We were different from the Beatles in the way that we were more working class – the Beatles were more middle class – and they had a different train of thought and they probably thought further ahead than we did. We didn’t wear the suits he provided.

If we went on tour, the suits would stay in the van and we’d wear whatever we liked, jeans and scruffy shoes, and sometimes we’d forget our gear and literally leave it on the pavement and borrow stuff when we got there. We never had a PA. He used to give us money to go in hotels and we’d sleep in the van and spend the money in the pub and just general things like that he didn’t take too kindly to so he just fired us.’

ALAN LIVINGSTONE : ‘I was sitting in my office one day and I got a call from a man named Brian Epstein, my secretary told me. I didn't know who he was, and I picked up the phone, and he said Mr Livingstone we don't understand why you won't put out the Beatles records. He said, ‘Have you heard them?’ And I said no. He said, would you please listen and call me back. So I said, sure.

Columbia Records, RCA, then RCA Victor Records, which was Decca Records in those days, a very big company, A&M Records, every one of them turned them down. They finally got a small company in Philadelphia called Swan Records, who put out two sides, two records, and nothing happened, and Swan gave them up, said we don't want them anymore. And that was the end of it, and the Beatles could've been dead in the United States.’

By early 1963, my acts were the most successful in the country but no-one had heard of us in America. All of my boys idolised America’s great rock ‘n’ roll stars but at that time there seemed little chance of the compliment being returned. And then, late one evening, the phone rang.

SID BERNSTEIN: ‘Brian was still working out of his home at the time so I called him in Liverpool. His mother Queenie Epstein answered. We talked about the book review section of the New York Times, we talked about New York and finally she said: ’I must be costing you an awful lot of money, Mr Bernstein. Let me get my son to the phone.’ I heard footsteps which was Brian coming down from his workshop in the lovely Tudor house they lived in. ‘Mr Bernstein can I help you?’ And I said ‘Yes. I’m interested in your group.’ He said ‘Why would you want to commit suicide? We can’t get any air play in New York.’ I had not at this time heard a note of their music but I had become obsessed with idea of presenting them, He said ‘Do you know how much money we get’. I said ‘I have no idea’. He said ‘We get the equivalent of $2000 a night for one show’. I said ‘I will give you $6500 for one day for two shows. He said ‘Wait ‘til I tell the boys that some crazy American wants to give $6500 for two shows in one day. You’ve got a deal.’

Operation USA started in November 1963. I went to New York and I took Billy J. Kramer with me. The trip cost me £2000 because I booked us into an extremely good hotel and we lived demonstratively and well in order to impress the Americans that we were people of some importance. Actually, of course, we were people of no great importance tob the Americans. We were two ordinary travellers. Nobody knew me and I didn’t know anybody over there beyond three contacts whose name were in my pocket book.

GEOFFREY ELLIS: I was walking with Brian and Billy J. Kramer through Times Square, I think fairly late one night after the theatre and Billy caught sight in one of the shop windows of a Western-style fringed shirt. ‘Oh’ he said to Brian, I’d like that. Brian said ‘No Billy, not your style.’ So Billy didn’t buy it. Brian was always conscious of how his artist ought to look and Billy’s style was rather clean-cut and that’s the image that Brian wanted him to retain, certainly no sort of country and western look at that time.

Then Brian gave me a lecture one night in a restaurant about how if I just lost some weight we could make some fantastic movies and I could have a different career. I said ‘Hey Brian, I have a hard time miming to records on TV, never mind making movies’. I was smart and I had the boy-next-door image and he thought maybe I was the one that was going to do it.

Brian used to say there’s no bad publicity. Once we made the records and The Beatles did, Brian realised we needed it worldwide. He was trying to get us abroad, into Germany, into France, into America to get on television. Brian was that the first [to get that]. He realised just how important it was.’

Ed Sullivan was the number one show on American TV and I’d heard that he’d witnessed scenes of Beatlemania at London Airport on a visit to Europe. He agreed to see me and I found him a most genial fellow. Much to Sullivan’s surprise I demanded that if The Beatles were to be on his show they must have top billing. After a lot of resistance and to-ing and fro-ing and haggling, Sullivan finally relented and we got our top billing. The show attracted the highest audience in the history of American TV.

GEORGE MARTIN: ’That year in 1963 I had 37 weeks in the Number One spot and these acts were all Epstein’s. He then realised he had the makings of a latterday Diaghilev.

He saw himself as an impresario with a stable of great stars. I mean Brian wanted to be a star himself – that’s the essential part of Brian - and he couldn’t do it as an actor but now he was able to do it as a man who was a manipulator, a puppeteer. It’s a pretty heady wine when everything you do becomes successful.’

For years The Beatles, like every other British artiste, had watched the American charts with remote envy. The American charts were the unobtainable; only Stateside artistes ever made any imprint. Always America seemed too big, too vast, too remote and too American. I remember the night we heard about the Number One position in Cashbox. I said to John Lennon ‘There can be nothing more important than this”, adding a tentative “Can there?”

"Whatever ever happens tomorrow, one thing is certain - it must not be allowed to look after itself. Tomorrow is the cardinal problem and it must be tightly under my control. Yesterday was a wonderful day, it was warm and dry and the sun shone, and the Beatles were brilliant and the others too. Today is nice too, there's still no change in the weather, except for the faintest breeze which suggests we must be on our guard; probably it might be as well to carry our raincoats tomorrow, then it won't rain. It's a great privilege being a weatherman, keeping the Beatles and the others dry and comfortable. I enjoy it far too much to relax.

However much I socialise with the great and famous, best of all, and far beyond anything money can buy, I love to lean on my elbows at the back of the stalls and watch the curtain rise on John, Paul, George, Ringo, Gerry, Billy, Tommy, Cilia - they stun the world. I think the sun will shine tomorrow."

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