Authors: Philip Norman
He remained the Beatles’ manager; a celebrity in that due proportion. He was, indeed, rather more often in the papers nowadays since their submersion in private projects and recording. Was it true they had started to break up? Quite untrue, Brian patiently said. They were simply resting. After what they had been through, who could blame them? Just before Christmas 1966, when a nursery school in the Welsh village of Aberfan was engulfed by a coal slag heap, several public voices as good as demanded that the Beatles do a live show to help raise funds for the bereaved families. The concept of the charity benefit pop concert was then an unknown one and, much as all four sympathized with Aberfan’s plight, they rejected what seemed a further move to turn them into national public property. As ever, Brian was there to explain the position on their behalf and stop the media criticism from rising above a mutter.
He might convince the press, but he did not deceive himself. A bond was broken that had, in any case, been so fragile, composed of arrangements, schedules, timetables, and notes. Despite the years and miles he had traveled with them, despite a fame and reckless wealth to equal theirs, he had no point of communication with them but a contract. Once their talent outran his efficiency Brian Epstein had no further part to play. With all else that was to be heard in their brilliant new music, Brian could hear the sound of his own doom.
He was, to outward appearances, still the epitome of that youthful success associated with Swinging London. Not yet thirty-two, he controlled an entertainment organization that, as well as the Beatles, represented
some of the best-known names in show business. His personal wealth was estimated, by the
Financial Times
, at seven million pounds. Outside 13 Chapel Street his red Rolls-Royce or his silver Bentley convertible stood in the mellow Belgravia sun.
NEMS Enterprises, though administered by many hands, still owed its main direction to Brian’s personal business judgment, that strange mixture of rashness and prescience. In 1965, he had bought the Saville Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, impervious to objections that it was just a few yards on the wrong side of the West End. The building appealed to Brian with its Art Deco exterior, its boxes with private anterooms in which leopardskin couches stood. At the Saville, he planned to put on straight plays in alternation with Sunday night pop shows. “We brought the Four Tops over from America, on the Sunday before their big record, ‘Reach Out, I’ll Be There,’ went to number one in Britain,” Tony Bramwell says. “Brian paid them $32,000 for a £2,000 gross at the Saville. Then, of course, he was able to bring them back to do a seven-week British tour.”
His passion for theater led Brian to subsidize the Saville through seasons of excellent, barely profitable productions, both drama and dance. He spent a fortune on the place, much of it unnecessarily—as with his insistence on taking out all the existing seats and replacing them with more comfortable ones. He had his own box there, and his own private bar. At the Saville, he could play theatrical impresario right to the borderline of his true desire, undimmed since his RADA days—that one night on the lit stage the leading man who entered left, through French windows, would be Brian himself.
The fantasy recurred in various projects with which, after August 1966, he attempted to fill his life. There was, for instance, his plan, in partnership with the disk jockey Brian Matthew, to build a new theater-cum-record studio in Bromley, Kent. He also dabbled in bullfighting, his other surreptitious passion. He put money into a film about El Cordobes and became a sponsor of the English matador Henry Higgins.
These ventures were not for profit, since he had more than enough money: They were symptoms of Brian’s desperate wish to find some other role than entrepreneur and businessman. He wanted to be creative, as the Beatles were—to establish by any possible means that credential for reentry into their world. So he tried to produce a record, for the Liverpool singer Rory Storm. He had always felt guilty at having
poached Ringo Starr from Rory’s group. He even tried directing a play,
Smashing Day
, at the New Arts theater. John Fernald, his old RADA teacher, had been supposed to direct it but had fallen ill. “Brian took over and really threw himself into rehearsals,” Joanne Newfield says. “He was totally involved, right up to the evening of the dress rehearsal. All the cast were waiting in their costumes—but no Brian. He’d forgotten all about it.”
Joanne had joined NEMS originally as secretary to Brian’s assistant, the high-powered Wendy Hanson. She inherited Wendy’s job in late 1966, when Brian closed down his Stafford Street office and announced he would be working entirely from Chapel Street. Sitting upstairs, under two life-size David Bailey portraits of her employer, Joanne was first to see the marked change in Brian’s dress and habits. His clothes grew more flamboyant, his gestures more overtly camp; it became a struggle for Joanne to keep him to his business engagements. “I’d find notes for me in the morning, asking me to get him out of appointments—meetings or lunches. I once had to cancel Bernard Delfont four times.”
One business matter had so harried and tormented Brian that he now refused even to think about it. In New York, the lawsuit against Seltaeb, the merchandising company, was about to enter its third year. The huge delay—caused largely by Brian’s failure to attend pretrial examinations—had seen Nicky Byrne’s claim for allegedly lost revenues rise, as the Beatles grew still more famous, from five million to twenty-two million dollars. The Beatles themselves even now knew nothing of the millions that their name had generated but that Brian had been unable to catch.
His other NEMS artists—apart from “my Cilla”—had long ago ceased to absorb his energy. Gerry Marsden was in a West End musical; Billy J. Kramer and the Fourmost had gone to other agencies. Brian was in fact actively seeking a business partner who could ultimately take over the whole NEMS operation from him. He had already offered a controlling interest to Larry Parnes, which Parnes turned down because the deal would not include the Beatles. Instead, Brian turned to Robert Stigwood, a ruddy-faced Australian who, since his arrival in London, had built up an impressive roster of emergent pop acts. Stigwood became NEMS’s joint managing director, pending his acquisition of a majority shareholding. Among the new clients he brought into the company were Cream, the Moody Blues, and Jimi Hendrix, a young
blues guitarist from Seattle whose explosive virtuosity had turned even modern legends like Eric Clapton and George Harrison into besotted disciples. Also under Stigwood’s wing three brothers from Australia called the Bee Gees, until then thought not to have a prayer because their name sounded too much like the Beatles.
Brian himself was now rarely to be seen in the daylight hours. Joanne Newfield, arriving at Chapel Street each morning, would find her day’s instructions in the note pushed under his bedroom door—a note written at dawn in amphetamine wakefulness, before the antidote drug plunged him into sleep. Sometimes, pushed under the door, there would be a pile of money, won on his perpetual journey round the Mayfair gambling clubs. “Jo…” one note said, “Please bank my happiness…”
With luck, and a little extra dose, he would not have to open his eyes until mid-afternoon. Joanne knew he had surfaced when the intercom in his bedroom was switched on. “When he first got up, he always felt terrible—hung over from drink and pills. He’d take some uppers to get over that. At about five o’clock, he’d be full of life. He’d come in and say, “Right. Let’s start work.”
The mounting depression, the chemicals warring within him, produced fits of irrational anger that drove Joanne many times to the point of resignation. Like others before her, she could never quite bring herself to do it. “The smallest thing could send him half-crazy. I got him a wrong number once, and he literally went berserk. He threw a whole tea tray at me. Another time, it was my birthday: He was terrible to me all day. The next day, I found this note. ‘Jo—good morning. Better late than never. Many happy returns of yesterday. Be a bit tolerant of me at my worst. Really, I don’t want to hurt anyone…’”
Several times he made a determined attempt to pull himself together. He began seeing a psychiatrist and, on at least two occasions, went into a drying-out clinic in Putney. For one period of several weeks a doctor and a nurse took up residence at Chapel Street. The nurse went out one afternoon, and Brian escaped. He was missing for two days. No one thought of looking for him where he was more and more to be found—in the dismal trysting alleyways of Piccadilly Underground station.
At other times it seemed he could find satisfaction only by creating a bizarre facsimile of his own mother, or at least the all-encompassing security she had once given him. Among his secret ports of call was a
dominatrix in Mayfair whose clients also included several senior figures in the Conservative party. Her main task was to gratify the almost conscious death wish that still remained a strong part of Brian’s sexual makeup while simultaneously making him feel childishly coddled and secure. He would lie in a rubber coffin while she read the newspapers out loud to him.
Life could still return to normal, as when his mother came down from Liverpool for a visit. Paradoxically, spells of conventional illness put him back on the rails. “I looked after him when he had glandular fever,” Joanne Newfield says. “He had a bout of jaundice as well, when Queenie came down to stay. Brian got into a good routine then and really seemed to enjoy it. I remember one Saturday afternoon how thrilled he was that he and Peter Brown had been out to Berwick Market to buy fruit. Brian thought this was wonderful. He’d done something normal—something just the same as other people did.”
Early in 1967, he made a second attempt to kill himself with a drug overdose. The Beatles were by then deeply involved in recording their new album. Brian had let an early pressing of “Strawberry Fields” / “Penny Lane” be stolen from Chapel Street by one of his boyfriends. Shortly afterward, the words “Brian Epstein is a queer” were scrawled on the garage door in lipstick. “He did once confide in me how hopeless his private life was,” Joanne says. “I’m no good with women and I’m no good with men,” he told me. He was in absolute despair that day.
“The doctor told me once that Brian was like a collision course inside himself. He could only be terribly happy or terribly unhappy. If there was any depression or misery, Brian would be drawn helplessly into it. The Beatles caused that happiness, and they caused that unhappiness. I don’t think there was any hope for him since the day he met the Beatles.”
The sixties’ increasingly tolerant atmosphere did little to ease his particular problems. In London at least, homosexuality had lost much of its Victorian stigma, thanks mainly to the fact that even ragingly hetero young men with their long hair, velvet suits, and ruffle-fronted shirts personified the traditional notion of “queers.” Nineteen sixty-seven was to see the decriminalization of homosexuality per se, with sexual acts permitted between consenting adult partners in private. But Brian’s tastes left him still miles on the wrong side of the law; besides, for someone
in his public position and of his parentage and religious background, it remained as impossible as ever to come out of the closet.
America still held vestiges of happiness. With his lawyer friend Nat Weiss he had formed a separate company, Nemperor Artists, to represent NEMS acts in New York. Weiss had himself gone over to artist-management, handling groups like Cyrkle, whose song “Red Rubber Ball” Brian had correctly judged a million-selling U.S. single. Nemperor Artists had another new signing, of talents as yet unrealized—Brian Epstein. He virtually gave the company to Nat Weiss so that Weiss could become
his
agent.
The portly, rather strange New Yorker had become Brian’s most loyal, long-suffering friend. There were difficulties in that city, too, after encounters with predatory boys around Times Square. One day, when Brian was due to be interviewed on radio WOR-FM, Nat Weiss found him drugged almost insensible with Seconal tablets. Weiss somehow revived him and delivered him to the studio.
That interview, with the longtime Beatles adherent Murray the K, has survived on an hour-long tape in Nat Weiss’s possession. It is remarkable less for the subjects covered than for the tenacity with which Brian, once on the air, fought his way back from his Seconal coma. At the beginning, he can scarcely even speak. But slowly, his voice frees itself, his thoughts unstick. He can articulate what everyone—what he most of all—has hoped to hear. The Beatles and he remain as close as they have ever been. “There hasn’t been so much as…a row.
“At the moment they’re doing great things in the studio. They take longer nowadays, of their own volition, to make records. They’re hypercritical of their own work. Paul rang me the other day and said he wanted to make just one small change to a track.
“I hope ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ are going to prove a thing or two. And certainly—
certainly
—the new album is going to prove more than a thing or two.”
“So—there we go,” are Murray the K’s sign-off words. “It’s good to know the Beatles are still together. Eppy is still together…”
There had been moments at Abbey Road studios during the previous four months when George Martin wondered whether the Beatles might have gone too far this time. There was, for instance, the time they asked him to provide farmyard noises, including a pack of foxhounds in full
cry. There was the matter of the Victorian steam organs, the forty-one-piece orchestra with no score to play, and the hours spent searching for a note that only dogs could hear. At such times, the Beatles’ record producer feared this new album would end, if it ended at all, merely by baffling its listeners.
Early 1967 had found them in the now familiar position of having to out-do the rivals they themselves had created. After
Revolver
, every other creative mind in pop was awakening to the possibilities of an album that was not just a compendium of past hits but a self-contained work on a definite theme, its tracks working interdependently like movements in a classical concerto. Two post-
Revolver
productions from across the Atlantic that had taken the Beatles’ idea several notches further on were largely responsible for driving them back into the studio. One was the Beach Boys’
Pet Sounds
, an almost Mozartian montage of multidubbed harmonies and counterpoint, recorded almost single-handedly by Brian Wilson while the rest of the band were out on tour. The second, even sharper goad was
Freak-Out
by a new California group called the Mothers of Invention: one of the first ever “double” albums, pungent with the iconoclastic wit of their leader, Frank Zappa, and embellished with quasi-comical sound effects and scraps of conversation.