heeding the suggestion of the investigating detective – so as not to endure the ignominy of an open hearing in which his life and inclinations would be bared. The court, piteously, merely fined him. Once again, it was back to Harry and Queenie, another failure stuck to the sole of his shoes, and a horrifying shame on top of it.
In his diary, recounting these days, he wrote of his deep self-loathing: ‘Through the wreckage of my life by society, my being will stain and bring the deepest distress to all my devoted family and few friends.’ Yet still he was drawn, again and again, to the same sort of furtive, dangerous sexual encounter the very prospect of which had got him framed and convicted in London. Cottaging at a public lavatory in Derby, he was attacked and beaten by a man dressed as a construction worker (Brian always, according to everyone who ever cruised with him, preferred the rough types); bloodied and robbed of his wallet, he made his way to a friend’s house in Liverpool to recuperate. A few days later, his assailant showed up at his home, threatening public exposure unless Brian paid him off. On the advice of his parents, Brian brought in the police; using Brian as bait, they caught the man and put him away for three years.
This was, seemingly, bottom: ashamed and humiliated, a bust at everything his parents might reasonably have hoped for him, Brian submitted without struggle to the business of selling furniture to Liverpool’s families. Now, for once, luck was with him. At the end of the ‘50s, the British economy had finally reawakened from its tedious post-war lethargy. The Epstein business was expanding into central Liverpool, first with an outlet on Charlotte Street and then into the heart of the shopping district, Whitechapel Street. For this move downtown, a new name was adopted: North End Music Stores, or NEMS.
It wasn’t so much the fact that there were more shops to manage that formed the basis of Brian’s good fortune but that the nature of the business was changing. Whereas the original I. Epstein and Sons forsook decoration for functionality and location, the central Liverpool NEMS stores would require a bit more dash to stand out. Brian, the creative, theatrical son with the nice way about him, made a neat fit with the new image. He was given a responsible position first at Charlotte Street, where he indulged in revolutionary – and very successful – experiments in window design (he displayed chairs with their backs facing out, for instance, in an effort to approximate how they’d look in a real sitting-room), and then at Whitechapel Street, where NEMS had planned to augment its booming business in phonographic equipment with a record department. It was like the invention of a new medium. And in it Brian would express something like genius.
NEMS Whitechapel was, by all accounts, a great record store: It stocked everything: imports, jazz, classical, pop, you name it – and if you did and it wasn’t in stock they would knock themselves out to get it. Typically for the time, it was stocked with listening booths in which shoppers could sample various records; the pre-Epstein Beatles whiled away many idle afternoons there listening to American records they had no intention of actually buying. Like Rick’s Café in Casablanca, everybody went to NEMS and everybody knew the enigmatic, elegant proprietor, the posh, cool number known to his staff as Mr Brian.
Mr Brian had his moods and his sometimes snobbish attitudes, but he was seen as a fair boss and nobody on his staff questioned his knowledge of how to run the business, his uncanny ability to forecast smash hits where everyone else saw nice little tunes, or his encyclopaedic knowledge of the records he sold. 'We used to have a game with Brian,’ Ringo Starr remembered, ‘where we’d say to him, “OK, ‘C’mon Everybody’ – what was the B side?” and he’d tell us. So we’d say, “What number did it reach?” and he’d know. It was thrilling.’
So it must have been with at least a slight sense of perturbation that Brian began to sense that something musically important was going on right under his nose—right there in central Liverpool—without his knowledge. A local act, the Beatles, had gone to Hamburg, in Germany, and cut a record with a third-rank Cliff Richard named Tony Sheridan, and a handful of excitable kids – girls mainly – were asking for it at NEMS. For reasons that have never been made clear, Brian hadn’t ordered the record, and his assistant, Alistair Taylor, contrived to invent a fictional customer, one Raymond Jones, and put his name in the order book as requesting the disc. It arrived from Germany and sold out lickety split. Brian, antennae twitching, sensed that something was up. He found that the Beatles played in a basement club, the Cavern, a few streets away from his shop, and he got his secretary to call to let the management know he’d be dropping in for one of the band’s lunchtime sessions.
On 9 November 1961, Brian, wearing his usual natty businessman’s attire, descended into the sticky, humid air of the Cavern and stood among the Coke-and-sandwich-snarfling teenage clerks and schoolskippers who watched in a rapt frenzy as the Beatles, four handsome young toughs in black leather, pounded through their repertoire. So parochial was the little world of Liverpool – and the even littler world of fans and players of what would come to be called Merseybeat – that Brian was actually announced by house manager/DJ Bob Wooler as a celebrity guest to the audience.
Brian was electrified – in fact, he was overcome with another of his whims. He turned to Alistair Taylor, secret instigator of this bizarre mission, who had come along to satisfy his own curiosity: ‘They are awful,’ he admitted, ‘but I think they’re fabulous. What do you think about me managing them?’
In a short life dotted with suspicious enthusiasms and pipe dreams, this may have been the most absurd yet. Brian knew absolutely nothing about showbiz management. Not only were the intricacies of running a pop musician’s career beyond his experience and, perhaps, abilities, but the racket was strictly a London affair. Even more than being gay or Jewish, being a Liverpudlian, however well bred, would be a massive obstacle.
But Brian’s question was rhetorical anyway. He was once again in the throes of fancy. He introduced himself to the band after their set, then returned several times over the coming weeks to see if his initial excitement had abated. He asked around town about the band: What sort of boys were they? Were they reliable? Were they, you know? Everyone told him not to waste his time. Nevertheless, on 30 November, after another lunchtime session, he asked the band if they would drop into NEMS Whitechapel to talk something over with him the following Sunday. They shrugged their agreement.
When they were sitting in his office at the otherwise empty store, Brian put his proposition to them bluntly: ‘Quite simply, you need a manager. Would you like me to do it?’
There was some talking about it among the four of them, and they, as Brian had done, asked around town about Brian. Paul McCartney’s dad, who remembered Harry Epstein, thought a Jewish manager would be a real boost: ‘He thought Jewish people were very good with money,’ his son remembered. But essentially the thing was agreed to there and then, terms pending. Brian Epstein had acquired the Beatles as artistes, and the Beatles had, on that Advent Sunday, acquired their John the Baptist.
If it seemed an unusual partnership – the 27-year-old classical music and show-tune fan with the refined air and the secretive private life, and the quartet of (mostly) teenage, roughneck, pill-popping rockers with laddish tastes and rooms in their parents’ houses – it was also an instance of absolute kismet.
In the Beatles, Brian had found a medium to express his sense of daring and flamboyance while still maintaining his discretion and reserve. ‘Brian wanted to be a star himself,’ said Beatles producer George Martin, ‘and he couldn’t do it as an actor, so he did it as a man who was a manipulator, a puppeteer.’ The Beatles were smart-ass, sexy, rough-and-tumble and extrovert – everything, in short, that Brian wished for himself (and, it can’t be avoided saying, that he sought in sexual partners). Too, his proximity to them gave him, in time, something that life had all but denied him thus far – friends.
For their part, the Beatles found in Brian someone with class – his own car, nice clothes and manners, a prestigious job – who made a dignified impression, took them seriously, recognised them as a cut above the motley Merseybeat fray and was willing to pitch them to the London pop music elite. Brian taught them about food, clothes, social niceties, the larger world, and instilled in them a sense of their right due. And he had a wild-eyed, messianic faith in them, swearing to one and all that they would be the biggest act that England – nay, the world