Beatles (27 page)

He was confined to barracks for some time. It wasn’t his first offence. He’d been guilty of other minor insubordinations, or at least inabilities to do the right thing. ‘The army was generally getting on my nerves. I really was becoming genuinely upset. It was getting me down so much that I reported to the barracks doctor who referred me to a psychiatrist.’

Other psychiatrists were consulted and all agreed that Private Epstein wasn’t one of nature’s soldiers. They agreed that he was mentally and emotionally unsuited to military service. After twelve months, his national service only half completed, he was
discharged on medical grounds. As is the way of the army, they still gave him most impressive sounding military references. These described him in glowing terms as a ‘sober, reliable and utterly trustworthy soldier’.

Brian told the story of his army debacle in very cheerful terms, almost hinting that he might have engineered his discharge. But there seems little doubt that he had been seriously disturbed by it all.

He ran all the way to Euston and caught the first train to Liverpool. He went back to the family store and worked very hard. He began to take an increasing interest in the record side. He’d always been interested in music, classical records mainly, but popular music as well. Edmundo Ros was one of his favourites at the time.

But he began to get even more interested in a new hobby, one he had been very fond of at school – acting. He was beginning to realize that perhaps he was more interested in artistic things than being a furniture salesman. He went to every production at the Liverpool Playhouse and began to spend more and more of his spare time either in amateur productions, or in the company of professional actors from the Playhouse. He became very friendly with two in particular, Brian Bedford and Helen Lindsay.

They suggested that he too could be an actor. He had the interest, the right feelings and, they were sure, the talent. Why didn’t he apply for RADA? They would help him. So he applied for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. And he got in.

‘I read two pieces for the director, John Fernald. They were from Eliot’s
Confidential Clerk
and from
Macbeth
. I got in without a full audition, for some reason. Perhaps the fact that I had no money problems helped.’

His father, naturally enough, wasn’t particularly pleased. Acting was second only to dress designing in his list of unmanly jobs. But at 22, his son and heir went off again to interrupt his career. This time willingly, unlike the army. Perhaps even for ever.

He was in the same year at RADA as Susannah York and Joanna Dunham. Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole had just left. While a student at RADA he took a part-time job in a record shop in Charing Cross Road.

‘I was doing reasonably well. John Fernald had great faith in me. But I began to loathe actors and all their social life. I hadn’t enjoyed school. And here I was seven years later in another community life. I just didn’t like it, or any of the people. I began to think it was too late. I was more a businessman after all.’

From the day he’d started RADA his father was always asking him when he was coming back to the business. Each holiday, as he was going back to RADA, he asked him to stay. During the summer vacation of 1957, before he began his fourth term, he asked Brian again over dinner at the Adelphi Hotel. This time he said yes.

His father had decided to open a new branch in Liverpool, this time in the city centre, in Great Charlotte Street. It was hoped it would interest Brian in the firm. Clive, Brian’s younger brother, was by this time also working in the firm.

Brian was in charge of the record department with one assistant. Anne Shelton, the singer, opened the new store. On the first morning the record department took £20. In Walton the record department took £70 in a good week.

‘Most record shops I’d ever been in were lousy. The minute a record became popular, it went out of stock. I aimed to have everything in stock, even the most way-out records.

‘I did this by ordering in triplicate any record that anyone ever wanted. I reckoned that if one person asked for something, there must be others who would want it too. I even ordered three copies of the LP “The Birth of a Baby”, just because one person had wanted it.’

Every customer was encouraged to leave an order for a record if by chance it wasn’t in. An immediate delivery was always promised. Brian worked out a simple but ingenious stock index whereby it could be seen immediately which record had sold out. This consisted of strings attached inside each
folder. When any were dangling down, it could be seen immediately that more records were needed. This was checked constantly throughout the day and replacements put in or reordered immediately.

He also worked out his own top twenty best-seller list of the pop records being sold in NEMS. This was checked twice daily. Apart from being a good gimmick, of interest to customers and an encouragement for them to buy certain records, it also showed him exactly which of the up-and-coming records should be ordered in bulk.

‘I’ve never seen anybody work as hard before,’ says his mother. ‘He seemed to have found something which completely fulfilled him for the first time in his life.’

Brian agreed. ‘I did work very hard. I don’t think I worked physically harder in my life before or after. I started at eight each day and didn’t finish until well into the night. On Sundays I was in the store all day making orders.’

By 1959, two years after opening, NEMS in Great Charlotte Street had an extensive pop and classical department covering two floors of the store. The staff had expanded from two to thirty. Business was going so well that it was decided to open another branch of NEMS in Whitechapel, the heart of Liverpool’s shopping centre.

The new shop was opened by Anthony Newley. Brian had got in touch with him through a Decca sales contact. The crowds on the opening day in central Liverpool were compared to the return of a triumphal cup-final team. Nobody in Liverpool had seen such a turnout for a pop singer, up till then.

Both shops thrived and expanded. By the August of 1961 Brian was boasting that the two NEMS records departments in central Liverpool in Whitechapel and Great Charlotte Street contained, ‘The finest record selections in the North’. This boast appeared in an advertisement on 31 August 1961, in
Mersey Beat
, that same Merseyside pop music newspaper which had begun the previous month. Brian himself was not personally a fan of pop music. His favourite composer was by then Sibelius. But as a
smart businessman, he saw that
Mersey Beat
was thriving and a good advertising market.

In that same issue he started a column called ‘Record Releases’. This was bylined by ‘Brian Epstein of NEMS’. In this he reviewed forthcoming records, light, jazz and pop. In that first column he said that ‘The Shadows’ popularity seems to increase continually.’ That must have made the Beatles puke.

The column gave him free publicity for his shops and also helped him to push certain records. But it was also smart of
Mersey Beat
to have got him. In the four years since he’d left RADA, fed up and disillusioned, he’d become about the leading personality in the record retailing business on Merseyside. His name and solid business background gave weight to
Mersey Beat
.

But very soon he was beginning to feel he had expanded as far as he could go. There weren’t many fresh fields to conquer in Merseyside, at least in his line. By the autumn of 1961 the feeling of boredom and dissatisfaction was coming on again. His mother remembers sensing it.

‘He started taking up teaching himself foreign languages. He became very interested in Spain and Spanish. He also went back to amateur acting again.’

His father was naturally worried that he would want to be off again, having built up two prosperous record stores.

Brian himself remembered this feeling of wanting something new, of being bored and frustrated by business. But his three closest friends at the time don’t remember him moaning about that, though they do recall him having other things that bothered him.

Once Whitechapel was established, he had begun to have more of a social life. He used to see a lot of Geoffrey Ellis, a boyhood friend who lived near him. Geoffrey had also gone to a public school, Ellesmere College, and then on to Oxford, where he read Law. Geoffrey says Brian was terribly shy and hesitant in his schooldays. But after Oxford, Geoffrey went to New York, to work for an insurance firm, and they lost contact, for a few years.

There was also a friend called Terry Doran, from a completely different background. He was an ex-secondary-modern schoolboy, now a car salesman, with a good line in Liverpool wit and mimicry. ‘I met Brian by chance one day in a Liverpool pub in 1959. I just fell in love with him from the beginning.’

Geoffrey and Terry were simply social friends, unconnected with his business, at least in those days. But his third friend, Peter Brown, was a friend in the same business. He eventually became Brian’s closest friend of all.

Peter was born in Bebington, went to a Roman Catholic grammar school, worked in Henderson’s, the Liverpool store, and then Lewis’s where he became manager of their record department.

When Brian came to plan the opening of the new NEMS store, in Whitechapel, he asked Peter to take over as manager of the Charlotte Street record department. Peter was getting £12 a week, managing the record department at Lewis’s. Brian offered him £16, plus commission, which he thought was enormous.

‘I soon learned all about Brian’s highly efficient ordering systems. After closing time at six we had to do all the orders. It could take from 40 minutes up to two hours.’

Terry remembers being kept waiting while they were both doing orders. Brian would tell Terry to meet him after the shop closed. ‘I’d go for a drink and end up being there till closing time, still waiting for them.’

There was a slight delay in opening Whitechapel and Peter found that for a few months Brian was still at Charlotte Street with him. ‘It was pretty difficult, officially being the manager, but having the boss still there running things. It was one long row. We were still as good social friends, but I think he was disappointed in me as a businessman.

‘He was very fond of sending notes to all the staff, even though there were so few of us. His stock control system really was marvellous. It ensured that we were never out of stock of any best-selling record. EMI people used to tell us we were the largest sellers in the North.’

Brian always maintained, quite wrongly, that girls didn’t find him attractive. But it was about this time that he started going out with a girl from his record store, Rita Harris.

‘It took him a long time to realize she had fallen in love with him,’ says Peter Brown. ‘We all used to go into Cheshire for a meal, Rita and Brian and me and perhaps one or two others.’

This was the most serious romance Brian ever had with a girl, but it eventually came to nothing.

His love life always appears to have ended unhappily. He did have violent affairs with other people, but they rarely lasted long, which worried him a great deal. He never really came to terms with himself sexually. But he decided that was how he was and he never tried to go against his nature. But he sometimes almost had a self-destruction complex.

‘He was really very lonely in Liverpool,’ says Peter. ‘He felt there were few places he could go and really enjoy himself. Our best nights out were in Manchester. Brian, Terry and I used to drive through there most Saturday evenings.

‘He had a phobia about his unhappy affairs and also another one just slightly, about being Jewish. I think he imagined anti-semitism sometimes when there wasn’t any. Perhaps it wasn’t awareness of his Jewishness. Perhaps it was just being part of an environment he didn’t really care for – the sort of successful, provincial, furniture-shop Jewishness, when his real nature was towards the artistic and the aesthetic.

‘But of course he could be a good businessman when he wanted to, saving pennies and being mean when he suddenly felt he had to. We had lots of rows over money. But it just happened now and again. He was mostly a very lavish spender.’

It’s easy to overstate the complexities of Brian’s personality and interests at this stage in his career. His parents knew little of his worries. They certainly didn’t see any effects of them, although his mother did remember him becoming restless, once both NEMS departments were thriving, and starting to look for something new.

He went off in the autumn of 1961 for a five-week holiday in Spain, the longest he’d had. He took with him a slight feeling
of frustration, in his personal life as well as in his business life. Nothing serious, perhaps. Just a feeling of unfulfilment. He’d been too busy really, building up NEMS for the last four years, to ever seriously become worried by it all, the way he had done in the army. One or two did consider him a poor little spoiled rich boy. But as far as most people could see, he was hard-working, charming and gay, with a family who loved him.

But he obviously felt he needed something new to fill his life, preferably something in some way artistic. RADA had been an outlet of a sort, the failure of which had stopped his artistic longings for a while. But there is nothing more insidiously frustrating than an artistic leaning, when one’s artistic tastes are greater than one’s artistic talents, or so it seems.

That was Brian Epstein on 28 October 1961. He was 27. So far he had been a failed schoolboy, a successful furniture salesman, a failed soldier, a successful record salesman, a failed actor, a successful record store executive. When into the shop came a customer asking for the Beatles.

The famous Epstein index system was beaten. All these lovely little bits of dangling string couldn’t help. Brian Epstein had to admit that he’d heard of neither a record called ‘My Bonnie’ nor a group called the Beatles.

It’s strange, in some ways, that he hadn’t heard of the Beatles. After all, he’d been advertising and writing a record column in
Mersey Beat
for several months. His eyes must have passed over their name in articles many times. But then of course his interest in
Mersey Beat
was purely professional, as a retailer taking space in order to sell records.