The Beatles (132 page)

Alistair Taylor walked slowly into Brian’s room and lightly, mournfully, touched Brian on the shoulder while Antonio’s wife, Maria, sobbed in the hall. Afterward, everyone assembled in the study to gather their thoughts. “It was some time before we called the police,” Joanne remembered, “because we wanted to make sure that things were okay in the
house—that there were no substances for them to find.” They combed through Brian’s study, tidying up this and that, and waited for David Jacobs, Brian’s lawyer, who was already on his way, via fast train, from Brighton.

Alistair said: “
We’ve got to get hold of Clive
before Queenie hears about this on the radio.” But no one answered the phone at Clive’s house. In the interim, the doorbell rang. Thinking it was the police, Taylor answered without looking through the peephole and came face-to-face with Mike Housego of the
Daily Sketch.
“What are you doing here on a Sunday?” the reporter wondered. “Oh, you know what Brian’s like,” Taylor responded too quickly. He looked past Housego and wondered whether the garage door was shut or if he could see the Bentley in its space. “Oh, that’s a bit weird,” said Housego. “We heard he’s ill.” “
Nooooo!
He’s fine. He’s got a bit of a headache. That’s why he’s gone out.”

A few minutes later another reporter called. The police must have passed the word to them, Taylor figured, making it more urgent than ever to contact Clive Epstein. “This is going to break,” he told Joanne. “The press aren’t stupid. If Queenie hears it over the air, we are in trouble.”

He finally reached Clive at home and broke the news. “There’s been an accident,” Alistair remembers telling him. “Oh—not… not Brian,” his brother stammered. “Is it bad?” Alistair hesitated. “Clive, he’s dead.” Clive Epstein’s reaction was unforgettable. “There was a big scream—a horrendous scream. I’ll never forget it to my dying day.” Joanne Newfield could hear it over the line, from across the room.

Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis left Kingsley Hill immediately for London, with stolid Geoffrey behind the wheel, racing the car like a madman along the Eastbourne Road. First, however, Brown had placed a call to David Jacobs at his country house in Hove—it was presumed that Jacobs would know how best to deal with the police—then followed it with the call to Bangor. “
The Beatles had to be told
before anyone else, and I didn’t want them to be told by the press,” Brown recalls. “They had to be protected. The press knew where they were; there were photographers in Bangor. I thought they should all come back to their guarded situations in London as soon as possible.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’ve got bad news,” Brown told Paul when he came on the phone. “Brian has died.” Brown thought Paul’s reaction to the news of Brian’s death was “noncommittal” but says, “Then I suppose he was stunned. Paul never said how terrible a blow it was or how sorry he
felt. It must have been confusing, following, as it did, two days of purging the spirit of material energy.” The boys had known little or nothing about the state of Brian’s health or the extent of his emotional unraveling. Later, at a hastily arranged press conference on the Bangor campus, Paul managed to express the group’s reaction: “
This is a terrible shock
. I am terribly upset.” But in the “
confusion and disbelief
” that followed the phone call, there was only numbness.

What could they do? Who would they turn to for advice? For the moment, Paul recalled, the Beatles “
traipsed off to the Maharishi
,” who was holding court in his inner sanctum amid piles of wilting flowers. “
Our friend’s dead
,” they told him. “How do we handle this?” Because Hindu theology dictates that mortals not focus on death but in the transcendence of the spirit—the soul’s moving on to another plane—the Maharishi disdained any comments about Brian’s physical death. Instead, as Ringo remembered, he advised them not to try holding on to Brian, “
to love him and let him go
,” so that his soul could continue on its upward journey. “You have to grieve for him and love him, and now you send him on his way.”

John put it into layman’s terms when he faced a crush of agitated reporters sometime later that afternoon. “
Well, Brian is just passing
into the next phase,” he told the stunned press corps, which had never heard such mumbo jumbo. “His spirit is still around and always will be. It’s a physical memory we have of him, and as men we will build on that memory.” But deep down, John remembered thinking: “We were in trouble then.” True, Brian’s business edge had been dulled badly by his drug addiction and demons. But he still provided some glue and, in a scene increasingly populated with Magic Alex types and vampires, he could provide some ballast. John admitted feeling “scared” about the Beatles’ ability to function, to remain together as a group, without Epstein’s instinct and finesse. Indeed, as soon as the news of his death had struck home, John thought, “
We’ve fuckin’ had it
.”

Eventually, the press descended on Chapel Street like jackals. Alistair Taylor, dog-tired and “in shock,” remembers staying long enough to “fend off the first wave.” He refused to let anyone in, but finally even Taylor couldn’t handle the relentless crowd on the sidewalk. “There was nothing more I could do,” he recalls. Slipping out the back, he went around the corner to a pub whose name he cannot recall. Mike Housego was at a table by the window, nursing a pint. “And I poured my heart out to Mike.
Everything I ever felt about Brian came pouring out.
Everything!
” The reporter just sat and listened, without taking out his notepad. Finally, Alistair asked: “Are you going to print all that, Mike?” Housego shook his head mournfully. “I never asked you to talk,” he said softly. “That’s not an interview, mate.” And not a word of it has ever appeared.

Nothing about the death had been heard backstage at the Saville Theatre, where at 7:30 that night the latest entry of “Brian Epstein Presents…” was playing before a packed house. Jimi Hendrix was headlining, with the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Keith West’s Tomorrow as the opening acts, and collectively the combos were burning up the place—literally. Arthur Brown had been electrifying crowds by setting his hair on fire during his finale. And as for the headliner, there was no shortage of excitement.

“
We did the first show
, which was really great,” recalls Tony Bramwell, “but I noticed that Brian hadn’t taken his box yet.” He’d usually sit in the royal box with friends, and between sets he’d make a rather grand entrance to have drinks with the artists at a bar at the side of the stage.

They were just about to start the second performance and were letting the audience in when there was a phone call backstage saying that Brian had been found dead. “We thought it wouldn’t be right to carry on with the show,” Bramwell says with typical understatement, “so Eric Burdon, who had stopped by to watch Jimi, went out into the street and told the crowd that the show was canceled, Brian Epstein was dead.” Brian’s name was up there on the marquee. He’d been a fixture on such shows as
Juke Box Jury
and
Desert Island Discs,
a recognizable part of the scene. In no small way, he’d revitalized the British pop music scene, giving rock ’n roll its most identifiable sound since Elvis Presley hit the turntables. All of this registered as the news of his death rippled along the line outside. Tony Bramwell says the crowd’s collective response was palpable. “The kids put their heads down and walked off in absolute silence.”

All evidence indicates an accidental overdose. His bedroom door had been locked from the inside, and pages of correspondence and amateur poetry lay scattered about the floor. The police recovered seventeen bottles of assorted pills in the bedroom, plus a residue of brandy shellacked the bowl of a crystal snifter found on his night table. “
I believe it was an accident
,” George Harrison concluded. “In those days everybody was topping themselves accidentally by taking uppers and/or amphetamine and alcohol—
loads of whiskey or brandy and uppers… and that’s the kind of thing that Brian did.” Paul, who heard the rumors of “
very sinister circumstances
,” also believed “it was a drink-and-sleeping-pills overdose.”
^*
Suicide—threatened before—seemed out of the question. Says Alistair Taylor vehemently, “
His father, Harry
, had died only six weeks before, and Brian would never have done that to Queenie—not in a million years, no matter how down he was. It just wasn’t in the man.”

What
was
in the man, however, was enough of a substance called carbrital to kill a small horse. Norman Cowan had prescribed the drug on two occasions for Brian, along with Librium and Tryptizol, issuing large amounts of pills, he told the coroner, “because he was off on holiday and Epstein needed drugs to tide him over.” It was impossible not to be suspicious, and the authorities were. “
Our main concern
was to convince the coroner that it was an overdose and not a suicide,” recalls Peter Brown, who starred in the witness box at the inquest on the morning of September 9, 1967. Brown and Norman Cowan also planned “very carefully” to claim Brian’s body immediately upon delivery of the official verdict and have the funeral the same day. To avoid a media circus in Liverpool, they had arranged to transport the enameled black coffin there directly by limousine and to bury Brian before sunset, as Jewish custom dictates, before the press expected the funeral to have taken place. Everyone else would come by train, except for
the Beatles, who had been asked
not to attend for fear they would attract a large crowd. Brian Epstein was all of thirty-two years old. On a lovely summer night, he finally got the one thing that had always eluded him: eternal peace.

In the days immediately following Brian’s death, various factions began assembling to wrest control of his music empire. “
There was a big power grab
,” recalls Alistair Taylor, who watched the action raptly from the sidelines. “The infighting was awful. Vic Lewis, Robert Stigwood, Peter Brown—the knives were out. Everybody wanted control of the Beatles.”

Incongruously,
Brian had left no will
designating an heir, but his chairman’s share of NEMS legally passed to Clive Epstein, who, according to most observers, wasn’t equipped to run the company. It was clear that Brian
had wanted Stigwood and his partner, David Shaw, out of the picture and had begun proceedings to ensure against their proposed takeover of NEMS.

In the ensuing mad scramble for control, no one bothered to consult the Beatles about replacing Brian Epstein. Incredible as it might seem, Stigwood had never even met the band. “In fact,
the Beatles were shocked
to learn that Brian had planned to sell NEMS,” Brown recalled. This was the first they’d heard that their management situation was in play—and they weren’t happy, to say the least, about the prospect.

On Friday, September 1, 1967, only four days after Brian Epstein died, Paul rounded up the Beatles for a meeting at his house to jump-start his plans for a Magical Mystery Tour. When the others pulled up in front of Cavendish Avenue, late in the afternoon, Paul was waiting for them at the front door with his sheepdog, Martha, panting by his side. “Let’s go upstairs to the music room,” he said. “There is something we should get to without delay.”