Malka received a comfortable upbringing and a boarding-school education. In 1933, she was a slender, rather refined and artistic girl whose only serious complaint against the world was the way it had Anglicized her given name. Malka is the Hebrew word for queen. So Queenie was what her family, and her new husband, called her.
Her first child was born on September 19, 1934, at a private nursing home on Rodney Street, Liverpool. It was a boy, and as such a cause for rejoicing to grandparents concerned with the perpetuity of business. To Queenie, the baby in her arms was something more beautiful than she had dared to imagine. She called him Brian because she liked the name, and Samuel for the sake of the family and the scriptures.
The new baby was brought home to substance and comfort. Queenie’s dowry from her parents was a handsome modern town house in Childwall, one of the smartest Liverpool suburbs. One ninety-seven Queens Drive was a five-bedroom residence with bay windows and a sunrise design on the glass over the front door, which a uniformed maid would open to visitors. A nanny became necessary when, in 1935, Queenie gave birth to her second son, Clive John.
The Epstein family shop occupied a prominent place on Walton Road. A row of tall display windows, extending around the corner onto Royal Street, offered a range of furniture and home requisites, from sideboards to standard lamps, whose appearance was not especially chic but whose quality and durability could always be relied on. Next door stood the North End Music Stores, a little double-fronted shop that had been there since the days when young men and women bought sheet music to sing around the parlor piano. Jim McCartney’s was one of the many local families that bought pianos from NEMS on the installment plan. Subsequently, Epstein’s had taken over the little shop, extending its stock to phonographs and radios.
Harry Epstein worked hard, but enjoyed his pleasures and sharing them with his wife. They were keen bridge players, fond of films and the theater, well known, in a hospitable community, for the generosity and style of their entertaining. Once a week, they would drive into Liverpool to dine in the Sefton Restaurant at the Adelphi, a hotel then at its splendid apogee. In Ranelagh Place, next to Lime Street, the polished automobiles slid up the ramp. Doormen hastened out to welcome them into the majestic, shiplike interior of the entrance hall.
To their two small sons Harry and Queenie Epstein gave the security, not only of Jewish family life but also of a middle class untroubled, as yet, by any social guilt. For Merseyside, in that time, was racked by unemployment. A few miles from Childwall, on gray and unknown dockyard streets, the men massed at dawn, like livestock, for the favor of even half a day’s work at four and sixpence. Only a mile or so away ragged children played barefoot on flinty cobblestones. But in Childwall, the nursery lights glowed softly; there was Auntie Muriel or Uncle Mac on the radio, and thin bread and butter for tea.
Brian left babyhood rapidly, learning to walk by the age of eleven months and to talk soon after that, clearly and interrogatively. In looks he was like his father, dark-eyed and round-faced, with wavy, light-brown hair. His temperament was Queenie’s, most notably in his love of refinement, and a feeling for style manifest even as a toddler. He would stand in his mother’s bedroom while she got ready to go out, and gravely confer with her about which dress and accessories she should wear. Like Queenie he loved the theater, its world of romance, strange light, and make-believe. The Wizard of Oz, the first film he ever saw, left him astounded with its wistful fantasy for days. At the same time he seemed normally robust, hammering wooden shapes into a plywood board at his first kindergarten school, Beechanhurst on Calderstones Road.
In 1940, during the bombing of Liverpool, Harry Epstein moved his family to relative safety in Southport on the West Lancashire coast. Brian attended Southport College, but hated it so much that Queenie transferred him to a smaller prep school. Despite his obvious intelligence and alertness he did not seem to do well there either. But now it was 1944, and safe to move back to Liverpool. Ten-year-old Brian was arrayed in a new black blazer and sent to Liverpool College, the most exclusive and expensive of the city’s fee-paying academies.
Before he had reached his eleventh birthday the college asked Harry and Queenie to remove him. It was alleged that he had done a dirty drawing in the mathematics class. According to Brian, this had been a design for a theater program, legitimately adorned by the figures of dancing girls. Privately the headmaster told Queenie that in other respects, too, Brian had proved to be a “problem child.” He himself was never to forget the shame of sitting on a sofa at home and hearing his father say, “I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.” The words produced one of the furious blushes by which Brian betrayed even the smallest discomfiture.
He had not sat for the eleven-plus exam, and so could not be sent to any of Liverpool’s excellent grammar schools. His parents were forced to settle for another small private academy that Brian, predictably, loathed. Queenie by now had begun to suspect that the fault might not be entirely on his side. Anti-Semitism was a habit in which many otherwise agreeable British people still overtly and comfortably indulged. The nation that had recently pitted itself against the Nazi Holocaust saw no harm in using words like “Yid” or “Jewboy” and in passing such expressions on to its children.
The Epsteins decided to try a school that actually welcomed Jewish boys. The nearest that could be found was Beaconsfield, near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. There, despite Queenie’s forebodings, Brian seemed to do a little better. He took up horseback riding and was encouraged to paint and draw. He made a friend of another Liverpool boy, Malcolm Shifrin, also the son of furniture people. The experiment was so successful that his younger brother, Clive, came to Beaconsfield to join him.
He continued to show a precocious love of luxury and refinement. Even when quite small, his greatest treat was to go with his mother and father for dinner at the Adelphi. Throughout the boy’s infancy Harry and Queenie sacrificed vacations abroad in favor of annual seaside visits to Llandudno in North Wales, or St. Anne’s. One wet summer in Llandudno, when Brian was eleven, as a change from variety shows, Queenie took him to a concert by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. From that moment he began to love and learn about classical music. Another year, at St. Anne’s, the family struck up acquaintanceship with Geraldo, a bandleader famous for his BBC radio shows. Brian was invited to go into Blackpool to watch Geraldo make a recording. Queenie remembers how he sat spellbound in the studio when the red light went on for silence.
His formal education had yet again run into squalls. Shortly to leave Beaconsfield, he was busily engaged in failing the entrance exams for major private schools such as Rugby, Repton, and Clifton. At last he was able to satisfy the requirements of Clayesmoore, a small private school still further away, in Dorset. “As soon as he got there, he started to grumble,” Queenie Epstein remembered. “Oh, those grumbles of his were enormous.”
Clive, his younger brother, a placid, conscientious, practical boy, had passed through prep school without trouble or complaint. Clive was good at exams, and so easily got into Wrekin College, a private school of the higher echelon in Shropshire. On the strength of Clive’s performance, the Wrekin head agreed to accept Brian also.
Wrekin was his eighth school. He stayed there for two years, in a torpor faithfully described in his school reports. His only aptitudes seemed to be for art and—he discovered—acting. He found that he could face an audience without blushing, and that he enjoyed speaking lines. School dramatics brought him friends, at times even won him official commendation. But some worm of reticence, nurtured by all his previous scholastic failures, prevented him from sharing this new success with his parents. Queenie Epstein always remembered driving down to Wrekin to see a school play about Christopher Columbus, and failing to spot Brian where she expected to see him, among the supporting cast. He had not told her, so she did not realize, that he was Christopher Columbus.
He left school at fifteen, without sitting for his school certificate. He had written ho
me that exams were not needed in the career he had chosen. Throughout his final terms he had come top of his class in art and design. He wanted to go to London and become a dress designer.
Few enough people in 1950 would have wished to see their sons make such a choice of profession. To a northern Jewish family, with its age-old view of filial duty, no more disturbing or wounding suggestion could have emanated from an elder son. Harry Epstein was outraged and made no secret of it; Queenie, though more sympathetic, could see no means of granting Brian’s wish within convention. The great scheme was buried quickly, before it could reach the ears of relations.
Another idea, that he might study art, languished as quickly under his father’s remorseless practicality. With no exams behind him, no aptitude save that of upsetting his parents, there was nothing left for Brian but to submit to heredity. In September 1950, shortly after his sixteenth birthday, he started work as a furniture salesman in the family’s Walton Road shop.
A woman came in to Epstein’s that day to buy a mirror. Brian was allowed to deal with her under the critical eye of his parental superiors. By the time the customer left he had persuaded her that what she really needed was a dining-table that cost twelve-pounds.
He was, he discovered, a born salesman. Walton Road was not a grand thoroughfare, nor were they grand people who shopped for furniture at I. Epstein & Sons. This young man who served them, with his dapper suit, solicitous manner, and upper-class voice, was decidedly an asset to the shop. Salesmanship awoke in him what eight costly schools could not—the will to work hard and be organized and efficient. He found he enjoyed arranging things for display, and window dressing. And he was doing something that did not disappoint, but actually pleased, his father.
To his grandfather, he was less pleasing. Isaac Epstein still directed the firm he had founded, arriving on the premises each morning as early as 6:00 A.M. Isaac, having dictated matters for half a century, looked askance on a grandson who boldly arranged dining-room chairs in the shop window with their back to the street, claiming it was “more natural.”
Upsets with his grandfather became so frequent that, in 1952, his father and Uncle Leslie judged it wiser to remove him temporarily from Isaac Epstein’s sight. For six months that year Brian worked as a trainee with the Times Furnishing Company at their Lord Street, Liverpool, branch. Reports on his progress were consistently favorable. As a salesman, he was smart and efficient; he dressed windows with flair and taste. When his stay with the branch ended he received a parting gift of a Parker pen and pencil set.
To outward appearances, his position was an enviable one. The son of wealthy parents, adored by his mother, indulged by a father glad to see this newfound business zeal, he seemed, in 1952, the very acme of provincial young bachelorhood. Ample pocket money supplemented his salesman’s pay, enabling him to dress with an elegance beyond his eighteen years. His suits came from the best Liverpool tailors; his ties were half-guinea silk foulards; he had his hair cut in the salon at Horne Brothers’ shop. He belonged to a sophisticated young set that congregated at tennis clubs and cocktail parties, and in fashionable Liverpool haunts such as the Adelphi Palm Court lounge and the Basnett oyster bar. Among this circle he was popular, witty, generous, and charming. Girls found him attractive, with his wavy hair, his snub nose and delicate mouth, and the large soft eyes that did not always look directly into theirs.
But by the time Brian was eighteen, he realized that, much as he enjoyed female company, he had no wish to share his life with any of the young women whom Queenie and his Adelphi set steered into his path. He must face the fact that he was homosexual.
It was a discovery calculated to fill any young British male of that era with unmitigated horror. In the 1950s, and up to the end of the following decade, homosexual acts between males were still a crime punishable by imprisonment. Only in rarified and enclosed worlds such as show business and couture could homosexuals yet find a measure of tolerance under the humanizing term “gay.” In the everyday world they were loathed, feared, and mocked as “queers,” “bum-boys,” “nancies,” “gingers,” “fruits,” “arse-bandits,” and innumerable other heartless synonyms, abused and even attacked with impunity if they betrayed themselves in the smallest detail. For the son of respectable, religious Jewish parents in Liverpool’s lingering Victorian twilight, the predicament was infinitely worse. There was never any question of Brian “coming out,” even—or especially not—to his own family. His father was simply unable to grasp such a concept; his more sensitive, intuitive mother may have known the truth even before Brian did, but she feared to breathe a word about it to anyone.
In 1952, he became eligible for national service. He was put into the army—not the RAF as he had wished—and sent south to do his basic training in Aldershot. He had hopes of being picked as officer material, but instead became a clerk in the Royal Army Service Corps. He was posted to London, to the RASC depot at Albany Barracks, Regent’s Park.
His army life was mitigated by plentiful pocket money from home and comparative liberty after 6:00 P.M. His mother’s sister, his aunt Frieda, lived in Hampstead, only a mile or so away; he was also within easy reach of the West End. He took to going around like a young Guards officer, with bowler hat, pinstripe suit, and rolled umbrella. Driving back into barracks one night he was mistakenly saluted by the gate sentry, and next morning was put on a charge of impersonating an officer.
The army’s reaction to this seemingly trivial escapade was draconian. Brian was confined to barracks and subjected to lengthy medical and psychiatric examinations without ever being told their purpose. His superiors may well have discovered his homosexuality, which needless to say was absolutely barred from all armed forces in those days. A close business associate would also later suggest that the incident at the barrack gate was no innocent misunderstanding, but that Brian habitually posed as an officer to gain entrance to service clubs like the “In and Out” in Piccadilly. Whatever the cause, he was declared psychologically unfit for military service and discharged after less than half his two-year term. Although the army could not be rid of him fast enough, it still provided a character reference describing him as “sober, conscientious … at all times utterly trustworthy.”
Within a few months he was once more a dapper and purposeful young man-about-Liverpool, working hard in the family business—and now with some real empathy and enjoyment. The little NEMS music shop in Harry Epstein’s empire had lately widened its stock from pianos and radios to phonograph records. Harry gave Brian the job of organizing and running the new record department.
The success he made of it reflected his passion for classical music as well as his newfound business efficiency. Even as a schoolboy he had had his own impressive record collection, housed in a cabinet made specially for him at his Hyman grandparents’ Sheffield factory. With his schoolfriend Malcolm Shifrin he was an ardent supporter of the “Liverpool Phil.” “Brian’s knowledge of music really was impressive even then,” Shifrin says. “So was his knowledge of the related arts, like ballet. He always knew music people—John Pritchard, the Philharmonic’s conductor, was a friend of his. We drove up twice to the Edinburgh Festival, and Brian introduced me to people there. But I always had the feeling he was a lonely person.”
He was still as addicted to the theater as he had been in his school days. Liverpool’s two main theaters, the Playhouse and the Royal Court, were surrounded in those days by half a dozen smaller but flourishing professional repertories. Behind the Royal Court was a genuine stage-door district of pubs and hotel bars that resounded to extravagant greetings in London accents. Brian haunted both the theaters and their adjacent bars in the hope of getting to know stage people. He himself appeared in one or two local amateur productions and, like an actor, acquired the habit of giving away signed photographs of himself to his friends.
Among the actors who befriended him was Brian Bedford, then, at the start of his career, starring in Hamlet at the Liverpool Playhouse. To Bedford,
Brian confided one night that he hated shop work and Liverpool, and that he, too, wanted to become an actor. Bedford encouraged him to try for an audition at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. RADA’s director, John Fernald, as it happened, had formerly run the Liverpool Playhouse. Brian auditioned with Fernald and, to his astonishment, was accepted.
The news filled his parents with dismay. In provincial Jewish business circles “going on the stage” was hardly less deplorable than becoming a dress designer. All the stability Brian seemed to have acquired was now put away, with his formal suits and ties. “He’d made up his mind,” Queenie said, “he was going to be a duffel-coated student. He wouldn’t even take his car. We’d given it to him for his twenty-first birthday. A beautiful little cream and maroon Hillman Californian.”
Under John Fernald at RADA Brian was a more than adequate pupil, sensitive and gentle. “He didn’t have a spectacular talent,” Fernald says, “but it was a pleasing one. If you think in terms of typecasting, he would have played the second male lead—the best friend in whom the hero can always confide.”
At RADA he acquired—or seemed to—a steady girlfriend. Her name was Joanna Dunham; she wore a fur coat dyed red. “Brian always seemed older than the rest of us,” Joanna says. “Even though he was only twenty-one. And he drank. That was something hardly anyone at RADA did then, although everyone smoked. Brian would say, just like an older person would, ‘I must have a drink.’
“I never thought he had any particular acting talent. There was one time, though, when he did surprise me. We had to do a test together for Fernald—a scene from The Seagull. We chose the scene between Konstantin and his mother, where Konstantin is adoring to his mother first, then flies into a terrible rage and tears the bandage off his head. The words must have had some special meaning for Brian. As he spoke the lines I could feel he was getting out of control. When he started tearing the bandage off, I really felt frightened. It was almost as if he were having a nervous breakdown there on stage.”