Brian seems to have tried to make one last stab at heterosexuality by having an affair with Joanna. One night at a party he got drunk and started to confide in her some of the secrets of his school days. “I felt he seriously wanted to have a relationship with me, and that he was trying to tell me something. He was very pissed and threatened to drive me home. I behaved very badly, I’m afraid. I just ran away.”
Worse was soon to come. At the end of RADA’s 1957 Easter term Brian returned to Liverpool to be with his family during Passover, then returned to London, where he’d arranged to spend the rest of the vacation working in a bookshop. One night, as he returned home to his North London flat after seeing a play at the Arts Theatre Club, he exchanged glances and a few words with a young man in the men’s lavatory at Swiss Cottage underground station. His interlocutor was a policeman, waiting there to entrap homosexuals in the act of cottaging, or seeking sex around public bathrooms. Despite having committed no offense Brian was arrested and charged with “persistently importuning.” When he appeared at Marylebone Magistrates Court later, officers persuaded him to plead guilty, assuring him he’d get nothing worse than a fine or conditional discharge. Only when he’d done so did he realize he was up on a charge of “importuning seven men.”
A letter, apparently written to his lawyer in the midst of this ordeal, reveals how desperately he had tried to join the sexual mainstream. “I do not think I am an abnormally weak-willed person—the effort and determination with which I have tried to rebuild my life these last few months have, I assure you, been no mean effort. I believed that my own will-power was the best thing with which to overcome my homosexuality. And I believe my life may have become contented and may even have attained a public success….”
In fact, it now seems that Harry and Queenie Epstein did not hear about the case, which would have been unlikely even to figure in any newspaper of wider circulation than the Hampstead and Highgate Express. But London was now poisoned for Brian, seemingly forever. On the eve of his fourth RADA term, over a family dinner at the Adelphi Hotel, he told his parents what they had so much longed to hear: He’d had enough of being a duffel-coated student. He was ready to come home to Liverpool and become a businessman.
For this apparent sacrifice he was given even further independence within the family firm. His father had bought a small shop in Hoylake, on the Cheshire Wirral, to be stocked with the more exclusive modern furniture that Brian favored, and run by him on his own. It was his idea that the opening should be performed by a celebrity, “Auntie Muriel,” his childhood radio favorite from BBC Children’s Hour.
There now began Brian’s uneasy and painful double life. By day, managing Clarendon Furnishings, he was a smart young executive. By night, he was a furtive and self-loathing lawbreaker, cruising the Liverpool darkness in search of others like himself, in constant fear of the police and of no less vigilant “queer-bashing” gangs. Though the city could not dare harbor anything like a modern gay bar, there were two acknowledged rendezvous under the sheltering wing of the Royal Court theater. A pub called the Magic Clock (or “Magic Cock”) and an old hotel named the Stork (more usually pronounced “Stalk”) both attracted an exclusively male clientele, dressed always with severe under-statement, semaphoring their forbidden brotherhood only with the faintest flicker of eyes or mouths.
But this precarious refuge was not enough for Brian. It was his further misfortune not to be attracted to other middle-class young men like himself, with whom he might have enjoyed discreet and—in that pre-AIDS era—relatively safe physical relationships. His taste was for heterosexual men of the artisan class: the very dockers, laborers, and merchant seamen who hated “queers” the most, and most actively sought to do them physical harm. For all their detestation there were many who habitually posed as “rough trade,” first leading a gay male on, then beating him up in simulated amazed outrage—and later, more often than not, blackmailing him with the threat of exposure to his family or the police.
Some time around 1958 Brian began his first, and probably last, happy emotional affair. One night in the Stork Hotel he met a tall, dark-haired young man whose evident nerves were kept in check by a quiet, measured Liverpool voice. With mutual astonishment, Brian and he recognized one another. The tall young man was Joe Flannery, the cabinet-maker’s son who used to be left in the nursery with Brian every Wednesday night.
The two began a relationship that from the beginning was more companionable than passionate. Joe hungered for glamour and refinement, and was as dazzled by Brian’s sophistication as he once had been by his beautiful toy coronation coach. The two would go to the theater and smart restaurants in Liverpool or sometimes further afield in Manchester. As Joe quickly discovered, Brian still treated his many expensive playthings with utter cavalierness. “Whenever he was parking his car between two other ones, he never cared if he bumped the one in front or the one behind. ‘What are bumpers for?’ he used to say.”
Driven from home by a homophobic father, Joe had opened a small bric-a-brac shop on Kirkdale Road and taken a flat in Alexander Terrace. Brian would come and have lunch with him in the shop or stay overnight at the flat. Joe bought a “bed settee” on the installment plan for them to share that, out of respect for Brian’s family, he did not get from Epstein’s furniture shop but from nearby Gerard Kelly’s. He still treasures the payments book for it to this day.
He was head over heels in love with Brian, but always accepted that his feelings were not returned with the same intensity. He recognized, too, that Brian still had an insatiable need to go downtown and seek the life-threatening thrills of rough trade. Their flat increasingly became a refuge when these encounters left Brian in no shape to go home to his family. “He’d sometimes come back at night with his face all bruised and cut and his beautiful Peter England white shirt soaked with blood. ‘Joe,’ he’d say to me, ‘put it straight into the bin.’”
His shy, fastidious flatmate came to understand that the danger, the humiliation, the physical pain—even the engulfing shame and self-disgust—of Brian’s night forays gave him an excitement he could not live without, try as he might. A horrible excitement lingered even from his worst disaster—the one that finally unmasked him to his family circle and much of Liverpool.
He described it all to Joe in quiet moments, as they lay together on the bed settee. A few months earlier one of his sexual partners had threatened to go to his family unless he paid a substantial sum. But the blackmail had not stopped there; it had gone on increasing until there was no alternative but to tell the police. In return for a guarantee of anonymity Brian had agreed to help snare the blackmailer by inviting him to the NEMS shop after hours, where concealed police officers could hear him incriminate himself out of his own mouth. The man had been caught and brought to trial—with Brian giving evidence as “Mr. X”—and had gone to prison, vowing vengeance.
It was evident that Brian derived some queasy thrill from the idea of a convict with a festering grudge against him. “He used to tell me all the time that somebody was out to get him,” Joe remembers, “and how his life wouldn’t be safe when this person was free again.”
The Epstein electrical retail business continued to expand. In 1958, with the start of the television boom, Harry was ready to move into central Liverpool. His first city shop was on Great Charlotte Street, near the Adelphi, and called NEMS after the North End Music Stores. Brian ran the record department and his younger brother, Clive, the household electrical side. Once again, at Brian’s prompting, there was a celebrity opening, by singer Anne Shelton, the “Forces Sweetheart.”
The next year, an even bigger singing star, Anthony Newley, opened a second, greatly extended NEMS city center shop. This one was in Whitechapel, close to Liverpool’s banking and insurance district, a narrow street recently developed by a row of contemporary shops. The Whitechapel NEMS had three sales floors, with a fourth for stock rooms and offices.
Brian had worked hard enough and produced profits en
ough at the Great Charlotte Street NEMS to convince his father that the new shop should have a greatly extended record department. In the event it had two: the classical on the ground floor, popular in the basement. The Whitechapel street window displayed records with a flair developed in Brian’s table and chair arrangements for the Times Furnishing Company. Another of his ideas was to cover the ceiling of the ground-floor department with hundreds of LP sleeves.
Before long, NEMS in Whitechapel, rather than Lewis’s or Blackler’s department stores, advertised “The Finest Record Selection in the North.” The policy, instituted by Brian, was that no request by a customer must ever be turned away. If the record were not in stock, it must be ordered. An ingenious system of cardboard folders with colored strings kept Brian constantly abreast of which records were in stock and which had sold out and needed reordering.
He was now twenty-seven, but looked older, with his dark suit and his conservative haircut. His staff called him “Mr. Brian”; behind his back they called him “Eppy.” They laughed a little at his slightly pompous executive airs. But they respected him as a decent and considerate employer, though a niggling perfectionist. If some small things were not right, he could fly into a red-faced tantrum, shouting and stamping his foot. Then, in a minute, he would again be his usual, quiet, charming, courteous self.
If there were occasional whispers about men’s lavatories and blackmail and court cases and “Mr. X,” they were no more than whispers. Few who saw him by day in Whitechapel could visualize him in circumstances other than driving out to some smart Cheshire restaurant, accompanied by an equally smart young woman. He liked female company and had several passing girlfriends. Once, to please Queenie, he even got engaged. The young woman involved was evidently mad about him. Somehow, his mother had noticed, that was always the point when Brian would grow nervous and evasive.
His adventures had brought him the benefit of certain good, longstanding male friends. There was Geoffrey Ellis, a recent Oxford graduate, now working in Liverpool for the Royal Insurance Company. There was also Peter Brown, who had originally run the record department at Lewis’s department store, and had afterward taken over from Brian as manager of the Great Charlotte Street NEMS. A slender, sensitive young man, rejected by his Catholic family in Bebington, Peter was to model his whole existence on Brian’s.
By the summer of 1961 Brian was again growing restless. The Whitechapel shop, well established and smooth running, absorbed less and less of his attention and energy. The one small innovation that summer had been Mersey Beat, Bill Harry’s new music paper, with its mutually advantageous record review column by “Brian Epstein of NEMS.” The column lapsed when Brian went away, as he regularly did, for a long vacation in Spain. In October, the experience and his tan had faded; he was conscious of a vague dissatisfaction. He felt as if he were waiting for something to happen.
On Saturday, October 28, an eighteen-year-old Huyton boy named Raymond Jones strolled into the Whitechapel branch of NEMS. Brian, that morning, happened to be behind the counter, helping with the weekend rush. He himself stepped forward to serve Raymond Jones, whom he recognized vaguely as one of the crowd of printers’ apprentices often to be seen in the shop during their lunch hour, sorting through the country-and-western stock. Like a good businessman he even remembered that Carl Perkins was this particular customer’s favorite singing star.
Today, Raymond Jones did not as usual ask for anything new by Carl Perkins. He asked for a single called “My Bonnie,” by the Beatles.
Brian had never heard of the single or the group whose name, in the busy shop, had to be repeated to him: Beatles, with an “a.” No group of that name, certainly, appeared in the Top Ten chart currently posted on NEMS’s front window. No such single had gone into a stock folder, marked by its appropriate colored string. Raymond Jones could provide no further details of the disk. He had heard about it, he said, at Hambleton Hall, where he and his mates always went on Friday night. The emcee, Bob Wooler, had urged them to be sure and ask their record shop for “My Bonnie” by the Beatles.
The only clue as to the record label was that it “sounded foreign.” Brian asked if these Beatles were a foreign group. No, Jones replied, they were Liverpudlians, working abroad sometimes, but mainly playing at a cellar club not far from this very shop.
The NEMS policy, that any disk could be ordered, held sway no less on a busy Saturday for an eighteen-year-old in jeans and a leather jacket. Brian promised Jones he would investigate the mystery and on his executive notepad wrote, “The Beatles—check on Monday.” His resolution to do so was strengthened by two further requests for “My Bonnie,” from girls this time, before the shop closed that afternoon.
It was certainly a little odd that Brian had not heard of the Beatles until then. He was, after all, in charge of a shop thronging with their admirers and visited regularly, when at a loose end, by the very Beatles in question. He was contributing to a music paper that mentioned their name about a dozen times in every issue. The Cavern Club itself was only just across Whitechapel and round the corner.
But Brian was twenty-seven and therefore of an age, as well as social background, still untouched by rock ’n’ roll music. His interest in it, like his Mersey Beat column, had been cultivated purely for business, and with some inner distaste by an ardent devotee of Sibelius and the Liverpool Phil. And none of his journeys, by day or night, in Liverpool would be likely to take him to Mathew Street.
He was, nevertheless, intrigued to learn of a homegrown group not only available on disk but also in demand by so discerning a customer as Raymond Jones. The following Monday, he began telephoning around NEMS’s usual record wholesalers. None could find in its catalogs any record called “My Bonnie” by the Beatles.
By this stage, with so small a potential profit at stake, any record dealer would have been justified in abandoning the search. Brian, however, partly as a result of the boredom he had been feeling, seized on the challenge of tracking down Raymond Jones’s request. If these Beatles truly were a Liverpool group, he reasoned, it would be quicker to go out and find them and ask which label had released their record. Jones, on his next visit, remembers Brian asking in all innocence, “Where is this Cavern Club everyone’s talking about?” Only then did he discover it was less than two hundred yards away.
Brian’s first visit to the Cavern, at lunchtime on Thursday, November 9, was arranged with typical formality and precision. He rang up Bill Harry, the editor of Mersey Beat; Bill then rang Ray McFall, the Cavern’s owner, who in his turn instructed Paddy Delaney, the doorman, that Brian was to pass through without the required one-shilling membership card. Paddy remembers seeing Brian that day on his way up Mathew Street, picking his way around the fruit crates and squashed cabbage leaves. “He had a dark suit on, very smart. And a briefcase under his arm.”
A few minutes later he bitterly regretted his decision. The warehouse cellar, with its dank archways, its dripping walls and dungeonlike aroma, bore no resemblance to any club in his understanding of the term. Equally discomfiting was the obvious gulf between him, at twenty-seven, and the teenage throng among which, luckily, the darkness hid his intrusion, all but the glimmer of his white business shirt. Bob Wooler’s record session was still in progress, with no activity yet down the middle tunnel on what could be seen of the stage. His ears affronted only a little less than his nostrils, Brian decided to wait just a few minutes longer.
What he saw that day was the Beatles giving a routine lunchtime Cavern performance. The club and its audience had become as much a habit as the wild welcome that they scarcely acknowledged, pitching into song after song as if to use time up as fast as possible; in the intervals, talking to each other, wolfing the Cavern snacks that were part of McFall’s payment, laughing at private jokes, pretending to cuff one another, at all times picking up and laying down the draggled cigarettes that smouldered dangerously on chairs and amplifier rims. Then, through the tomfoolery and indifference, would unexpectedly brea
k the pounding, shining sound; the harmony of their grouped faces; the bass and guitars cutting knife-sharp.
On Brian Epstein, their effect was transfixing, but for quite another reason. It is doubtful whether, in those surroundings and with his conservative taste, he could even have begun to appreciate the freshness of the Beatles’ music. Rather, it was the sight of four slim boys in form-fitting leather, sweat-drenched and prancing, that held him fascinated. It was a daydream, encountered at midday, a rearing up in public of his most covert fantasies. Most of all, the eye of his secret life watched the boy who seemed most aggressive and untidy, whose offhand manner and bad language would have affronted the daytime Mr. Epstein, but filled the nighttime Brian with a scarcely endurable excitement. Though he did not know it then, the one he could not take his eyes off was John Lennon.
At the interval, he pushed his way, briefcase and all, through the middle tunnel to try to speak to the Beatles as they came offstage. He still had no clear idea of why he wanted to meet them or what he might say. Bob Wooler had already mentioned him over the PA system and given a plug to NEMS as the shop where the Cavern bought its records. George Harrison, to whom Brian spoke first outside the band room, drily enquired, “What brings Mr. Epstein here?”
He stayed at the Cavern through the Beatles’ second session, until 2:10 P.M. When he climbed the stairs into daylight again he had managed to speak to Paul as well as George, and to discover that the record they had made was only as a backing group, and on the Polydor label. He had done his duty, both to NEMS and to Raymond Jones. But by now, a different idea had begun to germinate in his mind.