Mike Smith, however, reassured them that the session had gone well. So enthusiastic did the young A&R man seem that when the Beatles and Brian walked out into the snow that evening the contract seemed as good as signed. Before their hideous van journey with Neil back to Liverpool, Brian took them to a restaurant in Swiss Cottage and allowed them to order wine.
At Decca, meanwhile, Smith was beginning to have second thoughts. The main reason was another group, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, that had also auditioned that day and had put up a much better show. His boss, Dick Rowe, was prepared to let Smith have his head only to the extent of signing one new group.
“I told Mike he’d have to decide between them,” Dick Rowe remembered. “It was up to him—the Beatles or Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. He said, ‘They’re both good, but one’s a local group, the other comes from Liverpool.’ We decided it was better to take the local group. We could work with them more easily and stay closer in touch, as they came from Dagenham.”
On January 4, issue number 13 of Mersey Beat published the results of a poll among its five thousand readers to find Liverpool’s most popular group. The Beatles were first, followed by Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Remo Four, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, and the Big Three. The whole front page was devoted to a photograph of the winners in their black leather, cropped to conceal their scruffy shoes, and captioned by the hand that always rendered Paul’s surname as “McArtrey.” In all four Beatles’ homes lay piles of December Mersey Beats minus the voting coupon on which, like everyone involved, they had voted for themselves.
Mersey Beat knew nothing, however, of the test for Decca in London. Brian would not risk announcing it until the contract had been definitely awarded. The only mention was in Disker’s Liverpool Echo column, filed by Tony Barrow from inside Decca, where the signs still seemed good. “I said it was only a matter of weeks before they came down to record their first single.”
Barrow then learned to his astonishment from Dick Rowe’s office that the Beatles were to be turned down. The reasons given were that they sounded “too much like the Shadows,” and that groups with guitars were “on the way out.”
Brian fought Decca’s decision as hard as he could. He traveled to London alone to reason, unavailingly, with Dick Rowe and another Decca man, Beecher Stevens. He also went back to the salespeople, reminding them of his position in the retail world. “I heard afterward that he’d guaranteed to buy three thousand copies of any single we let the Beatles make,” Dick Rowe says. “I was never told about that at the time. The way economics were in the record business then, if we’d been sure of selling three thousand copies, we’d have been forced to record them, whatever sort of group they were.”
Someone at Decca suggested to Brian the possibility of hiring a studio and a freelance A&R man to supervise a session for the Beatles. He went so far as to contact Tony Meehan, formerly the Shadows’ drummer, and now an independent producer. But Meehan proved offhand; besides, the studio hire would have cost at least a hundred pounds. Brian was not yet prepared to go that far. He walked out of Decca having made the grand pronouncement that his group would one day be “bigger than Elvis.” The Decca men smiled. They had heard that one so many times.
On January 24, seven weeks after first approaching them, Brian was finally able to tie the Beatles down to a formal agreement. He had sent away for a sample management contract, and had modified and rewritten the terms in a praiseworthy attempt to make them fairer. The final document, though portentously worded and stuck with sixpenny postage stamps, had no legal validity. Since Paul and George were still under twenty-one, their signatures ought to have been endorsed by their fathers. And Brian forgot to sign his own name.
The four still slightly skeptical and uneasy Liverpool scruffs thus found themselves contracted to a real live organization. It had been Brian’s impressive idea to form a limited company, with his brother, Clive, to administer his new charges. He called it NEMS Enterprises, after the family business. Over the Whitechapel branch was a suite of offices that his father allowed him to use, mainly because that would enable him to continue running the record shop downstairs. Harry was determined Brian should keep his promise that managing the Beatles would take only two afternoons each week.
His brisk executive efficiency foundered the moment he first tried to fix the Beatles a booking. Only then did he realize he had no idea how to talk to the rough, tough Liverpool dance promoters on whom they depended for regular work. Tommy McArdle, the ex–middleweight boxer who ran New Brighton Tower Ballroom, was one of many puzzled local impresarios whom Brian suggested should “come across and have lunch.”
The first booking he managed to arrange was at a tiny seaside café on the Dee Estuary over in Cheshire. The profit to NEMS Enterprises, after paying for posters and Neil Aspinall’s gas and sundry expenses, and giving each Beatle his share, was slightly over one pound.
Nor had Brian yet realized the quality for which the Beatles were notorious up and down the Mersey—their dedicated unreliability and unpunctuality. He realized it one day when Ray McFall rang up to say that only three Beatles had turned up for the Cavern lunchtime session. Freda Kelly, who worked for NEMS Enterprises as wages clerk and fan club organizer, saw Brian go into one of many subsequent transports of fury. “There’s only three of them!” he kept saying. “Gerry Marsden’s singing with them, standing on an orange box so they needn’t bother to let the microphone down to his height.”
At night he would drive in his Ford Zodiac to wherever the Beatles were playing—to Neston Women’s Institute Hall, to Birkenhead, Wallasey, or New Brighton. Since everyone wore dark suits and white shirts to dances in those days, he was not too conspicuous as he walked in. Approaching the Beatles still threw him into a ferment of embarrass-ment—a circumstance that John Lennon was quick to spot. The more John stared at him, the more Brian would blush and stammer his way into some shaming faux pas. Sam Leach, all innocence, advised John to accept Brian’s proposal that they should fly together for the weekend to Copenhagen. “John nudged me in the ribs,” Sam says. ‘Shut up,’ he went. ‘Can’t you see he’s after me!’”
All the time, he was regularly traveling to London to try to interest other record companies in the Beatles. He now had a dozen of their songs on tape from the Decca audition—“Sheik of Araby,” “Hello Little Girl,” “Three Cool Cats,” “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “Your Feet’s Too Big.”
Decca, at least, had given them two auditions. At Pye, at Phillips, at EMI’s two prestige labels, Columbia and HMV, interest did not even extend to that. The fad now was for solo singers—Helen Shapiro, Jimmy Justice, Frank Ifield. Often, the mere mention of Liverpool was sufficient to glaze over the A&R man’s eye. “You’ve got a good business, Mr. Epstein,” one of them said with a show of kindness. “Why not stick to it?”
The Beatles would be waiting for him when he got off the train at Lime Street, tired and deflated by yet another supercilious turndown. He would break the latest disappointing news to them over coffee at the nearby Punch and Judy cafeteria or at Joe’s, an all-night greasy spoon where Brian kept a reserved table as grandly as if it were the Ritz. The boys did not reproach him for his continued lack of success; on the contrary, they did their best to lift his spirits and reassure him that next time he was bound to get lucky. John Lennon would joke that, if no one else wanted them, they’d have to settle for Embassy, the despised cheapo label sold only by Woolworth’s. Then John would pump up the other four with a time-honored routine, performed in the cheesey American accents of some 1940s showbiz movie starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney:
“Where we goin’, fellas?”
“To the top, Johnny!”
“And where’s that?”
“To the toppermost of the poppermost, Johnny!”
One night, as Brian drank with the Beatles at the Iron Door Club, a tall, dark-haired man came over and shyly introduced himself. It was Joe Flannery, his compa
nion in the nursery and in the later, brief relationship that Joe, at least, had never forgotten. He had not seen Brian since their amicable breakup in 1957, and initially presumed him to be “downtown” seeking rough trade, as of yore. That definition certainly seemed to apply to at least one of the boys Brian had with him: the slant-eyed, abrasive one who instantly turned the name Joe Flannery into “Flo Jannery.”
As sympathetic a listener as ever, Flannery soon elicited the fact that Brian now managed a pop group and that all was going far from smoothly. They adjourned for a private drink at the Beehive pub in Paradise Street, where Brian poured out the dual frustration of canvassing London record labels and trying to do business with small-time dance promoters on the Cheshire Wirral. “He told me he was really cheesed off with everything,” Joe says. “He was thinking of chucking it all in and going back to learning to act at RADA.”
Joe, as it happened, was managing his younger brother’s beat group, Lee Curtis and the All Stars. He offered to work unofficially for NEMS Enterprises, talking to promoters on the Beatles’ behalf and negotiating fees. He did it simply out of love for Brian. “I liked the way Brian spoke on the telephone. He never said ‘Hello’—just, ‘Joe…’ I always liked hearing that.”
The kindly, hospitable Flannery even let them use his pin-neat house as a base camp when gigs ended too late for them to return to their own homes. “I’d cook them beans on toast or cheese on toast, then they’d go to sleep all around my living room. Even then, I noticed there was a peck order. John always took the couch while Paul had the two armchairs pushed together. George didn’t seem to need as much sleep as the others, so I’d take him out in my car in the early hours of the morning and teach him to drive.”
On a side table in Flannery’s living room stood a hand-colored photograph of his mother, taken in the 1920s, her bobbed hair forming a glossy helmet with bangs above her eyes. Flannery remembers how fascinated John used to be by the photograph, and remains convinced that his mother, not Astrid or Jurgen Vollmer, was the genesis of the Beatle Cut.
With all these mundane management chores lifted from his shoulders, Brian was free to concentrate on matters he did understand. He understood, for example, how to design a poster, tastefully yet with an impact maximizing the Beatles’ meagre achievements. When they were booked to play at the Institute hall in Barnston, a small Cheshire village, Brian’s posters blazed the advent of MERSEY BEAT POLL WINNERS! POLYDOR RECORDING ARTISTS! PRIOR TO EUROPEAN TOUR!
On the Beatles themselves, Brian began to effect the same transformation—against much the same resistance—as on the display windows of the family’s Walton Road shop. He rearranged the four black-leather, draggle-headed, swearing, prancing Hamburg rockers to reflect his own idea of what a successful pop group ought to be.
To begin with, and most important of all, he told them, they must be punctual. They must not go onstage as a three-piece group, backing Gerry Marsden on an orange box. They must play to a program, not just as they pleased. They must not shout at their friends, and foes, in the audience. They must not eat or drink beer or wrestle and cuff each other onstage, or make V-signs or belch into the microphone. And if they must smoke, let it not be Woodbines, the workingman’s cigarette, but some sophisticated brand like Senior Service.
The black exi suits they had bought in Hamburg, and worn and slept in for more than a year, were Brian’s next concern. Black leather, to most people in 1962, still signified Nazis. He suggested an alternative that John Lennon, at first, doggedly refused to consider. Paul agreed with Brian that they should try it. Paul sided with Brian throughout the whole smartening process. George and Pete Best seemed not to mind, so John reluctantly gave way to the majority. On March 24, when they arrived for their twenty-five-pound date at Barnston Institute, each carried a bag from Burton’s, the chain-store tailor. That night, they took the stage in shiny gray lounge suits with velvet collars, cloth-covered buttons, and pencil-thin lapels.
Joe Flannery, having special knowledge, guessed at once what underlay Brian’s devotion. He had fallen in love with John Lennon. He was besotted, not by the pretty-faced Paul or Pete but by the boy whose facade of crudeness and toughness touched the nerve of his most secret rough trade fantasies. Joe recognized the look in Brian’s eye as he blushed and writhed under John’s pitiless sarcasm: “I’ve sat for hours with him in the car while he’s been crying over the things John’s said to him.”
Harry and Queenie Epstein, meanwhile, worried over the time and money Brian was spending, and his neglect of record-shop business in pursuit of his mad idea. To add to their anxiety, he had forsaken his smart lounge suits and white shirts and Horne Brothers ties, and taken to going around Liverpool dressed, like the Beatles, in a leather jacket and black polo-neck sweater. He even came to the Cavern dressed that way, not realizing that everyone was laughing at him. “He was champing a lot, too, that night,” Bob Wooler recalled. “They’d got him on the pep pills, the ones that dried up the saliva.”
Yet for all his efficiency, his headed notepaper, his expenditure on new lounge suits, his typewritten memoranda to the Beatles concerning punctuality and cleanliness, he still could not move them outside the same old drab hemisphere of Merseyside. No one in London had heard of them, save through a brief mention in the music newspaper Record Mirror—and that was through a fan’s letter, not through Brian. The Record Mirror afterward sent up a photographer to see them. His name was Dezo Hoffman; he was a middle-aged Hungarian freelancer. To the Beatles, he seemed godlike. They all had a bath before they came to Whitechapel to meet him. He shot rolls of film of them around Sefton Park, and lent them a movie camera so that they could film each other, leaping up and down in the spring sunshine and driving round town in Paul’s green Ford Classic.
The only excitement on their horizon, after Hoffman had gone, was returning to Hamburg. On April 13, they were to open a new Reeperbahn attraction, the Star-Club. That was the European Tour grandly billed by Brian outside Barnston Institute. Another very grand thing was that they were to go to Hamburg this time by air. Brian insisted on it, knowing what an effect the news would have on Mersey Beat’s readership.
He would go to any lengths to convince them that, despite all appearances, a big, wonderful moment was only just around the corner. In Birkenhead, sitting around in the pub next to the Majestic ballroom, he whispered to Joe Flannery to go out of the room, then come back in and say that Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager, was trying to reach him on the telephone. “They believed it,” Flannery says. “They really believed that Colonel Parker had been trying to ring up Brian Epstein in Birkenhead.”
That Christmas of 1961, while Brian was still wooing the Beatles, their old bass player Stu Sutcliffe had come over from Hamburg with his German fiancée, Astrid. Stu’s friends at the Cavern, like Bill Harry, were shocked by his thinness and translucent pallor. Allan Williams, with typical forthrightness, told him that he looked “at death’s door.”
Stu admitted to his mother that, since settling in Hamburg, in his studio in the Kirchherr house, he had been suffering severe headaches, even occasional blackouts. He had fainted once at art college, during Edouardo Paolozzi’s master class. The news had already reached Mrs. Sutcliffe via worried letters from Astrid to Stu’s younger sister, Pauline. Astrid feared he was working too hard. For days at a time, she said, he would not come down from his attic to sleep or eat. And the headaches were sometimes so violent, they seemed more like fits. Millie Sutcliffe had described the symptoms, so far as she understood them, to the dean of Liverpool University Medical School. He told her that she did have grounds for concern.
Stu still refused to believe that the headaches were a consequence of anything more than overwork and his and Astrid’s round-the-clock Hamburg life. He did agree, for his mother’s sake, to see a specialist in Liverpool. The specialist instantly sent him for an X-ray. No appointment could be made for three weeks: By that time, Stu and Astrid had returned to Hamburg.
F
rom January to April the only news Mrs. Sutcliffe received was in Astrid’s photographs. One of these showed Stu seated, stiff as a waxwork, in a bentwood rocking chair next to a marble-topped table crowded with liquor bottles. Another was a close-up of Stu and Astrid together. The face, next to the dark-eyed, ravishing girl, was haunted and brittle. “When I looked at that,” Millie Sutcliffe remembered, “something told me that my son was dying.”
In February, Stu again collapsed during an art school class. This time, he did not return. Astrid’s mother forced him to leave his attic and be properly nursed by her in a bedroom downstairs. The Kirchherr family doctor, suspecting a brain tumor, sent him for X-rays. No tumor showed itself. Two further doctors who examined Stu were equally baffled. “We tried everything,” Astrid says. “One treatment was a kind of special massage under water. When Stu came home in the afternoon from his massage he told my mother he’d been looking in an undertaker’s window and seen a beautiful white coffin. ‘Oh, Mum,’ he said, ‘buy it for me. I’d love to be buried in a white coffin.’”
By March, the headaches brought with them spells of temporary blindness. The pain grew so intense at times that Astrid and her mother had to hold Stu down to stop him from throwing himself out of the window. Yet on other days, he could appear quite normal. Astrid would come home from work to find him sitting up in bed reading, sketching, or writing another long letter to John in Liverpool. He was looking forward eagerly to the Beatles’ arrival and the opening of the Star-Club on April 13.
On April 10, Astrid, at work in her photographic studio, received a call from her mother to say that Stu was much worse, and that she was sending him to the hospital. It was the day that three of the Beatles—John, Paul, and Pete Best—flew out from Manchester Ringway Airport. George had the flu and was to follow with Brian Epstein a day later.