Billy J. was duly taped, backed by a Manchester group, the Dakotas, singing the Lennon-McCartney ballad “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” If George Harrison’s voice had cracked on the falsetto line, Billy J. Kramer’s broke into smithereens. Martin concealed the worst of it by double-tracking the vocal and filling in the cracks with his own piano accompaniment. The record was released on April 26; by mid-May every Top Ten chart showed it at number two.
That Brian had no idea of what the Beatles were already becoming is amply shown by his activities with NEMS Enterprises during the summer of 1963. Formerly, his desire had been to become a Beatle; to merge his existence, if only spiritually, with theirs. Now he began to see them merely as brand leaders in an empire of Liverpool artists, founded and ruled over paternalistically by himself. One of the NEMS handouts, indeed, showed all of them, the Beatles, Gerry and Billy J., the Pacemakers and Dakotas, as disembodied heads encircling Brian’s in a schoolmasterly mortarboard.
By June, he had signed up the Big Three and the Four Jays, another popular Cavern group, with twenty-two O-level passes between them, now renamed the Fourmost. He wanted a ballad singer to complement all the groups: Tommy Quigley, a freckle-faced boy he had seen at the Queen’s Hall, Widnes, was even now being groomed, as Tommy Quickly, to fulfill that destiny. One group he was dissuaded from signing was Lee Curtis and the All Stars, even though their manager was his great friend Joe Flannery. The Beatles vetoed the idea, apparently because Lee Curtis, Joe’s brother, was too handsome. When the two groups appeared together, Paul McCartney would never sing any songs that Lee had in his repertoire.
NEMS Enterprises now had a London office and the services of a full-time publicity man. Tony Barrow, in fact, had been industriously writing handouts for Brian since late 1962, still carrying on his PR work for Decca and his Disker column in the Liverpool Echo. Brian’s offer of thirty-six pounds per week was exactly double what Barrow earned as a freelancer. Another young PR man gave him some journalists’ names and addresses to copy out in exchange for a cheap lunch.
One of Barrow’s first jobs was to reorganize the Beatles’ Fan Club, which Freda Kelly still ran from the NEMS office in Liverpool. Freda could no longer cope with the applications for membership, running into tens of thousands, and the sacks of letters, inscribed toilet rolls, soft toys, and other Beatles-inspired greetings that poured daily into her office and her home. Barrow divided the club into a northern region, run by Freda in Liverpool, and a southern region, run from Monmouth Street by a girl named Bettina Rose. It was Barrow’s idea to invent a national secretary, “Anne Collingham,” whose duplicated signature appeared on every newsletter. To girls all over the British Isles “Anne Collingham” was real, and revered as an intermediary between their idols and them.
NEMS Enterprises also briefly encompassed a nineteen-year-old hustler of Anglo-Dutch parentage named Andrew Loog Oldham who had previously worked as a PR man for Larry Parnes, Don Arden, and the designer Mary Quant. Meeting Brian on the set of ABC-TV’s Thank Your Lucky Stars show, Oldham wangled a twenty-five-pounds-permonth retainer as an additional publicist for NEMS. To his chagrin he found this did not mean working with the Beatles, merely with subordinate Epstein discoveries like Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer.
In April 1963, unable to make further headway with NEMS, Oldham gave up his retainer and decided to strike out as a manager on his own. A tip-off from a friendly music journalist led him to the Station Hotel in Richmond, Surrey, where a band called the Rolling Stones played Chicago-style rhythm and blues, fronted by a sweater-clad sometime economics student then known as Mike Jagger. Scenting the odor of raw sex, Oldham offered to manage them despite having neither previous experience nor funds to back up such a venture. So he went back to Brian Epstein, offering 50 percent of the Stones in exchange for some office space and minimal cash investment. But Brian felt he already had more than enough bands and singers on his plate, and thus missed the chance to run both of the greatest supergroups of all time.
Oldham brought the Beatles to see the Stones at the Station Hotel, and introduced the two bands afterward. Despite their cultural differences, the homespun northerners and the more worldly, cynical southerners instantly struck up a rapport. In the Stones’ rebelliousness and sartorial free choice the Beatles all too clearly saw themselves as they had been before Brian cleaned and tidied them up. John particularly admired the Stones’ then leader Brian Jones for his multifaceted instrumental talent, especially on harmonica. “You really play that thing, don’t you?” he said to Jones wistfully. “I just blow and suck.”
The Beatles were now making their first-ever tour as top of the bill, headlining over Gerry and the Pacemakers and the American country star Roy Orbison. Orbison was such a hero of theirs that they felt almost guilty to see him take the subordinate slot on the bill, with his dark glasses, huge forelock of hair, and suboperatic arias like “In Dreams” and “Only the Lonely.” Another new performing hazard derived from George’s recent faux naif remark to a press interviewer that one of his major passions in life were children’s jelly babies. As a result, the Beatles were welcomed on stage not only by demented feminine screams but also by lime, orange, or blackcurrant jelly babies in hails thicker than locusts that stung unpleasantly whenever they connected with human flesh.
Up until this point their solitary roadie had been Neil Aspinall, the one-time accounting student whom they had got to know through Pete Best. For the first three tours Brian had left everything connected with the band’s welfare to him. It was he who drove them from town to town, carried in their guitars and amplifiers, and saw that they had food, sleep, and stage suits, if necessary tending to the last with a portable iron. Brusque and hollow-cheeked, with hair already thinning, Neil—or “Nell” as the Beatles called him—was both friend and servant, their equal, yet their errand boy.
In May 1963, after overwork had reduced Neil’s weight by forty-two pounds, Brian took on Mal Evans as assistant road manager. Mal was a hefty Liverpudlian, formerly employed as a post office engineer and part-time Cavern Club bouncer. Despite his size, he was gentle, amiable, and filled with the romance of rock ’n’ roll. At twenty-eight he was noticeably older than the Beatles and Neil; he was also married, with a newborn baby son. “He had a lot of sleepless nights, wondering if he should go on with them,” his widow, Lil Evans, says. “I didn’t want him to. I told him, ‘You’re a person in your own right—you don’t need to follow others.’ But he was starstruck.”
John’s aunt Mimi, having been a seagoing pilot’s daughter, did her best to cope with the growing chaos of life at Mendips. Though Cynthia and the baby were living downstairs, all Mimi had seen of John for weeks were the suitcases of sodden stage shirts he would leave for Cyn and her to wash. The telephone rang continuously; at the front gate there was a permanent picket of girls. “And if I left the back door open,” Mimi said, “there wouldn’t be a teacup or a saucer left in the kitchen.”
In Speke, Harry and Louise Harrison faced similar problems in their low-income housing. The fans were there when Harry left for work in the morning; they lined up at the bus stop, hoping to stop his bus. In the Dingle, little Elsie Graves was frankly bewildered by what had happened to her Ritchie. One minute he was on the dole; the next, he had so much money his mother wondered if it was all quite honest. “I remember her coming to me in a terrible state,” Olive Johnson says, “because she’d found pound notes left all over Ringo’s dressing table. He didn’t have a bank account until Brian opened one for him.”
Because of the siege of fans at Forthlin Road, Paul’s twenty-first birthday, on June 18, had to be celebrated at his auntie Jin’s in Birken-head. The large family party was augmented by John Lennon and Cynthia, Ringo and his girlfriend Maureen, George, Brian, and Bob Wooler. It was, as Paul had wanted, a typical Liverpool booze-up, riotous and noisy, with children underfoot and Jim McCartney’s piano renditions of sentimental evergreen songs. Unfortunately, the hard-drinking, sharp-tongued W
ooler chose the occasion to voice some caustic speculation about John’s relationship with Brian, as apparently corroborated by their recent Spanish vacation. John flew into a rage and laid into Wooler with his fists, breaking the portly DJ’s nose and bruising several of his ribs. The incident was smoothed over with profuse apologies and an ex gratia payment for damages to Wooler, though it still somehow managed to leak into the tabloid Sunday Mirror. But John and the Beatles were still too obscure in the adult world for it to generate much interest, let alone the deluge of follow-up stories that would have resulted today.
Liverpool was currently undergoing a hectic visitation by London A&R men, all eager to sign up their own Beatles and Pacemakers. In July, the Pye label released “Sweets For My Sweet” by the Searchers, long resident at the Iron Door Club. When “Sweets For My Sweet” went to number one, the A&R invasion of Liverpool became positively desperate. Any group would do so long as it talked Scouse, played rhythm and blues, buttoned its jackets high, and combed its hair forward. The man from Oriole signed Faron’s Flamingoes, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Earl Preston and the TT’s; the Fontana man took the Merseybeats and Howie Casey and the Seniors; the Pye man took the Undertakers and the Chants.
Merseyside’s new modishness was not confined to pop, but affected every sphere of British entertainment. Comedians who had once been told to disguise their Scouse accents now used them as an irresistible schtick, notably Beatle-fringed young Jimmy Tarbuck, a former habitué of the Cavern Club and friend of the Beatles, and Ken Dodd, who poured out a never-ending stream of Liverpool goonery about “Diddy Men” and “tickling sticks” and a seemingly mythical place called Knotty Ash. Arty and poetic Liverpool also received a look-in when Paul McCartney’s younger brother, Michael, joined with poets Roger McGough and John Gorman in a trio called the Scaffold, scoring hits with unlikely material like the Cub Scouts’ campfire song “Gin-Gan-Goolie.” The city that had once been the furthest possible point from all things fashionable had even inspired a “Mersey Look” for metropolitan dolly birds to complement the Mersey Sound—Lennon caps, wet-look PVC coats, and striped scarves marked “Liverpool” or “Everton.”
The south’s Merseymania brought salvation, at least, for Dick Rowe of Decca Records who had passed on the Beatles, albeit after two exhaustive auditions. In April 1963, Rowe agreed to judge a talent contest in Liverpool, hoping vainly it might produce some facsimile of the band he now so wished he hadn’t turned down. To make him even more uncomfortable, one of his fellow judges turned out to be none other than George Harrison. But it was to prove a blessing in disguise. During the evening, George happened to tell him about the great R&B group that Andrew Loog Oldham had just found playing behind the Station Hotel in Richmond, Surrey. Dick Rowe left Liverpool there and then, dashed down to Richmond, and offered Oldham’s discovery a contract, so winning dual immortality as The Man Who Turned the Beatles Down and The Man Who Signed the Rolling Stones.
Whatever new northern hit act came along, Brian Epstein’s NEMS stable always seemed to take another giant leap ahead. In June, Gerry Marsden was again number one with “I Like It.” In July, Billy J. Kramer did the same with “Bad To Me,” another Lennon-McCartney song, skillfully doctored by George Martin. At one point, the first three Top Ten places were occupied by NEMS acts—Gerry, Billy J. Kramer, and the Beatles’ “From Me to You.” To this day, no other pop impresario has matched the achievement.
In August, to lessen disruption at the Whitechapel shop, Brian moved NEMS Enterprises to Moorfields, a couple of streets away, near the old Liverpool Exchange station. The new offices, situated above a joke shop, had a reception area decorated with blow-up photographs of all the NEMS acts. Freda Kelly’s friend, a deep-voiced Irish girl named Laurie McCaffery, was taken on as receptionist and switchboard operator. Another new arrival was Tony Bramwell, George Harrison’s childhood friend, as office boy.
The Beatles were doing what all pop groups hoped for in summer. They were at the south coast resort of Margate, appearing with Gerry and the Pacemakers at the Winter Gardens theater. Dezo Hoffman came down from London to photograph them in their swimming trunks and socks, sunbathing on the terrace of their modest seafront hotel. They did not look like a group with the country’s best-selling single and album. Hoffman also filmed them, as he had in Liverpool, this time skylarking on the beach in striped Victorian bathing suits. Another visitor was the publisher of Beat Monthly. Brian had agreed to let him start a separate publication dealing exclusively with the Beatles and their fan club. “What are you going to find to write about us every month?” Paul McCartney asked him.
They had already been back to Abbey Road studios to record their fourth Parlophone single for George Martin. The song, “She Loves You,” was in the Lennon-McCartney tough-tender mode that previously had been confined to B sides. For the first time in any British pop song by male vocalists its subject was not a girl but another boy—a friend who couldn’t or wouldn’t see how much his girl cared for him. Cupid’s message, however, was not delivered by a quiet word in his ear but by an affirming shout of “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!” that could have been heard from the top of the Liver Building. John and Paul played it over on their acoustic guitars and, as usual, Martin had an editorial suggestion—why not move the first verse back and start with the chorus? Once again, in their instinctive way, they had hit on melodic effects far outside the usual pop scale. The ringing last chord of “She Loves You,” their producer informed them to their surprise, was a major sixth, reminiscent of forties big bands like Glenn Miller’s. Martin even worried if the song’s ending might be a little corny. But he had no such doubts about its beginning.
Britain, that wet and windy summer, had been enjoying a sex scandal unrivaled since the reign of Edward VII. A cabinet minister, John Profumo, holding no less an office than Conservative secretary of state for war, had been caught in a sexual liaison with a twenty-two-year-old model named Christine Keeler. The affair was enriched by Miss Keeler’s extremely wide circle of men friends, which included sundry West Indians, a property racketeer, a seedy osteopath named Stephen Ward, and—most piquant of all—the naval attaché at the Russian embassy in London. It was the possibility that Britain’s war minister shared the same courtesan as a Russian spy that drew Secret Service attention finally to Profumo’s sexual habits. Questioned in Parliament, he at first denied the impropriety; then—faced with imminent police and press disclosures—he admitted that he had misled the House of Commons.
The Profumo affair provided Fleet Street with a saga of almost infinite dimensions. From the unhappy minister, an avenue of sleaze stretched in one direction to the Notting Hill slums, where Keeler’s ex-lover, Peter Rachman, would set dogs on his uncooperative tenants; in the other direction, it implicated the cream of British aristocracy, the Astor family, on whose Cliveden estate Profumo had made his fatal acquaintanceship. By midsummer, all Britain seethed with rumors of sexual perversion on every level of public life. It was variously claimed that another cabinet minister had been caught receiving fellatio in public; that up to eight high court judges had been involved in a sex orgy; and that at a fashionable dinner party one of the country’s most eminent politicians had waited at table, naked and masked, with a placard around his neck reading: “If my services don’t please you, whip me.”
Months passed, the summer worsened, the Profumo affair ran on, and on. Christine Keeler disappeared, then reappeared. Profumo resigned in disgrace. Stephen Ward was arrested for living off immoral earnings. Every newspaper front page, day after day, steamed with the torrid, frequently horrid, doings of Christine Keeler and her associate, Mandy Rice-Davies. And gradually the surfeit of sex and scandal passed the limit that even the British public could absorb. Attention moved away from Profumo and on to the prime minister who had so indolently accepted the lie of his fellow aristocrat. Harold Macmillan, after eleven years in office, was reexamined in a new and searching light. What it revealed was scarcely credible as a twentieth-
century politician. A dusty old man in a walrus moustache hummed and hawed in the accent that had ruled Britain for a thousand years, but which now signified only complacency, crassness, and the natural conspiracy between men who shared the same private school and club.
No newspaper will ever admit to there being too much news. But to Fleet Street, in the summer of 1963, that condition was perilously close. Stephen Ward committed suicide on the eve of his trial; then, five days later, a second colossal story broke. A mail train on its way from Scotland to London was waylaid and robbed of 2 million pounds, the largest haul in criminal history. The search for the gang was then pushed off the front pages by Macmillan’s belated resignation and the struggle within the Tory party to choose his successor. By the end of September every editor in Fleet Street was longing for a diversion from this incessant heavy news—something light; something unconnected with the aristocratic classes; something harmless, blameless, and above all, cheerful.
The Daily Mirror found the answer first. The Mirror in those days belonged to the same publishing group as Melody Maker, Britain’s oldest established music newspaper. On September 11, Melody Maker announced the results of a poll among its readers to find the year’s most popular record artists. The Beatles—who had barely scraped into the 1962 poll—came out as top British group. Billy J. Kramer was named in the same poll as “Brightest Hope for 1964.”
As well as a fraternal story about the poll, the Mirror ran a two-page profile of the Beatles by its acerbic show-business columnist, Donald Zec. Under the headline “Four Frenzied Little Lord Fauntleroys Who Are Earning £5,000 a Week” Zec described the scenes he had witnessed among young girls at a Beatles concert in Luton, Bedfordshire. He afterward had the Beatles to tea at his flat, an ordeal that they survived with high spirits enough to drain all vitriol from the columnist’s pen. They were, Donald Zec said, “as nice a group of well-mannered music makers as you’ll find perforating the eardrum anywhere.”