The three had dinner served to them by Brian’s Austrian butler. Afterward, in an evidently restless mood, Brian began telephoning numbers in London that supplied what we would now term male prostitutes. But all were fully booked. Brian grew more edgy and irritable and finally announced he was returning to London. Peter and Geoffrey were not offended, nor particularly surprised. Walking out was a habit of Brian’s. Peter went with him out to the Bentley and told him he oughtn’t to drive after the wine he’d drunk with dinner. “Brian said I wasn’t to worry. He’d be back in the morning before I woke up.”
By this time, one of the agencies he’d contacted had found three boys and dispatched them on the sixty-mile journey to Sussex in a black London cab. But Brian was now well on his way back to London.
Geoffrey Ellis telephoned Chapel Street shortly after midnight to confirm that he had arrived safely. Up to then, Peter and Geoffrey had half-expected him to reappear at Kingsley Hill after a drive round the countryside. The call was taken by Antonio, Brian’s Spanish town butler. Antonio said that Mr. Epstein had come in a little time ago and had gone straight upstairs. He tried the intercom to the master bedroom, but got no reply. Peter and Geoffrey were reassured. Brian had managed the car journey safely and had obviously succeeded in falling asleep.
When Peter and Geoffrey got up, late on Saturday morning, Brian had not returned. They thought of ringing Chapel Street, but decided to let him sleep. At about five that afternoon, the telephone rang. It was Brian. He told Peter he had been asleep all day and was still very drowsy. Peter said that if he was returning to Sussex it would be safer to take the train. Brian agreed to telephone just as he was setting off so that Peter could collect him by car at Lewes station. Peter waited all Saturday evening for his call.
By Sunday morning, Antonio and his wife, Maria, were beginning to be worried. Brian was still in his room. The Spanish couple had heard nothing from him since breakfast time the previous day. Nor had he gone out, as was his habit, after dark. The Bentley was still as he had left it on Friday night. At the same time, they knew his irregular ways and how angry he could be. A lengthy discussion in Spanish ensued before Antonio decided to take the initiative.
He telephoned Peter Brown in Sussex first, but Peter had gone with Geoffrey Ellis to the village pub. He then telephoned Joanne Newfield at her home in Edgware. Joanne had helped cope with Brian’s two suicide attempts: She had also seen several false alarms. She drove at once from Edgware through the Bank Holiday silence to Chapel Street. “The moment I walked in,” she says, “I felt uneasy.”
Ceaseless hammering on Brian’s door and buzzing of his bedroom intercom brought no reply. Even then, they hesitated to break down his door. They had done so, unnecessarily, once before and Brian had been furious. By this time a doctor had arrived—not Brian’s regular, Dr. Cowan, but another man who understood his case. Peter Brown had rung up again from Sussex and was waiting on the line for news.
Antonio and the doctor broke down the bedroom suite’s outer double doors. Beyond the dressing-room lobby the curtains were drawn. Brian lay on his side amid the litter of documents and correspondence spread over the bed. Joanne approached and shook him. “Even though I knew he was dead, I pretended to the others that he wasn’t. ‘It’s all right,’ I kept saying, ‘he’s just asleep, he’s fine.’
“The doctor led me out of the room then. Maria was there, screaming, ‘Why? Why?’ Peter Brown was still holding on on the phone.
“A little while after that, something really strange happened. We broke into Brian’s room at about two o’clock. At three o’clock, the Daily Express rang up and said, ‘We’ve heard that Brian Epstein’s terribly ill. Is there any truth in it?’ Only the four of us knew what had happened and none of us had contacted any press. It was never explained how the story got out to the papers.”
Reporters and photographers were already massed in Chapel Street when Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis arrived from Sussex. Alistair Taylor, the NEMS office manager, had been sent for, and also Brian’s lawyer, David Jacobs. Peter Brown got through to Bangor and broke the news to Paul. Then he telephoned Brian’s brother, Clive, in Liverpool. Joanne heard Clive shout: “You’re lying! You’re lying!”
Brian’s body was taken away in a makeshift police coffin. Joanne attacked a photographer who pointed his camera at it. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of people seeing Brian in a thing like that.”
By early evening, there were television pictures of the Beatles leaving the Maharishi’s conference through forests of microphones and lights. “How do you feel,” they were asked, “about Brian Epstein’s death?” It emerged that they had been to see the Maharishi again and had been told that Brian’s death, being of the physical world, was “not important.” Their faces, even so, looked ravaged among the garlands and the bells. “He was a lovely fella,” John said bleakly.
The story was told in full on Bank Holiday Monday in newspapers read at the seaside or in back gardens. “Brian Epstein Death Riddle: Valet Finds Pop King in Locked Bedroom.” It was widely assumed—and still is—that he committed suicide. The story gained weight—not instantly, since Fleet Street still shunned the word—when his homosexuality became public knowledge. To the larger British public in 1967, that was reason enough to want to die.
The inquest, on September 8 at Westminster Coroner’s Court, found that Brian had died from an overdose of Carbitrol, a bromide-based drug that he had been taking to help him sleep. That the overdose had not been all at once but cumulative, over two or three days, seemed to rule out the possibility of suicide. The suggestion was that Brian, in a gradually more drowsy state, had not realized he was exceeding the proper dose. The police inspector called to Chapel Street reported having found seventeen bottles of various pills and tablets in his bathroom cupboard, in his briefcase, and beside his bed.
Nat Weiss traveled from New York to attend the inquest, bringing with him Brian’s last letter—the one that seemed so full of confidence in the future. The coroner, Mr. Gavin Thurston, recorded a verdict of accidental death from “incautious self-overdoses.”
One person who knew him, and also knew well a particular burden he carried, remains convinced that Brian’s death was neither accident nor suicide. According to this, necessarily anonymous, ex-associate, Brian was the victim of a murder contract taken out on him three years earlier in America after the Seltaeb merchandising fiasco.
In 1964, certainly, any number of American businessmen bore him a bitter grudge. The confusion over manufacturing licenses, and consequent cancellation by the big stores of seventy-eight million dollars’ worth of Beatles merchandise, caused several manufacturers to lose a fortune. “One man even had a heart attack and died. I was at a meeting when Lisson said he was going to kill Brian Epstein. I thought it was just American bullshit. I said, ‘No—wait until the courts have finished with him.’”
In August 1967, the courts had finished. The twenty-two-million-dollar lawsuit between NEMS and Nicky Byrne had been settled for a cash payment of ten thousand dollars to Byrne—enough to buy himself a yacht and sail off to start a new life in the Bahamas.
Just before he left New York Nicky Byrne received a mysterious telephone call. “This man’s voice, very low, very polite, said: ‘Mr. Byrne. I understand that your suit against Brian Epstein is settled, is that right?’ I said: ‘Yes, and what’s it got to do with you?’ But whoever it was just hung up.
“In August, I was in Florida—actually on my boat—and I got another call. That same very quiet, polite voice. ‘Mr. Byrne,’ it said, ‘you’re going to hear soon that Brian Epstein has met with an accident.’”
No one has ever explained those two telephone calls to Nicky Byrne, nor explained the curious fact that Brian’s death was known in Fleet Street less than an hour after Joanne Newfield burst into his darkened room.
For the murder theorists there is one further and deeply significant detail. The signature on the Seltaeb contract—the signature that gave five
strangers 90 percent of Beatles merchandise royalties, and so ensured the back-tracking litigation that followed—was that of Brian’s lawyer, David Jacobs. In the autumn of the following year Jacobs was found in his garage hanging by a length of satin from one of the beams. The inquest verdict was suicide. But several of his friends and associates were later to remember that in his last weeks alive he had seemed profoundly upset and worried about something.
• • •
Brian’s funeral, at Long Lane Jewish cemetery in Liverpool, was a private family affair. To his mother’s distress he was not buried next to his father but in a separate avenue of undecorated memorials. The Beatles did not attend. George Harrison sent a sunflower that Nat Weiss threw into the open grave.
Five weeks later, a memorial service was held for Brian at the New London Synagogue, St. John’s Wood. It was only a short walk from there to Paul’s house and Abbey Road and the studios where Brian ushered in the Beatles to meet George Martin on that summer day long ago in 1962.
The Beatles did attend this time, as did George Martin, Dick James, and scores of people who were wealthy and well known only because of the young man who came down from Liverpool in his Crombie overcoat; who blushed easily and never went back on a promise; who could be ecstatic but never happy; who somehow caught the lightning and then somehow let it go. The rabbi’s text was chosen from the Book of Proverbs: “Sayest thou that the man diligent in his business, he shall stand before kings.”
Jewish cemeteries as a rule do not permit flowers. But after the funeral a tall, quietly spoken man visited the rabbi at Long Lane synagogue and obtained special dispensation to lay a small posy on Brian’s grave each year on his birthday. It was Joe Flannery, his one-time companion in the nursery: the one-time lover who’d never fallen out of love with him.
PART FOUR
WASTING
SIXTEEN
“WE’VE GOT TO SPEND TWO MILLION OR THE TAXMAN WILL GET IT”
Since Brian had died without making a will, his whole estate passed automatically to his mother, Queenie. Nor was it worth anything like the seven million pounds commentators had estimated. Lush living had absorbed—even exceeded—a vast yearly income that had never been left to accumulate for one second into capital. What Brian did not spend on himself, on other people, or on the roulette table, he invested into offshoot companies and loss-making personal projects, like the Saville theater. Toward the end, shortage of ready money had led him to borrow heavily from NEMS Enterprises. His debt to his own company was found to be in the region of one hundred fifty thousand pounds. His final cash estate was realized chiefly through the sale of his two houses and his cars, paintings, and artworks. The residue, after death duties, was a little more than three-quarters of a million pounds.
Mrs. Epstein, bereaved within six weeks of both her husband and elder son, was in no state to face the complexities instantly arising from her inheritance. It fell to her younger son, Clive, to try to sort out Brian’s tangled business affairs. Clive, as cofounder of NEMS Enterprises, took over the chairmanship, pending discussions on the company’s future.
Tony Bramwell, George Harrison’s friend, visiting NEMS a few days after Brian’s death, found the half-dozen directors in a state of total confusion. No one at NEMS realized yet that Brian had virtually sold the company to his Australian associate, Robert Stigwood. “They were all squabbling about who was going to manage the Beatles,” Bramwell says. “It sickened me. I just walked out.”
Despite Brian’s depleted personal wealth, his estate was liable to taxes, based on NEMS’s current value, of some half a million pounds. Word quickly leaked onto the London Stock Exchange that to meet the estate duty the Epsteins would have no choice but to sell NEMS. It was rumored that an offer would be made, linking NEMS with Brian’s 10 percent holding in Northern Songs, the Lennon-McCartney publishing company.
Since Brian’s death the Beatles had had several further, apparently fruitful, sessions with the Maharishi. They were now full members of the Spiritual Regeneration movement and, as such, liable to pay a week’s earnings per month to support it. They had also undertaken to visit their guru’s academy in India to further their studies and ultimately to qualify as “teachers of Meditation.”
At Buckingham Palace the same week, the Queen held a levée for the Council of Knights Bachelor, whose members included Sir Joseph Lockwood, chairman of EMI. As Her Majesty entered the room she called out to Sir Joseph: “The Beatles are turning awfully funny, aren’t they?”
A few days after Brian’s funeral the four of them met Clive Epstein at Brian’s house in Chapel Street. Queenie, too, had insisted on being there. “All the boys turned up in suits, out of respect for Queenie,” Joanne Newfield says. “We all sat around Brian’s sitting room, having tea together. It felt so strange—as though nothing had happened at all. I half-expected Brian to walk in, just the way he used to, and join us.
“It was all too much for me. I just burst into tears. George looked at me very sternly and said, ‘You’re ‘not crying for Brian. You’re crying for yourself.’”
At that and subsequent meetings the Beatles agreed to accept Clive as Brian’s successor, at least for the two months until their contract with NEMS expired. What they most emphatically did not want was any managerial relationship with Robert Stigwood. Lengthy consultations followed with Lord Goodman, the country’s most eminent lawyer, who had recently acted for Brian as well as for EMI. As a result, Stigwood was persuaded to relinquish his option on NEMS. He departed with some five hundred thousand pounds, plus half the NEMS artists roster—among them the Bee Gees, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix—to set up, with spectacular success, on his own.
A new company, Nemperor Holdings, was formed to administer NEMS in what Clive Epstein promised would be “a program of vigorous expansion.” Vic Lewis, the ex-bandleader, became managing director. Clive, as chief executive, commuted back and forth from Liverpool, conscientiously trying to fill his elder brother’s shoes.
Peter Brown, at the Epstein family’s request, lived on for a time at Brian’s Chapel Street house. His resemblance to Brian, and the consequent reliance of Queenie Epstein on him, seemed to guarantee his accession to the role he had so long understudied. He took over Brian’s desk and Brian’s assistant—even certain of Brian’s little executive affectations. “Brian used to have this habit of dropping all the music papers on the floor and saying, ‘I’ve finished with these now,’ Joanne Newfield says. ‘A few days after he took over, Peter did exactly the same thing and used exactly the same words.’”
It was Brown who now had the direct line to all four Beatles and who, in a voice so very like Brian’s, passed along the inter-Beatles message he had just received. Paul wanted to have a meeting, just among themselves, to discuss future projects and plans. Could they all meet up on September 2 at Paul’s house?
The girls who stood outside Paul’s Cavendish Avenue house had never been formally introduced. They knew each other only as syllables, breathlessly gasped out in the running and jumping and climbing and neck-craning of the campaign they pursued in common. There was Big Sue and Little Sue, and Gayleen, and Margo, and “Willie,” and “Knickers.” Others came and went, or were shooed away, having tried to preempt the space allotted by mutual agreement among those half-dozen perennials. Waiting there, day after day, night after night until dawn, as days turned into months, as months lengthened to years, they somehow never did discover one another’s surnames.
They waited outside Paul’s because he was their favorite Beatle, but also because his house, being only a short walk from Abbey Road studios, was the recognized listening post for all Beatles intelligence. Pilgrimages would be made at intervals to John’s mock-Tudor Mansion in Weybridge or George’s Esher bungalow. But always the trail led back to St. John’s Wood and the big black double gates whose electric security lock, as time passed, grew less and less of an impediment.
Bored to distraction as the Beatles were by their female following, they co
uld not help but marvel at the almost psychic power that enabled these hard-core fans to shadow or waylay them. At Paul’s house or Abbey Road, or any ad hoc rehearsal or film-editing rendezvous, Peter Brown’s secret call would bring the four together under the scrutiny of those same half-dozen rather red and breathless faces. “They used to shout at us, ‘How did you know?’” Margo says. “Paul always called us the eyes and ears of the world.”
Margo, a brisk, jolly, and otherwise deeply rational girl, worked as a children’s nanny in Kingsbury, North London. Both job and location had been chosen for their convenience to the greater purpose that had brought Margo to London from the Lincolnshire seaside town of Cleethorpes. She arrived in 1968, looked after her two charges conscientiously for forty-eight hours, then made her way to St. John’s Wood. For the next two years, with only the most necessary intervals, Margo stood and waited outside Paul McCartney’s house.
The other Beatles had their own faithful followers, usually identified by a nickname: “Sue John” or “Linda Ringo.” “We all respected John,” Margo says. “We were a bit afraid of him, really. Ringo would come along and you’d never notice him until someone said, ‘That was Ringo.’ George always seemed to hate us. He’d push past us and even try to tread on our toes or kick us. He seemed very unhappy in those days.”
The main objective, however, remained that Beatle who was not only the most irresistibly good-looking but also the most patiently amiable and accessible. Margo had first noticed this quality in 1964 while chasing the Beatles’ limousine down Monmouth Street, when Paul leaned out of a window and shouted, “Run, girls, run!” There was also a time outside the Scala Theatre, during filming of A Hard Day’s Night, when he emerged to talk to Margo and her cousin in one of his several disguises. “This man came up to us with blond hair and a clipboard. He told us where to go if we wanted to see the next day’s filming. It was only when he said, ‘Ta-ra’ that we realized it was Paul.”