Shout! (26 page)

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.”

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.