The Beatles (46 page)

O
n a hazy Saturday evening in September 1961, Bob Wooler climbed aboard
the 500 Limited bus
bound for Liverpool center and spied a familiar face. George Harrison was seated about halfway back, steadying a cardboard envelope on his knees. As Wooler settled in next to him, George slipped a record sleeve from the package in one neat motion. “
Look at this. I’ve just received it
today,” he gushed, fingering it as one might a precious heirloom. Wooler examined the single: a near-mint copy of “My Bonnie” by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers.
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So, it was finally released, Wooler mused. The band had jabbered about nothing else since returning from Hamburg, to the point that Wooler actually dreaded its arrival. Nevertheless, he was impressed, seeing it in the flesh. “
Up until then
, none of the Merseyside bands had made a record,” he recalls, “so it was quite an achievement.”

Determined to make an event of it, he begged George for the record. “
Let me play it tonight
,” he cajoled, but George squirmed reluctantly. The copy had just arrived from Hamburg,
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and the other Beatles had yet to see it. With uncharacteristic aggressiveness, Wooler dismissed the argument with a wave. “They’ll have plenty of time for that,” he said. “Anyway, we’re all [appearing] at Hambleton Hall tomorrow night, at which time I’ll return it.” He also schemed to borrow it for lunchtime sessions at the Cavern, which the Beatles now headlined almost exclusively.

Like others on the scene, Wooler sensed a breakthrough in the making and wanted to capitalize on it. “The local pop scene,” as he saw it, “was
ready for a star.” Rock ’n roll was no longer simply a weekend dessert in Liverpool; it had become part of the essential daily diet, with lunchtime and evening shows a staple of everyday life. You could almost set your watch by it, a rhythm to the musical intervals that dovetailed with meals, commuting, work, and sleep. No one looked to the States or even to London for the latest hot sound. Why bother? Liverpool had everything they needed.

And it was the Beatles who defined the scene—maybe too much for its own good, Wooler thought. “The Beatles were difficult,” he recalls, “and so unprofessional onstage—smoking, swearing, eating, talking with one another. They considered themselves lords unto themselves.” One day, the Beatles played the Cavern wearing jeans. Jeans spelled trouble; anyone wearing them was turned away at the door. In no time, the band had attracted the attention of Ray McFall, who demanded that Wooler discipline the Beatles. During a break Wooler reluctantly delivered Ray’s message in the bandroom. “
Go and tell him to get fucking well stuffed
!” John snapped. From opposite angles, Paul and George converged, launching similar tirades. Wooler backed out of the room to symphonic abuse. Lords unto themselves.

The scene had somehow bought into the Beatles’ cheek. Their whole renegade attitude had caught on, and not only with fellow musicians. With rock ’n roll, as with nothing else in their lives, the fans cared as much about the attitude as the music. They were looking for a mind-set, a way of looking at things that pressed past the music itself into issues of identity—personality, looks, character, and originality. While stars such as Elvis and Buddy Holly had given them the music and the look, attitude remained uncultivated. Teddy boys had come the closest to defining a cultural outlook, but they proved too extreme. The Beatles, on the other hand, managed to push the envelope without hurting anyone. Violence wasn’t part of their agenda. Their music was loud, in-your-face loud, their stage presence disorderly and impolite. Anyone who disapproved could “get fucking well stuffed,” but that was the extent of their defiance. They were rebels, not anarchists.

And yet Wooler was determined to hasten their stardom, no matter how rudely they treated him. He plugged their record relentlessly—at dozens of dance halls on the weekends, numerous times a day at the crowded Cavern, to anyone, in fact, who would listen—even though it wasn’t available anywhere in the United Kingdom. “Buy the record, folks,” he’d implore. “Make sure you ask for it at your favorite record shop. If
they don’t have it, insist that they order it, and make sure that they get it for you.” But local retailers, who concentrated on sturdy sellers like Anthony Newley, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, and instrumentalists, had no interest. According to Wooler, “
There was only one record store
that took any interest in it and that was… [the NEMS] shop in Whitechapel.” North End Music Stores had a record department that was unmatched for its eclectic selection of music, thanks largely to the exuberance of its demanding manager, a tightly strung aesthete named Brian Epstein. The wellborn son of retail magnates from the upper crust of Liverpool’s Jewish community, Brian had little in common with the teenage riffraff who infested his store like crows. Although only six years older than John Lennon, Brian comported himself in a way that bespoke a man in his contented forties. And not out of some sort of pretense: he belonged to that segment of his generation which subscribed to refinement and discipline and maintained its manners during the periodic upheavals of rebellion. Raised as a gentleman, he wore immaculately tailored suits, spoke the King’s English with a crisp, polished clip, and led conversations with his chin raised to convey the superiority he keenly felt among commoners.
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Indulging an alliance of passions, his adolescent heart beat furiously for all things musical, except rock ’n roll, which he abhorred. He was a connoisseur of serious music, spanning theater, opera, and symphony—an erudite, cultured, and opinionated enthusiast who “
lived for Beethoven, Mozart
, Haydn, and Sibelius.” Although as a child Brian apparently showed little interest in playing an instrument, he had a box at the Liverpool Philharmonic from the age of twelve, and soon after acquired
a collection of the Brandenburg Concertos
, whose score he knew by heart.

Rock ’n roll had begun to ring up substantial sales for NEMS, making it a genre he could no longer afford to ignore. But as a listener, he wouldn’t give it the time of day. “
The closest Brian ever got
to rock ’n roll was ‘Volare,’ ” recalls Peter Brown, a friend and protégé who oversaw the NEMS shop on Great Charlotte Street.

He was born on September 19, 1934
, during the denouement of a crisp Yom Kippur afternoon while his father and uncle davened, as ploddingly as they polished furniture, in the crowded sanctuary of the Green Park Drive Synagogue, not too far from their homes. The Epsteins were lions of Liverpool’s resurgent Jewish community: merchants, philanthropists, pillars
of society, a long way up the ladder from their hardscrabble beginnings. In fact, Brian’s paternal grandfather, a furniture maker named Isaac, an émigré from the village of Hodan, Lithuania, arrived in England in the wave of immigration of the 1890s at the age of eighteen, with nothing except for the provisions of his trade and the forbearance of his wife, Diana. From the beginning, Isaac proved extremely talented, and there was plenty of work to keep him busy. Isaac offered customers a selection of his own handcrafted staples along with varied consignment pieces, and after a decade of struggle and sacrifice, he succeeded in opening a modest furniture shop that offered easy credit to families, and thus rather quickly attracted a solid clientele.

Isaac’s third child, Harry, an equally enterprising but very affable man, had hardly finished school before joining his father’s business on Walton Road, in the north end of the city. Renamed I. Epstein & Sons, it featured showrooms of well-crafted goods ranging from bassinets to bedroom suites and served families of all social and economic strata. Harry and his brother, Leslie, watched their father with curious, admiring eyes. Restlessly, they expanded into an adjacent shop (North End Music Stores) and then another and another, the unfolding empire consolidated under the catchy NEMS logo. More than anyone, Harry recognized the opportunity for growth, diversifying the company with home furnishings and appliances.

It took a momentous marriage to solidify NEMS’ primacy. Queenie Hyman (the nickname was given to her as a child, being that Malka, her given name, was the Hebrew word for
queen
),
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although eleven years Harry’s junior, was his partner in every respect—a capricious but capable wife born of aristocratic self-possession, whose family owned the highly esteemed Sheffield Veneering Company in the heart of the Midlands. A slim, dark-haired beauty, Queenie was educated at a Catholic boarding school, to which she applied herself with ungrudging tenacity; she had no intention of letting down in front of non-Jews. Among her firmest convictions, along with her fierce Jewish faith, was the treachery of Gentiles, most of whom she viewed as closet anti-Semites. It was a prejudice, however irrational, that remained with Queenie throughout her life—and that was subsequently passed down to Brian—despite the unshakable power of Liverpool’s Jewish community, the oldest, most unified, and prosperous of its kind outside of London.

Unquestionably, Queenie filled the empty spaces in Harry’s life. She ran an orderly and immaculate house, cultivated a social circle from among Liverpool’s most prominent Jewish families, and was an instinctive hostess who entertained with grand style and élan. “
She knew what it meant to be a lady
,” says a longtime friend of the family. What’s more, Queenie loved culture. She filled the living room with beautifully bound books and china figurines. A profusion of tasteful if innocuous art landscaped the walls. And she nurtured a passion for fine music, becoming an influential theater and symphony patron, amassing a library of records that was even more voluminous and diverse than that of her own parents. To accommodate her grandiose designs, the Epsteins built their dream house in 1934, the year following their marriage. It was a comfortable eleven-room stone residence, with a vaulted entrance, five high-ceilinged bedrooms, and a magnificent alcoved parlor in back, well situated on a lovely wooded property in Childwall, one of the suburbs undergoing rapid upscaling.

While Brian was still very young, Queenie began indoctrinating him in the things that captivated her most, playing him scores of gorgeous music—from concertos by Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, and Bach—as he lay in his crib. “She put so much emotion into his fairy tales that you thought she was auditioning for the West End,” says a neighbor. “And by the time Brian was five, he could recite a favorite story giving it the same dramatic emphasis as Queenie.”

Normal child play didn’t seem to interest him. He wasn’t particularly athletic or sports-minded, like other boys his age; there was no fascination with dinosaurs, tree forts, or family pets. He rarely played with his brother, Clive, who was almost two years younger. Brian was happiest, his relatives say, when among adults, having adult discussions. To an unnatural degree, he kept up with community chatter—what families argued about, who wasn’t on speaking terms, how people were managing personal crises. His aunt Stella recalls that when she babysat for her nephew, Brian would often ask after her friends, an expression of the most profound interest pasted on his tiny face. “
Tell me, Auntie
,” he would inquire, gazing at her earnestly, “how is Mrs. Abromowitz? What’s become of lovely Mrs. Shapiro’s son, Harold?” Listening to Brian, Stella thought, “he sounded like a little old man.”

But the little boy in him was frighteningly neglected, an oversight that was devastating to Brian’s development. “
Queenie treated him as an equal
,” says Rex Makin, a solicitor who lived next door and represented the Epsteins, and later Brian, in a professional capacity. “And this, among
other things, made him a very volatile person. He was subject to terrific mood swings, no doubt, to a great degree, because of frustration.”

To make matters worse, the physical geography of Brian’s life was every bit as unstable as the treacherous emotional terrain. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1940, exacerbated by Germany’s relentless bombardment of England, sent northerners scrambling to provide security for their families in areas deemed unlikely targets for bombs. Most Scousers remained rooted at the mercy of the unpredictable nightly air raids, but anyone with the resources escaped the harsh realities of war. The Epsteins were only one of hundreds of families who fled Liverpool for relative safety, moving in with relatives in Southport, just thirty miles up the Lancashire coast but a world apart. On the one hand, the move brought them immediate and effective security, but for Brian the sudden change proved a catastrophic force in his development.

Unlike Liverpool, where he participated in his parents’ active social life and accompanied them to the city’s finest restaurants, Southport was sleepy and unsophisticated—a fringe of tiny, cramped homes bordering the sea. It was the most unlikely place in the world for a boy in love with all the symbols of society.

Upon returning home, in 1945, Brian was disoriented, in more ways than one. He was already “
one of those out-of-sorts boys
who never quite fit,” and his grades, which were notably inconsistent, slipped even further. He ping-ponged from school to school, angry and unmotivated, unable to focus on his studies or to make friends. Two schools in Southport dismissed him for laziness and poor performance. A residency at Liverpool College ended shortly in his expulsion, along with a stinging censure from the headmaster, branding him a “
problem child
.” The next stop, at a coeducational prep school, proved even more disastrous—and ever brief. Brian lasted a only month, blaming his strident failure to conform on anti-Semitism. That may indeed have contributed to his discomfort (owing to a strong residue of postwar resentment in the North), but in fact it was only a smoke screen for a deepening alienation of a much darker and devious nature.

“
It was at this school
… that I can first remember my feeling for other male persons and a longing for a close and intimate friend,” Brian confessed in the pages of a private handwritten journal. As he had grown up in genteel surroundings and under Queenie’s indulgent spell, there was nothing in the way of stimuli to test the inchoate feelings that had always eluded him. Now, undercurrents of homosexuality welled to the surface,
coinciding with his own intensifying adolescence. He found it difficult to disguise his preference for other boys. The facade of “normalcy” began to crumble, replaced by fears of inadequacy and dread. No doubt he was unprepared for a confrontation of this sort. Certainly there were no role models to admire, no peers from whom to seek counsel. For a boy who had always been pampered and provided for, he was wildly unsuited to handle such a complicated matter. “Indeed,” he later admitted, “no one had explained to me the facts of life.”