Beatles (43 page)

Since early 1967 he had given up most of the daily responsibility for the running of NEMS, apart from the Beatles. He brought in Robert Stigwood, an Australian, to be co-managing director. It was he who ran NEMS from day to day, along with the other directors, Vic Lewis, Bernard Lee, Geoffrey Ellis and his brother Clive Epstein.

The withdrawal from NEMS came not long after the Beatles stopped touring. Apart from the Saville theatre, which was never a success financially, nothing took the place in his affections of the Beatles. But he was still looking for something, as he’d been looking for something when he’d gone off to join RADA, then later when he left everything to manage the Beatles. It was the old creative urge coming out again. He was being tormented once more by an unfulfilled creative desire, but yearning with little possibility of satisfaction. This is what often happened with Brian, with his love affairs and with most of his pleasures.

There did come a chance to be creative, when John Fernald, the ex-boss of RADA, who had taken Brian in as a student and
whom Brian took on later to work for him, fell ill during rehearsals of the play
A Smashing Day
and Brian took over as director.

‘He’d been ill at the time, recovering from jaundice, but he threw himself into rehearsals completely,’ says Joanne. ‘I don’t think I ever saw him as happy in all the three years I worked with him. He stayed up all night with the cast, waiting for the reviews, and adored every minute of it.’ But the play soon came off.

The urge to be creative never found another outlet. He didn’t know what he was looking for, and nothing presented itself the way the Beatles had done. Instead it turned him more and more against a strictly business life. This was one of the reasons he withdrew so much from NEMS.

‘He didn’t really like being a businessman,’ says Joanne. ‘He didn’t like business meetings. He so wanted to be a creator. He used to cancel even the most important meetings. Sometimes I had to say he was ill, or had an urgent conference. The real reason was that he was still in bed, having been awake with insomnia all night. It was awful. He would leave me notes telling me which meetings I had to get him out of. I had to cancel Bernard Delfont four times in one week. I don’t know what he must have thought.’

But there were several things which did give him great pleasure. He loved Kingsley Hill, his house in Sussex. He also loved bullfighting. He backed a fighter and was financing a film about bullfighting at the time of his death.

The other things he took up were more occasional whims, like drugs and gambling. He took LSD several times, when he heard from the Beatles the effects it had had on them. But on not more than a handful of occasions. He seems to have given it up about the same time as the Beatles – which was well before his death.

He had spasms of gambling. He enjoyed it and was successful. Joanne often found a note waiting for her when she arrived in the morning with a pile of money, perhaps around £300, which he’d won the night before. ‘He would say in his note that I had to go and bank his happiness.’

Peter Brown, who usually went with him, says he was a good gambler because he knew when to stop. ‘This was because he wasn’t really carried away by it. The whole point of gambling was somewhere to go very late at night and to meet people.’

Apart from the Beatles and Cilla Black, none of his artists lasted as big stars and many of them soon faded away completely. Quite a few, naturally, resented his over-attention to the Beatles and then, as he drew out of NEMS, his complete lack of work on their behalf. Brian regretted this as much as anyone. It would make him feel very guilty. ‘He believed in so many of them really,’ says Joanne. ‘He honestly did. He would promise them great things, absolutely sincerely. They’d go away, feeling hopeful again. In a few months they’d be back, accusing him of having let them down.’

But the only really important row he had with any of his artists was, ironically, not with any of the ones who were doing badly, but with Cilla Black, his most successful single star.

She had felt for a long time that she wasn’t getting the personal attention she’d had from Brian in the past and which she felt she deserved. At the beginning of the summer of 1967, she decided she’d had enough. Brian had gone off somewhere again, leaving her. So that was that. She was leaving him.

As Brian was away, Peter Brown was the first to hear the news of her decision. He knew how badly it would affect Brian and he was worried about telling him. He consulted Brian’s doctor for advice, who told him to do it slowly and carefully. When Brian heard, he made the mistake of allowing others to go and try to pacify her first, but they eventually met in Chapel Street. After several hours of discussions with Cilla, and then agreements, it was all patched up. They became friendlier than they’d ever been and remained so, up until his death. Cilla realized she would never have left Brian anyway.

There were never ever any rows with any of the Beatles. He loved them all as much as ever, and they loved him. But with the end of touring, their main point of contact ceased to exist.

They still saw a lot of each other. Any business decision came through his hands. But at the end of 1966, when the touring stopped, their concern was with themselves, working out what sort of life they would lead, what they would do with themselves, what the point of it all was. This was when the drugs, and then religion, started to enter their lives. They almost became hermits for several months, seeing only each other.

Brian went his own way, a way which had always been completely different, in so many respects, to theirs. If he hadn’t become their manager, it’s unlikely they would ever have been friends. He was of a different age, class and background, with different attitudes and, most of all, different pleasures. But for five years his life had been his work for them. When that finished, the Beatles had each other, and their wives. He was alone, obsessed by himself, worrying about his worries, worries which he hadn’t had much time to think about for five years.

The Beatles had no idea how he was leading his last year, how he had become increasingly dependent on pills, as his worries, real and imagined, took over and obsessed him. They were amazed to hear, a long time after his death, that he’d hardly been at his office for so many months and had rarely been up and out in daylight. They knew nothing either of his personal affairs.

They had heard he’d been mildly depressed early in 1967, but thought he’d got over it. When he was with them, he was certainly always happy. This was true. His greatest pleasure was to be with them. He loved doing anything for them.

‘He had Pattie and me for a week’s holiday in the south of France in 1966,’ says George. ‘When we arrived, he had every little thing worked out, each meal, each visit, each place we would go to, for the whole week. A private plane arrived one day, which he’d organized to take us to a bullfight.

‘He was always like this. He so wanted to please people that he worked everything out, down to the last detail.’ When he had a dinner party, he went to great lengths to know each
person’s favourite cigarettes and had them laid out by their plate at the table.

Pattie says she did once hear from Joanne about the amount of pills Brian was taking. ‘I said why couldn’t she or Peter stop him, but she said they couldn’t. I said to George that he should speak to Brian himself, but he said it wouldn’t do any good.’

Brian had at first been attracted most of all to John, from those early days in the Cavern. John was the only one he’d ever spent a holiday with alone, that time they went to Spain together, leaving Cyn in Liverpool.

His relationship with Paul was the most subtle and complicated, at least Brian felt it was. He felt he had to overcompensate towards Paul. He admitted it himself once. ‘I think Paul thinks I’m closer to John than I am with him. It’s not really true. I was earlier on, but now I love them all equally.’ He always gave Paul particularly lavish presents. They rarely gave him any.

‘Paul was the only one who ever gave him any little worries,’ says Joanne, ‘when he rang up to complain about something, or ask things. The others might ask exactly the same, but he always worried more about pleasing Paul. He could be upset by talking to Paul on the phone, but never by any of the others.’

This was probably because, in 1967, Paul, for the first time, had become interested in business affairs. Formerly, George had been the only one to cross-examine Brian on contracts, or how much they were getting, and couldn’t he do better. But George, when his interest in religion arrived, stopped worrying completely about materialistic things.

Brian was always involved, but now and again didn’t like the way they were doing things, such as the complicated – legally, economically and artistically – cover for
Sergeant Pepper
.

During the spring of 1967, when he was visiting New York, Nat Weiss says that Brian got a premonition he was going to die. At Kennedy Airport, he became convinced his plane was going to crash over the Atlantic. Just before take-off, he wrote a note on a scrap of paper, which he asked Nat Weiss to give the Beatles as his
last wish. The note, which Nat Weiss still has, read: ‘Brown Paper bags for Sergeant Pepper.’

As he didn’t crash, the Beatles never found out how much he worried about the complications of the
Sergeant Pepper
cover, just as they never found out so many things about his last year.

On 8 September 1967, a Westminster coroner’s court pronounced that Brian Epstein’s death was accidental. He had died from the cumulative effect of bromide in a drug he had been taking for some time. The drug was Carbitral. The level of bromide in him was only a ‘low fatal level’, but he had taken repeated ‘incautious self overdoses’ which had had a cumulative effect, enough to kill him.

His body showed there had been no one immense dose, but a series of large ones. The court was told he took drugs, in the form of sleeping tablets, as he suffered from perpetual insomnia.

In his body were found an antidepressant drug and barbiturate, as well as bromide. The police reported that in his house they had found 17 bottles of tablets of some sort, seven by his bedside, eight in the bathroom and two in a briefcase.

Medical experts said that the amount of bromide he had been taking would have made him drowsy and could also have made him careless and injudicious. He had died from an accidental overdose.

There is not the slightest reason to doubt it. The medical evidence showed conclusively he had been dosing himself up for three days. With suicide, the practice is to take one large dose.

It’s highly unlikely he would have deliberately committed suicide, not at that time, with his mother already recently bereaved. One or two small facts are still not clear, but there were no rows or specific reasons for depression, as far as is known. It was just an escalating depression as he thought his longed-for weekend would turn out boring.

The memorial service for Brian Epstein was held at the New London Synagogue, Abbey Road, St John’s Wood on 17 October 1967.

It was an apt setting, just a few yards away from EMI’s studios, where all the Beatles records up until Brian’s death had been recorded, and just round the corner from Paul’s house in Cavendish Avenue.

It was also not far away from St John’s Wood underground station, which contains the nearest public telephones to Paul’s house. Brian used these phones twice in his life. The first time was in 1962 when he rushed out of the EMI studios to cable the Beatles in Hamburg with some good news about their first record. The other time was five years later, just before his death. He’d been round to Paul’s house but couldn’t get in. Paul had been bothered by fans all day and had stopped answering the door. Brian had been forced to find a phone box and ring up Paul and tell him who it was before he was allowed in. Brian always thought this story was very symbolic.

George, when he heard of Brian’s death, says it struck him like an old-fashioned film. ‘You know, where they turn over the last page of one section to show you they’ve come to the end of it, before going on to the next. That was what Brian’s death was like. The end of a chapter.’

When the touring was over, they had no idea what was going to be in the next chapter. They’d had ten years, from 1956 to 1966, of not just living a communal life but communally living the same life. They were still each other’s greatest friends and they were still going to record together, but as individuals they felt it was time to look for a separate identity.

George was off first. The month after they stopped touring, in September 1966, he went to India with his wife. For the first time, he had found a serious interest not shared by the others.

John accepted a film part, in
How I Won The War
. He’d always liked Dick Lester, though he hadn’t particularly enjoyed doing their two Beatle films. He said it felt like being an extra. But he still thought that perhaps acting was the new thing he was looking for. He also liked the idea of an anti-war film, a subject he’s always felt strongly about.

Ringo, the most home- and family-minded of them all, started to expand his family and his home. Paul was the only one who felt out of it. He envied George. He wished he had something like Indian music to occupy himself. He did a bit of painting and decorated pieces of furniture, but without much
interest. He tried hard to think about God, but nothing came. So he decided to do the music for a film,
The Family Way
, to see if he enjoyed writing film music, but he didn’t. After that, he went off on a long trip across Africa.

George’s passion grew, but John soon found that he didn’t like acting and he didn’t like most actors. He and Paul were both searching again. They had no intention of retiring from life, as 25-year-old millionaires, but they’d avoided so much formal discipline and knowledge, the sort a university might have given them, that they didn’t know where to begin. Not that they wanted anyone to teach them anything. Materially and emotionally they were 100 years old. Which is where drugs came in. Through drugs they found out about themselves, by themselves.