John Lennon: The Life (32 page)
Brian was less assured when it came to dealing with the tough, often uncouth local promoters on whom the Beatles depended for regular work. Recognizing his own inexperience, he sought help from a tall, soft-spoken young man named Joe Flannery, with whom,
years before, he had had an atypically happy and stable love affair. Though now managing a rival group, Lee Curtis and the All Stars, fronted by his younger brother, Flannery agreed to help out with the Beatles behind the scenes. It was a decision prompted partly by love of Brian, partly by the good impression John made on him at their first meeting. “One night when my brother’s group and the Beatles were both on at the Iron Door, our bass amplifier broke down, so I had to ask the Beatles to lend us theirs. I went upstairs to their dressing-room which was just a big empty space, littered with great lumps of broken masonry. I asked Paul about borrowing the amp, but he told me I’d have to speak to John. ‘Sure, man,’ John said. ‘The show must go on.’”
Flo Jannery, as John dubbed him, became a part of the Beatles’ support team, negotiating their fees on Brian’s behalf and acting as a supernumerary fixer, adviser, and driver. “I’d often have to pick up John from his auntie’s, though she never let me in further than the bottom step of the front stairs. Sometimes he’d come out onto the top landing and beckon me up to his room without her knowing.
One of the Beatles’ favorite after-gig recreations was an American-style tenpin bowling alley in Tuebrook. If no lane happened to be free, they would hang out at Flannery’s flat in nearby Gardiner Road. On these visits, John would always be drawn to a hand-colored photograph of Flannery’s mother, Agnes, as a pretty young woman in the 1920s, with her hair styled in a bulbous golden bob. “He was fascinated by that picture of my mother,” Flannery remembers. “He always loved French women, and he used to say she looked just like Leslie Caron.” It was Agnes, with her gold bangs, so her son believes, who inspired the true Beatle Cut, as opposed to the prototypes created by Astrid Kirchherr and Jurgen Vollmer. “John came in one time and went straight to the picture of my mother, the way he always did. He said ‘I’ve been thinking it over.
That’s
the way we’re going to have our hair.’”
In hindsight, a simple explanation would be given for Brian’s interest. With his unerring knack of fancying the wrong person, he had fallen in love with John. Paul may have been prettier, Pete Best more Hollywood handsome, George more dewily boyish. But it was
tough-looking Teddy Boy John, with his black leather jacket and dagger-toed boots, who unwittingly ticked every box in a middle-class homosexual’s fantasy of rough trade. As it happened, even John’s feelings about “queers” and “arse bandits” ran second to his ambition for the Beatles. Years later, he would admit he had been ready to do anything that might help persuade Brian sign up the group—and indicated as much. But, from a mixture of innate decency and crippling shyness, Brian refused to take such advantage of him.
There was also an affinity between the two of them that had nothing to do with sex and everything with class. Notwithstanding their difference in age, and religion, both had much the same half-timbered suburban background, John in Woolton, Brian in just half-a-social-notch-higher Childwall. And, despite their common rejection of formal education, both had cultural interests far beyond NEMS’s record basement or playing rock ’n’ roll at the Cavern. At all events, John was the only Beatle that Brian knew socially: he would often be invited to the substantial Epstein family home in Queens Drive, just as Brian continued visiting Mendips even after Aunt Mimi’s support was in the bag. “John and Brian became very interested in each other,” Mimi would remember. “But not in any sordid way. That makes me sick to hear anything like that. What people don’t realise and only I know is that Brian and John both had a great love of art. They would talk for hours on end about art and paintings, and would go to the galleries together. Brian was an intellectual, and I think John found someone he could talk about things to on the same level.”
Despite his youth, Brian was a deeply paternal character who by rights should have married and raised a family. All those hitherto ungratifiable impulses to be provident and protective—and indulgent—he now poured into managing the Beatles, treating them not as his clients but as his children. This approach worked most powerfully on the one who, behind a carapace of toughness and independence, had longed for such a presence in his life since his Uncle George’s death six years earlier.
However, while being impressed, even awed, by what Brian was doing and promised still to do for the Beatles, John resolutely refused
to show him any awe or even undue respect as a person. After their first meeting, he took to calling him “Eppy,” a habit picked up by the other Beatles and ultimately by staff at NEMS. Brian hated the nickname for undermining his carefully nurtured executive gravitas but, even more, for suggesting the comical femininity of some butch maiden aunt. “The Beatles never talked to Brian about being gay,” Joe Flannery says. “They certainly never mocked him about it, to his face. But John had ways of letting him know that they knew: he’d do little gestures, roll his eyes or mimic the way Brian spoke. Worst of all for John was if he pretended he wasn’t…for instance, if he talked about “one of my girlfriends,” which he did actually have. Then John wouldn’t care what he said to deflate him. And, with the way Brian felt about John, there was nobody else in the world who could hurt him quite so much.”
Brian at this point saw no more future in Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting than did the pair themselves. His objective was to turn the Beatles into a nationally successful stage act, which under 1962 rules did not just mean appealing to teenagers but also being unthreatening and showbizzy enough to get onto grown-up television and radio. And, even with his limited grasp of youth culture, he knew there was only one possible example to follow. “Brian took them all to see the Shadows play at the Empire,” Bill Harry says. “He told them that if they wanted to make it, that was how they’d got to be.”
In other words, everything that had made their name on Merseyside—everything, indeed, that first attracted Brian to them—would now have to go. Instead of fooling around onstage as they did at the Cavern, drinking, smoking, eating, and trading banter with friends or foes in the audience, they must be as formal and restrained and carefully choreographed as the sedate strummers of “Apache” and “Wonderful Land,” smiling politely, moving minimally and ending each number with a unified, humble, and grateful bow. And instead of the allover black leather that signified rock ’n’ roll in its grubbiest outcast years—and, to many, still recalled Hitler’s Gestapo—they would have to wear Shadows-style, showbiz-style matching suits.
John, at first, was appalled even to think of giving up the rebel
persona he had worn like a battle honor for all these years, and being smarmed and groomed and goody-goodied as Brian proposed. Richmal Crompton’s William, forced to don an Eton jacket for a dancing lesson, could not have been more outraged. “He came home in a right old mood, banging around,” Mimi remembered. And eventually it came out. Brian had decided they should wear suits—and, worse than that for John, they had to wear ties, too. I don’t think [he] had worn a tie since he was at art school…. I thought ‘Ha ha John Lennon, no more scruffs for you.’…I thought it was hilarious.”
John made a brief attempt to organize resistance, but when he found no takers, principle yielded to pragmatism. “[Brian told us] ‘Look, if you wear a suit, you’ll get this much money’ and everyone wanted a good, sharp suit…we wanted a good suit even to wear off stage. ‘Yeah, man, all right, I’ll wear a suit—I’ll wear a bloody balloon if someone’s going to pay me.’”
Brian therefore ordered four identical Italianate suits in gray brushed tweed, which—this being Brian—did not come from some multiple outfitter like Burtons or Hepworths but from a bespoke tailor in Birkenhead at £40 apiece. After some out-of-town previews, the new look was formally unveiled at the Cavern in March, the Beatles playing one set in their leathers, then coming back later in suits. To mark the watershed moment, Brian had their portrait done by a wedding photographer for whom a “group” normally consisted of bride, groom, and assorted relatives. John, in his brushed tweed jacket, round-collared shirt, and tie, mostly communicates all the joie de vivre of a police lineup. But, according to Paul, being dressed in a modish outfit that hadn’t cost him a penny was less traumatic than he’d expected. “Check the pictures. John’s not scowling in all of them.”
The story of Brian’s efforts to find the Beatles a record deal would later be recounted like some modern Labor of Hercules: how, week after week, he would travel to London and pitch them to label after label, but without scoring so much as an audition; how smug, all-knowing metropolitan executives only just kept from sniggering at the notion of a Liverpool group becoming “bigger than Elvis” and, with affected kindliness, advised him to stick to shopkeeping; how,
night after night, he would be met off the train at Lime Street station by four hopeful faces, soon to be downcast once more.
At these glum debriefings, usually held at a station-exit coffee bar named the Punch and Judy, John would, surprisingly, not lambast Brian for his failure but be sympathetic and resolutely upbeat, joking that if all else failed they could try Embassy, a label dealing in inferior cover versions of current chart hits and sold only through Woolworths. When the other three’s spirits flagged, he would pep them up with a routine inspired by cornball Hollywood musicals like
The Band Wagon
. “Where are we goin,” fellas?” he’d call out in a cheesy American accent. “To the top, Johnny,” they would obediently chorus back. “And where’s that?” “To the toppermost of the poppermost, Johnny!”
Brian certainly suffered rejection and belittlement at the hands of London A&R (artists and repertory) men. But it was barely three weeks after Decca’s formal turndown that he struck a one-in-a-million lucky break. On February 13, he found his way to George Martin, the head of EMI’s Parlophone label. Totally against type, thirty-six-year-old Martin was a gentlemanly figure with a voice more suggestive of the BBC than the Top 20. As two cultured accents met with mutual surprise, the ball started rolling at last. Martin listened to recordings from the Decca audition, decided that, for all the eccentric choice of material, “something” was there, and expressed a willingness to give Decca’s rejects a hearing in person.
In addition to being a gentleman, Martin possessed an unusual combination of qualities that made him dream casting for the epic ahead. First, he was a trained classical musician; second, he had a pedigree as a producer of spoken-word comedy records, often in the form of shows before a live audience. At this stage, no firm date was made for his and the Beatles’ first encounter. But—to paraphrase lyrics he would one day know well—a splendid time was guaranteed for all.
B
rian’s hasty study of pop-star management had taught him one golden rule for young male stars and would-be stars. To win the devotion of teenage girls, they must seem to be footloose,
fancy-free—and thus theoretically available to each and every one of their fans. Wives were a complete nonstarter, fiancées and regular girlfriends almost as risky—and boyfriends, of course, completely off the chart. Though all four Beatles were sexually active, not to say hyperactive, only two were going steady, John with Cynthia Powell and Paul with Dot Rhone. Cynthia and Dot were now told they could no longer attend Beatles gigs and should be seen as little as possible with their swains in public. Schooled as they were in obedience and loyalty, both accepted the ruling without protest.
For Cyn, now in her final year of teacher training, it was not a good time to be shut out in the cold. The previous summer, her widowed mother, Lilian, had emigrated to Canada to make a new life as a children’s nanny. With the Powell family home in Hoylake rented out, it had seemed a neat solution for Cyn to join Mimi Smith’s student boarders at Mendips, taking a vacation job at a local Woolworths to help pay her rent. For some time after John’s return from Hamburg, they had lived under the same roof, albeit occupying separate bedrooms, with all hanky-panky strictly forbidden.
Cyn did her best to be helpful and unobtrusive, even taking on a share of the housework. But having such a rival for John’s attention actually in the house soon began to grate on Mimi’s never very resilient nerves. However late he came in from a gig, she had been used to waiting up for him, ready to make him tea and a snack, and hear the night’s news. Now, not unnaturally, Cyn would be waiting up for him, too—“hanging around in her nightdress,” as Mimi put it disapprovingly to sister Nanny. After a few weeks, the tension became too much, and Cyn left Menlove Avenue to board with her Aunt Tess on the other side of town.
In the absence of a firm audition date from Parlophone Records, West Germany rather than southern Britain still seemed the Beatles’ most promising territory. At Christmas, the pleasant and fair-dealing Peter Eckhorn had come over from Hamburg, met Brian, and booked them for a return appearance at his Top Ten Club that following spring. A couple of weeks afterward, Eckhorn’s security chief, the giant-killing Horst Fascher, also turned up in Liverpool with a singer-pianist named Roy Young, sometimes known as “Brit
ain’s Little Richard.” Fascher, it transpired, had fallen out with Eckhorn, quit the Top Ten and was seeking acts for a brand-new St. Pauli rock venue, the Star-Club.
“When I come to Liverpool, I’m told the Beatles have a new manager called Brian Epstein that I have to talk to,” he remembers. “Brian says to me ‘I’m sorry, the boys are already booked to play the Top Ten.’ I tell him ‘If the Beatles don’t come to my club, there will be no fuckin’ Top Ten Club…we’ll smash the fuckin’ place up.’”
For Stu Sutcliffe in Hamburg, the prospect of John’s return was a bright spot in a life that—all unbeknownst to his best friend—had become increasingly shadowed by pain and anxiety. The headaches that had plagued Stu for the past year were now so intense that he could sometimes barely move or even speak while in their skull-splitting throes; his skin grew drained of color even as his canvases rioted with it; his weight plummeted, and he suffered spells of dizziness and nausea. His violent mood swings and outbursts of irrational jealous rage against Astrid had soured a relationship that had once seemed ideal, postponing the wedding that once had seemed so urgent. His letters home to his family seemed to reflect an increasing mental confusion, the formerly regular italic script now wild and disjointed, like messages from an unhappy ghost.
