Shout! (42 page)

And yet, at times, Brian would seem unable to pluck up courage to go into the Beatles’ dressing room, but would stand out in the auditorium, suddenly as distant from them as the farthest screaming girl. “I saw him once,” Sommerville says, “in one of those northern ABCs, when the curtains opened and the scream went up. He was standing there with tears streaming down his face.”

It had become clear at an early stage, to various sharp-eyed people, that the Beatles were capable of selling far more than phonograph records by the million. Beatlemania demonstrated as never before to what extent young people in Britain were a market, gigantic and ripe for exploitation. From October 1963 onward Brian Epstein carried in his wake a little trail of businessmen, coaxing, cajoling, sometimes begging to be authorized to produce goods in the Beatles’ image.

Merchandising as a concept was largely unknown in mid-twentieth-century Britain, even though the Victorians had been adept at it. Walt Disney, that peerless weaver of dreams into plastic, was imitated on a small scale by British toy manufacturers, producing replicas of television puppets. Pop singers until now had lasted too short a time in public esteem to sell any but the most ephemeral goods.

No precedent existed, therefore, to warn Brian that there were billions at stake. He saw the merchandising purely as public relations—a way to increase audience goodwill and keep the fan club happy. He worried about the fan club and keeping it happy.

The first Beatles products catered simply for the desire, as strong in girls as in boys, to impersonate their idols. In Bethnal Green, East London, a factory was producing Beatles wigs at the rate of several thousand each week. The hairstyle that Astrid’s scissors had shaped for Stu Sutcliffe became a best-selling novelty, a black, fibrous mop, hovering just outside seriousness, 30s (£1.50) apiece. A Midlands clothing firm marketed collarless corduroy Beatles jackets like the one Astrid had made for Stu, the one that the Beatles at the time despised as “Mum’s jacket.” Girls, too, wore the jackets, the tab-collar shirts, even the elastic-sided, Cuban heel “Beatles boots,” obtainable by mail order at 75s 11d (£3.80), including shipping and handling.

Christmas 1963 signaled a fresh avalanche of Beatles products into the shops. There were Beatles guitars, of plastic, and miniature Beatles drums. There were Beatles lockets, each with a tiny quadruple photograph compressed inside. There were red and blue Beatles kitchen aprons, bespeckled with guitar-playing bugs. The four faces and four signatures, engraved, printed, or transferred, however indistinctly, appeared on belts, badges, handkerchiefs, jigsaw puzzles, rubber airbeds, record racks, bedspreads, “ottomans,” shoulder bags, pencils, buttons, and trays. There was a brand of confectionery known as Ringo Roll, and of Beatles chewing gum, each sixpenny packet warranted to contain
seven
photographs. A northern bakery chain announced guitar-shaped “Beatles cakes” (“Party priced at 5s”) and fivepenny individual Beatles “fancies.”

Brian, in the beginning, personally examined the products of each prospective licensee. In no case, he ruled, would the Beatles directly endorse any article. Nor would they lend their name to anything distasteful, inappropriate, or overtly exploitive of their fans. And, indeed, parents who had scolded their children for buying trash were frequently surprised by the goods’ quality and value. The Beatles jacket was smart, durable, and well-lined. The official Beatles sweater (“Designed for Beatles people by a leading British manufacturer”) was 100 percent botany wool, hardly extortionate at 35s (£1.75).

Soon, however, unauthorized Beatles goods began to appear. Though NEMS Enterprises held copyright on the name Beatles, infringement could be avoided simply by spelling it “Beetles.” The vaguest representation of insects, of guitars or little mop-headed men, had the power to sell anything, however cheap, however nasty. Even to spot the culprits, let alone bring lawsuits against them, meant a countrywide monitoring such as no British copyright holder had ever been obliged to undertake. NEMS Enterprises certainly could not undertake it. And so, after one or two minor prosecutions, the pirates settled down, unhampered, to their bonanza.

By late 1963, the merchandising had got into a tangle that Brian had not the time or the will to contemplate. He therefore handed the whole matter over to his lawyer, David Jacobs. It became Jacobs’s job not only to prosecute infringements, where visible, but also, at his independent discretion, to issue new manufacturing licenses. Prospective licensees were referred from NEMS Enterprises to Jacobs’s offices in Pall Mall.
Since Jacobs, too, was deeply preoccupied with social as well as legal matters, the task of appraising designs, production strategy, and probable income was delegated to the chief clerk in his chambers, Edward Marke.

Among the other cases currently being handled by M. A. Jacobs Ltd were several claims for damages by the relatives of passengers lost aboard a wrecked cruise ship, the
Lakonia
. The waiting-room where these bereaved litigants sat also served as a dumping ground for cascades of Beatles guitars, plastic windmills, and crayoning sets. Mr. Marke, though a conscientious legal functionary, knew little of the manufacturing business. So David Jacobs, in his turn, looked round for someone to take on this tiresome business of making millions.

His choice was Nicky Byrne, a man he had met at one of the numerous cocktail parties he attended. Byrne, indeed, was rather a celebrated figure at parties, of which he himself gave a great many at his fashionable Chelsea garage-cum-flat. Small, impishly dapper, formidably persuasive, he had been variously a country squire’s son, a Horse Guard trooper, and an amateur racing driver. His true avocation, however, was membership of the Chelsea Set, the subculture of debutantes, bohemians, heiresses, and charming cads that, since the mid-fifties, had flourished along and around the King’s Road.

Nicky Byrne was not a totally implausible choice, having in his extremely varied life touched the worlds of show business and popular retailing. In the fifties, he had run the Condor Club in Soho where Tommy Steele was discovered. His wife, Kiki—from whom he had recently parted—was a well-known fashion designer with her own successful Chelsea boutique.

The offer from Jacobs was that Byrne should administer the Beatles’ merchandising operation in Europe and throughout the world. He was not, he maintains, very eager to accept. “Brian Epstein had a very bad name in the business world at that time. Nobody knew who was licensed to make Beatles goods and who wasn’t. I got in touch with Kiki, my ex-wife, to see what she thought about it. I mentioned this company firm in Soho that was meant to be turning out Beatles gear. Kiki said, ‘Hold on a minute.’ She’d had a letter from a firm in the Midlands, asking her to design exactly the same thing for them.”

Nicky Byrne was eventually persuaded. He agreed to form a company named Stramsact to take over the assigning of Beatles merchandise
rights. A subsidiary called Seltaeb—Beatles spelled backward—would handle American rights, if any, when the Beatles went to New York in February to appear on the
Ed Sullivan Show
.

Five partners, all much younger than Nicky Byrne, constituted both Stramsact and Seltaeb. One of them, twenty-six-year-old John Fenton, had already been doing some merchandising deals of his own via David Jacobs. Two others, Mark Warman and Simon Miller-Munday, aged twenty and twenty-two, respectively, were simply friends of Nicky’s who had been nice to him during his breakup with Kiki.

Nicky Byrne’s most picturesque recruit after himself was twenty-three-year-old Lord Peregrine Eliot, heir to the Earl of St. Germans and owner of a six-thousand-acre estate in Cornwall. Lord Peregrine’s qualification was that he had shared a flat with Simon Miller-Munday. Although extremely rich, he was eager to earn funds to recarpet his ancestral home, Port Eliot. For one thousand pounds cash, His Lordship received 20 percent of the company.

Only Malcolm Evans, the sixth partner, a junior studio manager with Rediffusion TV, had any definite professional ability of any kind. Evans had met the others at a Nicky Byrne party, the high spot of which was the pushing of a grand piano through the Chelsea streets. “Nicky had got the entire Count Basie Orchestra to play at his party,” Evans says. “I remember that they were accompanied on the bagpipes by a full-dress pipe major from the barracks over the road.”

The contract between Stramsact-Seltaeb and NEMS Enterprises was left to Jacobs to draw up, approve, even sign on Brian’s and the Beatles’ behalf. “I was at my solicitor’s, just round the corner,” Nicky Byrne says. “He told me, ‘Write in what percentage you think you should take on the deal.’ So I put down the first figure that came into my head—90 percent.

“To my amazement, David Jacobs didn’t even question it. He didn’t think of it as 90 percent to us, but as 10 percent to the Beatles. He said, ‘Well, 10 percent is better than nothing.’

Christmas, far from diverting the mania, actually seemed to increase it. The Beatles
became
Christmas in their fancy dress, playing in the NEMS Christmas Show at Finsbury Park Astoria. One of the sketches was a Victorian melodrama in which George, as the heroine, was tied on a railway line by Sir Jasper (John) and rescued by “Fearless Paul the Signalman
’” They had acted such plays and farces for years among themselves. Mal Evans, their second road manager, stood by, laughing, as all did, at the good-humored knockabout fun; Mal had just received a savage tongue-lashing from John for having lost his twelve-string acoustic guitar.

Beatles records made the December Top Twenty literally impassable. As well as “I Want to Hold Your Hand” at number one, it contained six songs from the
With the Beatles
LP—indeed, the album itself, with almost a million copies sold, qualified for entrance to the
singles
chart at number fourteen; the customary seasonal gimmick record was Dora Bryan’s “All I Want for Christmas is a Beatle.”

Two anxiously awaited messages that Christmas went out to the British nation. The first came from Queen Elizabeth, speaking on television from Balmoral Castle. The second came from four young men, unknown a year ago, speaking to their eighty thousand fan club members in a babble of excited voices. They sang “Good King Wenceslas” and wished their subjects “a very happy Chrimble and a gear Near Year.”

“An examination of the heart of the nation at this moment,” the London
Evening Standard
said, “would find the name ‘Beatles’ upon it.” Under the heading “Why Do We Love Them So Much?” columnist Angus McGill said it was because “like well-bred children they are seen and not heard.” Maureen Cleave, in another article, could only conclude that “everybody loves them because they look so happy.”

In marketing terms, the figures they represented were still barely believable. “She Loves You” had sold 1.3 million copies; “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had sold 1.25 million. They had transformed the British music industry from complacent torpor to neurotic—though still unavailing—competitiveness. A tiny record label called Parlophone towered over the frantic A&R men with a run of success, unequaled to this day. For thirty-seven weeks out of the previous fifty-two, George Martin had had a record at number one. He was currently reading a memo from his EMI superiors explaining that he would not this year qualify for the staff Christmas bonus.

Pop music was legitimized—and not only socially. At the end of December a ballet,
Mods and Rockers
, was scored with Lennon and McCartney music. The
Times
published an article by its classical music critic, William Mann, who pronounced John and Paul to be “the outstanding English composers of 1963” for qualities of which they were
probably unconscious. In their slow ballad “This Boy” Mann detected “chains of pandiatonic clusters,” and in “Not a Second Time,” “an Aeolian cadence—the chord progression which ends Mahler’s ‘Song of the Earth.’” He further noticed their “autocratic but not by any means ungrammatical attitude to tonality… the quasi-instrumental vocal duetting… the melismas with altered vowels.” That one article raised for all time the mental portcullis between classical and pop; it also ushered in decades of sillier prose.

No Englishman, however cantankerous, could any longer profess ignorance on the subject. Not even Field Marshal Lord Montgomery, hero of El Alamein, who, speaking from the garden where he still kept Rommel’s desert caravan, threatened to invite the Beatles for the weekend “to see what kind of fellows they are.”

Nineteen sixty-four began on a note of post-Christmas acidity. In the Top Twenty “I Want to Hold Your Hand” yielded its number-one position to a non-Lennon-McCartney song, “Glad All Over” by the Dave Clark Five. Since the Five all came from the same north London suburb, they were greeted as harbingers of a “Tottenham Sound”; they had “crushed” the Beatles, several front-page headlines said. The
Daily Mail
published a cartoon in which a group of girls contemptuously regarded one of their number. “She must be really old,” the caption ran, “she remembers the Beatles.”

As a prelude to America, they were to visit Paris. Brian had booked them a three-week engagement at the Olympia theater, beginning on January 15. The crowd that massed at Heathrow to see them off descried only three Beatles being herded out to the aircraft. Ringo Starr, the newspapers said, was fogbound in Liverpool. Ringo, in fact, most unusually, was having a fit of temperament and had declared he wasn’t fookin’ coming. Across the Channel, further large and small hitches waited.

The Olympia, a wholly Parisian cross between cinema and music hall, was operated by a wily French promoter named Bruno Coquatrix. For three weeks of nightly Beatles shows Coquatrix was paying Brian Epstein a fee that did not cover their travel and hotel expenses—particularly since Brian, with typical expansiveness, had booked the entire entourage into the expensive George V hotel. To offset the loss Brian Sommerville did a publicity deal with British European Airways. The
Beatles were issued with special inflight bags lettered BEAtles. For carrying and prominently displaying these they and their guardians received three weeks’ unlimited air travel between London and Paris.