Shout! (60 page)

That night the Beatles’ party found themselves ensconced with the Maharishi’s three hundred other conference students, in the spartan bedrooms of a teacher-training college. Later they went out to the only restaurant open late in Bangor—serving Chinese food. Only after a long and rowdy meal did they realize they weren’t carrying enough money between them to pay the bill. In London, any restaurant would have pressed the dinner on them gratis, but Chinese waiters in a remote North Wales seaside resort were clearly a somewhat different proposition. Things had begun to look decidedly tricky when George pried open the heel of one of his sandals and produced a wad of ten-pound notes he had secreted there.

The following day the Beatles used a press conference with their new guru to announce that they had given up taking drugs. “It was an experience we went through,” Paul McCartney said. “Now it’s over. We don’t need it any more. We think we’re finding new ways of getting there.”

One of the journalists present was George Harrison, their old
Liverpool Echo
acquaintance—for Bangor is just in the
Echo
’s circulation area. Harrison was with them the next afternoon—Sunday—as, fully initiated into Spiritual Regeneration, they strolled around the college grounds.

“There was a phone ringing inside,” Harrison said. “It rang and rang. Eventually, Paul said, ‘Someone had better answer that.’ He went in and picked up the phone. I could hear him speaking. Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah…’ Then I heard him shout, ‘Oh, Christ—
no
!’”

• • •

That Friday, Brian had suddenly asked Joanne down to spend the Bank Holiday weekend at his house in Sussex. He also told her to invite a mutual friend of theirs, the Scots singer Lulu. But he had left it too late: Both Lulu and Joanne herself had other arrangements. As Brian did not seem too disappointed, Joanne presumed he would be entertaining a large house party. “He went off on his own on the Friday afternoon. He seemed really bright and happy that day. He’d put the top of the Bentley down. He was waving to me as he drove off.”

At Kingsley Hill, other disappointments waited. A young man whom Brian had hoped to get to know better that weekend would not, after all, be able to make it. Peter Brown had not arrived yet. He was still in London, trying to get Cynthia Lennon off to Bangor by car. Peter, and Geoffrey Ellis from the NEMS office, would be the only house guests. They were old friends and familiar companions. Brian, after two quiet weeks, had looked forward to more exciting company.

The three had dinner served to them by Brian’s Austrian butler. Afterward, in an evidently restless mood, Brian began telephoning numbers in London that supplied what we would now term male prostitutes. But all were fully booked. Brian grew more edgy and irritable and finally announced he was returning to London. Peter and Geoffrey were not offended, nor particularly surprised. Walking out was a habit of Brian’s. Peter went with him out to the Bentley and told him he oughtn’t to drive after the wine he’d drunk with dinner. “Brian said I wasn’t to worry. He’d be back in the morning before I woke up.”

By this time, one of the agencies he’d contacted had found three boys and dispatched them on the sixty-mile journey to Sussex in a black London cab. But Brian was now well on his way back to London.

Geoffrey Ellis telephoned Chapel Street shortly after midnight to confirm that he had arrived safely. Up to then, Peter and Geoffrey had half-expected him to reappear at Kingsley Hill after a drive round the countryside. The call was taken by Antonio, Brian’s Spanish town butler. Antonio said that Mr. Epstein had come in a little time ago and had gone straight upstairs. He tried the intercom to the master bedroom, but got no reply. Peter and Geoffrey were reassured. Brian had managed the car journey safely and had obviously succeeded in falling asleep.

When Peter and Geoffrey got up, late on Saturday morning, Brian had not returned. They thought of ringing Chapel Street, but decided to let him sleep. At about five that afternoon, the telephone rang. It was
Brian. He told Peter he had been asleep all day and was still very drowsy. Peter said that if he was returning to Sussex it would be safer to take the train. Brian agreed to telephone just as he was setting off so that Peter could collect him by car at Lewes station. Peter waited all Saturday evening for his call.

By Sunday morning, Antonio and his wife, Maria, were beginning to be worried. Brian was still in his room. The Spanish couple had heard nothing from him since breakfast time the previous day. Nor had he gone out, as was his habit, after dark. The Bentley was still as he had left it on Friday night. At the same time, they knew his irregular ways and how angry he could be. A lengthy discussion in Spanish ensued before Antonio decided to take the initiative.

He telephoned Peter Brown in Sussex first, but Peter had gone with Geoffrey Ellis to the village pub. He then telephoned Joanne Newfield at her home in Edgware. Joanne had helped cope with Brian’s two suicide attempts: She had also seen several false alarms. She drove at once from Edgware through the Bank Holiday silence to Chapel Street. “The moment I walked in,” she says, “I felt uneasy.”

Ceaseless hammering on Brian’s door and buzzing of his bedroom intercom brought no reply. Even then, they hesitated to break down his door. They had done so, unnecessarily, once before and Brian had been furious. By this time a doctor had arrived—not Brian’s regular, Dr. Cowan, but another man who understood his case. Peter Brown had rung up again from Sussex and was waiting on the line for news.

Antonio and the doctor broke down the bedroom suite’s outer double doors. Beyond the dressing-room lobby the curtains were drawn. Brian lay on his side amid the litter of documents and correspondence spread over the bed. Joanne approached and shook him. “Even though I knew he was dead, I pretended to the others that he wasn’t. ‘It’s all right,’ I kept saying, ‘he’s just asleep, he’s fine.’

“The doctor led me out of the room then. Maria was there, screaming, ‘Why? Why?’ Peter Brown was still holding on on the phone.

“A little while after that, something really strange happened. We broke into Brian’s room at about two o’clock. At three o’clock, the
Daily Express
rang up and said, ‘We’ve heard that Brian Epstein’s terribly ill. Is there any truth in it?’ Only the four of us knew what had happened and none of us had contacted any press. It was never explained how the story got out to the papers.”

Reporters and photographers were already massed in Chapel Street when Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis arrived from Sussex. Alistair Taylor, the NEMS office manager, had been sent for, and also Brian’s lawyer, David Jacobs. Peter Brown got through to Bangor and broke the news to Paul. Then he telephoned Brian’s brother, Clive, in Liverpool. Joanne heard Clive shout: “You’re lying! You’re lying!”

Brian’s body was taken away in a makeshift police coffin. Joanne attacked a photographer who pointed his camera at it. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of people seeing Brian in a thing like that.”

By early evening, there were television pictures of the Beatles leaving the Maharishi’s conference through forests of microphones and lights. “How do you feel,” they were asked, “about Brian Epstein’s death?” It emerged that they had been to see the Maharishi again and had been told that Brian’s death, being of the physical world, was “not important.” Their faces, even so, looked ravaged among the garlands and the bells. “He was a lovely fella,” John said bleakly.

The story was told in full on Bank Holiday Monday in newspapers read at the seaside or in back gardens. “Brian Epstein Death Riddle: Valet Finds Pop King in Locked Bedroom.” It was widely assumed—and still is—that he committed suicide. The story gained weight—not instantly, since Fleet Street still shunned the word—when his homosexuality became public knowledge. To the larger British public in 1967, that was reason enough to want to die.

The inquest, on September 8 at Westminster Coroner’s Court, found that Brian had died from an overdose of Carbitrol, a bromide-based drug that he had been taking to help him sleep. That the overdose had not been all at once but cumulative, over two or three days, seemed to rule out the possibility of suicide. The suggestion was that Brian, in a gradually more drowsy state, had not realized he was exceeding the proper dose. The police inspector called to Chapel Street reported having found seventeen bottles of various pills and tablets in his bathroom cupboard, in his briefcase, and beside his bed.

Nat Weiss traveled from New York to attend the inquest, bringing with him Brian’s last letter—the one that seemed so full of confidence in the future. The coroner, Mr. Gavin Thurston, recorded a verdict of accidental death from “incautious self-overdoses.”

One person who knew him, and also knew well a particular burden
he carried, remains convinced that Brian’s death was neither accident nor suicide. According to this, necessarily anonymous, ex-associate, Brian was the victim of a murder contract taken out on him three years earlier in America after the Seltaeb merchandising fiasco.

In 1964, certainly, any number of American businessmen bore him a bitter grudge. The confusion over manufacturing licenses, and consequent cancellation by the big stores of seventy-eight million dollars’ worth of Beatles merchandise, caused several manufacturers to lose a fortune. “One man even had a heart attack and died. I was at a meeting when Lisson said he was going to kill Brian Epstein. I thought it was just American bullshit. I said, ‘No—wait until the courts have finished with him.’”

In August 1967, the courts had finished. The twenty-two-million-dollar lawsuit between NEMS and Nicky Byrne had been settled for a cash payment of ten thousand dollars to Byrne—enough to buy himself a yacht and sail off to start a new life in the Bahamas.

Just before he left New York Nicky Byrne received a mysterious telephone call. “This man’s voice, very low, very polite, said: ‘Mr. Byrne. I understand that your suit against Brian Epstein is settled, is that right?’ I said: ‘Yes, and what’s it got to do with you?’ But whoever it was just hung up.

“In August, I was in Florida—actually on my boat—and I got another call. That same very quiet, polite voice. ‘Mr. Byrne,’ it said, ‘you’re going to hear soon that Brian Epstein has met with an accident.’”

No one has ever explained those two telephone calls to Nicky Byrne, nor explained the curious fact that Brian’s death was known in Fleet Street less than an hour after Joanne Newfield burst into his darkened room.

For the murder theorists there is one further and deeply significant detail. The signature on the Seltaeb contract—the signature that gave five strangers 90 percent of Beatles merchandise royalties, and so ensured the back-tracking litigation that followed—was that of Brian’s lawyer, David Jacobs. In the autumn of the following year Jacobs was found in his garage hanging by a length of satin from one of the beams. The inquest verdict was suicide. But several of his friends and associates were later to remember that in his last weeks alive he had seemed profoundly upset and worried about something.

• • •

Brian’s funeral, at Long Lane Jewish cemetery in Liverpool, was a private family affair. To his mother’s distress he was not buried next to his father but in a separate avenue of undecorated memorials. The Beatles did not attend. George Harrison sent a sunflower that Nat Weiss threw into the open grave.

Five weeks later, a memorial service was held for Brian at the New London Synagogue, St. John’s Wood. It was only a short walk from there to Paul’s house and Abbey Road and the studios where Brian ushered in the Beatles to meet George Martin on that summer day long ago in 1962.

The Beatles did attend this time, as did George Martin, Dick James, and scores of people who were wealthy and well known only because of the young man who came down from Liverpool in his Crombie overcoat; who blushed easily and never went back on a promise; who could be ecstatic but never happy; who somehow caught the lightning and then somehow let it go. The rabbi’s text was chosen from the Book of Proverbs: “Sayest thou that the man diligent in his business, he shall stand before kings.”

Jewish cemeteries as a rule do not permit flowers. But after the funeral a tall, quietly spoken man visited the rabbi at Long Lane synagogue and obtained special dispensation to lay a small posy on Brian’s grave each year on his birthday. It was Joe Flannery, his one-time companion in the nursery: the one-time lover who’d never fallen out of love with him.

PART FOUR

WASTING

SIXTEEN

“WE’VE GOT TO SPEND TWO MILLION OR THE TAXMAN WILL GET IT”

S
ince Brian had died without making a will, his whole estate passed automatically to his mother, Queenie. Nor was it worth anything like the seven million pounds commentators had estimated. Lush living had absorbed—even exceeded—a vast yearly income that had never been left to accumulate for one second into capital. What Brian did not spend on himself, on other people, or on the roulette table, he invested into offshoot companies and loss-making personal projects, like the Saville theater. Toward the end, shortage of ready money had led him to borrow heavily from NEMS Enterprises. His debt to his own company was found to be in the region of one hundred fifty thousand pounds. His final cash estate was realized chiefly through the sale of his two houses and his cars, paintings, and artworks. The residue, after death duties, was a little more than three-quarters of a million pounds.

Mrs. Epstein, bereaved within six weeks of both her husband and elder son, was in no state to face the complexities instantly arising from her inheritance. It fell to her younger son, Clive, to try to sort out Brian’s tangled business affairs. Clive, as cofounder of NEMS Enterprises, took over the chairmanship, pending discussions on the company’s future.

Tony Bramwell, George Harrison’s friend, visiting NEMS a few days after Brian’s death, found the half-dozen directors in a state of total confusion. No one at NEMS realized yet that Brian had virtually sold the company to his Australian associate, Robert Stigwood. “They were all squabbling about who was going to manage the Beatles,” Bramwell says. “It sickened me. I just walked out.”