Beatles (26 page)

I remember a time when

Everyone I loved hated me

Because I hated them
.

So what, so what, so

Fucking what
.

I remember a time when

Belly buttons were knee high

When only shitting was

Dirty and everything else

Clean and beautiful
.

I can’t remember anything

without a sadness

So deep that it hardly

becomes known to me
.

So deep that its tears

leave me a spectator

of my own stupidity
.

And so I go rambling on

With a hey nonny nonny no
.

Stu in Hamburg was filling his letters with the same sort of wailings and anguish, only his began to be much worse than John’s. Stu wrote in his letters as if he were Jesus. John, thinking at first it was all a joke, pretended to be John the Baptist.

One day, towards the end of 1961, Stu collapsed at the art college in Hamburg and was brought home. ‘He’d been getting a lot of headaches,’ says Astrid, ‘but we just put it down to working too hard at college.’

Stu went back the next day but in February 1962, it happened again. He collapsed, was brought back to Astrid’s and was taken to his room. This time he stayed there. He wrote long 30-page letters to John, did endless drawings and paintings or just walked round and round his room. He had violent headaches and temper tantrums which made it difficult for Astrid and her mother to look after him. He did have medical treatment, but nothing seemed to help. ‘He came back from a specialist one day and said he didn’t want a black coffin like everyone else. He’d just seen a white coffin in a window and he wanted that.’

Stu died in April 1962 after a brain haemorrhage. ‘He lived so much in such a short time,’ says Klaus. ‘Every second of his short time he was doing something. He saw ten times more than other people. His imagination was fantastic. His death was a tragedy. He would have done so much.’

There is no doubt about Stu’s artistic talent. Professor Paolozzi thought he was obviously destined to succeed. He had won prizes in Liverpool at an early age. Since his death, his
paintings have appeared in numerous exhibitions in Liverpool and London. He had had a great influence on John and the rest of the Beatles, leading their fashion in hair, clothes and in thoughts.

‘I looked up to Stu,’ says John. ‘I depended on him to tell me the truth, the way I do with Paul today. Stu would tell me if something was good and I’d believe him.’

Even today, they still miss him. It’s strange to think that by 1962, the one who was looked upon as the cleverest Beatle had died.

The death of Stu was in a way a macabre climax to their year of apparently getting nowhere and feeling depressed. But back in Liverpool, just before Stu collapsed, the something John was looking for was at last about to happen.

It happened, just to be precise, at three o’clock on the afternoon of 28 October 1961. A youth in a black leather jacket called Raymond Jones walked into the NEMS record store in Whitechapel, Liverpool, and asked for a record called ‘My Bonnie’ by a group called the Beatles. Brian Epstein, who was behind the counter, said he was terribly sorry. He’d never heard of that record, nor of a group called the Beatles.

The Epstein family fortunes were founded by Brian’s grandfather Isaac, a Jewish refugee from Poland, who came to Liverpool at the turn of the century. He opened a furniture store, later called I. Epstein and Sons, in Walton Road, Liverpool. This in turn was taken over by his elder son, Harry, Brian’s father.

It is assumed by many people in Liverpool that the Epsteins have always owned NEMS, North End Music Stores, the name which Brian later made famous locally, through the record shop. But NEMS had been going long before the Epsteins. Jim McCartney, Paul’s father, remembered having a piano which came from NEMS during the First World War.

The Epsteins didn’t take over NEMS till the thirties. It was at the end of the block in Walton Road which contained I. Epstein and Sons and they had always had an eye on it for expansion. Harry saw that its record and music business would fit easily into his furniture firm, but it was the site as much as anything that he wanted when he eventually bought it.

Harry married into another highly successful Jewish furniture family, the Hymans from Sheffield. He married his wife Queenie in 1933 when she was 18 and he was 29.

Brian, their elder son, was born on 19 September 1934, in a private nursing home in Rodney Street, the Harley Street of Liverpool. Their second son, Clive, was born 23 months later.

With two sons, the fortunes of the Epstein furniture firm seemed assured for many decades to come. Harry and Queenie were living in a large five-bedroomed detached house in Childwall, one of Liverpool’s most desirable residential areas. The Epsteins lived in this house, 197 Queen’s Drive, for the next 30 years, until Clive left to get married. Today it is lived in by the Dean of Liverpool.

The Epsteins lived in some style up to the outbreak of the war. They had two living-in staff – a nanny for the boys and a general help.

All that Mrs Epstein can remember of Brian as a baby is that he was the most beautiful child she’d ever seen. ‘As he began to walk and talk, he developed a very inquiring mind. He always wanted to know everything.’ Brian’s earliest memories are of the great excitement of being taken to visit his relations in Sheffield.

His first school of any sort was the Beechanhurst Kindergarten in Liverpool where he hammered wooden shapes into a plywood board. In 1940, when he was six years old, Liverpool was under heavy bombing and the family were evacuated first of all to Prestatyn, in North Wales, and then to Southport, where there was a large Jewish community. Brian was sent to Southport College where he began his formal education, the beginning of a very long and very unhappy process.

‘I was one of those out-of-sorts boys who never quite fit,’ so he recorded in his 1964 autobiography (
A Cellarful of Noise
, Souvenir Press). ‘I was ragged, nagged and bullied by boys and masters. My parents must have despaired of me many times.’

In 1943, the family returned to Liverpool and Brian entered Liverpool College, a private fee-paying school. The following year, at the age of ten, Liverpool College expelled him.

‘The official reason was for inattention and for being below standard. I’d been caught in a maths lesson doing drawings of girls. There were other crimes I was supposed to have committed. I’m sure my failings were many.’

He remembered arriving home and sitting on a sofa, with
his father saying ‘I just don’t know what on earth we’re going to do with you.’

His mother thinks that in later years he tended to overestimate his own failings at school. She agrees he was hardly happy or successful at any of them, but she thinks it was often as much the fault of the school system as anything. ‘It was just after the war. Schools were hard to get into. There was none of the freedom they have today. They just threw you out if they didn’t like you.’

Brian himself thought that, apart from his own inability to fit in, there might also have been some anti-semitism. ‘I do remember being called Jew or Yid. But it didn’t seem to mean much more than the way a red-headed boy gets called Ginger.’

After his expulsion from Liverpool College, his parents found him another local private school, but they kept him there for only a few weeks. They realized it was the sort of pseudo-posh school that took advantage of such parents, caring little for education but a lot for taking money from wealthy parents who couldn’t get their kids in anywhere else.

In the end they found him a good Jewish prep school called Beaconsfield near Tunbridge Wells. Here he took up horse-riding, which he loved, and art which he also loved and was encouraged to do for the first time.

At 13 he sat the common entrance exam. This is the examination needed to get into any of the good Headmasters’ Conference public schools. He failed this miserably, but it didn’t stop his parents trying to get him into one of them. Rugby, Repton and Clifton all turned him down. He went eventually to the sort of establishment that will take anybody. This was a very hearty, outdoor one in the West Country. He was forced to play rugby. He was very unhappy.

But his father didn’t give up trying and in the autumn of 1948, just on Brian’s 14th birthday, he got him into Wrekin College, a well-known and established public school in Shropshire.

He didn’t look forward to Wrekin as he’d eventually begun to settle down at the West Country school. He was getting on
with his art and at last making a few friends. He wrote in a diary at the time: ‘Now for the Wrekin I hate. I am going there only because my parents want me to … it is a pity because it has been a great year for me. The birth of new ideas, a little more popularity.’

He eventually settled down at Wrekin, at least he found ways of putting the time in. His interest in art continued. He became top of the class in art and decided that he was going to be a dress designer.

‘I wrote to my father that I wanted to be a dress designer, but he was against it. He said it wasn’t the sort of thing for young men to do.’

At the same time, he developed an interest in acting. At home in Liverpool his mother took him to many plays. ‘I used to take him first of all to folderol sort of things. Then later to improve his mind I took him to Peter Glenville. I also took him to hear the Liverpool Phil.’

Brian took a star part in the school’s production of
Christopher Columbus
. ‘His daddy and I drove down to see it,’ says his mother. ‘We sat through it all and the headmaster came up and asked us afterwards if we’d liked Brian. He was just so good we hadn’t recognized him.’

He left Wrekin when he was 16, without taking his school certificate. No one thought he could ever have passed it. His father was still against him becoming a dress designer, but Brian decided he wanted to leave school and get a job all the same.

‘After seven schools, all of them rotten, I’d had enough. I’d been thwarted in the only thing I wanted to do, so I just accepted anything. On 10 September 1950, very thin, pink-cheeked, curly-haired and half-educated, I reported for duty at the family store in Walton, Liverpool.’

He started as a furniture salesman on £5 a week. The day after he joined he sold a £12 dining table to a woman who had come into the shop to buy a mirror.

He found he was a good salesman. And he enjoyed it. He also started taking an interest in the design and layout of the
shop. His father had been naturally pleased that his elder son had at last decided to come into the business. Brian found, to his surprise, that it pleased him as well.

‘Brian always had beautiful taste,’ says his mother. ‘And he always appreciated lovely furniture.’

But Brian didn’t think the store’s window displays were all that lovely. He started experimenting, doing what was considered at the time very daring things, such as putting chairs with their backs to the window. His father thought perhaps he was doing things a bit quicker than was necessary, but didn’t complain as he was so pleased that his son and heir was settling down well in the career he had chosen for him. As further experience he decided to send Brian to another firm, not connected with them, to do a six months’ apprenticeship.

Brian spent the six months at The Times furniture store in Lord Street, Liverpool, still on £5 a week. He seems to have done well there too. When he left they presented him with a Parker pen and pencil set. (The pen was the one he loaned to Paul McCartney a few years later, to sign his first contract.)

After the six months, he moved back to Walton. He began to take over the designing of the whole store. ‘I enjoyed it, especially trying new things. I enjoyed selling as well, watching people relax and show trust in me. It was pleasant to see the wary look dissolve and people begin to think there were good things ahead for them and I would be the provider.’

He had a few rows over his plans for window dressing. ‘They wanted all the windows jam-packed. I preferred very little in the window, perhaps just one chair. I was also crazy about contemporary furniture. It was just coming in and I wanted everybody to know about it. I think if you show the public something lovely, they’ll accept it.’

On 9 December 1952, in the midst of his brave new schemes for I. Epstein and Sons, he was called up for national service. If school horrified him, the thought of the army was terrifying. ‘I’d been a poor schoolboy. I was sure I was going to make the lousiest soldier ever.’

He applied for the RAF and was made a clerk in the Royal Army Service Corps. He did his basic training at Aldershot.

‘It was like prison and I did everything wrong. I turned right instead of left and when I was told to stand still I fell over.’

He managed to get through his square bashing, after a fashion, and even had the notion that he might be chosen to be on parade for the Coronation. The year was then 1953. He thought the Coronation sounded glamorous and exciting and it would be nice to be part of it. But he wasn’t chosen. Instead he went round the pubs and clubs and got drunk.

He was about the only ex-public schoolboy in his intake who didn’t become an officer. But in his off-duty hours, dressed as always in impeccable taste and spending his time in smart West End clubs, he could easily have passed for one.

After Aldershot, he managed to get a posting to Regent’s Park Barracks in London, one of the most desirable postings for young officers around town. He had lots of relations in London and managed to get out and enjoy himself. He drove himself back one night in a large car, wearing a bowler hat, pin-striped suit and carrying an umbrella over his arm.

As he entered the barracks, the guard saluted him, two soldiers confined to the guardhouse jerked their heads in Eyes Right and a clerk shouted ‘Good night, sir.’ But an officer inside wasn’t so easily misled. ‘Private Epstein. You will report to the company office at 10.00 hours tomorrow morning charged with impersonating an officer.’