Brian Epstein: the brilliant but troubled man behind the Beatles

Epstein was flying in the face of the trends, but he was offering the future – always a tricky thing for the music industry to handle, preferring as it does simple formulae despite the perennial demand for novelty. His retort would have been laughed off in early 1962, particularly as it came from the manager of a group from Liverpool, but Epstein’s prediction came true. The Beatles eclipsed Elvis, and Epstein had been first to conceive of the thought, even before the group themselves.

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Assuming The Beatles’ management in December 1961, Epstein quickly started as he meant to go on. He tightened up their date sheet, gave them itineraries, got more money, and started to seek a record contract. He also got them out of the black leather outfits they had worn for most of 1961 and into smart Italian-style suits. John Lennon later complained about it, but this was the statement of a reformed sinner. All the group agreed to the change because they all wanted success.

Epstein grounded The Beatles. He gave them unconditional love in the widest sense – which they sometimes abused, but basically respected and appreciated – and deftly oriented them within the show-business mores of the day. The Beatles would, from 1965 on, change the music industry forever, but until then, becoming a successful pop group involved doing variety shows, wearing uniform clothes, and being polite and disciplined. With his theatrical training and interest in presentation, Epstein turned a group of Liverpool hard rockers into a prototypical Boy Band.

Within 18 months of his involvement, The Beatles had the top single and album in the UK: From Me To You (seven weeks at the top) and Please Please Me (#1 for 30 weeks). By autumn, they had become a national phenomenon and, by April 1964, Beatlemania swept the US, with the top five singles in the Billboard charts. This was a cultural revolution, and – apart from the group and producer George Martin – the man who had engineered it was Brian Epstein.

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Who was Brian Epstein?

Born in September 1934 as the first child to a comfortably off Jewish family, Epstein was an outsider by the time he was a teenager. His education was interrupted by frequent school moves and his army career (this being the age of enforced national service). Dissatisfied while working in his family’s business, NEMS (North End Music Stores) – as a teenager he had expressed the desire to be a dress designer – he went to the prestigious RADA drama school for a year in 1956, but didn’t stay the course.

Nevertheless, his theatrical bent served him in the record shops that NEMS opened after his return. Epstein developed an ear for future pop hits – for instance, buying in hundreds of copies of John Leyton’s Johnny Remember Me well before it rose to number one – and a flair for presentation that made NEMS one of the most important record retail outlets in the North West. With an ordering policy of at least one copy of almost every single released, it was a magnet for Liverpool youth, including the four fledgling Beatles.

Despite his business successes, he was drifting, directionless and dissatisfied. Yet all this changed on 9 December 1961, when Epstein went to see The Beatles play a lunchtime session at the Cavern Club. He was aware of the group name from posters around the city and, more pertinently, from customer requests for their German-only release My Bonnie. When he met them that day, he recognised at least one as a regular customer in NEMS. But that wasn’t what hit him.

“Something tremendous came over,” he stated in his 1964 autobiography A Cellarful of Noise, “and I was immediately struck by their music, their beat, and their sense of humour on stage. They were very funny; their ad-libbing was excellent. I liked them enormously… I thought their sound was something that an awful lot of people would like. They were fresh and they were honest and they had what I thought was a sort of presence, and – this is a terrible, vague term – ‘star quality’. Whatever that is, they had it — or I sensed that they had it.”

This was an instinctive decision, indeed a conversion. In the Beatles, Epstein found his cause. He adored them as artists, and they provided a focus for his wish to change the world. Much of his restlessness and unhappiness was caused by one incontrovertible fact – he was homosexual (queer, in the parlance of the era) at a time when society was very proscriptive of same-sex relationships.

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Any physical expression of his sexuality was illegal, leaving him open to violence, imprisonment and blackmail (especially since he took risks). Many gay men ignored these oppressive conditions and got on with their lives, but Epstein was sensitive, angry and burning at injustice. In April 1957, he was arrested for ‘persistent importuning’ by a police provocateur in a Swiss Cottage toilet (public toilets, or ‘cottages’, were frequently used by gay men for sex, which was a fact frequently exploited by ‘pretty policemen’ who would indicate interest and then put the handcuffs on).

He was devastated. In a hand-written document to be used in his defence, he railed: “The damage, the lying criminal methods of the police in importuning me and consequently capturing me leaves me cold, stunned and finished.” But this unpleasant event gave him a wider understanding of what it was to be an outcast: “I feel deeply, because I have always felt deeply for the persecuted, the Jews, the coloured people, for the old and society’s misfits.”

It was this realisation that led Epstein away from a conventional career path into pop management. In late 1961, he found an outlet for his visions in a scruffy group that nobody wanted. The Beatles also felt like outcasts at that point, and both parties saw something in each other that went beyond business. They recognised a mutual need. Once the Beatles had found success, Epstein did another extraordinary thing in terms of pop management. Instead of the customary Svengali act, he set them free artistically. In this, they were encouraged by producer George Martin.

Rather than tell the Beatles what to do and what songs to play, as was standard practice at the time, he worked with the group to help them realise their vision. Anything more unlike Elvis – who was railroaded during the sixties by manager ‘Colonel Tom’ Parker into a series of poor Hollywood films with dreadful songs – could not be imagined. By 1965, the Beatles were on top of the world, globally successful on their own terms.

Sexuality, drugs and rock and roll

Epstein himself was extremely rich and validated – not only with The Beatles, but with his other acts like Cilla Black and Gerry and the Pacemakers – but success did not bring stability. The patterns of his early life were set. He continued to indulge in risk-taking behaviour, both in his private life and his leisure activities, such as his reckless gambling habit and a reliance on pills and prescription drugs that began to take over his daily life.

The year 1966 was when The Beatles found the limits of their freedom, most notably when a chance comment by Lennon about the group being “more popular than Jesus” caused a furore. Death threats and burnings of Beatle products overshadowed the 1966 American tour. Epstein conducted a successful damage-limitation campaign – the shows went ahead but the Beatles had had enough, and unilaterally decided that they would give up touring.

For Epstein, this was a shattering blow. He loved the planning and the activity of the tours. Without this function, he felt his connection with the Beatles weakening. His poor mental state was compounded by the fact that, during the Beatles’ last concert, he had been robbed of money and incriminating documents by his then-partner, ‘Dizz’ Gillespie.

The year 1966 was when the Beatles found the limits of their freedom, most notably when a chance comment by Lennon about the group being “more popular than Jesus” caused a furore. Death threats and burnings of Beatle products overshadowed the American tour

At the end of September 1966, he attempted suicide, but was found by assistant Peter Brown and rushed to hospital. After recovering, Epstein, knowing the Beatles would not reconvene for three months, took on a West End venue called the Saville Theatre and showcased pop concerts. One of his first promotions, in November 1966, was the Four Tops, then at number one with Reach Out, I’ll Be There. In January 1967, he undertook a merger between NEMS and the company of Robert Stigwood, manager of Cream and later the Bee Gees. He began taking LSD, which appeared to have a beneficial effect on his psyche.

There was still Beatle business, though: the renegotiation of their EMI contract in January 1967, the Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever single, and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. In one of his last acts for the group, Epstein arranged a video recording of their new single to be played as Britain’s segment on the Our World global television link. On 25 June 1967, All You Need Is Love beamed to over 400 million viewers in 25 countries.

Brian Epstein's death

On 27 July 1967, male homosexuality was partially decriminalised. Exactly a month later, Epstein was found dead at his Belgravia home. Although the circumstances were not crystal clear, it seems likely that his death was an accidental prescription-drug overdose. Although this made national news, none of Epstein’s obituaries mentioned that he was homosexual. The relative liberalisation of the mid-sixties had, for him, come too late.

There is a distinct irony in the fact that Epstein died so soon after the passing of legislation that would, in time, make life better for homosexual people. With the Beatles, he helped to instigate the social changes that were the backdrop to the liberalising legislation of the sixties, but he was unable to benefit. The stigma had gone too deep. The guilt and poor self image that built up over all those years in the shadows made it impossible for him – as it still does for many gay men – to avoid extreme risk-taking and the attendant consequences.

For years, history was not kind to Epstein. He died early in the story and was not around to defend himself. He was accused of personal and financial misdemeanours, most particularly in the disastrous story of the Beatles’ US merchandising company, Seltaeb. No doubt he did make mistakes, but this was an extraordinary event of unreckoned magnitude. Yet, simply, the Beatles would not have happened without Brian Epstein. In this respect, he should be counted as a man who altered the course of 20th-century history.

This article was first published in the February 2018 issue of BBC History Revealed