‘He started taking up teaching himself foreign languages. He became very interested in Spain and Spanish. He also went back to amateur acting again.’
His father was naturally worried that he would want to be off again, having built up two prosperous record stores.
Brian himself remembered this feeling of wanting something new, of being bored and frustrated by business. But his three closest friends at the time don’t remember him moaning about that, though they do recall him having other things that bothered him.
Once Whitechapel was established, he had begun to have more of a social life. He used to see a lot of Geoffrey Ellis, a boyhood friend who lived near him. Geoffrey had also gone to a public school, Ellesmere College, and then on to Oxford, where he read Law. Geoffrey says Brian was terribly shy and hesitant in his schooldays. But after Oxford, Geoffrey went to New York, to work for an insurance firm, and they lost contact, for a few years.
There was also a friend called Terry Doran, from a completely different background. He was an ex-secondary-modern schoolboy, now a car salesman, with a good line in Liverpool wit and mimicry. ‘I met Brian by chance one day in a Liverpool pub in 1959. I just fell in love with him from the beginning.’
Geoffrey and Terry were simply social friends, unconnected with his business, at least in those days. But his third friend, Peter Brown, was a friend in the same business. He eventually became Brian’s closest friend of all.
Peter was born in Bebington, went to a Roman Catholic grammar school, worked in Henderson’s, the Liverpool store, and then Lewis’s where he became manager of their record department.
When Brian came to plan the opening of the new NEMS store, in Whitechapel, he asked Peter to take over as manager of the Charlotte Street record department. Peter was getting £12 a week, managing the record department at Lewis’s. Brian offered him £16, plus commission, which he thought was enormous.
‘I soon learned all about Brian’s highly efficient ordering systems. After closing time at six we had to do all the orders. It could take from 40 minutes up to two hours.’
Terry remembers being kept waiting while they were both doing orders. Brian would tell Terry to meet him after the shop closed. ‘I’d go for a drink and end up being there till closing time, still waiting for them.’
There was a slight delay in opening Whitechapel and Peter found that for a few months Brian was still at Charlotte Street with him. ‘It was pretty difficult, officially being the manager, but having the boss still there running things. It was one long row. We were still as good social friends, but I think he was disappointed in me as a businessman.
‘He was very fond of sending notes to all the staff, even though there were so few of us. His stock control system really was marvellous. It ensured that we were never out of stock of any best-selling record. EMI people used to tell us we were the largest sellers in the North.’
Brian always maintained, quite wrongly, that girls didn’t find him attractive. But it was about this time that he started going out with a girl from his record store, Rita Harris.
‘It took him a long time to realize she had fallen in love with him,’ says Peter Brown. ‘We all used to go into Cheshire for a meal, Rita and Brian and me and perhaps one or two others.’
This was the most serious romance Brian ever had with a girl, but it eventually came to nothing.
His love life always appears to have ended unhappily. He did have violent affairs with other people, but they rarely lasted long, which worried him a great deal. He never really came to terms with himself sexually. But he decided that was how he was and he never tried to go against his nature. But he sometimes almost had a self — destruction complex.
‘He was really very lonely in Liverpool,’ says Peter. ‘He felt there were few places he could go and really enjoy himself. Our best nights out were in Manchester. Brian, Terry and I used to drive through there most Saturday evenings.
‘He had a phobia about his unhappy affairs and also another one just slightly, about being Jewish. I think he imagined antisemitism sometimes when there wasn’t any. Perhaps it wasn’t awareness of his Jewishness. Perhaps it was just being part of an environment he didn’t really care for — the sort of successful, provincial, furniture-shop Jewishness, when his real nature was towards the artistic and the aesthetic.
‘But of course he could be a good businessman when he wanted to, saving pennies and being mean when he suddenly felt he had to. We had lots of rows over money. But it just happened now and again. He was mostly a very lavish spender.’
It’s easy to overstate the complexities of Brian’s personality and interests at this stage in his career. His parents knew little of his worries. They certainly didn’t see any effects of them, although his mother did remember him becoming restless, once both NEMS departments were thriving, and starting to look for something new.
He went off in the autumn of 1961 for a fiveweek holiday in Spain, the longest he’d had. He took with him a slight feeling of frustration, in his personal life as well as in his business life. Nothing serious, perhaps. Just a feeling of unfulfilment. He’d been too busy really, building up NEMS for the last four years, to ever seriously become worried by it all, the way he had done in the army. One or two did consider him a poor little spoiled rich boy. But as far as most people could see, he was hardworking, charming and gay, with a family who loved him.
But he obviously felt he needed something new to fill his life, preferably something in some way artistic. RADA had been an outlet of a sort, the failure of which had stopped his artistic longings for a while. But there is nothing more insidiously frustrating than an artistic leaning, when one’s artistic tastes are greater than one’s artistic talents, or so it seems.
That was Brian Epstein on 28 October 1961. He was 27. So far he had been a failed schoolboy, a successful furniture salesman, a failed soldier, a successful record salesman, a failed actor, a successful record store executive. When into the shop came a customer asking for the Beatles.
16 brian signs the beatles
The famous Epstein index system was beaten. All these lovely little bits of dangling string couldn’t help. Brian Epstein had to admit that he’d heard of neither a record called ‘My Bonnie’ nor a group called the Beatles.
It’s strange, in some ways, that he hadn’t heard of the Beatles. After all, he’d been advertising and writing a record column in Mersey Beat for several months. His eyes must have passed over their name in articles many times. But then of course his interest in Mersey Beat was purely professional, as a retailer taking space in order to sell records.
He was only interested in those groups which had made records, because records were what he sold. None of the Liverpool groups being written about in Mersey Beat had made a record. So there was no reason for him to take any notice of them.
He was aware that there were flourishing beat groups and clubs in Liverpool. But he wasn’t interested in them personally. At 27, he was well out of the age range for the coffee bars and beat groups. He’d also been, for most of the previous five years, a full-time businessman, with little time for any sort of leisure activities, apart from the theatre.
But he was annoyed by his lack of knowledge of the new record he was being asked for. Surely if this group, wherever they came from, had produced a record, he must know about it. So when Raymond Jones made his request he promised to get it for him and wrote down on a pad: ‘My Bonnie. The Beatles. Check on Monday.’