The pity of it was, Brian Epstein wasn’t some scruff whose catalogue of failures represented an inability to reach goals that lay beyond his grasp. He was rather the sort, who, by the long-standing rules of English society, ought to have done well enough at something.
He had been born into middle-class comfort and privilege, the eldest son of a respected Jewish merchant family in Child-wall, a well-appointed, leafy suburb of Liverpool. His father, Harry, worked in his own father’s successful furniture store; his mother, Queenie, came from a family that produced a popular line of furniture that the Epsteins sold. By the time Brian arrived on 19 September 1934 (Yom Kippur, auspiciously), the little family – which would grow only by one more son – was installed in a five-bedroom, two-bathroom house. Save for a wartime evacuation to a northern seaside community during the German air assault on Liverpool’s ports, it was the only family home Brian would ever know.
As the first-born son of a well-off Jewish family, Brian was naturally presumed to be destined for great things: scholastic excellence, perfect manners, social standing. He would have a career, make a name, sire a family. In all of this, for years, he would disappoint Harry and Queenie. ‘I was not,’ he would one day admit, ‘the best of sons.’
Once Brian began attending school, his presumed future began to dissolve. He had no particular scholastic aptitude. He disliked sports (though he did, schoolmates recall, like wearing dashing sporting uniforms). He was, by his own confession, something less than a people person: ‘With little to offer in the way of brilliance and nothing in the way of acceptable personality I was not a very popular individual … I was not very good at forming friendships.’
Partly due to the family’s needs to evacuate Liverpool, partly due to his own slovenly school habits and petulant manner, partly due to the fact that he failed to forge one single, enduring bond with any classmate or institution, he attended five grammar schools and two colleges before removing himself altogether from academe and the hopes of a profession in letters, law, medicine or science. Just before his sixteenth birthday, he went to work for Harry; it would have to be business for him—and the family business at that.
At the time, I. Epstein and Sons, the store run by Harry with his Polish immigrant father Isaac, was sufficiently respected and popular to prosper even in the lingering shadow of rationing and economic stagnation that smothered English confidence in the early ‘50s. Everyone shopped there for furniture, musical instruments and the like, even families who had to count their pennies like the James McCartneys of Speke; wee little Paul first played ‘Chopsticks’ on a piano sold to his father by Harry Epstein. Brian, maturing into something of a proper young man, with a new, becoming fussiness about his dress and manner, took to the responsibility of being a third-generation furniture peddler. At last something seemed to engage his attention and maybe even his ambition.
He began, too, to socialise, dating some of the daughters of Liverpool’s most prominent Jewish families and slipping – with caution but undeniable engagement – into the city’s world of closeted homosexuals. There would long be a side of Brian that was drawn sexually to women – at least one local lass whom he chatted up at a boozy soirée in the early ‘60s remembered him as ‘a better necker than anyone else at that party’. But increasingly he found himself attracted to men in a fashion more profound and lasting than the groping, bonding, transitional stereotype of English public school life; he had even matured and grown sufficiently sure to confess his bent to his parents and brother who, though disappointed, nevertheless stood by him.
Now, with a bit of money and his blossoming poshness and the taste of success at something, finally on his tongue, he was building a complete life for himself. And then came the letter: 9 December 1952: an able-bodied 18-year-old man, Brian Epstein was conscripted into His Majesty’s armed forces. It’s a measure of how much Epstein had absorbed Harry’s and Queenie’s notions of what sort of man he should be that his immediate inclination was to join the RAF, the most elite corps he could think of (and, he somehow surmised, the easiest). Instead, he was assigned to the army and sent to train at Aldershot, 40 or so miles south-west of London.
Brian hated Aldershot: ‘If there is a more depressing place than this in all Europe, then I would not be interested to know of it.’ And he hated the army as much as he had hated any of the colleges he had struggled through: ‘If I had been a poor schoolboy, I was surely the lousiest soldier in the world.’ Agreeing with Brian’s self-assessment, his commanders assigned him as a clerk to the staff of the Royal Army Service Corps and stationed him in Regent’s Park.
If conscription had seemed a prison sentence, then this specific station was the most hoped-for of reprieves. Brian had relatives in West London – and now he had the whole capital as his furlough ground. He immersed himself in the city’s pleasures – the restaurants, the coffee bars, the theatres and nightclubs, the gay demi-monde—with ready ease. A little too ready, actually. He rolled back to his barracks one night in a large hired car, dressed like a City gent: bowler, pinstripe suit, brolly – the works. The guards and several others took him for an officer, and he accepted their salutes; the next morning, a testy superior charged him with impersonating an officer. He lost his liberty privileges and, with them, his equilibrium. Before long, he was seeing a psychiatrist and, less than a year after showing up for induction, he was given a medical discharge. ‘I ran like a hare for the Euston train,’ was how he remembered his release.
Back to the furniture racket then, and the Liverpool social whirl. Brian and his chums—similarly elegant young homosexual sons of comfortable families—became gourmets and night owls, now driving out to sample the fare at country inns, frequenting the city’s discreet gay bars, perhaps taking in a performance of the Liverpool Playhouse repertory company and afterwards lounging with the players in a pub or coffee bar. It was in this latter setting that the next unlikely fancy popped into Brian’s head: surely nature had bred him so grandly for the stage. With the help of a few friends connected to the theatre, he would enrol in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art – he would be an actor.
As with school and soldiering, it made a poor fit: ‘Brian was not a natural mover,’ recalled the actress Helen Lindsay, who helped him prepare for his RADA audition. ‘He had no flow in his movements. His movement was completely unrelated to his speech.’ Nevertheless he applied himself and on his twenty-second birthday he passed the audition and was accepted into the most prestigious acting school in the world.
Once again, he had London available to him, and he took to it with Epicurean zeal. There were concerts and parties and restaurants and liaisons with both men and women. His teachers weren’t overwhelmed by him, but they recognised that he projected a palpable presence and might yet learn to be an artist. But he was miserable, drinking too much, lonely for all his apparent company and antipathetic to the actorly personality he was meant to be cultivating in himself: ‘The narcissism appalled me.’ Before the first academic year had ended, he had resolved to leave.
And this wouldn’t be the worst news he would bring home. On a Wednesday night just after Easter 1957, Brian stepped off a tube train at Swiss Cottage, en route to his Hampstead bedsit. He used the station men’s room and, when he emerged, noticed a young man eyeballing him. The look they exchanged hit a nerve in Brian immediately: this was a gay man, he reckoned, and although he had recently turned his mind to quelling his homosexual inclinations he was undeniably excited. He walked around the tube station a few times, continuing to return the other man’s gaze, and then, agitated and a little scared, stepped out into the street. When he saw that he was being followed, he exchanged a few words with the fellow, a conversation that was entirely innocent in the strictest sense but utterly explicit in another. Brian broke away, and a minute or three later saw the man again, this time in the company of another man; both were watching him. He walked away; he loitered; he agonised: What did they want?
They wanted to arrest him. ‘Persistently importuning for immoral purposes’ they called it, claiming that it wasn’t just a single undercover officer but four (and then, the next day in Marylebone Magistrates Court,