Shout! (25 page)

John Lennon took out his boredom in writing for
Mersey Beat
, and in letters to Stu Sutcliffe in Hamburg—long letters in pencil on exercise book paper, full of scribble and doodles, poems that started seriously but petered out into self-conscious obscenity and anguished cries about the “shittiness” of life. The correspondence could not be shown to Aunt Mimi or Millie Sutcliffe, teeming as it did with swear words and a running joke whereby Stu took the character of Christ and John, that of John the Baptist. It seemed that Stu, by staying on in Hamburg, had done the adventurous and enviable thing.

One letter from Stu mentioned that Jurgen Vollmer, a photographer friend of Astrid’s, was soon going to be in Paris on vacation. John and Paul decided on the spur of the moment to use some money John’s Scottish aunt had given him to go across to Paris and meet Jurgen. They went without a word to George or Pete Best, and despite the imminence of several important bookings. For almost a week they lived in Montmartre and hung around the Flea Market, looking for sleeveless jackets like the one Jurgen wore. They also persuaded Jurgen to cut their hair in the “French” style that Astrid had given Stu and George. They returned to Liverpool to find George and Pete Best disgusted with them; for a time, it seemed that the Beatles were finished. Bob Wooler and Ray Mc-Fall persuaded them to continue, each lecturing John and Paul sternly on the need to be reliable.

What did it matter anyway? The Cavern was always there, with another nightlong session to trap them underground. Up on Mathew Street, where Paddy Delaney stood in his evening dress, a cloud of steam from the close-packed bodies below drifted out under the solitary light.

PART TWO

GETTING

SEVEN

“WHAT BRINGS MR. EPSTEIN HERE?”

E
ach Wednesday night in the late 1930s little Joe Flannery would be dressed in his nightclothes and taken to spend the evening at the house of his father’s best customer, Harry Epstein. Joe’s father, Chris Flannery, was a cabinetmaker specializing in the heavy sideboards sold at Epstein’s Walton Road shop. “Mr. Harry” was a stickler for quality, refusing to accept any piece whose drawers did not slide in as easily upside-down. But on Wednesday evenings formality relaxed. The Flannerys and the Epsteins drove into Liverpool together to attend the weekly wrestling bouts. Seven-year-old Joe would wait for his parents at Mr. Harry’s house, playing upstairs in the nursery with the Epsteins’ son, Brian.

This other boy was not like Joe. He was slender and delicate; he had a nanny to look after him in his own softly lit upstairs domain. He did not speak like Joe, nor like any Liverpool child. And he had many beautiful toys. Joe, in particular, loved the model coach that Brian had been given to mark the 1937 coronation of George VI. It was the state coach in miniature, made of tin but magnificently gilded, drawn by a dozen plumed tin horses, spurred on by liveried tin postillions and grooms.

Brian knew how much Joe loved the coronation coach. To grant, or arbitrarily refuse, permission to play with it gave him a sensation he slowly recognized as power over someone older and stronger. Though he himself cared little for the coach, he worried that Joe, because of loving it so much, would somehow gain possession of it. So one night while Joe was there, he stamped on it until he had broken it.

In 1933, the wedding took place of eighteen-year-old Malka Hyman to twenty-nine-year-old Harry Epstein. The match was approved of, uniting as it did two highly respectable Jewish families and two comparably thriving furniture firms. Harry’s father, Isaac, owned the Liverpool shop he had founded as a penniless Lithuanian immigrant at the turn of the century. The Hymans, Malka’s people, owned the Sheffield Cabinet
Company, mass producing such items as The Clarendon, a bedroom suite that, in the twenties and early thirties, graced many a suburban English home.

Malka received a comfortable upbringing and a boarding-school education. In 1933, she was a slender, rather refined and artistic girl whose only serious complaint against the world was the way it had Anglicized her given name. Malka is the Hebrew word for queen. So Queenie was what her family, and her new husband, called her.

Her first child was born on September 19, 1934, at a private nursing home on Rodney Street, Liverpool. It was a boy, and as such a cause for rejoicing to grandparents concerned with the perpetuity of business. To Queenie, the baby in her arms was something more beautiful than she had dared to imagine. She called him Brian because she liked the name, and Samuel for the sake of the family and the scriptures.

The new baby was brought home to substance and comfort. Queenie’s dowry from her parents was a handsome modern town house in Childwall, one of the smartest Liverpool suburbs. One ninety-seven Queens Drive was a five-bedroom residence with bay windows and a sunrise design on the glass over the front door, which a uniformed maid would open to visitors. A nanny became necessary when, in 1935, Queenie gave birth to her second son, Clive John.

The Epstein family shop occupied a prominent place on Walton Road. A row of tall display windows, extending around the corner onto Royal Street, offered a range of furniture and home requisites, from sideboards to standard lamps, whose appearance was not especially chic but whose quality and durability could always be relied on. Next door stood the North End Music Stores, a little double-fronted shop that had been there since the days when young men and women bought sheet music to sing around the parlor piano. Jim McCartney’s was one of the many local families that bought pianos from NEMS on the installment plan. Subsequently, Epstein’s had taken over the little shop, extending its stock to phonographs and radios.

Harry Epstein worked hard, but enjoyed his pleasures and sharing them with his wife. They were keen bridge players, fond of films and the theater, well known, in a hospitable community, for the generosity and style of their entertaining. Once a week, they would drive into Liverpool to dine in the Sefton Restaurant at the Adelphi, a hotel then at its splendid apogee. In Ranelagh Place, next to Lime Street, the polished automobiles
slid up the ramp. Doormen hastened out to welcome them into the majestic, shiplike interior of the entrance hall.

To their two small sons Harry and Queenie Epstein gave the security, not only of Jewish family life but also of a middle class untroubled, as yet, by any social guilt. For Merseyside, in that time, was racked by unemployment. A few miles from Childwall, on gray and unknown dockyard streets, the men massed at dawn, like livestock, for the favor of even half a day’s work at four and sixpence. Only a mile or so away ragged children played barefoot on flinty cobblestones. But in Childwall, the nursery lights glowed softly; there was Auntie Muriel or Uncle Mac on the radio, and thin bread and butter for tea.

Brian left babyhood rapidly, learning to walk by the age of eleven months and to talk soon after that, clearly and interrogatively. In looks he was like his father, dark-eyed and round-faced, with wavy, light-brown hair. His temperament was Queenie’s, most notably in his love of refinement, and a feeling for style manifest even as a toddler. He would stand in his mother’s bedroom while she got ready to go out, and gravely confer with her about which dress and accessories she should wear. Like Queenie he loved the theater, its world of romance, strange light, and make-believe.
The Wizard of Oz
, the first film he ever saw, left him astounded with its wistful fantasy for days. At the same time he seemed normally robust, hammering wooden shapes into a plywood board at his first kindergarten school, Beechanhurst on Calderstones Road.

In 1940, during the bombing of Liverpool, Harry Epstein moved his family to relative safety in Southport on the West Lancashire coast. Brian attended Southport College, but hated it so much that Queenie transferred him to a smaller prep school. Despite his obvious intelligence and alertness he did not seem to do well there either. But now it was 1944, and safe to move back to Liverpool. Ten-year-old Brian was arrayed in a new black blazer and sent to Liverpool College, the most exclusive and expensive of the city’s fee-paying academies.

Before he had reached his eleventh birthday the college asked Harry and Queenie to remove him. It was alleged that he had done a dirty drawing in the mathematics class. According to Brian, this had been a design for a theater program, legitimately adorned by the figures of dancing girls. Privately the headmaster told Queenie that in other respects, too, Brian had proved to be a “problem child.” He himself was
never to forget the shame of sitting on a sofa at home and hearing his father say, “I don’t know
what
we’re going to do with you.” The words produced one of the furious blushes by which Brian betrayed even the smallest discomfiture.

He had not sat for the eleven-plus exam, and so could not be sent to any of Liverpool’s excellent grammar schools. His parents were forced to settle for another small private academy that Brian, predictably, loathed. Queenie by now had begun to suspect that the fault might not be entirely on his side. Anti-Semitism was a habit in which many otherwise agreeable British people still overtly and comfortably indulged. The nation that had recently pitted itself against the Nazi Holocaust saw no harm in using words like “Yid” or “Jewboy” and in passing such expressions on to its children.

The Epsteins decided to try a school that actually welcomed Jewish boys. The nearest that could be found was Beaconsfield, near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. There, despite Queenie’s forebodings, Brian seemed to do a little better. He took up horseback riding and was encouraged to paint and draw. He made a friend of another Liverpool boy, Malcolm Shifrin, also the son of furniture people. The experiment was so successful that his younger brother, Clive, came to Beaconsfield to join him.

He continued to show a precocious love of luxury and refinement. Even when quite small, his greatest treat was to go with his mother and father for dinner at the Adelphi. Throughout the boy’s infancy Harry and Queenie sacrificed vacations abroad in favor of annual seaside visits to Llandudno in North Wales, or St. Anne’s. One wet summer in Llandudno, when Brian was eleven, as a change from variety shows, Queenie took him to a concert by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. From that moment he began to love and learn about classical music. Another year, at St. Anne’s, the family struck up acquaintanceship with Geraldo, a bandleader famous for his BBC radio shows. Brian was invited to go into Blackpool to watch Geraldo make a recording. Queenie remembers how he sat spellbound in the studio when the red light went on for silence.

His formal education had yet again run into squalls. Shortly to leave Beaconsfield, he was busily engaged in failing the entrance exams for major private schools such as Rugby, Repton, and Clifton. At last he was able to satisfy the requirements of Clayesmoore, a small private school still further away, in Dorset. “As soon as he got there, he started to
grumble,” Queenie Epstein remembered. “Oh, those grumbles of his were enormous.”

Clive, his younger brother, a placid, conscientious, practical boy, had passed through prep school without trouble or complaint. Clive was good at exams, and so easily got into Wrekin College, a private school of the higher echelon in Shropshire. On the strength of Clive’s performance, the Wrekin head agreed to accept Brian also.

Wrekin was his eighth school. He stayed there for two years, in a torpor faithfully described in his school reports. His only aptitudes seemed to be for art and—he discovered—acting. He found that he could face an audience without blushing, and that he enjoyed speaking lines. School dramatics brought him friends, at times even won him official commendation. But some worm of reticence, nurtured by all his previous scholastic failures, prevented him from sharing this new success with his parents. Queenie Epstein always remembered driving down to Wrekin to see a school play about Christopher Columbus, and failing to spot Brian where she expected to see him, among the supporting cast. He had not told her, so she did not realize, that he
was
Christopher Columbus.

He left school at fifteen, without sitting for his school certificate. He had written home that exams were not needed in the career he had chosen. Throughout his final terms he had come top of his class in art and design. He wanted to go to London and become a dress designer.

Few enough people in 1950 would have wished to see their sons make such a choice of profession. To a northern Jewish family, with its age-old view of filial duty, no more disturbing or wounding suggestion could have emanated from an elder son. Harry Epstein was outraged and made no secret of it; Queenie, though more sympathetic, could see no means of granting Brian’s wish within convention. The great scheme was buried quickly, before it could reach the ears of relations.

Another idea, that he might study art, languished as quickly under his father’s remorseless practicality. With no exams behind him, no aptitude save that of upsetting his parents, there was nothing left for Brian but to submit to heredity. In September 1950, shortly after his sixteenth birthday, he started work as a furniture salesman in the family’s Walton Road shop.

A woman came in to Epstein’s that day to buy a mirror. Brian was allowed
to deal with her under the critical eye of his parental superiors. By the time the customer left he had persuaded her that what she really needed was a dining-table that cost twelve-pounds.

He was, he discovered, a born salesman. Walton Road was not a grand thoroughfare, nor were they grand people who shopped for furniture at I. Epstein & Sons. This young man who served them, with his dapper suit, solicitous manner, and upper-class voice, was decidedly an asset to the shop. Salesmanship awoke in him what eight costly schools could not—the will to work hard and be organized and efficient. He found he enjoyed arranging things for display, and window dressing. And he was doing something that did not disappoint, but actually pleased, his father.