The Star Maker

By BRIAN McCONNELL and BERNARD FALK

They called him the Prince of Pop... the Napoleon of Show Business. And Brian Epstein earned his fame and his nicknames the hard way.

He once said of his struggle to the top: “It was tough. You shout and you fight and you claw and if you haven’t got faith and tenacity, you give up. I kept on.”

But Epstein, the Star Maker, was more modest about his greatest show business find - the Beatles. He repeatedly denied that their success was due to him.

Thirty-two-year-old Epstein stumbled across the Beatles when he was selling records in his family’s Liverpool store.

Ruthless

People kept asking for their records, so - in November, 1961 - he went to the Cavern Club to hear them.

A month later, he signed them up - and Epstein, the former public school boy who had been a window-dresser, salesman and soldier, was on the way to making them millionaires and becoming one himself.

Many things drove Epstein on to success. He was a formidable man whose bland smile and affable charm could hide a ruthless streak.

But mainly it was his craving for friends that gave him the talent of finding unknowns and making them famous.

For even in the limelight, surrounded by the big names of show business and the fans, Epstein was a lonely man.

And loneliness was the thing he feared most.

The four Beatles were among the few people he regarded as real friends.

He liked them, he said, because they were natural.

One cause of his shyness and loneliness was his unhappy days at boarding school.

Social

He left at 16 and decided to be “good at things I like, rather than work at things which will give me social company.”

And it was selling records in the North End Musical Stores - which gave his enterprise the name NEMS - that Epstein heard of the Beatles.

As their manager, he believed in them, and had many rejections from recording companies.

The first record was not a success, and they operated at a loss in the first year.

Then, as Epstein put it: “Well over a year’s hard work, a bit of luck, and we were in.

“I didn’t make them. I was not their boss. I was their friend.”

Besides the Beatles, the Epstein “stable” included Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and other big “names.”

In 1964, Epstein moved from Liverpool to London, bought a £31,000 house in Belgravia, and ventured further into business.

He backed several successful London shows and gained a controlling interest in the Saville Theatre.

Last night, the lights went out at the theatre after the first house.

Of the Beatles, by the Beatles and for the Beatles..

By DONALD ZEC

Brian Epstein discovered the Beatles.

The phrase is short, but its significance, whether measured in millions or by the way it jolted an antiquated world right down to its hardening arteries, is a phenomenon of the century.

It must now stand as the untimely epitaph - to one of the most extraordinary, almost unparalleled careers in the history of entertainment.

Brian Epstein did not merely unleash a new, exciting sound. He harnessed its vibrant energies, lived to see it orchestrate the young revolution now pulling the rug out from under the entire world.

Those of us who recoiled with faint derision at John, Paul, George and Ringo’s thundering and unscissored debut were soon to have our old-fashioned smiles knocked sideways.

To Epstein the swinging sound first heard in that dark, dank cave in Liverpool was something raw, fresh, unfathomable. But Epstein was no cigar-smoking business manager in for the fast percentage and out again when the heat cooled off.

He was of the Beatles, by the Beatles, for the Beatles.

He loved their restless music, poured their lagers and lime, lived with them, jazzed around with them, erected the tough yet silken curtain between them and those jealous for a piece of the action.

Embraced

He was part of the “scene.” The moods, the fancies and the fantasies, the transcendental “experiences,” the new cults and cultures that embraced the Beatles, embraced Epstein, too.

He loved them. I know that because he told me so - with the quiet candour that won friends and made enemies.

And they loved him. Not because he helped to make them millionaires (although there were no audible complaints on that score).

They rooted for him because he was ahead of them in the minefields, pointing a way, offering a hand.

John Lennon has said: “He’s the only one we take things from. He’s one above us. We couldn't be run by anybody but him - not anybody.”

The question, too early to be asked but soon to be answered is this: Can the Beatles, the most lucrative quartet in pop entertainment - survive without Epstein?

A dim, but mercenary entrepreneur of the old school might have been glad to squeeze this talented foursome dry, chew them up and spit them out on to the open market. But Epstein, like the Beatles music, was out of a different and more substantial mould.

Tough to deal with, determined, shrewd, coolly suspicious - he was all that to be sure. But anyone who goes out on safari into a jungle must know how to deal with the man eaters and the rest of the devious carnivores.

Handsome

The big Hollywood magnates who welcomed this slim, handsome, deceptively genial gent into their close-carpeted offices were convinced they could con the cuff-links off his Turnbull and Asser shirts.

In about thirty seconds flat he had them reaching for their ulcer pills, meekly accepting his terms, lodged uncomfortably in their gullets.

It was hard enough to take from any business manager. Coming from this polite, diffident 32-year-old made grit in the eye a more acceptable hazard.

My last meeting with him was over lunch at his period house in Belgravia. Cilla Black was there. She, too, was an Epstein discovery. She, too, like the Beatles, was raised from street level to a penthouse suite.

The intuitive skill of Brian Epstein resided in his sure knowledge of what millions of young people wanted in music - what excited him.

Agents told him that Cilla Black, nasal of voice, homely of face, wouldn’t earn a penny at the box office. Epstein advised them to queue for the next performance. She now tops the bill, is starring in a film.

She too, will feel that a mighty comforting arm slipped from her shoulder last night....

Epstein entertained me in a house which, like its owner, was stylish and defiantly extravagant - a luxurious mixture of mosaics and old masters. An 8ft. blow-up of the handsome face of El Cordobes, the bullfighter, adorned the bathroom wall.

The famous Spaniard was his friend. So too, was Nureyev the ballet dancer.

Vanity

But unlike those blazing extroverts Epstein was a mild egocentric masquerading as an enigma. He permitted himself the odd, amusing touch of vanity - like having as his telegraphic address simply “Nemperor” - the “nem” for his vast company NEMS Enterprises. The rest you will grasp for yourselves.

His was no rags-to-riches tale. He came from an Orthodox Jewish middle-class family; went to RADA; ran a record shop, discovered the Beatles, turned the pop world on its slightly-deafened ear, taking it all inscrutably over a cup of China tea.

In the last few months Epstein, like one or two of the Beatles, entered the bizarre world of experiments in “mind perception.” He has declared in interviews his experiments with marijuana and LSD. And like others who have “turned on” he strenuously defended it.

Did he know that LSD could have extremely damaging and sometimes fatal effects, Mike Hennessey of the Melody Maker asked him recently.

Epstein replied: “I did have some apprehension, but I took that risk. I think LSD helped me to know myself better and I think it helped me to become less bad tempered.”

Whatever the effects of the drug, there can be no doubt that Epstein had withdrawn from the more raucous and spectacular elements of show business.

He lived almost like a recluse, more the mystic, less the manager.

The mysticism has acquired a harsh and tragic reality.

To manage this sometimes difficult, sometimes beguiling, often downright cussed group required a kind of gentleness, kindness and goodwill.

Brian Epstein had those qualities and considerable skill besides.