#brian things

Like, hoodies are perfect so long as the sleeves are long enough to bunch up and put a little hint of weight on there. But then when it's t-shirt/sleeveless weather, it feels Wrong to walk around without bracers or wristbands or a watch or something on there

Peter Bourne (works as Bette Bourne) and Brian Epstein

Peter was twenty-three, homosexual and a rising actor. Brian admired his Pierre Cardin suits and ties and his articulacy. Immediately Brian ‘quietly and shyly’ confessed that more than anything he wanted to be an actor. He told Peter that he had left R.A.D.A unsuccessfully. ‘I said, “Well, be an actor! Look, you’ve got all this money, you can make a choice. Change your name and go into rep!”

...

Brian went several nights to the theatre to develop his friendship with Peter Bourne. They visited restaurants after the show, and Brian introduced him to his friends in the pop scene: Cilla Black and Peter Noone. ‘It was wonderful to be met at the theatre by a Bentley, impressing all these actors,’ says Bourne.

Epstein was, says Bourne, ‘very afraid of being gay. I hadn’t come out yet, and in the seventies I got involved with the Gay Liberation thing. But in those days, it was very discreet and quiet. There were plenty of bars and all the gays were having a good time; I was quite happy about it. I loved the gay world. But Brian was very frightened. He was very sort of discreet about it. At that point everybody was made to feel there was something wrong with being gay.’

Brian sometimes visisted Peter’s home in Gloucester Terrace, but he also trusted him sufficiently to give him a key to his Knightsbridge flat. There, a surly John Lennon suspected Bourne’s role as a new boyfriend of Brian when he already had one. ‘I think John approved of the other boy and I was somebody strange and new.’ Brian, says Bourne, ‘absolutely worshipped John Lennon.’

‘I used to put on a really posh accent in those days to get into the theatre. John didn’t like that at all. Ringo was always very socialable. I think I was very much the pretty boy of the moment, probably one of several people. Brian had a very beautiful American boyfriend and they’d been having a row. I think I was unconsciously being used as the usurper, in a way.’

Brian and Peter’s conversations often swung round to the theatre. ‘I felt sorry for him because he was so frustrated in acting. He thought it was silly I should try to persuade him to continue in the theatre. I told him Laurence Olivier got chucked out of Central School of Drama and Rex Harrison too.’

...

Talking of their relationship, he says: ‘The sexual thing was practically nil. I liked him very much and tried to discuss some things with him. He wouldn’t. He was afraid. I don’t think he knew himself. He’d gone up a road that in a way he regretted. In spite of all his money and all his power, the Beatles got the adulation. He got the fame, he got the money, the extras, the frills, but he never really got what he wanted.’ That, says Bourne, was ‘to be there, on the stage, in the limelight.’

...

‘The pressure of of being gay in those years was enormous. Particularly for him. As well as delighting him, the situation he was in alarmed him. He couldn’t afford, for instance, to have a feminine image of any kind, any indiscretion like that. Because the rock world image was so heavily butch and male in those years. Even in the theatre, if there was any indication from the stage that I was gay, I wouldn’t have got the job, wouldn’t be in work. Brian knew all this, instictively, as far as his role was concerned.’

‘Being gay obviously made him very lonely because he couldn’t discuss it with his closest friends. They all knew. They were okay about it: “Well, Brian is gay and that’s it.” But they didn’t want to know anything about that, really. I got the impression he didn’t talk to people intimately very much. Lennon was probably the only one.’

After two months of keen friendship, exchanging Christmas gifts, going to the theatre, dinner dates and parties together, Brian and Peter agreed to split. ‘It was probably clear to him that I wanted more intimacy, wanted to be more intense and more real, perhaps. I wasn’t his type. That was really the truth. I was a bit upset: he asked me for the keys back so I suppose he ended it.’ The self-effacing Bourne looks back on himself during that period as ‘an incredibly superficial, vain young man who liked all the perks in life.’ He does not regard himself as having been important in Epstein’s life, but he enjoyed being taken to restaurants like the White Elephant in Curzon Street, Mayfair, where Brian was able to nod at Peter O’Toole and Sian Phillips on the next table...

‘He wanted to know about my world, things to do with Shakespeare, Shaw, Chekhov, which he thought was real theatre. I was in the real theatre, appearing with classical actors. He wanted a piece of that. It could be that I was as close as he was likely to get. Now I’m older I can see exactly what his trip was. It certainly wasn’t me. I know what he was into. I didn’t want to look at it then. It wasn’t what I was coming up on. He liked me but when it was time to go I had to give the key back. And that was that. And we both knew.

‘I think he had a lot of self-hatred. I think it was connected with being Jewish. A lot of Jewish gays I’ve met since then have told me the conflict is incredible, trying to be Jewish and trying to be gay and trying to make things work. But Brian didn’t have the advantage of latter-day Jews who were able to talk about it and adjust. He was totally locked in his cell. Nobody was talking about the social problems, as we did during the seventies. This was the early 1960s, and it must have been incredibly stifling.’ 

(Brian Epstein: The Man Who Made The Beatles by Ray Coleman)

Bonus: 

( This and a few others might be my favorite panels in the entire book series. )

Hey anon! Lovely question!

Brian did see The Leather Boys.

"Brian was always proud that he had an original copy of My Fair Lady. This was our type of music. We liked stage shows, musicals and musical films. This is the music we enjoyed." Joe Flannery

"I managed to get a copy of ‘The War Game’ to show at home this weekend and cannot say how impressed I was." Brian in a letter to Derek Taylor. As it mentions in this post for the quote, Brian wrote to many friends urging them to watch this drama-documentary

Dirk Bogarde films would have definitely been on his radar, as Joe Flannery specifically mentions The Servant and Victim as important films from his youth. Brian was also a big fan of Judy Garland.