Chapter II

1 RIAN Epstein's part in this shadow play has been described many Mimes. My own involvement with him was as interviewer for the \ Daily Express, ghostwriter for his autobiography A Cellarful of Noise and then (for twice the Express salary) I became, in 19 64, his personal assistant and Joan and I and our four children followed Brian and the Beatles on the trail to the metropolis. All of our provincial lives were over. We had no choice and maybe, anyway, it was time to go crackers. Hold tight. Close your eyes.

Now on Epstein's staff, I was writing his book, as well as George's column, newly negotiated at a hundred and fifty-pounds a week, and I was Brian's assistant and Beatles' press officer. It was 7964 and it was a very hard and sometimes unhappy year. But I am ahead of the story.

There was a feeling we all had, built into us all that something was going to happen. I felt extremely positive. It was just a matter of time and how to get it happening. Everything had seemed to take years and years. That is where Brian was good. He knew how to get it happening. "We had felt cocky and certain but when Epstein said "you're going to be bigger than Elvis you know", we thought "well, how big do you have to be? I mean, I doubt that". That seemed outrageous yet he did have the right attitude.

The Beatles moved to some hotels. Some crummy places. I forget. I remember the main place we stayed was the Sloane Square Hotel, near the theatre. Then we moved to the President Hotel. John was already married and later Paul went to live at Jane Asher's parents' house in Wimpole Street and Ringo and I got a flat in Green Street, Mayfair.

Brian was good. Just before he died he was on the verge of possible

realisation which might have brought him to another level. The only time that Brian and I had a real good talk about serious matters, outside of business affairs, was just before he died at the last house he lived in, in Sussex, 1967. He asked all kinds of things and wanted to know what T was doing in India and I tried to tell him, and he was very interested.

Brian Epstein died over the final holiday weekend towards the end of the extraordinary "acid summer" of 1967; this was the summer when the Beatles met Mabarishi Mahesh Yogi, when the Monterey Pop Festival and kindred (if smaller) events consolidated a touching belief among the young—and then were hundreds of thousands of young people all over the world who shared this belief—that with sufficient love and faith, the world could be saved from the mistakes inherited from its "straight" masters. Today, on the terrifying edge of the i$8os, this simple approach with its "flower-power" slogans: brotherhood, love, peace and music (usually followed by the word 'Man', borrowed from an earlier black] ia?? generation) is material for jokes and it is dismissed as naive. Maybe it was.

Yet at the end of that of all summers, Brian Epstein was dead. Although he had been adjusting to a more open and sharing perception of life with the Beatles, his usefulness as Father was diminishing, in the natural course of events. The Beatles were no longer touring. Their final concert had been held in 1 (/66, in Candlestick Park, San Francisco. They were all, apparently, settled with women-folk.

With George Martin to keep an eye on them, they were second to none as masters of the recording studio, so Brian's role was changing. I talked to him at his house in Sussex, in May, in that last summer when Joan and I flew over from f^os Angeles for his housewarming party—a psychedelic affair which can be described only (and I shall not use the phrase elsewhere) as 'mind-blowing'.

He was extremely happy—and this was before we had 'taken anything' that evening—-and reflective and he realised that now that the Beatles were established as one of the world's great treasures, with Sgt Pepper soon to re-confirm their supremacy, he had time to expand other interests, set up a country house, manage what was a very busy and profitable international group of companies (with his partners, Nat Weiss¹ and Robert Stigwood) and still take care of