This year marked the first major recognition of Global Beatles Day on June 25. Started in 2009 as a grassroots project by superfan Faith Cohen, it commemorates the June 25, 1967, live worldwide televised performance and recording of “All You Need is Love.” Apple Corps even released an official new, colorized version of the performance from the Our World broadcast.
So, it’s by happy coincidence that the very next morning Beatles scholar/author Philip Norman Zooms in from his home in the UK. His 1981 Shout! is universally recognized as the first legitimate, non-sanctioned biography of the group. And he’s penned individual tomes on John, Paul, and George, along with other rock superheroes like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Buddy Holly.
“The Beatles actually didn’t even want to do that show because they told [manager] Brian Epstein they were done with live performances. Brian not only persuaded them but also convinced them not to just play a Sgt. Pepper track and write a special song for it,” Norman says. “And so, we have the greatest anthem of the 1960s because of Brian Epstein. And his name was not mentioned once yesterday.”
In Norman’s latest book, Mr. Moonlight: Brian Epstein and the Making of the Beatles (368 pp., $32.50, Da Capo) he takes the most-detailed dive ever into the triumphant and tragic life of a hugely significant figure in the group’s lore. One without whom the Beatles might have remained just a footnote in music history.
“Writing the other books, I wrote about Brian to some extent. But the full magnitude of his achievement was extraordinary. There was no rule book for being a pop manager,” Norman says. “He also faced awful anti-Semitism and homophobia. Even at the height if his fame and success and career. It was always waiting in the wings.”
One thing that Brian Epstein seemed to have in abundance was an unshakeable faith in the potential of “his boys.” Even when record company executive after executive must have dropped the cigars from their mouths when the impeccably dressed and posh accented 27-year-old across the table (whose family was in the furniture business) claimed that the Beatles—a band from of all places Liverpool—“would be bigger than Elvis.”
Norman says Brian Epstein was a “fascinating and complex character” whose approach was a mixture of great daring, shyness and self-doubt.
“And two years later, they were bigger than 20 Elvises!” Norman says. “And that’s because of Brian’s amazing instinct, intuition, of course, luck. He did not dilute the Beatles’ music or personality. He treated them like his children and built a protective wall around them. The fame could have actually torn them to pieces. Brian played by the rules, but he was breaking them as well.”
After all, it was Brian who whipped the scruffy, leather-clad, on-stage swearing and loose-playing combo that graced the stage at the dank Cavern Club into the smart, suited, and focused band that showed up on The Ed Sullivan Show in the States.
“He made them acceptable to a general pop audience and teenagers and their parents. Even Queen Elizabeth II could be a Beatles fan. And suddenly, everybody wanted everything British,” Norman says. “For this, he never got any public honor or word of thanks from the government.”
Norman draws on research but more importantly first-hand interviews with Epstein’s friends, family, and associates, some decades old. Names like Joe Flannery, Brian Sommerville, Lonnie Trimble and Brian Joyce who don’t appear in almost any other Beatles books have their say here. Even if it’s from beyond the grave.
“When I started researching Shout! at the end of the ‘70s, people told me I was crazy. Because everything there was to know about the Beatles was already known,” Norman says. Not lost to the fact that since that book came out hundreds of books on the Beatles’ lives, music, and impact have appeared in its wake.
Norman remembers he even avoided using the word “Beatle” in chasing interviews, instead telling potential subjects that he was working on a tome about “pop culture in the ‘60s with a special emphasis on [music}.”
Brian Epstein was still a mystery to even his closest relations—as close as they could possibly get. And he was prone to intense mood shifts, accentuated by a taste for pills, booze, and gambling, while already prone to insomnia and depression.
Being a closeted gay man in a country where it was still actually a crime to be homosexual made his social life dicey. And not helped by the fact that he was most attracted to encounters with individuals known colloquially as “rough trade.”
“He wasn’t just a Jekyll and Hyde character. He was Jekyll and Hyde and about 20 other people besides” his lawyer/friend Nat Weiss tells Norman.
“Brian unfortunately had this streak of masochism, which led him to look for sexual partners, young, straight men, in the most dangerous place: the Liverpool docks,” Norman adds. “He would be beaten up by ‘queer baiting’ gangs hunting for homosexual men. Beaten up all the time! It finally got into the papers and he was recognized by an older man who blackmailed him.”
Norman adds that Epstein was always afraid the Beatles would “find out,” even though they already knew. Lennon would purportedly alter the lyric “Baby, you’re a rich man too” to “Baby, you’re a rich fag Jew” when he wanted to taunt his manager with his familiar cruel streak.
Lennon played this somewhat sexual infatuation to his benefit when it came to band/managerial issues. And for years there’s been speculation of what exactly happened when Epstein and Lennon took a two-week Spanish vacation alone—immediately following the birth of John and wife Cynthia’s son Julian.
When a prominent Liverpool DJ made a crack about their closeness at a party, a drunken Lennon punched him out, sending him to the hospital. A financial settlement and lukewarm apology ensued. “John will never suffer. He’s the only important one. The others don’t matter but I’ll always take care of John” Norman reports that Epstein told a friend early in the band’s career.
A disastrous earlier deal that Epstein made also lost millions of dollars when he signed a 90 percent/10 percent split with a company who handled the band’s merchandising—with he and the Beatles on the 10 percent end when it should have been flipped.
Then again, no one could have predicted the incredible torrent of Beatles wigs, guitars, games, toys, figures, clothing, bubble bath, and talcum powder that would be manufactured only to immediately fly off shelves. A more favorable but still inadequate split would be later negotiated.
By 1967, Brian Epstein was coming to the end of his management contract with the Beatles, and he was despondent that they wouldn’t keep him on. After all, they really didn’t need him as much anymore since they stopped touring and had emerged as their own men.
Brian Epstein would die that year at the age of 32 from the effects of taking too many sedatives, mixed with alcohol. It’s long been debated whether this was accidental or suicide, but Norman throws another theory in to the pot: That Brian Epstein may have been murdered.
“No one can be sure, but one thing that’s absolutely certain is that it was not suicide. He took his religion very seriously and suicide a sin in Judaism. His mother had also been recently widowed, and he wouldn’t have left her,” he says.
Norman suggests a murder tied to that bad merchandising deal, which in a winding series of events led to a manufacturer’s heart attack and his son’s declaration of vengeance against Epstein. He also notes that notorious English twin gangsters Ronald and Reginald Kray at one point wanted to get very involved in Beatle business.
“Dreadful villains,” Norman notes. “My researcher interviewed Reggie Kray once and he talked about Brian ‘going and dying’ but saying ‘it wasn’t us.’” Norman also notes that Epstein’s deathbed scene seemed staged. And why was someone who succumbed from a purported barbiturate overdose bleeding from the nose?
Only one paper even reported that observation at the time. Furthering the weirdness was that Epstein’s lawyer partner in the merchandising deal, David Jacobs, was later found hanged to death by a satin cord in his garage.
Brian Epstein’s story has already been the subject of his own autobiography early in the Beatles years (the ghostwritten A Cellarful of Noise), a graphic novel (The Fifth Beatle), and another bio by Ray Coleman (The Man Who Made the Beatles). In 2024, his story was dramatized on film in Midas Man. Norman was not a fan, calling it “terrible” and “ghastly.”
Now 83 years, old, Philip Norman is working on another book but declines to reveal the subject. Though betting money says it won’t be a solo bio of Ringo Starr to complete his quartet.
“Ringo would not be quite a book,” he says with that famous dry English wit. “Perhaps more of a booklet!”
