Without Brian Epstein, the Beatles might well have been just another Liverpool band.
It has been said time and again about the Jewish manager of the world’s first pop boyband, the man who ushered Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and John Lennon from obscurity in 1961 to unprecedented international stardom by 1967.
With today’s release of the new biopic Midas Man, chronicling Epstein’s rise to success alongside the Fab Four as well as his premature death at the age of 32, the extent of his influence and achievements are given another commendatory re-examining.
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Epstein, a Liverpudlian Jew often lauded as the fifth Beatle,discovered the burgeoning band after establishing a successful record store out of his family’s furniture shop in Liverpool.
The store, around the corner from the Cavern Club, was where Epstein first saw the Beatles perform on 9 November 1961. Three weeks later, he approached John Lennon and offered to be the band’s manager.
McCartney recalled his father immediately approving of the idea: “He thought Jewish people were very good with money,” McCartney said years later. “That was the common wisdom. He thought Brian would be very good for us… And he was right. If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian.”
Brian Epstein (1934 – 1967), manager of the Beatles, in London on 10 March 1964. (Photo by Larry Ellis/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Epstein swiftly transformed the group, trading out their jeans-and-leather-jacket greaser look – inspired by the concurrent popularity of heartthrob Elvis Presley – for the tailored matching suits the world would come to know them by. He got the Beatles a recording contract in June 1962 with EMI’s smallest label, Parlophone, headed by Sir George Martin, after being rejected by all the major British record companies. At the time, it was one of Parlophone’s cheapest deals.
Drummer Pete Best was replaced by Ringo Starr and, in less than a year with Epstein as manager, the Beatles were well on their way to becoming the most successful band the world had ever seen.
Epstein was born on Yom Kippur in 1934 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Liverpool. His father was a former warden of the Greenbank Drive Synagogue, where the family was among the congregation. In Epstein’s childhood, he belonged to a number of Jewish youth organisations, though he told the JC in 1963 that he couldn’t remember which.
“I’m not one for being on things,” he’d said. “I don’t like committees.”
That JC reporter met the 29-year-old Epstein “during half an hour snatched between his successful visit to Sweden with the Beatles and his visit to the United States with Billy J. Kramer.”
“He finds his hectic life, he told me, ‘enjoyable and exciting, but a little bit wearing—every month or so I find I need a holiday.’”
The Beatles relax in a hotel room in Paris on 16 January 1964. From left to right, John Lennon (1940 – 1980), George Harrison (1943 – 2001), band manager Brian Epstein (1934 – 1967), Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. (Photo by Harry Benson/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Described as “tall, good-looking and well-groomed,” Epstein shared with the JC that his immediate aim in life was “to see my artists maintain the popularity they’ve attained and bust out all over the world,” which would include his artists making guest appearances in Israel.
But Epstein was reportedly never fully at ease with his Jewishness, keen to downplay his upbringing in a well-to-do home in Liverpool’s most affluent neighbourhood where his family ran their business. His accent bore no trace of his Liverpudlian roots.
Epstein trained for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and maintained an interest in theatre despite his later station behind the scenes. However, in the JC’s obituary for Epstein, Mike Sarne wrote rather bluntly that he “did not have the ability himself to be an entertainer.”
“He was a failure as an actor and found his true vocation in managing the lives of others. He lived out his own artistic aspirations by proxy, as it were, and because he could not sing or act himself obtained his satisfaction in the huge success of his artists. He was never a driving, artistic force in the ‘pop’ world, but a sensible, intelligent man.”
Brian Epstein (1934 – 1967), manager of The Beatles, on 10 July 1966. (Photo by C. Maher/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Epstein’s homosexuality was not widely known until after his death, though it was common knowledge in his social circle. His shyness around both his Jewishness and his sexuality was not helped by the fact that Lennon reportedly had a habit of goading Epstein for both.
In 1967, several weeks after his father died, Epstein passed away from an accidental drug overdose in his bedroom.
Sarne wrote in his JC obituary for Epstein that the former Beatles manager “was always a little surprised by success, despite the fact that he worked so hard for it,” and attributed his “strength of character” to the “solidarity of his upbringing and the integrity of his background.” He called Epstein “the product of a good Jewish family.”
Jewish journalist Ivor Davis, who covered the Beatles’ 1964 American tour and was afforded brief but intimate glimpses into Epstein’s world, wrote in 2015 that although Epstein “had insisted to me he was never a practicing Jew, I learned much later an intriguing fact: In a will he had signed in l956, he decreed, ‘that all my clothes be sent directly and immediately to the State of Israel.’”
Epstein was buried in Kirkdale Jewish Cemetery in Liverpool. None of the Beatles came to that service, but they turned up for his memorial service as Kaddish was being recited at the New London Synagogue in October 1967.
Perhaps the new biopic, which centres on the Jewish visionary behind the pop sensation, will breathe new life into Epstein’s story, allowing contemporary fans of the Beatles a chance to say “Hello, Goodbye” to the band’s once-golden fifth member.
