Shout! Read Free

security greater than any band ever enjoyed, or ever will, but also kept them largely in ignorance of what was being done in their name. They had no idea how Epstein fiddled and finessed them into the British charts with the weakest of all their A-sides, “Love Me Do,” nor how, later, he finessed and fiddled them into top billing on the Ed Sullivan Show , on a night that changed the course of American culture. They had no idea about the millions that were lost through botched contracts for Beatles merchandising, nor about Epstein’s tortured private life on the wilder shores of the gay world. And after Epstein’s death, somehow that obscuring, anesthetizing bubble remained unbroken. Even John, with all his angry honesty, never got near to the bottom of his Beatles past. Paul preferred—and still prefers—the glossy showbiz version of myth.
    Gaining access to the key background figures was no pushover either. All had been interviewed countless times already: It took the persuasiveness of a cold-calling double-glazing salesman on my part to convince them this book would be different and that I could prompt them to say anything new. I had illuminating talks with George Martin, the Beatles’ nonpareil record producer; with Bob Wooler, the Cavern Club disk jockey who gave them crucial early tips about stage presentation; with Pete Best, the drummer they brutally dumped on the threshold of their success. I drank tea with John’s aunt and childhood guardian, MimiSmith, and Irish coffee with Michael McCartney, Paul’s younger brother. Brian Epstein’s mother, Queenie, and his brother, Clive, gave me their blessing, as did Millie Sutcliffe, mother of the gifted, tragic “fifth Beatle,” Stuart, and his sister, Pauline. I flew to New York to see Epstein’s former close friend Nat Weiss, and to Los Angeles to see his old lieutenant, and near clone, Peter Brown. I traveled to Hamburg to explore the dives and strip clubs where the Beatles cut their teeth as performers, and to track down Astrid Kirchherr, whose photographs gave them their most durable as well as classiest image.
    I also unearthed dozens of minor players in the drama who had never been interviewed before, whose stories were still fresh and undistorted by repetition. There was Joe Flannery, the gently hilarious man who had provided Brian Epstein’s one and only happy, stable gay relationship. There was Nicky Byrne, the dapper Chelsea wheeler-dealer who had presided over the merchandising fiasco in America, and Byrne’s former business partner Lord Peregrine Eliot, heir to the Cornish earldom of St. Germans. There was “Lord Woodbine,” the calypso singer who had accompanied the Beatles on their first trip to Hamburg; Paddy Delaney, the guardsmanlike former doorman of the Cavern Club; Tommy Moore, who briefly became the Beatles’ drummer although old enough to be their father, but then decided he preferred his former job on a forklift truck. Time and again, my research took me back to Liverpool to stay at the Adelphi Hotel, then still glorious, writing up my notes in its Titanic -sized Palm Court, going to sleep at night under blankets bearing the insignia of the old London–Midland Railway. I grew to love the city: its sumptuous Victorian architecture, its scabrous, surreal humor. Listen to almost any Scouser [Liverpudlian] on the street and you understand all about the Beatles and why they captured the planet. Nowhere else can you be told, as a term of affection, that you are “as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest.”
    Writing a biography is impossible without obsession. And I became obsessed, talking about nothing but the Beatles, thinking about nothing but the Beatles, puzzling and worrying at night over tiny missing links in the narrative, developing one muscle in my brain to an inordinate degree while other muscles grew slack. Wasn’t it going the tiniest bit too far to list all the stallholders and amusements at Woolton church