The Life Of Brian

You can imagine him now, at sixty-five, locked behind the gates of his mansion, wondering. He doesn't wonder if he and the Beatles--yes, he as well, Brian Epstein as much as anyone--brought even more joy into even more hearts than, even now, anyone knows. He wonders if when all those whom his boys touched so deeply have finished with the three who are left, with Paul, George, and Ringo, they will turn to him.

He reads about the Liverpool boy who had to kill George Harrison because the Beatles were, are, "witches" -- and what does that make him, Brian? As he once wrote in his private diary, "Who can say with certainty that I was not born with a disability unfit for society to tolerate?"

In London in 1956 Epstein was solicited by an undercover policeman, responded to his entreaties, and was arrested. Homosexuality was still illegal; as a Jew whose rabbi was cursed and chased on the streets of Liverpool, he knew himself as an outcast within society at large, and, further, as an outcast among outcasts. By the mere facts of his life, he was doubly a criminal--and, in part, this is where the Beatles came from. This is one of the motives behind their charm and their conquest. As Epstein wrote in 1956, knowing nothing of his future, "I am determined to go through the horror of this world."

"This is the story of an individual who had a hand in changing the world and whose credit has quietly evaporated," Debbie Geller writes in The Brian Epstein Story, an oral biography of the Beatles manager who died in 1967 of a drug overdose--maybe a suicide, maybe not. The sense you get from Geller's book, a companion work to Anthony Wall's astonishing two-and-a-half hour television documentary of the same name, is that Epstein had to change the world to find a place in it--and that the Beatles' story, all of the side roads, back alleys, and dead end streets along with its great highway, remains the best story pop music has to tell.

That Epstein failed to find a place in a world he did much to change--or, perhaps, make bigger, less fixed and certain--hangs a veil of tragedy over the film and the book. But tragedy also seems to give almost everyone who speaks to Wall and Geller, no matter how small or forgotten they may be today, a sense of having been privileged to be part of something so much bigger than themselves. This translates into dignity and a sense of freedom. The speakers were part of so much real history, were close enough to see its wheels turn and its gears grind, that history can no longer hurt them. So they speak freely, in their own voices, as if they are not afraid of any judgment. Epstein clients Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer of Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas--Marsden fat and bitter in the face, Kramer still shockingly handsome--were once world-famous, icons of Merseybeat. Now they seem like nobodies in their own home town. You see Marsden actually speaking on a "Ferry Cross the Mersey"--the song was a global smash in 1965--as if he now works on it. Yet they talk as if they have had three decades to think it over, to decide if it was worth it, to measure what of their selves they gained and lost in pursuit of the money and fame that they also gained and lost. You don't begin to think you've heard the story before.

In both book and film, it is Paul McCartney, the only Beatle interviewed, who is the revelation. He sits before the camera, magically looking both his real age and as if he is his own son. He's thoughtful, funny, physically expressive, consumed with delight at his Brian Epstein imitations: with the love for the man he can feel as he spreads his arms and purses his lips just as Epstein once did. He spoke for just forty minutes, in the fall of 1997, but as Wall and Geller cut back and forth, on film and on the page, between McCartney and dozens of others, he seems to have left nothing out. He tells his stories perfectly, and yet you feel he's telling you things he's never told anyone, like the story of how, near the end of his life, consumed with a despair he could not put into words, Epstein tried to sell the Beatles to Robert Stigwood.

"We said, `In fact, if you do, if you somehow manage to pull this off, we can promise you one thing. We will record 'God Save the Queen' for every single record we make from now on and we'll sing it out of tune. That's a promise. So if this guy buys us that's what he's buying.'

"Funnily enough, the Sex Pistols did it years later. It was always a good idea."

The first part of that tale is in both book and movie; the last line, only in the book. "Why did you leave that out of the film?" I asked Geller. "Because it didn't sound that good on tape," she said. "It looked great on the page." A different aesthetic underpins the two projects, collaborative as they are (Geller produced Wall's film, he edited her book). In Geller's book you feel returned to life as it was lived, to bare realities. In the movie, fantasy is always present, edging around the corners of the frames, the film sometimes promising to sweep away history's bad ending by the unresolved desires you can read on the faces it presents.