The Beatles' manager wanted to be a dress designer and briefly studied acting
Brian Epstein had never managed a band when he wandered into Liverpool's Cavern Club for a lunchtime show in 1961. Within months he had signed the Beatles, swapped their scruffy look for sharp suits and landed them a deal with Parlophone. Before all that, he had dreamed of the stage and of fashion.
Epstein arrived on 19 September 1934 in a house on Liverpool's Rodney Street, the elder son of a Jewish retailing family. His grandfather Isaac, a Lithuanian-born immigrant who reached Britain in the 1890s, founded a furniture business on Walton Road that grew into NEMS, the North End Music Stores, selling instruments and appliances on easy credit; Paul McCartney's father once bought a piano there. Brian's parents Harry and Malka, known as Queenie, married in 1933, and a second son, Clive, followed.
School went badly. Two schools in Southport expelled him during the war, and he was shuffled between boarding schools including Clayesmore in Dorset and Wrekin College in Shropshire, where he learned violin and chafed at the strict regime, perhaps partly because he was hiding his homosexuality. Theatre was the one subject he loved. Just before turning 16 he wrote to his father asking to become a dress designer; Harry refused, and Brian ended up in the family furniture shop on 5 pounds a week.
Conscripted in December 1952 as an army clerk in London, he used the posting to discover the capital's culture, and army psychiatrists recommended an early discharge by January 1954. Back home he ran a shop in Hoylake and became a NEMS director in 1955. After being robbed in London in 1956 and confiding in a family friend who was a psychiatrist, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art alongside Albert Finney, Peter O'Toole and Susannah York, but left after three terms, feeling too much a businessman to enjoy student life.
Put in charge of the family's record shop, he showed a knack for spotting talent. After the Beatles came Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cilla Black, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, the Big Three and Tommy Quickly, many of them thriving under his guidance. He managed the Beatles until his death on 27 August 1967, at 32, from an accidental overdose of alcohol and barbiturates.
Source: Brian Epstein
