However, I had included quite a few references to drugs, including them taking LSD, which was rather daring for 1968, though I always referred to it in the past, sometimes saying that of course they did not take pot now, though I’m sure I made the truth fairly obvious.
It took me quite some time to get any reaction, as they all found reading books rather hard. Then to my delight each in turn said they had no complaints, no objections, and they agreed to everything going in. I think Paul had some minor factual mistakes, people’s names I had spelled wrongly, though I now can’t remember what they were.
George was the only one who rang me with any serious comments. He wanted more about the Indian stuff and thought I had not taken him seriously enough, or his philosophies, and wanted some bits explained better. I did what he asked, although trying not to add to the length of the book.
I was very relieved by their reactions, and my agent started getting copies made for America, then suddenly I got a letter from John. He asked me to take out a derogatory remark about the man his mother Julia later married, a Welshman, by whom she had two daughters, Jackie and Julia, John’s stepsisters. He was worried about ‘the nasty-minded world’ they might be faced with in the future.
He also asked me to make sure Mimi read the book. She was worried SICK about it, so he said. That was what really bothered me. I had easily coped with John’s own change, which was minor but I didn’t want to have to faff around with any of the parents.
I sent it to Mimi and she had hysterics. The chapter about his childhood came back with almost every paragraph heavily crossed out or amended. In the margins she had written beside John’s own quotes such things as ‘Rubbish’, ‘Never!’
She denied so many of John’s own memories of his childhood, especially if they contradicted her memories of the same people or events. She was against his use of bad language, as she maintained John had never sworn when he was little, and didn’t want stories about him stealing.
Some of her comments, in the margins, were quite witty. I had quoted John as saying that he had to practise his guitar behind Mimi’s back at home and that she made him stand in the glass porch to play. Above this line Mimi had written ‘This wicked woman’. Another time, she added a story about Julia and the new husband, and how they really regarded John, writing it out in the margin, then asking me not to print it, as John had never been told.
She also added some useful comments about the day that John first met Paul, at the Woolton Parish Fête, when John had dressed up as a real Teddy Boy for the first time.
‘It was the first time I saw him with others playing,’ so Mimi wrote. ‘It was a bombshell and a shock. Had no idea he would be there. It was forced home to me that day that I had been fighting a losing battle. Even then I would not give in. What a waste of my life and, more important, my health.’
I could understand the desire to protect Julia’s two daughters, as they were only teenagers in 1968, and John had been rather bitchy about their father, so I agreed to all that. It was her determination to censor John’s account of himself that seemed very unfair.
Most memories of childhood are suspect. It’s what different people choose to remember that is interesting. Who had the better memory anyway, Mimi or John? John, by this time, was fed up with the whole subject and insisted I kept her happy at all cost, so I travelled to Bournemouth and went through the offending paragraphs line by line. Some of the bad language was removed and some wilder parts of his stories, and she was eventually pacified.
You will notice in the book that Chapter 1 ends rather limply and abruptly with the phrase ‘John was as happy as the day was long’. This was at Mimi’s insistence. I gave in, a compromise, in order to keep in most of John’s other stories. She thought this would soften them. That was the truth about John’s childhood, as she saw it. I was relatively happy, as the other truths were still there as well, so readers could decide for themselves.
The book, when it was published, was greeted as a ‘candid’ biography by all the critics, on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Europe and Japan, and was even described as ‘the frankest authorized biography ever written’. I’ll spare you the details. It was, of course, a long time ago and lots of things have happened since then. I was upset, several years later, when John, in an interview, said that my book had been ‘bullshit’. This was at the time when he had got into his head that the whole Beatle image was a whitewash. As far as John and my book was concerned, I only had to make minor changes, one to please John, the other to please Mimi.
I then had a lot of trouble with some of their side kicks at Apple, who took it upon themselves to try to alter things elsewhere in the book, on subjects such as drugs. The Beatles by this time had gone off to India, having read and approved the book. Their assistants, left behind in charge of the office, wanted several changes.
I managed, in the main, to fight them off, though I had many agonizing weeks, getting all the necessary approvals, trying to keep track of all the copies, and then the corrected copies, which were flying around. The Beatles themselves, having read their own individual copy, left it lying around at home, or at Abbey Road, or in the Apple office, so everyone was dying to find out if they figured in the book. John, in that letter asking me to make changes, also mentions that ‘Dot’s heard from Margaret something about her’. Dot was John’s housekeeper at the time, and was only mentioned once or twice. As for Margaret, I can’t even remember who she was.
I would not like to go through all those weeks again, but the worst was to come. I had forgotten that Brian Epstein had been the one responsible for the main contract, on their behalf. As he was now dead, the Epstein family demanded to see the manuscript. Legally, his mother had inherited his estate. I was therefore technically beholden to Mrs Queenie Epstein, an old lady who knew nothing about the pop world, and, even worse, nothing about Brian’s secret life, for the final clearance on the book.
You can imagine what she thought about any suggestions that Brian might be homosexual. She denied it. As far as she was concerned, it wasn’t true. I needed her signed agreement. We had by this time sold the American and several other rights, and the buyers naturally wanted to see the legal clearances.
Clive Epstein, Brian’s brother, was helpful, though of course he wanted to keep his mother happy. As her beloved son had died only recently, it was thought unseemly to go into all the sordid details of his last couple of years. I hadn’t really written much about that and in the end I was persuaded to steer completely clear of his sex life, but I thought I did manage to make it fairly clear at the end of Chapter 15, where I said he had only one girlfriend in his life — and then continued to talk about his unhappy love affairs. I also described him as a ‘gay bachelor’. The word was not in such common use in England in those days, but it was enough to let many people know the truth.
Did it matter, Brian’s homosexuality? I did regret having to disguise it, as he himself had given me permission to mention it and it has been publicly stated since. With most people, their sex life is not relevant, either way, to their work, although these days many people in public life, at least in the arts and show business, make no effort to hide what sort of people they are. With Brian, I think it did matter and it was a vital clue to his personality, to his death, and also to the birth of his interest in the Beatles.
One of the strangest episodes in all the Beatle sagas is how such a person as Brian Epstein came to be interested in them in the first place. What attracted a public-school, well brought-up, middle-class Jewish boy, a rising businessman who loved Sibelius and had shown not the slightest personal interest in any sort of pop culture? What made him go along to see four scruffy, working-class yobbos in a smelly underground coffee bar? He fancied them. That was one explanation, though I was never able to spell it out. Most of all, he fancied John, jumping around in his leather gear and big cowboy boots. (The gossip, years later, was that he fancied Paul, as Paul was always supposed to be the prettiest Beatle, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. He liked them butch and aggressive, even when they didn’t like him — often because they didn’t like him sexually.)