The Outsider

"I'm not a commercial person," said Brian Epstein. "I'm a frustrated actor."

He was, in fact, a spectacular commercial success. As discoverer-manager of the Beatles, he personally earned $14 million in five years. Yet he was right about his life; it was the ache of being a failed actor and an outsider among the Beatles that most pained Epstein.

One morning last week his body was found in bed by his valet in his town house around the corner from Buckingham Palace. He was 32. Police uncovered "no suspicious circumstances," but no natural causes either. He had been ill with mononucleosis, but that disease is almost never fatal. So a coroner's inquest was ordered, with a verdict due this week. One speculation:

Epstein may have died inadvertently from a combination of alcohol and the barbiturates found on his bedside table.

"Something Big." Son of a prosperous department-store owner in Liverpool, Epstein was a sensitive boy who dropped out of his seventh and last school at 16. The army discharged him after twelve maladjusted months; he got nowhere at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He was 25 before he made a go of something--running one of his family's record departments.

One day in 1961, a customer asked for a record made in Germany by a group called the Beatles. When Epstein discovered they were playing near by in a joint named The Cavern, he took a squint. "It was a smoky, smelly, pretty squalid cellar," he later recalled, "and their act was ragged, undisciplined, and their clothes were a mess. Yet I recognized the appeal of their beat, and I rather liked their humor. I sensed something big--if it could be at once harnessed and at the same time left untamed." That was Brian Epstein's life work: organizing the unruly Merseyside boys, adding some professional polish, and making them wash (but not cut) their hair regularly. When they finally clicked after months of relentless salesmanship at London record companies, Epstein felt fulfilled. "My own sense of inferiority," he said, "evaporated with the Beatles."

The bourgeois manager never did swing with the zesty, remarkably creative Beatles. A slightly dandified bachelor, he kept pretty much to himself; he said recently that he had made five LSD trips in one 14-month period. Asked once what he feared most in life, he replied: "Loneliness. I hope I'll never be lonely, although actually, one inflicts loneliness on oneself."

Mystic Cult. With the Beatles cutting out personal appearances and thus needing him less and less, Epstein built up a management agency for other big-beat talent. He bought a West End theater and produced such works as James Baldwin's Amen Corner. He also made a none too impressive debut as host of a five-minute segment of NBC's Hullabaloo TV series.

When Epstein died last week, the Beatles were some 225 miles away in Wales, getting initiated into an Indian mystic cult led by one Maharishi Mahesh Yogi --a recent enthusiasm of theirs. All four Beatles rushed back to London, making statements like John's, "We loved Brian, and he was one of us."

But at Epstein's funeral service in a Liverpool synagogue, no Beatle was present.

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