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crafted a letter to his parents in which he surveyed various careers that he’d decided he was not interested in—business, law, the ministry—before announcing that he’d finally realized what he wanted to do: he would make his fortune designing dresses. Given his extraordinary interest in fashion, it might not have been a bad path, but Brian’s father—the well-to-do son of a penniless immigrant, known for his serious mien and tenacious work ethic—was horrified at the notion. He’d have preferred, first, that Brian stay in school, but his unhappy son had been such a chronic underachiever that he resolved instead to steer him into the family business: retail furniture. Surprisingly, Brian quickly began showing acumen as a salesman; he spent hours arranging the furniture displays in the windows, and he always showed up for work immaculately dressed. As a young man, his biographer posits, he may even have been“Liverpool’s best-dressed bachelor. His thick hair was styled at the Horne Brothers salon, his clothes came from the top tailors, and he found himself popular among girls,” even though he was secretly gay (homosexuality being illegal in England until 1967). As hobbies,Epstein took up foreign languages (Spanish and French), and he immersed himself in Liverpool’s theater community.
    In the late 1950s, Brian’s dad launched NEMS (North End Music Stores) and hired his son to run the record department. Brian was a demanding, fastidious boss, and his regal bearing could rub some people the wrong way. He insisted that his employees should always look their very best, and that they address every potential customer as “sir” or “madam”—even the four particularly disheveled lads in jeans and leather jackets who were always dropping by in the middle of the afternoon to listen to records but rarely to purchase any.“They used to drive us crackers,” an employee said about the group she later discovered was the Beatles. Often they were looking for “way-out American music” that was not in stock.
    Epstein had a policy of ordering any record that a customer asked for, and in late 1961, he was briefly stumped when requests started trickling in for a new single called “My Bonnie,” supposedly by “the Beatles.” Brian searched hard for the record, but it simply didn’t seem to exist in any of his ordering catalogues. Finally, he was able to determine that the disc people were seeking, which was recorded in Germany, was actually put out by the English singer-guitarist Tony Sheridan, who had merely used the Beatles as a backup band. What’s more, the Beatles weren’t properly mentioned on the record; instead, they were listed as the “Beat Brothers,” because the company that produced the single thought “Beatles” sounded too much like peedles , German slang for “penis.” Nevertheless, Epstein ordered twenty-five copies of “My Bonnie,” which sold out in a day. Then he ordered fifty more discs, and very quickly they, too, disappeared from his record bins.
    Epstein usually claimed that this was the fated episode that brought the Beatles to his attention and piqued his curiosity so much that he decided to attend one of their lunchtime engagements at the Cavern Club (which happened to be only about a three-minute walkfrom his store). This could be so, but it’s hard to believe. Since July 1961, the Beatles were regularly featured in Bill Harry’s Mersey Beat , a music newspaper that Epstein not only distributed at NEMS, but that also featured his own record reviews. Even though Brian’s personal tastes were more for Mozart and Shakespeare than rock ’n’ roll, it seems likely that the enterprising record store manager would have at least recognized the name of one of Liverpool’s most popular bands—especially since they played regularly just around the corner.
    In any event, it was on November 9, 1961, that Brian and his trusty personal assistant Alistair Taylor ventured down the stairs