Review: 'Mr. Moonlight: Brian Epstein and the Making of the Beatles'

Brian Epstein lived with a massive secret at the same time that he was one of the most recognizable men of his era. To this day he remains the most famous band manager in pop history. He was also a gay man living in mid-twentieth century Britain, where homosexuality was outlawed and a man caught having sexual relations with another man faced prison or even chemical castration. When he should have been basking in his immense success as the business brain behind The Beatles, Brian Epstein lived under perpetual thunderheads of stress, fear, and self-loathing. That final quality may even account for why he fell in with The Beatles in the first place, as the Beatle that most enthralled him was regularly horribly cruel to him, Lennon casually ridiculing his manager both for being gay and Jewish. Even worse were some of the men Epstein with whom he had romantic and sexual relationships. It was not unusual for him to be robbed, beaten, or blackmailed. 

Although he was rarely seen without a reserved, proud smile on his face, Brian Epstein seemingly lived an unwaveringly sad life beset from without by bigotry and violence and beset from within by shame. If The Beatles' publicist Derek Taylor stated Epstein as capable of "massive cruelty," you can't really blame the manager. That shit trickles down.

That Brian Epstein's biography is a downer shouldn't come as a surprise. While learning that John, Paul, George, and Ringo lived through their own nightmares from the eye of Hurricane Beatlemania might come as a surprise to fans caught in the euphoric thrall of "She Loves You" or "Hey Jude", Epstein's story could never be mistaken for a happy one. His fatal drug overdose was one of pop's most high-profile deaths. So one should not require any words of caution before treading into Mr. Moonlight: Brian Epstein and the Making of the Beatles. In fact, the darkest passages of Philip Norman's biography—the beatings, the extortion attempts, the miserable relationships, Lennon's viciousness, the overdose, even some of the poor business decisions, such as merchandising and film-fee blunders—are all things I'd already known from reading a hundred other Beatles-related books. 

What surprised me was some of the details about the man behind the oft-told sad stories. I knew that Brian Epstein faced antisemitism, often from his own camp; I did not know the extent of the role his Jewishness played in his life, though he drew the line at Zionism, standing firm against pressure to help fund the Israeli army during the Six-Day War. I did not know about his ambition to be an actor, which persisted well into his Beatles days. I did not know how much of a steadying influence his good friend and one-time boyfriend Joe Flannery played in his life. One cannot read Mr. Moonlight without wishing that 1960s Britain hadn't been a homophobic hell and that Brian stayed with Joe. 

I also had no idea that London's most infamous underworld team, the Kray Twins, cooked up a number of Epstein-targeting schemes. Speaking as someone with an extreme aversion to conspiracy theories, I'm at best ambivalent about Norman's carefully floated theory that Epstein might have been murdered. The author also never convincingly illustrates Epstein's "massive cruelty." Perhaps it's the author's failure. Perhaps Taylor was exaggerating.

Mr. Moonlight is a tragic story, but Norman, a serious chronicler of The Beatles and other groups of their era, mostly handles it as he should: empathizing with his subject and conducting a mass of interviews that flesh out the tale and bolster it with credibility, even when the conspiracy theories start flying. Mr. Moonlight is no fun read, but it is an essential one for anyone who wants to know the full, unromanticized story of Beatlemania.