Peter Brown, one of the Beatles’ closest confidants, tells all
Peter Brown stood in his spacious New York City apartment, pointing first at the dining table and then through the window to the park outside, with Strawberry Fields just to the right.
“John sat at that table looking through here,” Brown said, “and he couldn’t take his eyes off the park.”
That’s John as in Lennon. And the story of the former Beatle coveting this livingroom view in 1971 — and how Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, eventually got their own place one block down, at the Dakota — is just one of Brown’s countless nuggets of Fab Four lore. In the 1960s he was an assistant to Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, and then an officer at Apple Corps, the band’s company. A key figure in the Beatles’ secretive inner circle, Brown kept a red telephone on his desk whose number was known only to the four members.
And it was Brown who, in 1969, informed Lennon that he and Ono could quickly and quietly wed in a small British territory on the edge of the Mediterranean, a piece of advice immortalized in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”: “Peter Brown called to say, ‘You can make it OK/YOU can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain.’”
Next week, Brown and writer Steven Gaines are releasing “All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words,” made up of interviews they conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people close to it, including business representatives, lawyers, wives and ex-wives — the raw material that Brown and Gaines used for their earlier narrative biography of the band, “The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles,” published in 1983.
Now 87, Brown is a polarizing figure in Beatles history. He was a witness to some of the band’s most important moments and was a trusted keeper of its secrets. “The only people left are Paul and Ringo and me,” he said.
On a tour of Brown’s apartment, the spoils of his access were everywhere. In his bedroom, Brown showed off an original image of the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” with background figures (like Gandhi) that didn’t make the final cut. In the dining room are binders and boxes stuffed with Beatle-related snapshots and correspondence.
But the publication of “The Love You Make” four decades ago also made him a kind of villain. According to Brown, the band agreed to interviews to set the record straight about its history. Yet the book — primarily written by Gaines, a journalist and biographer known for detailed, wartsand-all portraits — was seen as tawdry and sensational, preoccupied with sex lives and internecine conflicts, with music a secondary subject. Excerpts ran in National Enquirer.
To the band and many of those around them, it was seen as a betrayal. Paul Mccartney accused Brown of misleading him by pitching it as a more general book about music in the 1960s. Linda Mccartney said she and Paul burned it.
“That book was a shame,” Mark Lewisohn, the preeminent Beatles scholar, said in a recent interview.
“It’s almost like there are two different Peter Browns,” Lewisohn added. “There’s the Peter Brown I know, who is this upright, respectable, very successful businessman. And then the one who attached his name to this Steven Gaines book.”
Brown has heard all the criticism before, and waves it off. Sitting in a chair he inherited from Epstein — and dapper as always in a purple button-down shirt and charcoal slacks — Brown said the book stands as an accurate portrayal, and that the Beatles knew full well what they were getting into.
“There was never any effort on my part to make it negative,” Brown said in his unflappably gentle voice, as classical music wafted quietly through his home. “And nobody’s ever questioned that it was true.”
Brown and Gaines’ new book, “All You Need Is Love,” goes even deeper into Beatle lore than their first. It offers an extended transcript of Ono denying, not too persuasively, that she introduced Lennon to heroin, and includes various firsthand accounts of the threats and chaos the band faced on tour in Manila, Philippines, in 1966. Ron Kass, who led the Beatles’ Apple label, describes the impossibility of running a business with Lennon and Mccartney as the bosses. One, he says, wanted the label design to be green, the other white; Kass decided to make each side a different color.
There are also startling comments from Mccartney and George Harrison about Lennon, revealing the tension and raw feelings that were still present a decade after the band broke up, in interviews recorded just weeks before Lennon was killed in December 1980. Harrison calls his former bandmate “a piece of (expletive)” and wonders why he had “become so nasty.”
As with many Beatles histories, there are plenty of contradictions, opposing perspectives and selective memories. Interviews with manager Allen Klein and lawyer John L. Eastman offer an icy tit-for-tat on the battle for business control during the band’s last days. And Alexis Mardas, aka Magic Alex, the supposed inventor who others in the book call a con man, gives his account — with skeptical footnotes added by Brown and Gaines — of the Beatles’ retreat in India in 1968.
When asked about finding the truth amid contrasting accounts in an oral history, Brown turned philosophical. “It depends on where you’re sitting,” he said.