A close confidant
Peter Brown discusses the Beatles in `All You Need is Love'
Peter Brown stood in his spacious Central Park West 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 living-room 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 a book, “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 Beatlerelated 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, warts-and-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.”
He also rejected McCartney's version of events. “Paul imagines things,” Brown said. “Everything he does, he has his own way of remembering, and he's crazy about it.”
Gaines, for his part, attributes the notoriety of the original book to his and Brown's refusal to produce a sanitized hagiography, and their decision instead to publish controversial private details. Among those was a rumor that Lennon once had a sexual encounter with Epstein, which Brown and Gaines reported as fact, based on their research.
“Nobody had put something like that in a book,” Gaines said. That episode, on a trip to Spain in 1963, has been debated for years by Beatles commentators. Lennon denied having sex with Epstein, saying in an interview with Playboy: “It was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated.”
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,