In Loving Memory of Brian Epstein
by Woody Lifton
(The-Beatles-History.com)
Brian Epstein
In Loving Memory of Brian Epstein
posted on Rec.Music.Beatles 8/26/2000 by John Whelan
Beatle author and historian Ray Coleman on Brian Epstein
"As Brian lay in bed on that Saturday night, 3,000 miles away his best friend in New York was enthusiastically anticipating his arrival a week later. At his apartment at 301 East 63rd Street, where Brian had often stayed, Nat Weiss was checking with Brian's chauffeur the music on the cassette he had prepared, as always, for the car that would meet Brian at the airport. Such attention to small detail endeared Weiss to Epstein
Twelve hours later, mid-morning on Sunday New York time, a phone call from Geoffrey Ellis halted Weiss's plans for the coming week. 'I've got something terrible to tell you. Brian is dead. The press doesn't know about it yet...' Weiss was dumbfounded, speechless. The tears would flow later. Within an hour, American journalists were phoning him as he packed his bags for the night flight to London....
In Wiltshire, where George and Judy Martin had gone to their cottage with their newly-born daughter, they were parking their car when someone walked across and said: 'Your friend is dead.' To mark the birth of Lucy on 9 August, Brian had sent a huge teddy bear made of flowers to the hospital. When George and Judy returned to their London home, a further bouquet from Brian was waiting for Judy on the doorstep; the flowers were dead....
Five red carnations were spread in a row on the top step at Chapel Street, on the day after Brian's death. On a rough piece of paper a message was written: 'We love you too.' The admirers were anonymous.
Alan Freeman, who had been to parties at Brian's house, made an 'absolutely impassioned act' when he heard the radio news flash. 'I just had to go and sit near where he lived,' he says. He drove to a barren Chapel Street, parked his car outside his flat, and sat there for five hours until midnight, just gazing at the house. 'I was absolutely stunned. Why I did that I will never know.'....
Jewish law decrees that a body should be buried within forty-eight hours of death. Because of the impending request, the coroner could not release Brian's body until a post-mortem had been carried out. The next evening, Brian's body arrived at the synagogue in Greenbank Drive, Liverpool, where he had impressed everyone, including his tutor, at his bar mitzvah nineteen years earlier, and where he had stood alongside his family on the Sabbaths and High Holydays. From there he was taken to the Jewish Cemetery, Long Lane, Aintree, and buried in Section A, Grave H12, near his father, in a ceremony that began at 7 p.m.
Gerry Marsden, Cilla Black, NAT WEISS and Peter Brown were there, along with the family; Cilla, upset at the Jewish law which discourages women from attending the actual burial, was so distraught at the synagogue that Queenie had to give her a Valium.
The gloom at the graveside was compounded by the tactlessness of the officiating rabbi, Dr Norman Soloman. Ignoring all Brian's achievements and fame, he said that the man he scarcely knew was a symbol of the malaise of the sixties generation.
This was the final crushing exit for the tearful Nat Weiss. Defying the Jewish rule which forbids flowers at funerals, he felt compelled to honor a request by George Harrison to toss on top of Brian's coffin a farewell on behalf of the Beatles: concealed in a newspaper was a solitary white chrysanthemum
Source: Brian Epstein, THE MAN WHO MADE THE BEATLES by Ray Coleman, Penguin Books, 1990
