John Lennon Said His Relationship With Beatles Manager Brian Epstein Was ‘Almost Like a Love Affair’
Shortly before the birth of his first child, John Lennon went on vacation with Beatles manager Brian Epstein. While Paul McCartney believed Lennon took the vacation to assert dominance in the band, Lennon said he did it because of how much he enjoyed his relationship with Epstein. The pair had a close friendship that, according to Lennon, bordered on a love affair.
John Lennon said he had a very intense relationship with Brian Epstein
While Epstein said that he grew to love all four Beatles in equal measure, he admitted that he was closest with Lennon in the band’s early years.
“I think Paul thinks I’m closer to John than I am with him,” he said, per the book The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “It’s not really true. It was earlier on, but now I love them all equally.”
Lennon and Epstein were close enough that the former refused to give up his vacation plans for the imminent birth of his son. Lennon said he enjoyed sitting with Epstein and asking about the men he liked.
“It was my first experience with a homosexual that I was conscious was a homosexual. We used to sit in a café in Torremolinos looking at all the boys and I’d say, ‘Do you like that one? Do you like this one?'” he said, per The Beatles Anthology. “I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time: ‘I am experiencing this.'”
During the trip, their relationship deepened.
“It was almost a love affair, but not quite,” Lennon said. “It was not consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship.”
John Lennon brutally attacked someone for mentioning his relationship with Brian Epstein
While Lennon enjoyed his relationship with Epstein, he didn’t want anyone else to talk about it. Therefore, when a friend insinuated that Lennon and Epstein were having an affair, he flew into a rage.
“I was out of my mind with drink. (You know, when you get to the point where you want to drink out of all the empty glasses, that drunk),” Lennon said. “And Bob [Wooler] was saying, ‘Come on, John, tell me about you and Brian — we all know.'”
Lennon’s response was so violent that he claimed it turned him off from fighting altogether.
“If somebody said it now I wouldn’t give a s***, but I was beating the s*** out of him, hitting him with a big stick, and for the first time I thought, ‘I can kill this guy,'” Lennon said. “I just saw it, like on a screen: if I hit him once more, that’s going to be it.”
Wooler also sued Lennon afterward. He settled with him for ￡200.
He spoke about the difficulty of being in the band after his manager’s death
In 1967, Epstein died of an accidental overdose. The Beatles felt lost without him, and Lennon began to think that the end of the band was near.
“I knew that we were in trouble then,” he said, per History. “I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. I was scared. I thought, ‘We’ve f***ing had it.'”
In many ways, Lennon was right. While the band would stay together for another two years, the group dynamic had fractured. Their new manager, Allen Klein, drove a further wedge between the band.
