Meek, Orton and Epstein
[Guardian, 2007]
Just over forty years ago, on the 27th of July 1967, the Sexual Offences Bill received the Royal Assent and became an Act of law. In overturning the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 – the ‘blackmailer’s charter’ – the Sexual Offences Act substantially decriminalised homosexual acts and allowed gay men some freedom to live their lives openly and without fear. However for three high-achieving British gay men, 1967 marked the end not a beginning.
The outline of their deaths is well known. On the 3rd of February 1967, the independent record producer Joe Meek killed his landlady, Violet Shenton, before turning the shotgun on himself. On the 9th of August, the hottest new British playwright, Joe Orton, was murdered by his companion, Kenneth Halliwell. On the 27th of August, the body of the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein was found after an accidental overdose of a prescribed sleeping pill.
Within the still small, incestuous world of London’s entertainment industry, the three had links that went beyond the year of their deaths. During 1966, Meek had meetings with Epstein about managing Liverpool’s the Cryin’ Shames, whose wracked ballad, “Please Stay”, was Meek’s last top 30 hit. In early 1967, Joe Orton had been sounded out about writing the script for the Beatles’ third United Artists movie – provisionally entitled “Up Against It”.
However they shared more than professional interests. All three were born within five years of each other: Meek in 1929, Orton in 1933, Epstein in 1934. All achieved their majority in the early to mid-fifties, a time when homosexuality became the number one enemy within – not only associated with biblical perversion and racial meltdown, but, thanks to the defection of Burgess and MacLean, the dreaded spectre of communism.
The eventual passing of the SOA – in the teeth of some manic parliamentary opposition – marked well over a decade of campaigning that began out of this extreme prejudice. The process began with the September 1957 publication of the Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. The Wolfenden Report, as it was better known, recommended a change in the law for both humanitarian and practical reasons, while observing that the authorities should not concern themselves with private acts.
To commemorate this fifty year anniversary, BBC4 is running a week of programmes between September the 1st and the 7th that aim to shed light on the Hidden Lives that most gay men were forced to live before 1967. For, despite its liberalising provisions, the SOA didn’t overturn decades of extreme prejudice overnight: there would be no magical rebirth for many gay men who had borne the brunt of tabloid hostility, draconian sentencing, and the tender ministrations of blackmailers and police provocateurs.
During the early fifties, there was a major crackdown on male homosexuality in Britain. Although there is no definitive evidence for an anti-communist witch-hunt, some of this could have come from the establishment wish to assert an aggressive, restrictive normality after the social upheavals of the Second World War, with the police casting themselves as the upright and ferocious guardians of a traditional morality.
The highest profile case of that period was the joint trial of Lord Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers, and Peter Wildeblood in early 1954. Convicted of sexual offences with two young airmen, Montagu was jailed for a year, the other two for eighteen months. Incensed by his treatment, Wildebood, a journalist, wrote a campaigning biography, “Against The Law’, which on its publication in 1955 helped to crystallise opinion against the harsh application of the law.
Partly as a result of the wide publicity that the Montagu case had received, the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution had already been set up in the summer of 1954. Refuting the standard slurs then used against homosexual men (paedophilia, the destruction of family life etc), the Report caused a big stir on its publication in September 1957: well ahead of public opinion, it marked a sea change in attitudes towards male homosexuality.
Three months previously, Brian Epstein had found himself in big trouble. Arrested during April 1957 for ‘persistent importuning’ by a police provocateur in a Swiss Cottage toilet, he was devastated. As he wrote at the time, ‘the damage, the lying criminal methods of the police in importuning me and consequently capturing me leaves me cold, stunned and finished’.
The hand-written, impassioned document for his defence makes for fascinating reading. In his turmoil, Epstein had ‘believed that my own will-power was the best thing with which to overcome my homosexuality’. At the same time, it gave him a wider understanding of what it was to be an outcast: ‘I feel deeply because I have always felt deeply for the persecuted, the Jews, the coloured people, for the old and society’s misfits’.
It was this realisation of his marginality that led Epstein away from a conventional career path into pop management. In late 1961 he found an outlet for his visions in a scruffy group that nobody wanted. Divining the Beatles’ world-beating quality, he spent much of early 1962 – while they were struggling to get a record contract – telling anyone who would listen that they would be bigger than Elvis. He was not taken seriously.
Epstein avoided prison, despite this and other dangerous encounters, but Joe Orton did not. In April 1962, while still struggling writers, both he and Halliwell received a six month prison sentence for stealing and defacing library books (which they then returned: their inspired and witty collages could now be considered detournement, and thus high concept art). Orton was certain that the condign sentence was passed ‘because we were queers’.
For Halliwell, prison was a crushing blow, but it honed Orton’s prose: ‘being in the nick brought detachment into my writing,’ he said in 1964. Within a year of his release, he received his first commission when “The Boy Hairdresser” was accepted by the BBC Third Programme. In September 1963, he began a new, full-length play designed as a full-blown attack on British society, that ‘old whore’ which had lifted up her foul smelling skirts.
While Orton was writing “Entertaining Mr. Sloane”, Joe Meek found himself in deep trouble. On November the 11th 1963, he was caught in a public toilet just off the Holloway Road and charged with ‘persistently importuning’. He was fined, but his real punishment did not occur until the next day, when he was named and shamed on the front page of the Evening News as ‘The Man Who Wrote Telstar”. He became the target of blackmailers.
The arrest happened at a critical time for Meek. In the early sixties, he had built himself up into Britain’s foremost independent record producer with elemental melodramas like John Leyton’s “Johnny Remember Me” and “Wild Wind”. In the last quarter of 1962, he hit paydirt with the Tornados’ “Telstar”, number one in both the US and the UK, which gave a melody to the media age. However the onset of the Beat Boom meant that he was becoming passé. The Beatles, not the Tornados, were at number one in November 1963.
Meek continued to fight the odds. His last big hit came in 1964 with the Honeycombs’ stomping “Have I The Right” – an oblique comment on his own blocked sexual and emotional fulfilment. In August 1966, he went public with his homosexuality in “Do You Come Here Often”, a Tornados b side that faithfully reproduced the competitive bickering between two nitroglycerine queens. This extraordinary slice of gay life was among his very last releases.
For all their unprecedented freedoms, however, the High Sixties could not wipe away the past. All three of these major cultural innovators – Meek, Orton and Epstein – were scarred by what they had gone through in the early 1950′s, when to be homosexual meant that you were the lowest of the low. All three had suffered violence, prejudice, and the bullying attention of Laura Norder. Out of this adversity, however, came a ferocious drive.
This is the syndrome known as gay over-achievement, an incandescent drive for revenge – right, if you think I’m a piece of dirt, I’m going to fucking show you and the world that I’m not. In fact, I’m going to do more than show you that I’m not a piece of dirt, I’m going to ram the fact that I’m better than you right down your throat. In public. So you have to see the fact that I am richer, cleverer, prettier than you everyday, in the newspapers, in the magazines, on the television. So you can choke on your dirty words.
All three enacted this drive with incredible force, as their experiences coloured their visionary sensibilities. Meek expanded the possibilities of recorded sound in a series of records that remain perfect distillations of teenage angst. Between 1964 and 1967 Joe Orton wrote five plays and three television screenplays and transformed British theatre with a new farcical language that combined camp’s caustic cadences with stylised naturalism. In January 1967, “Loot” was awarded an award for the best play of the year.
In the five years before his death, Brian Epstein saw his visions come true. Under his sympathetic guidance, the no-hoper Beatles became the biggest pop stars in the world. Unlike Elvis, they did not settle into mediocrity but changed the possibilities of pop forever by growing artistically and spiritually. The release of the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in June 1967 was the pinnacle of their extraordinary career: as Brian Epstein had foreseen, they remain the biggest showbusiness story of the 20th century.
Despite their achievements, all three found that success didn’t eradicate the deep scars of exile. They had got to the top, and, for Meek and Epstein at least, it was a barren plateau. Drugs and sex – for Orton, lust was ‘an emotion indistinguishable from anger’ – might have filled the hole, but they were never enough. If there was an underlying message to the sixties careening momentum, it was that rage could turn inwards to self-destruction.
The shocking fact about Joe Meek’s lethal self-hatred is that how many gay men of his generation shared that impulse. In his diary for 11 March 1967, Joe Orton wrote about a conversation he had with his friend Kenneth Williams, by then a national figure in the UK for his appearances in the “Carry On” film series. Orton found Williams ‘a horrible mess’ sexually: ‘he mentions “guilt” a lot in conversation.
Although Orton totally rejected Williams’ sexual guilt as the holdover from a bygone era, he couldn’t escape his older partner, Kenneth Halliwell. As the playwright’s star rose, the balance of their fifteen-year relationship tipped irreversibly. The more that Orton flaunted his promiscuity in the diary entries and revelled in his success, the more depressed Halliwell became. On the 9th of August 1967, his resentments exploded in a spasm of shocking violence.
In turn, Epstein’s mental state had deteriorated since August 1966, after the Beatles’ stopped touring: he hadn’t been able to attend their last ever show at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park because his then current boyfriend, a hustler called Diz Gillespie, had robbed him of money and valuable documents. According to his attorney and close friend Nat Weiss, that accounted for ‘his first major depression, the start of his loss of confidence’.
At the very moment that homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK, the number one record was the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” – the recording of which had marked Brian Epstein’s last ever public appearance with the group. Just when Britain began to savour the new freedoms that they had envisioned and help to bring about, Meek, Orton and Epstein succumbed to the actual or willed suicides that were one logical conclusion to the years that they had spent in the shadow. Stigmas can kill.