The Velvet Mafia: The Gay Men Who Ran The Swinging Sixties

By Darryl W. Bullock

In the fifties and sixties, in the period leading up to the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality and the founding of the Gay Liberation movement, a group of gay men behind the scenes of rock’n’roll was changing pop, politics and society for good.

Through a mix of new interviews and contemporary reports, Darryl W. Bullock shines a light on the lives of the so-called ‘Velvet Mafia’, including impresario Larry Parnes, Beatles manager Brian Epstein, songwriter Lionel Bart, record producer Joe Meek, and Bee Gees and Cream manager Robert Stigwood.

Compelling and enlightening, The Velvet Mafia explores how the LGBT professionals at the heart of the music industry were working together and supporting each other at a time when being homosexual could mean the end of your career – or much worse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Feb 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781787592070

Book preview

Introduction

‘Pop promotion sought to glamorise testosterone-fuelled boy bands and make them appealing to young girls. Is it unsurprising that many of those behind the scenes were gay? Who better to know where attraction lay?’ – Alan Blaikley and Ken Howard¹

Because we live in a time when many musicians, performers and their managers are happy for their sexuality to be known, it’s easy for us to forget that this has not always been the case. Thanks to advances in the law and in the change in attitude towards people once vilified as ‘poofs’, ‘queers’, ‘lezzers’ and the like, many of today’s biggest stars are able to talk openly about their own sexuality and even incorporate it into their art. But this inclusivity has only come about very recently. Go back a little over a generation and you discover LGBT performers being told by their management that coming out would destroy their careers. As ridiculous as it might seem to us in these more enlightened times, at their hit making height both Boy George and Marc Almond were warned by their respective record companies not to talk to the media about their sexuality. Even Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford, the defiantly out duo that fronted the multi-million-selling Frankie Goes to Hollywood, were told that they would never be accepted in America if they dared to mention the ‘g’ word. Following a blip in the early 1970s when, thanks to women’s lib, gay lib and the carefully marketed androgyny of many glam rock artists it became fashionable for artists to embrace bisexuality, with the exception of a few notable cult musicians – including Jayne County and Tom Robinson – it was not until the 1980s that a new breed of pop star decided to talk openly about homosexuality. Frankie’s debut, ‘Relax’, arrived in November 1983, but in June 1984 Bronski Beat would become the first group consisting entirely of out-gay musicians to have a chart hit. It would take a while before their contemporaries would be so bold but, slowly, established stars began to feel comfortable enough to defy their management and open up about their sexuality to their audience.

Back at the start of the rock ’n’ roll era, no one dared dream that popular musicians would one day be able to be honest about their sexuality, or that their audience would accept them for being lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans. Despite that, the pop music industry in the UK would be fashioned by a coterie of gay men (and at least one lesbian), many with backgrounds in fashion, retail and the theatre; people who understood what the kids wanted and knew exactly how to give it to them. In their quest for the top, they would rub shoulders with some of the most notorious criminals in the country, risk all in illegal gambling dens and fall foul to blackmailers, yet they also formed a loose network that helped the biggest stars of the period reach their apex, while providing support, friendship and opportunities to their LGBT associates. Behind their backs, these titans of the industry would be referred to by envious rivals as the gay, lavender or Velvet Mafia.

Life in Britain during the first half of the 1950s was pretty grim. We may have won the Second World War, but Britain had taken a battering; it was broke and broken, and heavy rationing continued for almost a decade. A pall of desperation hung over a country where bomb craters still scarred major cities. In December 1952, in the dirty, decrepit capital, a severely cold winter combined with the fumes belching out of factories and homes to create the Great Smog of London, causing the deaths of more than 4,000 people in just a few days and going on to claim thousands more. Something had to change. The old king was dead; a new, young and vital queen sat on the throne, and her coronation, filmed in spectacular colour, added a splash of vibrancy to an otherwise miserable black-and-white world.

In that first decade following the end of hostilities, a new enemy emerged. In May 1952 top-selling tabloid the Sunday Pictorial ran a three-part series entitled ‘Evil Men’ that reporter Douglas Warth promised would mark an ‘end to the conspiracy of silence’ surrounding homosexuality in Britain. Warth and his editor, Hugh Cudlipp, did their damnedest to drive homosexual men in positions of power out of their respective closets. It was the first time that any British newspaper had been so brazen, but Warth justified his prurience in his introduction, claiming that ‘the natural British tendency to pass over anything unpleasant in scornful silence is providing cover for an unnatural sex vice which is getting a dangerous grip on this country’. He stated that ‘there were over a million known homosexuals in Britain’ before the war, and that the number of ‘pansies’ and ‘queers’ had only increased since. A report commissioned by the Home Office revealed that the number of convictions for homosexual acts (as well as those for prostitution) rose rapidly in the immediate post-war period. It seemed as if the Government was backing the Sunday Pictorial’s claims.

In truth, there was little evidence that there were more prostitutes plying their trade in London than before, just as there was no proof that there were more ‘poofs’, yet any and all sexual acts involving two or more men were criminal offences, and, in the wake of the publication of ‘Evil Men’, the Home Office pursued prosecution more rigorously than ever before. Police forces around the country were encouraged to root out – by fair means or foul – any man breaking the law.

Why this sudden interest in sex? Cudlipp ‘was revolted and alarmed by homosexuality’², and had made a success of his newspapers, the Sunday Pictorial and the Daily Mirror, by feeding readers an endless stream of sensation and scandal, but he was not alone. With Nazism crushed, homosexuality and the threat of ‘Reds under the bed’ became the joint anathema of the British press. Newspapers including the News of the World and The People filled their front pages with high-profile cases involving prominent public figures who were either homosexual, Russian moles or – worse – both, as in the cases of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, the diplomats-turned-spies who defected to the USSR in May 1951.

People did not dare talk about being homosexual. If you were to discuss your feelings with your teacher or your doctor, the chances are you would be referred to a psychiatrist. If you were arrested, tried and found guilty of being a homosexual, you could be fined, imprisoned and forced to undergo electric shock therapy or even chemical castration, and your name and address would be printed alongside the degenerate crime you had committed in the newspapers, for your family, friends, neighbours and work associates to see. In 1952, when code breaker and mathematics genius Alan Turing was charged with gross indecency, he was offered a choice between imprisonment and probation, the latter conditional on his willingness to undergo hormonal treatment (the aforementioned chemical castration) designed to reduce his libido. Following a year of ‘treatment’, which was usually accompanied by nausea, vomiting and dehydration, Turing – who was key to breaking the Enigma code during the Second World War and so significantly foreshortening hostilities – took his own life.

Scotland Yard detectives, led by Commander E. A. Cole, spent months in America where they were persuaded by the FBI to weed out homosexuals in all spheres of public life. Police Commissioner Sir John Nott-Bower vowed to ‘rip the cover off all London’s filth spots’, claiming that he knew a ‘vast underground pervert ring was flourishing in central London, to which perverts from other countries… were easily admitted’.³ It was claimed that the police ‘knew the names of thousands of perverts—many of high social position and some world-famous—but they took no action’⁴ before being encouraged by their colleagues stateside. In west London alone, 600 men were convicted of homosexual offences in 1953.

That same year, rumours started to circulate that a prominent ‘26-year-old bachelor peer’ had been up to no good. Soon after, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu fled to France and then to America, from where he knew he could not be extradited. His recent engagement to the daughter of a major he had met while studying in Oxford was called off; his family told reporters that he was recuperating after picking up a bug, and that he was ‘to undergo further special treatment’.⁵ He told the press that he had ‘insisted on the break for personal reasons’.⁶ One week later, a warrant was issued for his arrest, with a second warrant issued for film director Kenneth Hume, who had been scouting out his friend Montagu’s ancestral pile as a possible filming location. Both men were accused of having committed indecent assault. Montagu returned to London to face the charge and he and Hume appeared before Winchester Assizes in December 1953; the bisexual Montagu was eventually acquitted of committing a serious sexual offence against a 14-year-old Boy Scout during a picnic and swim at the beach. Montagu insisted that the whole thing was a set up: he had originally accused the boy of theft but the police, aware of his sexual predilections, were after him. Meanwhile the case against Hume collapsed – partly because the police had made a poor attempt to alter dates in his passport – and, after a second trial, he was finally found not guilty.

While the court case was still commanding headlines, the notoriously homophobic Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe announced that ‘Homosexuals in general are exhibitionists and proselytisers, and a danger to others, especially the young. So long as I hold the office of Home Secretary, I shall give no countenance to the view that they should not be prevented from being such a danger.’⁷ Three weeks later, the law came for Montagu again; this time the press were on the doorstep waiting when the police arrived. Montagu, his cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers and Daily Mail correspondent Peter Wildeblood were charged with ‘conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons’ after Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers had made use of a beach hut near Montagu’s estate to entertain a couple of friends. These certain ‘male persons’ were young airmen Edward McNally and John Reynolds. McNally and Wildeblood had been in a relationship for some time, while Reynolds was a friend of McNally’s. ‘Eddie was one of those people whom it was impossible to get rid of,’ Wildeblood wrote. ‘Worse still, he grew on one, like ivy… there grew up between us an extraordinary, passionate tension.’⁸ Montagu protested his innocence ‘because I was’, as he told the Evening Standard in 2007. ‘It was guilt by association.’ Despite claims that the whole affair had been entirely innocent, and his insistence that ‘we had some drinks, we danced, we kissed, that’s all’⁹, the result of this historic trial would see a peer of the realm jailed for a year, and his co-defendants incarcerated for 18 months each.

The anti-homosexual establishment had a busy year in 1953. In January Labour MP William J. ‘Bill’ Field was fined £15 after he was arrested while cottaging* in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, the scandal ending his political career. On 1 June it was announced that the actor John Gielgud was to be knighted; four months later, he was fined £10 after pleading guilty to ‘persistently importuning male persons for immoral purposes’ in a public convenience in Dudmaston Mews, Chelsea. Blaming his actions on the effects of alcohol, he was admonished by the magistrate and advised to ‘see your doctor the moment you leave here… This conduct is dangerous to other men, particularly young men, and is a scourge in this neighbourhood.’¹⁰

Gielgud had been rehearsing a new play, A Day by the Sea, and was worried about both the company and audiences finding out, especially given that a British Rail porter from Newport, South Wales, was jailed for six months for an identical offence in the same week that Gielgud had received a slap on the wrist. He need not have concerned himself. Co-star Dame Sybil Thorndike laughed the incident off, calling him a ‘silly bugger’, and, when the play opened in Liverpool the following week, the audience gave him a standing ovation when he stepped out on to the stage. Yet if public attitudes towards homosexuality were evolving, the attitude of those in power was stagnating. In a debate in the House of Lords, Earl Winterton referred to Gielgud when he spoke about the ‘filthy, disgusting vice of homosexuality’: ‘Many of the great actors of the past… were friends of mine … It is inconceivable that they would have been guilty of the disgusting offence of male importuning, or that the theatrical public of those days would have treated the offence with the leniency accorded to a well-known actor of the present day.’¹¹

During the same debate, another peer, Lord Vansittart, deplored the degree to which the vice had infiltrated the theatre, clearly demonstrated when ‘a man, risen to honour, who was subsequently arrested and who, having thereafter to make a public appearance, received an ovation. Whatever else is right or wrong about all these things, that must be wrong—dead wrong. It shows that something is radically wrong with public opinion.’¹² The stress caused Gielgud, a man who had always enjoyed the anonymity of cottaging, to suffer a breakdown several months into the play’s run.

The publicity around these cases caused many in Parliament to ask if there should be restrictions imposed on the media, limiting the details of criminal prosecutions for homosexual offences. Maxwell Fyfe argued that it was ‘in the public interest that cases of this kind, however unpleasant, should be reported, so that everyone may know that conduct of this kind is an offence against criminal law and may realise what is the punishment for committing that crime.’¹³ Then, in November, the Sunday Times ran a lead article that concluded that ‘the law that makes intercourse between males as such an indictable offence is neither enforceable nor consonant with current ethical standards’.¹⁴

Reacting to the weight of public opinion, and in spite of his earlier words, in 1954 Maxwell Fyfe set up the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in Great Britain. Its chairman was the vice chancellor of Reading University, Sir John Wolfenden. Among those questioned by the committee was Peter Wildeblood, Lord Montagu’s co-defendant. Such was the concern that the female secretaries working on the report would be corrupted by the subject matter, the code words ‘Huntley’ and ‘Palmers’ were used for homosexuals and prostitutes respectively on internal communications.* Even the Church of England got involved, convening a Moral Welfare Council and compiling their own report on ‘the problem of homosexuality’.¹⁵

The Wolfenden Report was published in September 1957. It concluded that the continued criminalisation of homosexuality impinged on civil liberties and, although it was imperative that the law should be used to prevent abuse and protect vulnerable individuals, it should not intrude into matters of personal morality. Despite 12 of the 13 signatories of the report agreeing that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private no longer be a criminal offence’¹⁶, the Cabinet opposed any proposal to implement Wolfenden’s recommendations; they would not be acted upon for another decade. For now, the brouhaha stirred up by the newspapers would provide a handy distraction from certain sleazy goings-on involving Members of Parliament, almost all of which would eventually command bigger headlines than those garnered by Montagu, Gielgud or the Cambridge spy ring.

Outside of Parliament, homosexuals still ran the risk of being arrested should they dare to do anything more than look at another man in a provocative way. Police forces around the country continued to arrest as many gay men as they possibly could, seeking them out and using foul methods to coerce them into revealing themselves. For years the British police happily used entrapment, false witness statements and strong-arm tactics to rid the country’s streets of the dreaded homosexual menace. More than a thousand men were jailed annually; it would take more than the instigation of the Bugger’s Charter (as the Wolfenden Report was disparagingly known) to change that any time soon.

But optimism was in the air. The times they were a-changin’ and within this febrile atmosphere a new type of Briton was born: the teenager. It was only a few years since clothing rationing had ended, and most British youngsters could only dream of owning the denim jeans and leather jackets they saw Marlon Brando and James Dean wearing in fan magazines. With little in the way of distinctively ‘British’ fashion, those kids who could afford to rebel either dressed in an approximation of their Hollywood heroes, the cool and chic French existentialists (a look adopted by the Beatniks) or Italian modernists (whose style would later be adopted by the Mods). The only uniquely British tribe were the Teddy Boys, whose style was influenced by the formal wear of their Edwardian grandfathers and the greased back ‘duck’s arse’ hair of their American idols.

In the decade following the end of the war, the average British teen looked like a pocket-sized version of their father or mother, although after the emergence of the Teddy Boys that would slowly start to change. Mary Quant opened her first store, Bazaar, on the corner of the King’s Road in Chelsea in 1955, followed two years later by John Stephen, who opened the first gents’ outfitters on Carnaby Street. Even if they could not afford the clothes they could watch the movies, they could dance the dances, they could find kids like themselves who loved the music and they could hang out together on street corners and in coffee bars where, for the price of a Coke or a cappuccino, you could spend hours sitting by the jukebox, listening to the wild, exciting sounds no BBC radio DJ would dare play.

A few British companies had the prescience to press the US music that the kids craved. But the youngsters wanted more; they wanted artists who understood the uniquely British issues that affected them. They also wanted to play that music themselves, but very few could afford the expensive electric guitars, valve-driven amplifiers and shiny drum sets needed. Even if you were able to acquire these coveted items (pretty much always on hire purchase, the dreaded ‘never-never’) and were musically inclined, the best you could hope for – once you had become proficient enough – was to join one of the dozens of orchestras or big bands touring the country, providing the music for Saturday-night dances at venues like the Hammersmith Palais. British record companies seemed reluctant to sign new, homegrown talent for the teen market. They wanted artists with wider appeal, and spent little time worrying about teens making music for other teens. Why bother when they had an endless supply of 30- and 40-year-olds crooning bland cover versions of US hits, or when they could license and release the American originals over here? No one saw any reason to upset the status quo.

For those that had the chops, finding work as a live musician was relatively easy. For years the powerful Musicians’ Union (MU) had made it almost impossible for American artists to tour Britain, insisting that visiting bandleaders use British talent, rather than bring their regular accompanists over with them. There were also strict rules governing both airplay and recording. Most of the music played on the radio or on television (then still an emergent force) was performed live by studio musicians paid the Union rate. After efforts by promoters to break this stranglehold, things came to a head in 1954 when an attempted boycott of Nat King Cole’s performance at the London Palladium was called off after the theatre threatened to sue the Union: the MU had initially refused to allow British musicians to appear because Cole brought three American musicians with him. The following year, the MU and the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) penned an exchange agreement, allowing American performers to visit the UK if an equal number of British musicians were allowed into the USA. But it would be a further two years before a genuine American rock ’n’ roll star would set foot on British soil.

Something had to change. And someone had to be the one to change it.

*Picking up other men in public toilets.

*Huntley & Palmers is a well-known biscuit manufacturers, originally based in Reading, the city where Wolfenden was working at the time of his groundbreaking report.

1

Mr Parnes, Shillings and Pence

‘Call me Larry. Everybody calls me Larry.’ – Larry Parnes¹⁷

Our story begins with Tommy Steele. Or, rather, with Laurence Maurice Parnes.

Pop music in Britain in the 1950s was a dreary affair, with the lists of top-selling discs under siege to novelty acts, comedy songs and avuncular tenors in dinner jackets. Until November 1952, and the very first Top 12 (published by music weekly the New Musical Express), there had not been a chart; previously a song’s popularity had been judged by the sale of sheet music rather than discs. Even after that date, the singles market was dominated by the sale of brittle 78s, the majority aimed at either housewives, grandparents or children. Only three British singers featured in the list of the UK’s 10 bestselling singles of 1955; the following year, there was only one. The rest of the list was made up of instrumentals and the saccharine-sweet Hollywood-glossy sounds of Doris Day, Pat Boone and the like.

With few American artists touring the country, no dedicated pop or rock shows on television, no pop radio station, and very limited airtime allotted for playing discs on the BBC’s Light Programme (the only shows regularly playing pop were Housewives’ Choice and Family Favourites), most of this first generation of post-war rebels only got to hear the new sounds coming from America via tepid re-recordings performed by middle-of-the-road crooners on variety shows like the Billy Cotton Band Show, which began on radio in 1949 and transferred to television in 1956. Luckily, hip British teenagers could access the imported sounds of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Bill Haley via late-night broadcasts from Radio Luxembourg, listened to after lights out beneath the blankets on the newest must-have gadget, a transistor radio. But it was Hollywood, and specifically the film Blackboard Jungle, that brought the two-year-old ‘Rock Around the Clock’ to their attention and seemed to open the gates of Hell at the very same time. In Memphis a 14-year-old schoolgirl turned arsonist and caused £45,000 worth of damage after watching the movie and, along with four other members of all-girl gang Corpus Debs, was placed in juvenile detention indefinitely. When the film was screened in Britain, riots broke out in cinemas, teenagers danced in the aisles and councils around the country threatened to ban it. Anthony Carthew, reviewing the film for the Daily Herald, claimed that watching it made him ‘physically sick’, and that he had come to the conclusion that ‘many American male teenagers are either mentally deficient or brutal thugs’. Having already enjoyed a two-week run in January, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ re-entered the British charts in October, hitting the number one spot in December 1955. It went on to become the biggest-selling single of the 1950s and was the first record to sell over a million copies in the UK.

Up until this point, the British record industry had barely acknowledged the advent of the teenager, and there were no British acts breaking through to satiate this new demographic. Squarer-than-square bandleader Ronnie Aldrich tried with his 1955 single ‘Rock Love’, but the kids were not fooled by a man nudging 40 pretending to be hip, no matter if he was accompanied by some swinging sax sounds that aped Haley’s Comets. For the most part, British record companies were run by men with no foresight, and often with no experience: the man at the helm of EMI, the biggest and most successful record company in the world at the time, had previously run a flour mill. Recording studios were presided over by producers in grey suits and deferential engineers who wore lab coats and populated by artists who did as they were told. The producer was king, the songwriter came second and the lowly artist sat at the bottom of the pile waiting to be thrown a bone. The only ones getting rich were record companies and hit songwriters: it was not unusual to have two, three or four different recordings of the same song competing for sales and chart supremacy. Artists would get a flat rate for the recording session or, if they were lucky, a meagre royalty of one old penny per record sold. Singers who wrote their own songs were rarer than hen’s teeth, and those that did often found themselves sharing credit with their producer, arranger or A&R (artists and repertoire) man. Even if they had been making a fortune, it would have been taken away in tax.

Then along came skiffle.

A hybrid of traditional folk, jazz, blues and the emerging rock ’n’ roll, skiffle was easy and cheap, and offered music-mad teens a way to make a noise without having to buy expensive, electrically amplified equipment. The timing was fortuitous: a trade embargo, set up to encourage people to ‘buy British’ and help reignite the post-war economy, prohibited the sale of glossy, imported American goods – including those coveted electric guitars. With skiffle British teens could attempt to emulate their American idols and busk along to the songs they heard transmitted over crackly airwaves from Radio Luxembourg, 208 medium wave. Although the roots of skiffle could be traced back to musicians turning up to play ad hoc at Harlem rent parties in the twenties and thirties, or even to the ‘spasm’ bands (acts made up of youngsters using home-made instruments) playing New Orleans from the mid-1890s, this uniquely British version was new, exciting and aimed squarely at the kids, and 24-year-old jazz guitarist Lonnie Donegan quickly became the genre’s leading icon. ‘Donegan didn’t just do skiffle, he was an entertainer,’ singer Vince Eager explains. ‘He was an absolute craftsman, a revue artist who loved comedy – that’s why he did songs like My Old Man’s a Dustman – he did it because he didn’t just want to be a skiffler, or a trad jazz man.’

Donegan began playing skiffle while still a member of Chris Barber’s Jazz Band. Initially given a solo spot during the act’s live set, he would pick away at his banjo to a couple of American folk tunes, usually accompanied by Barber on double bass and Beryl Brydon on washboard. This spot proved so popular with audiences that the trio were soon playing as Lonnie Donegan’s Skiffle Group, and the band-within-a-band appeared on the bill as Barber’s support act. In 1954 the trio recorded ‘Rock Island Line’ but, like ‘Rock Around the Clock’, it would take some time to become a major hit. When it eventually charted in January 1956, the fast-paced railroad song catapulted skiffle into the public consciousness. A craze was born: Donegan became a huge influence on a whole generation of would-be singers and guitar players, who were happy to send off their five-shilling deposits to buy cheaply made, Donegan-endorsed Spanish guitars. His debut album, Lonnie Donegan Showcase, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and stayed on the album charts for 22 weeks. Soon skiffle bands were springing up around the country.

London-based trainee-typesetter Michael Bourne, later to find fame as singer and actor Mike Berry, was just one of the many young men and women turned on to skiffle by Donegan. ‘We were called the Rebels. There were two other guys with guitars, and the bass player and his dad had made a tea-chest bass, and painted hands and feet jiving all over it. A friend of my mother’s had loaned me a guitar, but I didn’t take to it straight away, so I played washboard and sang; we didn’t have PA systems. We copied Lonnie Donegan, but we also sang rock ’n’ roll. It was pretty dreadful. We just tried to do what everybody else did with the limited capabilities of skiffle. We’d heard Freight Train by Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey, who we all fancied, but Lonnie was the one, and when my brother bought Rock Island Line on a 78 I was just blown away! I thought it was the best thing I’d ever heard. Lonnie had such energy, and his rendition was fantastic.’¹⁸

A window into a new world was slowly opening and, in May 1956, it was flung wide when ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ became Elvis Presley’s first UK chart hit, reaching number two and staying in the hit parade for a Donegan-equalling 22 weeks. Despite Presley being dismissed by one newspaper as little more than a ‘colourful Mississippi hillbilly’¹⁹, British teenagers became obsessed with the new, bequiffed and Brillantined guitar-slinging rebel from the other side of the Atlantic. Soon everything that the kids listened to, and lusted after, came from the United States. Ironically, Presley lost out in the race to the top spot to Pat Boone, the man who had made a career out of mollifying Middle America with his heavily censored, God-fearing, white-bread versions of black rhythm and blues hits. ‘The first big impression on me was Little Richard,’ Mike Berry recalls. ‘I went with my big sister to see the film Don’t Knock the Rock and Little Richard sang Long Tall Sally. I was absolutely gobsmacked. Then I heard Elvis. When I first heard Hound Dog I thought, Woah! What is this?’

Things happened fast: by the middle of August national newspaper the Daily Mirror was asking its readers ‘Do We Want This Shockin’ Rockin’?’ and reporting that, in the US at least, rock ’n’ roll had ‘been blamed for starting riots, rape and alcoholism among the youngsters. Mayors have banned rock concerts in several towns. Many disc jockeys won’t play it anymore,’ and warning its frightened readers that ‘rock ’n’ roll is about to make a big bid in Britain’.²⁰ Three weeks later, London jazz club Studio 51 introduced the country’s first weekly rock ’n’ roll night, but the men who ran the recording industry were slower to act. Rock ’n’ roll was a passing phase, not worth investing their time or energy in, derided by the Mirror’s Patrick Doncaster as ‘about as musical as the flushing of a sewer…’ Doncaster may have felt that ‘we have little need to fear about rock ’n’ roll troubles here. [Our] teenagers do not compare with America’s’²¹, but he was wrong, and if the newspapers and record labels were not going to exploit the demand, someone else would have to.

Born Laurence Maurice Parnes in 1930 in Willesden, London (at least, that’s the way it appears on his birth certificate; he would often spell his given name ‘Lawrence’), Larry Parnes was the first British artist manager to become a celebrity in his own right. He was also the first to realise that cute young men were a commodity, a product to be packaged and sold, and to understand how to sell that product to the British public. Parnes saw how the onslaught of American artists was stealing the hearts and emptying the pockets of British teenagers, and the businessman in him fancied a slice of that pie.

Parnes proudly boasted that he had organised his first show when he was just eight years old, while the family was enjoying their annual vacation at the Queen’s Hotel, in the Cliftonville area of Margate. Enlisting other holidaying children and charging their parents for the privilege of seeing their own kids perform, the teeny tycoon sang one song, ‘Ten Little Miles from Town’, and claimed to have taken £2 and 15 shillings on the door. Performing was in the blood, as he told BBC Radio Merseyside presenter Bob Azurdia in 1988: ‘My mother’s youngest brother was a comedian and singer called Len Young, the Singing Fool, and he played the variety halls before and after the war. He married one of the Kaye Sisters, Carol Kaye, and so she is my aunt. I remember as a little kid listening to him on the Royal Variety Performance on radio. He used to take me to these variety halls and backstage to meet all the big stars of the era like Max Miller and George Formby, so a love of the theatre was inbred in me from five or six years old.’²² The BBC began broadcasting the Royal Variety Performance in 1926. Uncle Len was never invited to perform, although he did appear regularly on radio in the thirties and forties. Bizarrely, Aunt Carol did appear, alongside the two other Kaye Sisters, Judy Garland and headliner Tommy Steele, at the 1957 Royal Variety Show. But Larry was never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Although not massively wealthy, the Parnes family were doing very nicely, thank you, certainly well enough to be able to afford live-in staff and the occasional luxury holiday. In early 1939 young Larry, his father, Nathan, mother, Stella, and elder sister, Barbara, left London for the family’s first trip to New York. Larry fell in love with the vibrancy of the city and would be a frequent visitor for the rest of his life. After their return to London, it became clear that war with Germany was inevitable, and the Parnes children were evacuated from the capital to the relative safety of the countryside. It was there that Larry developed a love for animals, especially dogs and horses.

Once the war was over, Larry and Barbara returned home to the London suburb of Brondesbury Park. Parnes paid little attention to his studies and, after leaving school, he worked in the family clothing business, entertaining vague ideas about becoming an actor. ‘I used to have a bit of fun making cardboard microphones and pretending that I was singing through them, but I realised that if it ever happened, I would have frightened goodness knows how many people out of the theatres. I had some photographs taken when I was about 16, like all young people do if they want to get anywhere. The shop that took the photographs thought one of them was so good that they put it in the window and lo and behold, a week later I was contacted by a lady talent scout for Gaumont British Films. I met with her and she thought I had potential as an actor. My mum and dad, God rest their souls, didn’t want me to do that.²³

‘I had started working in my parents’ fashion shops as an errand boy and I was picking up pins with a magnet and putting them in boxes,’ Parnes told Azurdia. ‘Then I learnt window displays and the financial side of it. By the time I was 18, I was a junior manager and I got £2 a week.’ The ambitious and creative young man wanted to break free from his parents and live his own life. It would have destroyed Nathan and Stella to learn that their only son was homosexual and had already started to frequent the underground bars and private members’ clubs which had been springing up in and around Soho since before the war. With their financial help, he opened the doors to his first shop, in Romford, ‘and after two years, I had three shops and I was in my very early 20s’.

But, as Brian Epstein would also discover several years later, dressing windows and looking after the till was not fulfilling enough for Larry Parnes. ‘I entered show business in 1955 by way of an investment in a play called House of Shame,’ he told Then and Now magazine in a late 1970s interview. ‘The show toured for one year. I got my money back and made fifteen shillings profit.’ Written by Bruce Walker, author of the hit play (and later film) Cosh Boy, House of Shame had been touring the country since the summer of 1954, but reviews were poor and the producers were looking at hefty losses. Parnes, with encouragement from his friend, the gay composer Geoffrey Wright, had recently ploughed some of his own money into the show. The two men had met in one of Soho’s clubs. Eighteen years older than Parnes, Wright had been wildly successful before the war, writing music and songs for revues at the Gate Theatre Studio in Charing Cross. He joined the Navy during hostilities but had found it difficult to re-establish his career in peacetime and so reluctantly moved into the business side of the industry.

Parnes and Wright’s investment helped to turn things around, but it was not until photographer and nascent booking agent John Kennedy came along and changed the name of the play to the much more salacious Women of the Streets that things really took off. New Zealander Kennedy also hit on the ruse of having actresses stand outside the theatre dressed as prostitutes to entice customers in. It was a stroke of genius. The laws against staging such lascivious entertainment were strict: only four years earlier the Lord Chancellor had been asked to consider repealing ‘the ban upon plays in which reference to homosexuality and lesbianism occur’, but the then-Lord Chamberlain noted that ‘the British public is apt to be intolerant of attempts at moral reform and there may be inclination to ridicule, which would be unfortunate’.²⁴ The women were arrested, the press picked up the story and the play became a moderate success.

After Women of the Streets, Parnes and Wright established a new company, Wright Stage Productions Ltd, and Parnes was persuaded to invest in another play, a musical loosely based on the story of Frankenstein. It seems never to have played to a paying audience, and he quickly erased it from his history.* Parnes wanted the world to believe that, with no experience but with a lot of front and flair, he used the 15 shillings he made from Women of the Streets to become the most successful artist manager of the early rock era, the one that set the template for what would