Feature

Q&A: Peter Brown

By Christopher Bonanos

In 1962, Peter Brown's friend Brian Epstein asked him to help manage a local band. Within months, he was at the center of Beatlemania. Today he runs the P.R. firm Brown Lloyd James, and this week, his 1983 memoir, The Love You Make, written with Steven Gaines, comes back into print.

Why reissue the book now?
When the Anthology came out -- the big coffee-table book -- Neil Aspinall, who runs Apple, gave me a copy. And I'm reading George Harrison talking about when we were in the Philippines . . .

You were attacked for inadvertently snubbing Mrs. Marcos . . .
We were beaten up. And I'm thinking, This is not how it happened. So I called Neil and said, "The book's fabulous, but the chapter on the Philippines is wrong." And he said, "I know -- but it's George's version. It's how he remembers it." Then I read a review in Rolling Stone that referred to other Beatle books and not mine. And I got pissed off.

Any corrections or new material in this edition?
No -- I thought we'd leave well enough alone. If there was any criticism, it was, Why did you have to be so frank? Paul once said to me, "Why did you have to put in that I had VD in Hamburg?"

Do you still speak with Paul and Ringo?
I don't not talk to them. I see a lot of Yoko -- she very cleverly adopts the attitude of "I've never read it." Which is fine by me. We're good friends -- we're neighbors.

You live in the Dakota?
Next door. When John and Yoko first came to New York, they came to visit me, and John said to my doorman, "Is anything available?" And they said no, so he simply went to the next building, having no idea it was the Dakota. And there was a sublet.