Terry Doran, confidant of the Beatles and Brian Epstein – obituary

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Terry Doran, confidant of the Beatles and Brian Epstein – obituary
A man from the motor trade, he supplied the Fab Four with cars, rolled their joints and supplied a missing word for A Day in the Life
By Telegraph Obituaries
26 April 2020


Terry Doran
CREDIT: Roy Brigden/Daily Mail/Shutterstock

Terry Doran, who has died of Covid-19 aged 80, was a close friend and confidant of the Beatles and their manager Brian Epstein, and who over the years played a variety of supporting roles in the lives of the group.

Described by the Beatles’ biographer, Mark Lewisohn, as “a laugh, joint-roller and merry tripper”, Doran, a former car salesman, was initially responsible for supplying the Beatles with a succession of luxury automobiles; he was then involved in running the Beatles’ Apple music publishing company, and acted successively as personal assistant and right-hand man for John Lennon and George Harrison.

Terence James Doran was born on December 14 1939 in Liverpool, the son of Joseph and Elizabeth (nee Molloy), and the second of four children.

In 1959 he was working as a car salesman at a dealership in Warrington when he met Brian Epstein, who was then managing his family’s NEMS record stores, in a Liverpool pub. The pair became friends, and when Epstein became manager of the Beatles it was Doran who provided the group with their first cars (George Harrison’s was a second-hand, two-door, blue Ford Anglia 105E Deluxe).

Doran with George Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd in 1969
CREDIT: Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

When Epstein and the group moved to London, Doran followed, and with Epstein as a partner set up a dealership called Brydor Cars, with a showroom in an old cinema in Hounslow, which supplied a succession of luxury saloons and fast sports cars to the group and other pop stars including the Rolling Stones, the Moody Blues and the Yardbirds. The Stones’ manager Andrew Oldham bought a Rolls Royce Phantom V, just like John Lennon’s.

Epstein preferred cash deals, and he and Doran would often spend evenings gambling the profits at the White Elephant club in Mayfair. The business was eventually dissolved.

Doran’s easy-going nature and quick Scouse wit made him a popular figure within the Beatles’ inner circle. He liked to tell the friends that the line “Meeting a man from the motor trade” in the song She’s Leaving Home, was a “tip of the hat” to him from Paul McCartney, although McCartney maintained it was “just fiction”. But John Lennon did credit Doran for contributing the verb “fill” to his song A Day in the Life during the recording of the song at Abbey Road.

“There was still one word missing in that verse when we came to record. I knew the line had to go: “Now they know how many holes it takes to – something – the Albert Hall.” It was a nonsense verse really, but for some reason I couldn’t think of the verb. It was Terry who said ‘fill’ the Albert Hall, and that was it.’

In 1967, Doran became managing director of Apple Music Publishing, one of the numerous commercial ventures funded by the Beatles. Working from a cramped office above the Apple boutique in Baker Street, he assembled the musicians to form the group Grapefruit – a name suggested by Lennon after a book written by his future wife, Yoko Ono. Doran managed the group, and also briefly, and unhappily, Mary Hopkin.

Doran in 1969 at Heathrow Airport with George Harrison, returning from a holiday in Sardinia
CREDIT: Roy Brigden/Daily Mail/Shutterstock

Doran was a flamboyant figure, with an aureole of permed air and a dandyish taste in clothing, who drove around London in a large Rover painted in psychedelic swirls by the two Dutch artists collectively known as The Fool, who were also responsible for decorating the Apple boutique.

His greatest talent was not for business, but for friendship, kindness and amusement – “a rock and roll Frankie Howerd”, as one friend remembers, with a decidedly camp sense of humour, but “who kept his persuasion to himself”. He was also famed within music circles for rolling the best joints in London, while at the same being able to maintain a sense of equilibrium even as all around him were losing theirs.

He was particularly close to John Lennon. Early on in the Beatles’ success, he looked after Lennon’s “pocket money” – which would be doled out to the group by Brian Epstein – and after leaving Apple Music he became Lennon’s personal assistant and companion.

For a while he was an almost constant presence at Lennon’s home, Kenwood, in St Georges Hill, Surrey. At a time when Lennon was spending much of his time watching television, lost in an LSD haze, Doran took care of domestic duties, which included escorting Lennon’s then wife Cynthia on outings to London and the Speakeasy club, where Doran was a regular fixture. Even when Lennon was available for paternal duties his son Julian came to prefer Doran putting him to bed.

Lennon once said he would keep Doran around for as long as he made him laugh. But when in 1969 Lennon married Yoko Ono the arrangement came to an end.

George Harrison asked Doran to become his personal assistant, and he moved into a lodge in the grounds at Friar Park, Harrison’s 120-room neo-Gothic Victorian mansion near Henley-on-Thames. Doran would jokingly complain to friends about the “half-mile journey from the living room to the kitchen”, maintaining that no matter how wealthy, “You can only live in one room at a time.”

Members of Grapefruit, the band Doran managed, seated, with Brian Jones, Donovan, The Beatles and Cilla Black
CREDIT: ANL/Shutterstock

Like Harrison, he developed a keen interest in Indian spirituality. Jerry Shirley, the drummer for Humble Pie, was a friend of Doran’s. In 1970, when Shirley was just 18, his mother died. He tells the story of how he was in the Speakeasy drowning his sorrows when Doran suddenly appeared out of the blue.

“I don’t know how he’d found out that she’d died or where I was, but he sat me down, gave me a book and said ‘read this’. It was The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, with some very pertinent paragraphs about loss and grief, which Terry had underlined in ink. I still have it. The fact that he had a lot of responsibility on his shoulders and that he would have taken the time to seek me out and do that for me, I will never forget that. He also made me laugh out loud many, many times. He was a wonderful man.”

Doran proved extremely useful in tempering the spiritual with the practical. For a while Harrison invited members of the Hare Krishna movement to live at Friar Park, but they proved to be neglectful parents. One toddler, left to wander around on his own and fell in a deep fountain in the gardens and would have died had Doran not rushed to the fountain and dived in and saved him. Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd angrily reproached the parents to be told that “Krishna looks after them.”

The group eventually moved out when in 1973 Harrison bought them a mansion of their own in Hertfordshire, which was renamed Bhaktivedanta Manor. 

In the early 1980s Doran left Friar Park and moved to California, where he set up a business running rehearsal rooms. He later returned to his old job as a car salesman, this time in a dealership in Park Lane.

Always physically frail, in later years he suffered from Parkinson’s disease and spent his last years in a nursing home in North London.

Doran, who once described the Beatles as “the finest human beings I’ve known”, always maintained an unswerving loyalty to the group, and he was one of the few of their inner circle to maintain a discreet and enduring silence about their lives, resisting offers to write his own account of his time with them and refusing to discuss them in interviews and documentaries.

Terry Doran never married.

Terry Doran, born December 14 1939, died April 18 2020 

Terry Doran, middle, with John Lennon (and Mike McGear on right?)