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When the telephone rang in a dormitory in Bangor, Wales, in late August 1967, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were told that their manager, Brian Epstein, had been found dead in his London townhouse. He was just 32. Behind closed doors, John Lennon was shattered. He turned to his bandmates and uttered a brutally honest epitaph: "We’ve fuckin’ had it now." For decades, casual observers wrote off Lennon’s panic as typical rock-star melodrama. But as Philip Norman illustrates in his biography, Mr. Moonlight: Brian Epstein and the Making of the Beatles, Lennon was right. Epstein wasn’t merely their business manager—he was the central pillar and ultimate shock absorber who kept four explosive creative egos from tearing each other apart.I