John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  The story of Brian’s efforts to find the Beatles a record deal would later be recounted like some modern Labor of Hercules: how, week after week, he would travel to London and pitch them to label after label, but without scoring so much as an audition; how smug, all-knowing metropolitan executives only just kept from sniggering at the notion of a Liverpool group becoming “bigger than Elvis” and, with affected kindliness, advised him to stick to shopkeeping; how, night after night, he would be met off the train at Lime Street station by four hopeful faces, soon to be downcast once more.

  At these glum debriefings, usually held at a station-exit coffee bar named the Punch and Judy, John would, surprisingly, not lambast Brian for his failure but be sympathetic and resolutely upbeat, joking that if all else failed they could try Embassy, a label dealing in inferior cover versions of current chart hits and sold only through Woolworths. When the other three’s spirits flagged, he would pep them up with a routine inspired by cornball Hollywood musicals like The Band Wagon. “Where are we goin,” fellas?” he’d call out in a cheesy American accent. “To the top, Johnny,” they would obediently chorus back. “And where’s that?” “To the toppermost of the poppermost, Johnny!”

  Brian certainly suffered rejection and belittlement at the hands of London A&R (artists and repertory) men. But it was barely three weeks after Decca’s formal turndown that he struck a one-in-a-million lucky break. On February 13, he found his way to George Martin, the head of EMI’s Parlophone label. Totally against type, thirty-six-year-old Martin was a gentlemanly figure with a voice more suggestive of the BBC than the Top 20. As two cultured accents met with mutual surprise, the ball started rolling at last. Martin listened to recordings from the Decca audition, decided that, for all the eccentric choice of material, “something” was there, and expressed a willingness to give Decca’s rejects a hearing in person.

  In addition to being a gentleman, Martin possessed an unusual combination of qualities that made him dream casting for the epic ahead. First, he was a trained classical musician; second, he had a pedigree as a producer of spoken-word comedy records, often in the form of shows before a live audience. At this stage, no firm date was made for his and the Beatles’ first encounter. But—to paraphrase lyrics he would one day know well—a splendid time was guaranteed for all.

  Brian’s hasty study of pop-star management had taught him one golden rule for young male stars and would-be stars. To win the devotion of teenage girls, they must seem to be footloose, fancy-free—and thus theoretically available to each and every one of their fans. Wives were a complete nonstarter, fiancées and regular girlfriends almost as risky—and boyfriends, of course, completely off the chart. Though all four Beatles were sexually active, not to say hyperactive, only two were going steady, John with Cynthia Powell and Paul with Dot Rhone. Cynthia and Dot were now told they could no longer attend Beatles gigs and should be seen as little as possible with their swains in public. Schooled as they were in obedience and loyalty, both accepted the ruling without protest.

  For Cyn, now in her final year of teacher training, it was not a good time to be shut out in the cold. The previous summer, her widowed mother, Lilian, had emigrated to Canada to make a new life as a children’s nanny. With the Powell family home in Hoylake rented out, it had seemed a neat solution for Cyn to join Mimi Smith’s student boarders at Mendips, taking a vacation job at a local Woolworths to help pay her rent. For some time after John’s return from Hamburg, they had lived under the same roof, albeit occupying separate bedrooms, with all hanky-panky strictly forbidden.

  Cyn did her best to be helpful and unobtrusive, even taking on a share of the housework. But having such a rival for John’s attention actually in the house soon began to grate on Mimi’s never very resilient nerves. However late he came in from a gig, she had been used to waiting up for him, ready to make him tea and a snack, and hear the night’s news. Now, not unnaturally, Cyn would be waiting up for him, too—“hanging around in her nightdress,” as Mimi put it disapprovingly to sister Nanny. After a few weeks, the tension became too much, and Cyn left Menlove Avenue to board with her Aunt Tess on the other side of town.

  In the absence of a firm audition date from Parlophone Records, West Germany rather than southern Britain still seemed the Beatles’ most promising territory. At Christmas, the pleasant and fair-dealing Peter Eckhorn had come over from Hamburg, met Brian, and booked them for a return appearance at his Top Ten Club that following spring. A couple of weeks afterward, Eckhorn’s security chief, the giant-killing Horst Fascher, also turned up in Liverpool with a singer-pianist named Roy Young, sometimes known as “Britain’s Little Richard.” Fascher, it transpired, had fallen out with Eckhorn, quit the Top Ten and was seeking acts for a brand-new St. Pauli rock venue, the Star-Club.

  “When I come to Liverpool, I’m told the Beatles have a new manager called Brian Epstein that I have to talk to,” he remembers. “Brian says to me ‘I’m sorry, the boys are already booked to play the Top Ten.’ I tell him ‘If the Beatles don’t come to my club, there will be no fuckin’ Top Ten Club…we’ll smash the fuckin’ place up.’”

  For Stu Sutcliffe in Hamburg, the prospect of John’s return was a bright spot in a life that—all unbeknownst to his best friend—had become increasingly shadowed by pain and anxiety. The headaches that had plagued Stu for the past year were now so intense that he could sometimes barely move or even speak while in their skull-splitting throes; his skin grew drained of color even as his canvases rioted with it; his weight plummeted, and he suffered spells of dizziness and nausea. His violent mood swings and outbursts of irrational jealous rage against Astrid had soured a relationship that had once seemed ideal, postponing the wedding that once had seemed so urgent. His letters home to his family seemed to reflect an increasing mental confusion, the formerly regular italic script now wild and disjointed, like messages from an unhappy ghost.

  Yet the attacks were as sporadic as they were unpredictable. For days at a time, Stu would be free from pain and seemingly back to normal: lapping up his master classes with Eduardo Paolozzi at the state art college, working with near-drunken euphoria in his attic studio at the Kirchherr house.

  On January 22, he wrote optimistically to his mother, Millie, that he was enjoying his painting, his German college grant had just been increased, and “my little Astrid is happy and contented.” A few days later, he required treatment in the local hospital’s outpatients department after apparently suffering a kind of fit. The Kirchherrs’ doctor sent him for blood tests, an electrocardiogram, and an X-ray, which ominously recorded an “increase in skull-pressure.” He began a course of cranial hydrotherapy and massage, which had such immediate beneficial results that he stopped it before it was completed. Astrid wrote to his mother that he was “very ill” but that, with various treatments, including the long-delayed appendectomy, he would be cured “in 7 months.”

  Early in February, he returned to Liverpool to see his mother, who had herself been seriously ill and recently undergone surgery. Though he looked pale and wraithlike even for him, none of his Beatle ex-colleagues, least of all myopic John, noticed anything untoward. He saw them play at the Cavern, met Brian Epstein, and even discussed taking some future role as designer or art director for the group. “I didn’t know anyone as lovely as you existed in Liverpool,” Brian wrote to him afterward.

  Back in Hamburg, he suffered a further bout of convulsions, followed by more racking headaches. The Kirchherrs’ doctor recommended specialist treatment at a neurological clinic, including induced sleep, but no spare beds for such care were available. Stu wrote to his mother that he was “very ill, bed-bound…can’t walk far without falling over.” Three days later, he had another seizure, this time serious enough to make the doctor suspect epilepsy. Unable to sleep, he was tortured by fears of going mad or blind, or both, by remorse for saddling the Kirchherrs with his medical bills, and by recurrent urges to jump to his death from his studio window. With eerie prescience, he even ask
ed Astrid’s mother to buy him a white coffin to be buried in. “My head is compressed,” he wrote to his sister, Joyce, “and filled with such unbelievable pain….” And John knew nothing about any of it.

  The Beatles were due in town on April 11—for the first time arriving grandly by air—to inaugurate the Star-Club two days later. On April 10, in his studio at the Kirchherrs,” Stu suffered a seizure lasting more than half an hour. With Astrid out at work, it was left to a distraught Frau Kirchherr to make him as comfortable as possible, then send for the doctor who had been treating him. The doctor arrived to find him in a coma, and arranged his immediate admittance to the neurological unit at Heidberg Hospital. Astrid returned home just in time to go with him in the ambulance. He died during the journey, cradled in her arms. He was twenty-one.

  In the traumatic hours that followed, no one thought to break the news to his best friend. When John took off from Manchester next morning with Paul and Pete (George was recovering from measles and would follow with Brian a day later), he still no idea that Stu was dead. He found out from Astrid and Klaus Voormann in the arrivals hall at Hamburg airport. As after Uncle George’s death, his first reaction was uncontrollable hysterical laughter. “It was frightening,” Astrid remembers. “John was laughing but also kind of crying, saying ‘No, no, no!’ and lashing out with his hands.”

  When Brian and George arrived next day, Stu’s mother was on the same flight, bound for the ordeal of identifying his body, sorting out his effects, and arranging his transportation home. But the John who greeted her in Hamburg showed no sign of his wild outburst twenty-four hours earlier. Millie Sutcliffe was always to be mystified and hurt by his apparent lack of feeling.

  As in all cases of sudden death, an autopsy had to be performed on Stu before his funeral could take place. This found he had died from “cerebral haemorrhage due to bleeding into the right ventricle of the brain.” No explanation for the fatal rupture could be found, other than an indentation at the front of the skull, suggesting it had once suffered “trauma”—that is, some powerful impact or blow. In all Stu’s peaceable twenty-one, there seemed only one moment when he might have sustained such an injury. That was after the Beatles’ Lathom Hall gig in early 1961, when a group of Teds had cornered him backstage, knocked him down, and kicked him in the head.

  Almost forty years were to pass before Stu’s younger sister, Pauline, published a memoir containing another explanation of the damage to his skull. According to Pauline, he did not suffer it at Lathom Hall, but a few weeks later in Hamburg during the Beatles’ residency at the Top Ten Club. One day while he and John were walking together near the club, John had allegedly attacked him without provocation or warning, punching him to the ground, then repeatedly kicking him in the head as he lay there. Paul McCartney was also said to have been present. Since John instantly fled from the scene, it was left to Paul to pick up Stu—who had been left bleeding from the face and one ear—and help him back to the Beatles’ quarters at the Top Ten.

  Pauline said she had been told of the incident by Stu himself, during what was to be his last trip home to Liverpool. As she understood it, various grievances had been fermenting together in John’s mind—Stu’s poor musicianship and the trouble it was causing within the group, mingled with jealousy of Stu’s new life as a “real” artist, perhaps even some secret hankering after Astrid. Unhinged by the usual Hamburg combination of drink, pills, and sleeplessness, he had suddenly lost control and lashed out.

  According to Pauline, her family knew about the attack at the time but, in the misery following Stu’s death, were unable even to discuss it among themselves, let alone make it public. That it never emerged in the decades that followed was due to Millie Sutcliffe, specifically her determination to have Stu recognized as a creative force in his own right, not merely a footnote to the Beatles. So strongly did she feel on this point that she swore her two daughters to place an embargo on Stu’s letters and memorabilia—and by implication this particular story—for fifteen years after her own death, which came in 1984. The allegation was thus never made in John’s own lifetime. Nonetheless, Pauline believes, he always remained haunted by what he had done, fearing it might have been a contributory factor in the fatal hemorrhage.

  Other people close to them both at the time are reluctant to believe John could have made such a mindlessly vicious attack, however drunken or crazed. They point out how protective he had always been of Stu, how in the Lathom Hall fracas, he had even broken a finger in battling with Stu’s attackers. They deny that Stu’s poor musicianship was ever a serious issue with John (he was, in fact, almost out of the Beatles at the time of the alleged assault) or that John ever felt jealousy of his work or any covetousness regarding Astrid. Paul McCartney, the only named witness, has no recollection of it. “It’s possible Stu and John had a fight in a drunken moment,” he says, “but I don’t remember anything that stands out.” Astrid herself remains convinced that no such incident ever took place, “because if it had, Stuart would have told me.”

  Stu’s death caused huge shock, not only to his friends but to the teachers and ex-teachers who recognized him as a prodigious talent as well as a beautiful boy. He was buried at Huyton Cemetery on Maundy Thursday, April 19. John did not interrupt his Hamburg engagement to attend and, later, delivered a characteristically terse epitaph: “I looked up to Stu. I depended on him to tell me the truth.”

  A subsequent letter from Astrid to Millie Sutcliffe, however, showed a glimpse of his real feelings: “Why can’t we go for other people to Heaven? John asks me that—he said he would go for Stuart in heaven because Stuart was such a marvellous boy and he is nothing…. One day he showed me and Klaus his little room. Every piece of paper from Stuart he have stick on the wall and big photographs by his bed.”

  The Beatles’ new employer, Manfred Weissleder, was among the Reeperbahn’s most respected, and feared, denizens. His clubs enjoyed mysterious immunity from racketeers and protection gangs, prompting rumors of friendly links, to put it no higher, with Hamburg’s criminal underworld. From his numerous employees he demanded the ring-kissing obeisance of a Mafia don. “If you show Manfred any disrespect, you get fired,” the saying went. “But if you do it in front of a woman, you’ll be lucky to be left alive.”

  Weissleder’s Star-Club was St. Pauli’s biggest and plushiest music venue to date, a two-thousand-capacity space with cinema-style raked seating and bars that seemed to run away to infinity, overhung by forests of trendy tubular lamps. For headlining a five-act bill (also featuring Tony Sheridan, Roy Young, Tex Roburg and the Playboys, and the Bachelors), the Beatles received 500 deutschmarks (£44.50) each per week, plus shares of an under-the-table cash bribe that Fascher had paid Brian Epstein to secure them. Compared with what they were used to, the work hours seemed almost leisurely: four sixty-minute performances on one night, then three on the next, with an hour-long break rather than the customary fifteen minutes between sets. But they were still on call from eight p.m. to four a.m. seven nights a week, and in the entire six weeks would have only one day off.

  Best of all, for one Beatle at least, the engagement meant putting Brian’s restyling plans temporarily in abeyance. Having delivered them safely and seen the opening show, he had returned to Liverpool to work on more long-term strategic matters, chiefly the still-unscheduled audition date with Parlophone Records and George Martin. The Beatles could therefore go onstage every night in just shirts and jeans—accompanied by Roy Young as pianist and covocalist—without having to make any attempt at Shadow-boxing. The Star-Club’s clientele did not want bows and smiles; they wanted the crazy, mach-schau young Englanders they had followed from the Indra through the Kaiserkeller to the Top Ten. And this John gave them with a vengeance.

  He had always been hardest to hold in Hamburg. But those around him in these days and nights immediately following Stu Sutcliffe’s death felt a special intensity—almost a desperation—in the way he swilled beer, swallowed pills, and created mayhem, onsta
ge and off. “It was like ‘Stuart’s dead and we’re still alive,’” Horst Fascher says. “‘Let’s make all the shit we can, because tomorrow it may all be over.’”

  John, Paul, and Pete Best all by now had regular Hamburg girlfriends whose existence their Liverpool girlfriends—like sailors’ wives in an earlier era—never suspected. For a long time, John’s was one of the Star-Club’s barmaids, Bettina Derlien, a devout Beatles enthusiast who would signify approval of a particular number by making the long lamps above the bar jiggle and jog crazily together. “When it got late at night and the inside of the club was nearly empty, Betty would give John a blow-job behind the bar-counter,” Fascher says. “Not once…many times.”

  He wrote regularly to Cynthia, with a mixture of passion and pathos, begging her for lyrics to songs like “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues,” sometimes adding bits to the same letter over several days to that it ended up more like diary extracts, several hundred words long. As part of Cyn’s teacher-training course, she was now receiving practical classroom experience at a kindergarten in one of the toughest parts of Garston. To save herself the long daily bus ride from her aunt’s—and make herself more available to John when he returned home—she had taken a bed-sitting-room in Garmoyle Road, not far from Penny Lane. Her companion in anonymity, Paul’s girlfriend, Dot Rhone, was to have shared the room, but John objected that she would spoil their romantic times together (“with the Sunday papers, choccies and a throbber”), so Dot took the adjacent room instead.