John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Working for the Reeperbahn’s acknowledged Godfather theoretically shielded all the Beatles from ordinary dangers and hassles. Every Weissleder employee was issued a gold Star-Club lapel badge denoting a protected species whom hustlers hustled and bouncers bounced at their peril. But not even this talisman was proof against John’s incorrigible mischief-making. One morning, during the customary postperformance mooch around the harbor fish market, he persuaded some fellow musicians to join him in buying a live piglet. Their not-over-gentle efforts to control the squealing, terrified creature so outraged German bystanders that the Polizei were called and they found themselves under arrest for alleged animal cruelty. As none of them carried any identification, they were put into a cell until Fascher could be called to vouch for them.

  The living accommodation provided by Weissleder was a small second-floor flat with a balcony, across the street from the club and immediately adjacent to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. Here, squalor quickly set in on scale unknown even in Gambier Terrace. When George vomited next to his own bed, the mess stayed on the floor for days, decorated with matchsticks and referred to almost affectionately as the Thing. To a nauseated Weissleder, John explained that it was their pet hedgehog.

  Most Sunday mornings, an after-show party would be starting at the flat just as the more pious Freiheit residents made their way to early mass at St. Joseph’s. With only one small toilet among many partygoers, it was commonplace for males to relieve themselves over the balcony into the street. The most enduring of all John-goes-wild-in-Hamburg legends would be that on one such morning, as a group of nuns were passing beneath, he deliberately urinated on their heads. Investigation reveals that the victims of this unwelcome shower may not actually have been wearing habits but, Horst Fascher attests, “They were still very, very holy people.”

  Klaus Voormann witnessed a more calculated act of sacrilege by the erstwhile Woolton choirboy. One day when Klaus went up to the Beatles’ flat, John was seated on his bed, drawing on an outsize piece of cardboard and muttering to himself. “I see that he’s drawing Jesus, hanging on the Cross, with this big prick. All the time, he’s talking in a kind of sermon, working himself up. Then he goes onto the balcony, holds up the Cross and starts preaching to the people down in the street. Some of them laugh, some cringe and look away, some get angry and start shouting back at him. This is not just a little joke…this is heavy. If the police had seen him, he could have been in real trouble, maybe even gotten deported.”

  As it happened, John’s disruptions were about to be eclipsed by a master. On May 28, the Star-Club’s rolling bill was joined for two weeks by the legendary Gene Vincent. Barring Elvis and Buddy Holly, no American rock-’n’-roll pioneer had given John more inspiration since his first shaky “Be-Bop-A-Lula” at the St. Peter’s Church fete. Although still not yet thirty, Vincent had been prematurely aged by fame, quick-following decline, and the physical injuries life had showered on him. But he sang with the same eerie lisp (even if it now took three half bottles of Johnnie Walker whiskey per night to induce) and wore the black leather that he’d been first to make the rocker’s emblem. “We met Gene backstage,” John would remember. “Backstage? It was a toilet. And we were thrilled.”

  “Don’t make any shit tonight, John,” Fascher would plead before every show, and on quite a few nights he didn’t, seeming content to scream out every Chuck Berry song the Star-Club crowd demanded or croon “To Know Her Is to Love Her” as tenderly as if the only “her” on his mind was patient Cynthia back home in Garmoyle Road. The constant influx of new support bands, notably Gerry and the Pacemakers, kept him on his mettle in finding new songs to cover. There was a second recording date for Polydor (more minstrel-flavored oldies, like “Sweet Georgia Brown” and even “Swanee River”) to wind up the one-year contract with Bert Kaempfert. And a telegram from Brian Epstein produced excitement that needed no fueling by beer or pills or gorilla suits. Parlophone’s George Martin had finally fixed the Beatles’ audition (or “recording session,” as Brian put it) for June 6, a week after their return home.

  “I haven’t seen Astrid since the day we arrived,” John wrote to Cynthia, probably to allay any suspicion that he might be moving in on Stu’s girl. In fact, Astrid says, she could not have had a more sympathetic or supportive friend. John refused to let her cry alone at home, insisting that she attend the Beatles’ Star-Club opening and come back often afterward. Whenever misery threatened to overwhelm her under the tubular lamps, he would be there with a dose of pragmatism as astringent as smelling salts. “He’d always say ‘Let’s have a bean [Preludin] and talk,’” she remembers. “He convinced me it wasn’t possible to just give up, that I had to get through my grief and carry on. He put it very, very harshly, like he was almost telling me off: ‘You have got to decide if you want to die or go on living, but make a decision.’ He was the one who saved me really.”

  As the “bean” took effect, John would open up about his own feelings for Stu, that strange, unstable mixture of hero-worship and casual cruelty. As much as grief-stricken, he seemed almost bitter toward Stu for fading out of his life with so little warning. From there, the talk would often turn to another such offender, though on an incalculably greater scale—his mother, Julia. “John used to say that Stuart was the second person to have left him,” Astrid remembers. “First his mummy left him, then Stuart. I think it was the root of his anger…that people he loved the most always left him.

  “Once I just asked him ‘Did you really love Stuart from all your heart?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Why didn’t you show it then?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s not done, is it?’ John was very conservative.”

  When George Martin finally met the Beatles at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, he had a private agenda that, had John suspected it, could have strangled one of pop music’s greatest collaborations at birth. Although Martin’s Parlophone label had some pop output, it was negligible in comparison with EMI’s flagship label, Columbia, whose glittering roster was headed by Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Whereas Parlophone’s trademark comedy records each required a huge effort to conceive and develop, Columbia’s label boss, Norrie Paramour, could just sit back and watch Cliff-and-the-Shadows hits, Cliff-only hits, and Shadows-only hits roll forth like an automated production line. Martin wanted a Cliff and some Shadows of his own, and he hoped the Liverpool boys might fit the bill, or be made to fit it.

  The encounter could not have begun more intimidatingly. In 1962, records were still made with much the same formality they had been in 1902. The engineers wore long white coats like doctors or laboratory technicians, symbolizing how far their craft lay beyond the understanding, let alone participation, of ordinary mortals. The producer, or A&R man, was an omnipotent figure who not only chose his artists’ material but dictated exactly how it should be sung or played. It was assumed, usually with good reason, that pop stars were musical illiterates who needed all the skill of professional songwriters, arrangers, and session players to enrich their puny sound, and all the arcane wizardry of the engineers to make it releasable.

  Martin had originally not meant to audition the Beatles personally but to leave it to his assistant, Ron Richards, who dealt with Parlophone’s other few pop acts. Only when Richards alerted him to something possibly out of the ordinary did he come up from the canteen to inspect them. Then, against all the odds, everything began to go right. For, despite appearances, Martin was not really upper class at all. A North London carpenter’s son, he had acquired his patrician languor by osmosis, first in the wartime Fleet Air Arm, later at the Guildhall School of Music. Moreover, as a producer of comedy records, he had worked and been on friendly personal terms with the arch-Goons Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. On that basis alone, John was practically willing to kiss his shoes.

  Despite this rapport, Martin kept to his secret agenda. What the Beatles believed to be a general audition was actually a test for John and Paul in turn, to see which might be turned into the stand-alone front m
an. Martin jointly had in mind a Cliff Richard and a recent Peter Sellers comedy routine as a rock-’n’-roll singer named Clint Thigh. In the event, he found it impossible to choose between John’s voice and Paul’s, especially when the two melded together. “Paul’s was sweeter, but John gave the combination its interest and sharpness. He was the lemon juice against the virgin olive oil.”

  Where Martin differed from all previous auditioners was in giving as much credence to John’s and Paul’s own songs as to their interpretation of other peoples’. Of the four tracks recorded on June 6 as demos for a future single, three were Lennon-McCartney compositions—“Love Me Do,” “P.S. I Love You,” and “Ask Me Why.” The first dated back to truant afternoons in the McCartneys’ Allerton living room; the remaining two demonstrated just how far the truants had developed since. Both were ballads, virtually identical in tempo, each bearing its originator’s unmistakable footprint, yet with words, music, and performance equally unmistakably imprinted by his partner. “P.S. I Love You” was a Paul love-letter song, as sweet and romantic as had ever been committed to Basildon Bond notepaper, but with John’s voice chiming on random words almost tonelessly like a warning P.P.S.—I’ve got my eye on you. “Ask Me Why” showed John determined to match Paul in melodic adventurousness, with two different bridges and a close-harmony chorus and falsetto line straight from black American soul. The irrepressible wordsmith popped up everywhere, as in the punctilious to the rhyming of believe and conceive.

  The audition proved a fateful one for Pete Best. Afterward, Martin took Brian aside and told him Pete wasn’t a good enough drummer to play on the Beatles’ debut single, whatever it turned out to be. He did not say Pete should be fired, only that he preferred to use a session drummer accustomed to the very different demands of working in a studio. But his words concentrated the minds of the other three on what had become a nagging problem within their ranks. As a personality, Pete had never really fitted into the group. His taciturn manner, his fondness for his own company, his steadfast refusal to take pills, especially his film-star good looks and crisp, short haircut, all created an aloof, uninvolved air that had not mattered so much when they were nobodies but was becoming increasingly noticeable and irksome now they were starting to be somebodies.

  Since their very first Hamburg gig, the others had been covetously eyeing Rory Storm’s drummer Ringo Starr, the doleful-faced Dingle boy whose humor meshed with theirs as naturally as his sticks found their backbeat. Ringo it so happened, had recently become disaffected with Rory and quit the Hurricanes for brief period, only rejoining for lack of anything better. Back in February on a night when Pete was unwell, he’d sat in with John, Paul, and George yet again, and again proved what a perfect fit he was. After so long seemingly far beyond their reach, he was suddenly there for the asking.

  Yet firing Pete Best, even with the excuse that Parlophone demanded it, would create all manner of complications. Not only did Pete have his own huge following among the Beatles’ hometown fans, but his mother Mona had been their unofficial agent and tireless advocate. Moreover, his close friend, Neil Aspinall, was their indispensable driver—and, in a twist worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan, Neil and Mona Best had been having an affair, which ended with Mrs. Best becoming pregnant. For John, the dagger thrust into Pete’s back would be hardest of all. “He’d always got on well with Pete up until then,” Bill Harry says. “They used to go out drinking together a lot in Hamburg. Pete had been the one to stand by John when they tried mugging that sailor, and was also against dropping the black leather and going into suits. John respected Pete as the kind of hard man he himself always wanted to be.”

  John was already busily engaged in making his own life more complicated. On July 6, the Beatles played on another Cavern-sponsored “riverboat shuffle” aboard the cruiser Royal Iris, once again as support to Mister Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band. Since the previous summer’s trip down the Mersey together, Bilk had enjoyed a massive hit with his clarinet solo “Stranger on the Shore,” dominating the UK’s Top 20 for over six months and becoming the first British musician in years to make number one in America. So taken was he with his rock-’n’-roll shipmates this second time afloat that he presented each of them with a black bowler hat like the one he himself always wore onstage. At the Pier Head later, when Neil Aspinall counted bowler-hatted Beatles back into the van, John was missing. He had gone off with Patricia Inder.

  Patricia had long been one of the Beatles’ inner circle of female fans, the ones they knew by name, tried hardest to please, and even consulted about their performance. Since their arrival at the Cavern, she had seldom missed a show, day or night, conspicuous among the arch-worshippers in the front row with her tiny stature, waist-length blonde hair, and huge bush-baby eyes. She had always known John liked her but that he considered her far too young and innocent for any serious dalliance; when they’d first met, backstage at Aintree Institute, she was still only fifteen. “He used to call me ‘my little Brigitte Bardot.’ And he wrote ‘Hello Little Girl’ for me. When the Beatles first played it at the Cavern, he said, ‘This is for someone special and she knows who she is.’”

  Patricia was nineteen now, so no one could accuse him of cradle snatching. After the riverboat shuffle, he invited her to a party at a mutual friend’s flat, but when they arrived there, the place was empty. “I asked John who was coming to the party. He said ‘Just the two of us.’” That first night, she says, John only kissed her, but at their next tryst, a couple of days later, she willingly lost her virginity.

  They began regularly spending nights together, Patricia telling her parents she was with her friend Sue, while John told Cynthia he was writing songs at Paul’s house. When the evening’s gig at the Cavern or elsewhere was over, they would rendezvous at Sue’s flat in Princes Road, which fortunately possessed a large spare bedroom. Since Paul was partial to Sue—as well as to several of Patricia’s other friends—he, too, would often be having a sleepover there. George Harrison accepted the situation less easily, making Patricia wonder if he might also have had designs on her. “When George found out about John and me, he took it really badly. In fact, he slapped my face.”

  The routine in Sue’s spare room seldom varied. “John always used to light a candle beside the bed. Then he’d put a fresh packet of chewing gum under his pillow. I’d thought he’d be like he was onstage, all tough and don’t-care, but he was incredibly thoughtful and gentle and romantic. He was the first fellow I’d ever known who kissed my eyes. He’d sometimes put my face between both his hands and run his fingers over my skin as if he was a blind person. Some lads, when they kissed you, they’d suck you in and spit you out and it was horrible, but John was the best kisser I’d ever met.”

  To Patricia, as to few others—especially women—he would sometimes reveal the lack of confidence behind his attention-grabbing, wisecracking stage persona. “He’d say ‘What do you see in me? I’m ugly…I’ve got a big nose….’ I don’t think he really believed he had the looks to make it in pop music, because he never used to talk about becoming a star. But he always said he’d end up a millionaire.”

  He spoke often about his mother, how beautiful and funny she had been and how much he still missed her. Sometimes he would even talk about his father, a subject that still remained taboo inside his family circle and one he seldom discussed with even his closest male friends. Patricia herself still had both parents, but knew that did not automatically make for a happy family. Her mother was a fanatical ballroom dancer and seldom at home; her docker father spent most of his leisure hours drinking with workmates. “I told John I never saw my dad either, because he was in the pub all day. John said, ‘But at least you know he’s there.’”

  Cynthia never suspected a thing, even on those few-and-far-between nights when she was allowed to leave her secret bedsit in Garmoyle Road and come into town to see John at the Cavern. More than once she and Patricia found themselves alone together in the primitive ladies’ room, where a
rat had once been seen scuttling along the top of the door. “Our eyes would meet in the mirror,” Patricia says, “but I never got any vibe that she knew.”

  With both his official and clandestine girlfriends, John was no more scrupulous about contraception than he had ever been. Patricia feared the worst when her period was two weeks overdue, but it proved a false alarm. Cynthia was not so lucky when, responding at last to the same persistent discouragement, her own monthly “friend” failed to arrive on schedule. An examination by a coldly disapproving woman doctor confirmed that she was pregnant.

  For almost every young couple in this situation, especially in northern England, there could be only one possible outcome. The day had yet to dawn when women would question their age-old duty to reproduce life at whatever cost, and demand control over their own bodies. Surgical abortions were performed only in cases of extreme medical necessity, taking no account of how much the child was wanted or would be loved; the only alternative was an illegal and dangerous backstreet world of rusty scalpels, hot baths, and gin. The baby must be born and its father persuaded, or coerced, into saving its mother from social leperhood by “giving it a name.”

  Characteristically, Cyn blamed no one but herself for what had happened, and was in mortal dread of telling John—especially at this moment when he seemed poised on the edge of stardom and was meant to be shedding emotional encumbrances rather than acquiring them. She expected anger or icy hailstones of contempt; instead, he reacted quite calmly and matter-of-factly, saying without any prompting that they’d better get married, the sooner the better.

  Patricia Inder heard the two-part news from Paul McCartney first, then John himself confirmed it. “He told me, ‘I love Cynthia, but I’m in love with you.’ He said it didn’t have to make a difference to us, and that he still wanted to go on seeing me. I said, ‘You can’t be serious…Cynthia’s pregnant…you’re going to marry her.’ John said, ‘I still want to go on seeing you.’”