Tune In

by Mark Lewisohn

  They had no idea that Stu had suffered a violent convulsive fit at noon this same day, that it lasted thirty-five minutes, that he slipped into a coma, that Nielsa Kirchherr summoned Astrid home from work, and that, at 4:30PM, in an ambulance speeding him to the hospital, Stuart died in his fiancée’s arms.

  * * *

  * There’s no certain information about the harmonica John played in this period—it may have been the one he “slap leathered” in Arnhem in August 1960, as the Beatles passed through the Netherlands on their way to Hamburg.

  † In this period when the Beatles couldn’t get a contract, record company signings followed the pattern established over many years. Philips snapped up a Canadian singing wrestler, Frankie Townsend, and a middle-aged London housewife singer, Mary May; Oriole signed a singing builder’s laborer they renamed Brett Ansell; Mike Smith at Decca produced house-decorator singer Vern Brandon; Wally Ridley at HMV signed ten-year-old schoolboy singer Stephen Sinclair; Norrie Paramor at Columbia signed Welsh council draftsman singer Peter Harvey, plus “pint-sized” 15-year-old schoolboy singer Ian Vint, and four singing-trumpeters called the Bell-Tones. And so on, ad infinitum. Here was the rut of old show business—and not one electric guitar anywhere.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  APRIL 10–13, 1962

  “HE COULD EASILY HAVE BEEN THE BEATLE”

  The news reached Liverpool in reverse: a telegram from Astrid to Millie Sutcliffe saying Stuart had died came before another saying he was dangerously ill. The truth was clear and appalling. He was 21 years and 10 months.

  Millie was shattered. Stuart was the eldest of her three children, the only son. Things had started going wrong the day he became a strolling minstrel, plucking his rock and roll, chucking his final year at Liverpool College of Art to play with the Beatles in Germany, getting engaged to Astrid Kirchherr and making Hamburg his home. Millie had hardly seen him in twenty months—and now her boy was dead.

  Charles Sutcliffe, Stuart’s father, couldn’t be reached. A naval second engineer, he’d sailed for South America two days earlier. “He has a weak heart and we cannot radio his ship to tell him,” Joyce Sutcliffe (Stuart’s eldest sister, 20) told the Liverpool Echo, while the Prescot & Huyton Reporter reported that a padre would meet him when the ship docked in Buenos Aires after three weeks. Stuart’s death was in all the local press, not because he was Stuart Sutcliffe (he had, as yet, no public reputation) or because he’d been in the Beatles (the Echo journalist wrote “Stuart went to Germany 18 months ago with a Liverpool skiffle group”) but simply because it was a newsworthy tragedy.1

  Allan Williams was distraught. He too received word direct from Astrid. Allan and Beryl had provided a haven for her and Stuart during their stormy visits to Liverpool—and they’d be instrumental again in keeping warring parties at bay. Allan’s memory is that he broke the news to Millie before the arrival of those telegrams. “She was heartbroken. She always called him ‘Wee Stuart’ and he was the love of her life. Then I contacted Brian Epstein. I knew he was flying to Hamburg and said, ‘Will you travel over with Millie?’ I paid her fare and they traveled together.”2

  As Millie would remember, the first Beatle to hear the news was George, who’d stayed in Liverpool after the others traveled ahead. “Brian said he’d call for me to travel to Manchester airport with them in his car. And that was when George burst into tears, on my doorstep. He cried like a child. Brian had apparently cabled the Beatles confirming his arrival and asking them to meet the flight. He said I was in the party—but didn’t tell them why. Presumably, he thought they’d already heard the news.”3

  John, Paul and Pete were at Hamburg airport to greet them. Manfred Weissleder had loaned them a driver and his big American car, a Chevrolet Impala with built-in record player and cocktail bar. On the way, they felt on top of the world; on the way back, that world had caved in. At the terminal, waiting for George and Brian, they saw Astrid and Klaus, who’d come to collect Millie. “Where’s Stu?” they asked—and it was here and now that Astrid told them he was dead. “Paul tried to be comforting; he put his arm around me and said how sorry he was. Pete wept—he just sat there and cried his eyes out. John went into hysterics. We couldn’t make out, in the state we [Klaus and I] were both in, whether he was laughing or crying because he did everything at once. I remember him sitting on a bench, huddled over, and he was shaking, rocking backward and forward.”4

  John went out of control, just like when Uncle George, his surrogate father, had died when John was 14, and when his mother was killed when he was 17. Everybody died on John. “John didn’t laugh when he heard Stuart died, as people have made out,” Paul insists, indicating a reaction far more psychologically complex.5

  For Paul himself, Stuart’s death was tough in a different way. He was shocked and saddened, but he also had to reconcile his position within the unfolding scene. He’d openly teased, taunted, irritated and derided him for two years or more, his jealousy of Stu’s friendship with John sustained; the last real time he’d seen Stuart was when he’d so needled him, Stuart was finally goaded into a fight, on stage, in front of an audience. It was declared a draw, but everyone talked of how surprisingly strong Stuart was; Paul had started the scrap and not won. When Stuart was in Liverpool in February, he’d mostly avoided Paul. There are quotes about that trip from John, George, Pete and Mike McCartney, but not Paul; Mike had exchanged letters with Stuart and was now being quoted in the Echo talking about him, Paul wasn’t.

  The upshot was that, aside from the other Beatles, Paul was disliked by the people who loved Stuart—notably Astrid, Klaus, and Stuart’s family—and Stuart’s death slammed a lid on it. As Paul would concede, “It was really sad for me because I hadn’t liked him and it’s kind of too late when someone dies—you can’t go back [and say] ‘Hey, Stu, I was only kidding …’ His mum and his sister never felt too good about me.”6

  • • •

  Millie Sutcliffe said John averted his eyes when she entered the arrivals hall, but there was rarely much affection between the two of them and none by the time (1970) she made this remark, so the truth is hard to establish.7 It was, of course, simply a horrible time for everyone. Millie and Astrid, the two principal mourners, had the worst relationship of all, but here they were, thrown together in grief and a thousand angry questions.

  Millie had formally to identify her son’s corpse. A grueling scene was played out in private at the morgue, enough to establish further polarization between Millie on one side and Astrid and Klaus on the other. Millie also had to arrange transportation of the body back to England, for the funeral. She wasn’t going to let him be buried in Germany. Her anti-German feelings had blanketed everything these past twenty months. As Allan Williams had noted, she held the opinion shared by many in Britain while the two world wars were in living memory: “The only good German is a dead German.” First Germany had bombed Millie’s Britain to near-bankruptcy, now her son had died there, with no doctor preventing it. She thought the worst of everyone and everything.

  A postmortem gave the cause of death as a blood clot on the brain. A forensic pathologist, who asked to keep the brain for further examination, added that Stuart had suffered a hemorrhage. Astrid was also told he’d had a rare condition, where the size of his brain was gradually increasing and pressing against his skull. No equipment had yet been invented to diagnose any such symptoms. She further learned that, had Stuart survived the convulsive fit that plunged him into a coma, “he would have been blind or almost a zombie, and that there wouldn’t have been any cure for it. To him, that would have been worse than death.”8

  It would also be said by several of Stuart’s Liverpool art school friends that he’d never been robust—he is remembered variously as weak, sick-looking, delicate, puny, prone to falling over, and vividly foreseeing his early death. Twenty years afterward, an additional idea also gained ground: that there was a link between Stuart’s brain hemorrhage and the night in late January 1961 when he was attacked b
y Teddy Boys, the incident at Lathom Hall in the north end of Liverpool when John fractured a finger rescuing him. Although the association of these two events would become an accepted truth, it cannot be more than theoretical.9

  The funeral of Stuart Fergusson Victor Sutcliffe was held on April 19, 1962, the day before Good Friday and the start of the Easter weekend, at St. Gabriel’s Chapel of Ease in Huyton. This was where the Sutcliffes had settled after leaving Scotland three years into the last war. Stuart had been a member of the church’s youth club and a choirboy here from nine or ten until his voice broke.

  John, Paul, George and Pete were in Hamburg and sent neither flowers nor words of sympathy. Cynthia attended, as did Stuart’s closest art school friend Rod Murray. Louise Harrison was present for George. Astrid and Klaus were there, so too Allan and Beryl and Allan’s father, Dick Williams, but not many others, and few family members. Rod Murray says there was just “a small roomful” of mourners. Stuart was buried in the quiet cemetery across from the church. Air-transport specifications prohibited the white coffin he’d wanted. The family’s memorial notice, posted in the Echo and the local press, said he’d died “After much suffering bravely borne” and ended with words from the Book of Job: “God hath given and God hath taken away.”10

  Astrid clung to Beryl for moral and physical support—although, for some reason, she stayed with Millie and her daughters in their flat on Sefton Park. They all endured a highly testing time that, says Astrid, climaxed when Millie accused her of murdering Stuart. As she’d done before, Astrid sounded the alarm and Allan and Beryl rushed over, rescued her from the troubled waters and let her stay with them in Liverpool 8, where Klaus was already staying.

  The death of Stuart Sutcliffe was heartbreaking in every way.

  The variety, quantity and quality of his art had been breathtaking. He was dead at 21 but had crammed a lifetime’s work into a few short years, leaving a prodigious legacy of landscapes, life studies, abstracts, collages, charcoals and monotype drawings, executed in an array of styles and all with the utmost commitment. The work of his final months was prolific, intense and dazzling. He was, by any definition, a real talent.

  It soon became impossible to detach Stuart Sutcliffe’s life and work from the swamping shadow of the Beatles—but art critics had noticed his gifts years earlier: he was the art school star scholar and the 19-year-old exhibitor in The John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 2, an accolade put beyond doubt when Moores personally bought the piece. Eduardo Paolozzi, the British painter and sculptor who taught Stuart in Hamburg, reflected in 1968, “If he’d lived he could easily have been the Beatle. He was imaginative, ultra-intelligent, and he was open to everything, not just to painting or pop but to every media and experience possible.”11

  Every experience possible—this was Astrid’s loss, a devastating burden to carry at the age of 23. “Stuart was somebody very, very special. He had a wisdom, and the ability to give so much, as far as feeling and love was concerned. We were young and innocent and Stuart gave all he had—he wasn’t the type of person who could hide anything. He gave everything fully, not only to me but in his devotion to art. We had loved from first sight and he’s the only man I met who I was sure would be ‘the one’—he would be me and I would be him.”12

  Stuart played a crucial role in shaping the Beatles. He was Stuart de Staël, with an intuitive understanding of image, essential to their development in 1960–1. He and John together cooked up the Beatles name, and without Stuart they may not have taken the Paris fringe haircuts and collarless jackets and the long black scarves. That these were also Astrid’s influences was another vital contribution: he was the bridge that delivered them the inspiration and style of Astrid, Klaus and Jürgen. The Beatles wouldn’t have looked continental without their “angel friends.”

  The three Germans loved the Beatles for many reasons, and the Beatles were arty and receptive enough to tune in for themselves. However, it all sprang from their initial fascination with the boy whose bass playing had started off ropey but ended up good, and whose stage presence was magnetic—the fragile James Dean dude in dark glasses, the little man in black leather with his big bass guitar and expressive “Love Me Tender.” Stu had been a Beatle because his soul mate, John, wanted him up there by his side, and he’d left only because his life was no longer in Liverpool, not because they’d kicked him out. They had often been horrible to him, John included, but that was just life …

  The loss to John was incalculable. He and Stu had shared a kinship and rarefied degree of honesty. Five years later he’d say, “I looked up to Stu. I depended on him to tell me the truth, the way I do with Paul today. Stu would tell me if something was good and I’d believe him.”13 John never said any more about Stu than this—but while that appears to indicate an almost unique desire to keep his feelings clamped down and private, actually it was because no one asked.* Klaus Voormann observed of John and Stuart’s friendship that John was content not to hold the upper hand: “John looked up to Stuart. It might not come across that way but that’s what I felt. And Stuart looked down to John—not in a bad way, but natural. John was more on the funny side of life, making jokes all the time, and while Stuart could be funny he was also serious about things. I’ve seen the letters between them and you get the feeling of a wise man talking to somebody who’s a little helpless: that was Stuart and John respectively.”14

  Just how much Stuart’s death affected John would be seen in the Beatles’ seven-week season in the Star-Club. This terrible event cast a gloom over their Hamburg return; but, for everyone else, rock was about to roll Grosse Freiheit once more, and with a vengeance. The Beatles were in the ideal place to work through their latest tough experience. Last time here, Stuart was one of them; this time he was gone, and they simply had to get on with it.

  “Stuart died loving the Beatles, having hope and faith in everything they did,” Millie would say.15 On Friday, April 13, with their friend not yet buried, they plugged in once more, yelled one–two–three–four! and put that hope and faith to work.

  * * *

  * John Lennon wasn’t one to shy away from a question, but not once in his hundreds of interviews did any journalist or broadcaster bring up the subject of his onetime best friend, the Beatle who’d died so young and so talented at 21.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  APRIL 13–JUNE 2, 1962

  YOU BETTER MOVE ON

  The Beatles in Germany, Brian Epstein’s report of the Star-Club opening, went out by post to fan club members and was printed verbatim in Mersey Beat. A typed bulletin of 250 words set the scene on “an exciting season” … and Brian made sure to end with breaking news: that the Beatles’ first British appearance post-Germany would be in the Cavern on June 9. They were coming home.

  The report didn’t mention Stuart. He’d not played in Liverpool since March the previous year, and, as few of the fans knew him, it seemed pointless to darken the club’s premiere dispatch with such shocking news.* In Hamburg, of course, it couldn’t be avoided. Astrid stayed away from the opening night, unable to face it and having to keep Millie company at home, but Klaus went. This was Friday and he was flying to England the following afternoon with Millie, Astrid and the coffin. Klaus hadn’t seen the Beatles in nine months, and the five-piece group he loved had shrunk to a quartet. Some things never changed, though, like how you couldn’t take your eyes off one Beatle in particular.

  That first night at the Star-Club, John came on stage dressed like a cleaning-woman, doing his cripple act and carrying a long wooden plank. He walked across the stage and knocked over the microphones and some of the drum kit, then he went up and cleaned the microphones. He cleaned under Paul’s armpit, and George’s. The people in the club were laughing—they didn’t know Stuart had died. They didn’t know Stuart. It gave me shivers to watch it, but this is what clowns do, bring humor to tragedy. It was hilarious.1

  There would be quite a few more Lennon incidents to come, enough to form the impression of a you
ng man derailed by the deaths that kept afflicting him. In a time to come he might have been diagnosed as suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, but in 1962 such terms didn’t exist, therapy wasn’t offered, and the only pills were little white ones called Prellies. He was fortunate to be in one of the few places in the world (the only one in his world) where he could be Lennon without landing himself in much trouble. For three months Brian had had the Beatles putting miles on the clock, spreading themselves further from Liverpool, but for the next seven weeks, give or take the odd excursion, John and the others would spend their lives on one short stretch of neon-lit Grosse Freiheit—playing, sleeping, eating, drinking, pissing, shitting, shouting, loving, preaching, puking.

  Pacing was the key—pacing in Preludin, booze, hard-living and performance—and it was generally remembered the hard way. At the Indra and Top Ten, the Beatles had been the only band on the bill, playing all night long, and at the Kaiserkeller they’d been one of two; here at the Star-Club they were one of two or three and sometimes four, playing in rotation. At the start, as John explained in a letter to Cyn, they played three hours one night and four the next, “so it doesn’t seem long at all really,” but eventually they were doing just an hour in the run-up to midnight (usually before 10PM, so under-18s could see them before having to leave) and an hour sometime after midnight. Whatever the demands, the Beatles went at them full tilt, hammering their vocal cords and instantly suffering “Hamburg throat.” A letter written by Pete three days into the season said John, Paul and George had all lost their voices.2

  It was useful, then, that they sometimes had a fifth man working with them. Roy Young sang and played piano and electric organ in the house band and also did cameos with the other acts, the Beatles included. He was good value—he performed standing up, was almost always grinning, and the side of his grand piano shouted his name in large glittery letters. As Pete didn’t have the Beatles’ name on his bass drum, they looked like the Roy Young Band.3