John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  His visits to Astrid’s brought out all the sides of John she would never have suspected—the Woolton-bred politeness, the secret homebody, the instant response to any maternal warmth with the faintest echo of Julia’s. “The amazing thing was how he loved my mother. They couldn’t understand a word of one another; Mummy didn’t talk English and John didn’t talk German. But as soon as he used to come in, he always said ‘Where’s Mummy?’ He’d rush into the kitchen to see her and he seemed to become a completely different person. That tough rock ’n’ roller, the guy who didn’t care, just disappeared. That was correct what he did with my Mummy, hugging her and being with her, looking into the pots to see what she was cooking.”

  Even with the little English that she spoke, Astrid became instantly aware of the strange, seesawing relationship between Stu and John; how John would defer to Stu at one moment and at the next, mock and belittle him seemingly beyond any forgiveness; how Stu at one moment could appear the more dominant of the two, but at the next curl up into unprotesting victimhood. “Stuart was someone John really, really loved. Now I’m thinking that when he treated him badly, it was because he was afraid anyone might see how much he loved him.”

  Winning such a girl did more than boost Stu’s standing with John and the other Beatles; it also kicked his hibernating visual creativity back into life. Spending time as he now did with Astrid’s exi group of photographers and art students, it wasn’t long before he felt a rekindling urge first to draw, then to paint. A sketchbook once more became an indivisible part of his person and, with the teeming Reeperbahn color and grotesquery all around him, his pen or pencil was seldom idle. To a former girlfriend in Liverpool he wrote of his exaltation at “being the artist again.” The letter was written from his dark cubbyhole at the Bambi Kino, in the faint beam of a flashlight strapped to his forehead like an old-fashioned coal miner’s lamp.

  In mid-November, barely a month after their first meeting, Stu and Astrid decided to get engaged. The news met with equal approval from John and the other Beatles (guaranteeing, as it did, hot baths, meals and hand-laundering for the foreseeable future) and from Astrid’s mother, who idolized Stu almost as much as did her daughter and also seems to have had prescient fears of his health. Appalled by Astrid’s description of his living conditions at the Bambi, Frau Kirchherr insisted that he move into her home forthwith, occupying a spare room at the top of the house that had formerly been Klaus Voormann’s.

  Klaus himself bore Stu no resentment for displacing him; his relationship with Astrid had been cooling off anyway, and he felt more than compensated by his new friendship with the Beatles, especially with John. He had been tinkering around on a guitar for some time, but now, with John’s encouragement, he began to think that a German boy, too, could aspire to play rock ’n’ roll. “I learned so much from watching John onstage,” he remembers. “And he was the one who taught me how to really play rhythm guitar. He had a special way of strumming only two strings and muffling the others with the flat of his hand.”

  Astrid had always chosen Klaus’s clothes for him, in true exi style making them as much like hers as possible. But Stu was not only her same height and build but also had her exact waist and leg measurements: she could dress him in her almost sexless jackets, turtleneck shirts, and pants like some life-size doll. Stu now became as style conscious as Astrid, and even more adventurous than she in the matter of exi cross-dressing. In her wardrobe was a black corduroy suit with the unequivocally female feature of a round “shawl” collar. “Stu loved this suit and decided to wear it to the Kaiserkeller one night,” she recalls, “When he walked in, John and the others burst out laughing and shouted ‘Borrowed mum’s suit, have you, Stu?’”

  For all of them, however, the exi look was a vast improvement on the cheapo Italian one with which they had first arrived in Hamburg. To replace their lilac jackets and cardboard two-tone shoes—which by now had almost decomposed from the accumulated sweat of long nights onstage—they bought fancily tooled cowboy boots that reached halfway up their shins, and had black leather jerkins with matching trousers made to measure by a local tailor.

  The lack of Stu’s civilizing influence in off-duty hours may partly have accounted for the grubbiest episode in John’s Hamburg career. One night, short of money as usual, he and the other three remaining Beatles decided to follow long-established St. Pauli custom and mug a sailor. The chosen victim was a German in a seemingly helpless state of inebriation who plied them with drinks all night onstage at the Kaiserkeller, then took all of them out for a meal, showing frequent, unwise glimpses of a wallet stuffed with cash. The whole group were supposed to lend a hand in parting him from this when they left the restaurant and headed for a suitably unlit and deserted area. At the critical moment, however, Paul and George lost their nerve and melted away, leaving the dirty work to John and Pete.

  The sailor proved a less easy mark than expected, putting up a ferocious battle with his fists that felled each of his assailants in turn, then threatening them with a wicked-looking handgun. Actually, it fired nothing more lethal than tear-gas shells, but by the time this became apparent, both would-be muggers were fleeing for their lives back to the sheltering darkness of the Bambi Kino. Many nights afterward did John anxiously scan the Kaiserkeller’s promenaders, certain that the victim would return to take revenge supported by his whole ship’s company. Amazingly, he never did. But retribution of a different kind was just around the corner.

  In late November 1960, the Kaiserkeller suddenly lost its monopoly as the Reeperbahn’s live rock-’n’-roll venue A few doors away appeared a rival called the Top Ten Club, converted from an old indoor circus whose bareback horse riders also used to be bare. The Top Ten’s owner, Peter Eckhorn, a former steward with the Hanseatic shipping line, was young, go-ahead, and determined to outdo Bruno in every way possible. His first headline attraction was Tony Sheridan, who had originally found fame at the Kaiserkeller; he also hired the lethal Horst Fascher as club manager and head of security. Then, using Fascher as an intermediary, he invited the Beatles to leave Koschmider and come over to him.

  Eckhorn offered better pay and living accommodations and, most important, was a rock-’n’-roll fan rather than just an exploiter. With no manager on the spot to raise tiresome ethical questions, the five simply walked out on their Kaiserkeller contract, which still had until December 31 to run. Rather than try to outbid Eckhorn, Koschmider resorted to fury and veiled threats, fingering the knotty chair leg concealed inside his trousers and hinting that if they defected to the Top Ten, they had better take care out on the street after dark. But with Horst Fascher and his killer punch on their side, Bruno’s bludgeon held no terrors.

  Crossing such a powerful, well-connected St. Pauli figure was still not something to be done with impunity. By the strangest coincidence, just after this showdown with Koschmider, the Reeperbahn’s Ausweiskontrolle, or youth-protection squad, received a tip-off that George Harrison was under eighteen and so had been violating its nightly 10:00 p.m. curfew for the past three months. George was immediately deported, traveling home to Liverpool by train.

  An even riper opportunity for revenge presented itself on the following day, when Paul and Pete Best went to the Bambi Kino to move their clothes over to the Top Ten Club. In a puerile act of defiance as they left their squalid dormitory for the last time, they set fire to a condom in the corridor. The condom’s thin rubber produced only a fitful flare, and the corridor was made of stone; nevertheless Koschmider had them arrested for attempted arson, and they were thrown into a cell at the Reeperbahn’s police headquarters. When Stu Sutcliffe turned up later, accompanied by Astrid, he too was held and interrogated. John found himself in the novel position of being the only one not in trouble.

  Though Koschmider dropped the arson charge, Paul and Pete were also instantly deported for working without permits, returning home together next day by air. John and Stu for some reason escaped deportation but had to sign official pledges not to take
any further employment of any kind in West Germany. Stu had the security of the Kirchherr house, where he was to spend the imminent Christmas holiday. But without work, money, or lodgings, John had no choice but to follow the others home by train. For someone too myopic to read most English signs, let alone foreign ones, it was a nightmare ordeal, struggling from country to country and platform to platform with his suitcase and guitar case, his amplifier strapped to his back. His great fear was that the amp might be stolen before he’d even paid for it.

  And where was the Hamburg outlaw heading, like an arrow from a bow? Where else but to the neat bay window and stained-glass porch of Mendips? Arriving late at night, he had to awaken Aunt Mimi by throwing pebbles up at her bedroom window. Except for the amplifier and the cowboy boots, it could have been yet another scene from Just William.

  11

  THE SINGING RAGE

  I wasn’t too keen on reaching twenty-one. I was thinking…that I’d missed the boat.

  For the next couple of weeks, John lay low in Menlove Avenue, more thankful than he had ever been for Aunt Mimi’s spotless home and good cooking—even if the latter was spiced by sharp references to the tramplike condition in which he’d reappeared, the fortune in German marks he’d failed to bring with him, and his new boots. Stretched on his familiar narrow bed, with some almost known-by-heart children’s classic balanced on his chest and his legs resting up the wall, he felt no compulsion even to contact the other Beatles, let alone decide when or where they would regroup.

  “I didn’t know what they were doing,” he remembered. “I just withdrew to think whether [playing music] was worth going on with. I was always a sort of poet or painter and I thought ‘Is this it? Nightclubs and seedy scenes, being deported and weird people in clubs?’ You see, part of me is a monk and part of me is a performing flea.”

  But there could be no going back to his former Left Bank life in Liverpool 8. He had burned all his bridges at the art college, which in any case held no allure since the expulsion of his partner-in-mischief, Jeff Mohammed, the previous summer. The apartment share in Gambier Terrace was no more, Rod Murray, “Ducky” Duxbury, and company having been evicted following the People’s beatnik exposé and mounting complaints from other tenants about noise. While Stu Sutcliffe still remained in Hamburg, John’s only link with college was his girlfriend Cynthia—who knocked at Mendips’s front door on the day after his return, delighted by his unscheduled reappearance and touchingly convinced that he had been as faithful to her during their three-and-a-half-month separation as she to him. With no one now to steal her pens and brushes in the weekly lettering class, Cyn remained on course to sit her National Diploma and, as she thought, become a children’s art teacher.

  Mimi had hoped that, if nothing else, “Humbug” would end John’s involvement with someone she still regarded, contrary to all appearances, as a duplicitous vamp, scheming to steal him away for ever. Alas, their reunion only threw gasoline on these fires of suspicion. A few days later, John took Cynthia into Liverpool and spent £17—almost every penny he had brought home—on buying her a brown suede coat from C&A Modes. They then returned to Woolton, taking along a cooked chicken for tea. When Mimi saw the coat, she flew into a rage that was spectacular even for her, calling Cyn John’s “gangster’s moll,” flinging the chicken at him, then following it up with a dust brush.

  Paul McCartney and George Harrison were also lying low in their rather less sheltered habitats, waiting for some word from the leader but by no means sure that it would come. George initially did not realize that Paul and Pete Best had also been kicked out of West Germany, and for a time thought the Beatles must still be playing at the Top Ten Club with another lead guitarist in his place. As for Paul, his homecoming to 20 Forthlin Road almost unrecognizably emaciated had stirred even the normally placid Jim McCartney to real anger about the educational opportunities that had been sacrificed by following “that Lennon.” To appease his father, Paul agreed to find a proper job and took the first available one: that of driver’s mate on a dockside delivery van.

  To add to the feeling of gloom and anticlimax, those months abroad had seen a radical change in both the sound and look of British pop, which seemed to leave them lagging far behind. In October, Cliff Richard’s backing group, the Shadows, had scored a massive hit on their own account with a tango-flavored instrumental number called “Apache.” Like Richard, the Shadows seemed part of a movement to make rock’s beat less alarming to adults: they wore matching shiny suits, smiled and bowed in unison, and while playing did a little dance in unison, one step forward, one back, one sideways, as disciplined and restrained as a seventeenth-century gavotte. All over the nation, as a result, groups were frantically buying bow ties and demoting their vocalists in favor of lead guitars with quavery tremolo arms. Any still singing rock ’n’ roll in black leather risked being laughed off the stage.

  Not until mid-December did John rouse himself to get back in touch with Paul, George, and Pete. One homecoming gig, at least, was in the bag. Pete’s mother, the forceful Mona Best, still operated the Casbah club in the cellar of her West Derby house. They played there on December 17, announced by by posters proclaiming the “Return of the fabulous Beatles.” A chemistry student named Chas Newby, who had been with Pete’s former group, the Blackjacks, agreed to fill in on bass until Stu Sutcliffe came home, sometime after Christmas.

  In the wider world outside West Derby, hopes of employment lay mainly with Allan Williams, whom they still regarded as their manager even though he had been of no help in the Hamburg crisis. But Williams’s previously booming entrepreneurial career had suffered a serious setback. Inspired by the evident huge profitability of the Reeperbahn’s music-and-drinking dens, he had decided to open a place on similarly grandiose lines in Liverpool. Trusting to his usual Midas touch, he had taken premises in Soho Street, borrowed the name of the Hamburg club where the Beatles were to have headlined, and hired an accomplished local disc jockey, Bob Wooler, as resident emcee. But somewhere along the line, he seemed to have upset one person to many. Liverpool’s Top Ten Club opened its doors on December 1, 1960; six nights later, it mysteriously burned to the ground.

  For the Beatles, this Wagnerian catastrophe brought a stroke of luck. Bob Wooler also worked regularly for a dance promoter named Brian Kelly, whose venues included Lathom Hall, Aintree Institute, and Litherland Town Hall. Impressed that the Beatles had played abroad, even though he had not yet heard them play at home, Wooler secured them a £6 booking at Litherland Town Hall on December 27, along with the Del Renas, the Deltones, and the Searchers. On the posters they were billed as “Direct from Hamburg.”

  The Litherland Town Hall crowd had no clear collective memory of any group called the Beatles, only of indifferent performers variously known as the Silver Beetles, the Beatals, or the Quarrymen; it was thus generally assumed that “Direct from Hamburg” meant they were German. And certainly there was nothing recognizably English about the figures clad all over in storm-trooper black leather, not step-dancing Shadows-style but mach-schauing in wild asymmetry as they pounded out the stomping beat the Reeperbahn had hammered into them. The very first blast had a stunning effect on their audience, girls and boys alike abandoning the normal dance-hall pursuits of jiving, chatting each other up, or looking for trouble, and almost stampeding to the stage front—the first-ever recorded outbreak of Beatlemania.

  From here on, they would never again have to beg for work. Brian Kelly hastily block-booked them for further shows at Litherland and his two other venues, even stationing a bouncer outside their dressing-room door to stop rival showmen from getting to them. But the task proved impossible. A promoter named Sam Leach, who caught them at Hambleton Hall—an experience he likened to James Stewart’s discovery of a “noo sound” as Glenn Miller in the Hollywood biopic—booked them for two city-center clubs, the Cassanova and the Iron Door. It was as if their whole, inglorious pre-Hamburg career had never been. The new fans who mobbed them after each sh
ow now realized they were fellow Scouses yet still treated them somehow like foreigners, honored guests immune from the normal Liverpool heritage of ruthless criticism and put-downs. One night at Aintree Institute, a tiny, flaxen-haired girl named Patricia Inder sought them out backstage to tell them, “You’ll be as big as Cliff one day.” Whatever John’s later attitude to Richard and the Shadows, he was as “made up” (delighted) as all the others.

  Mona Best also claimed her share, putting them on both at the Casbah and at dances she also now ran at St. John’s Hall in Tuebrook. The Casbah became the Beatles’ operations center almost as much as the Jacaranda; Mrs. Best or the methodical Pete organized their schedule, and the club’s bouncer, Frank Garner, doubled as their driver.

  Lodging with the Bests was a friend of Pete’s, a young trainee accountant named Neil Aspinall, who by day worked in the Prudential building in Dale Street. Neil had been at Liverpool Institute with Paul and George and was a friend of Duff Lowe, the Quarrymen’s sometime pianist. He owned a red-and-white van he had bought for £8, with two rough wooden seats in its rear. For the consideration of a pound or two, he was only too happy to take over from Frank the bouncer in driving the Beatles to their night’s gig. After helping them unload their equipment, he would return to the Bests’ house to work at his accountancy correspondence course for a couple of hours until it was time to pick them up. “I noticed this strange thing about them not having a leader,” he remembered. “They might not have had a front man, like Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, but when you saw John you always knew exactly who the leader was.”