John Lennon: The Life (33 page)

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 vari
ous 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 asked 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 un
derstood 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 en
gagement 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.”

T
he 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, onstage 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.

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.”