The Beatles (45 page)

There were other changes, too, changes that proved more heart-warming and encouraging. From the moment Dot rushed into Paul’s arms, she noticed that “
he seemed more grown-up
… more confident.” She could tell right off that “he loved being in Hamburg, he was so excited about all it had to offer.”

And though no one said as much aloud, the prospect of marriage was on everyone’s mind. Cynthia and Dot certainly discussed it with breathless enchantment, and if letters home were any indication of John’s true feelings, he was similarly marriage-minded. And yet there were lingering questions, not the least of which was their age. Also, the band was on the verge of something important; everyone could feel it. The vacation in Hamburg was the first measure of how the girls would take to the Beatles’ expanding success. This was the world they’d all left home in pursuit of.

As it turned out, the reunion with the girls was a glorious one. John
and Paul, enormously attentive, romanced them with Hamburg proper by day and St. Pauli by night. “We did a lot of sightseeing,” Dot recalls of her “idyllic time” with Paul. “There was a boat tour of Hamburg harbor and visits to churches.”
John took Cynthia
to more familiar turf, the port, where they clutched hands and watched ferries scuttling the waves around the Elbe’s endless basins. And when the sights became burdensome, everyone shopped. After embracing Hamburg’s everyday charms, each girl was treated to a glimpse of kinky street life, taken for a stroll along the Herbertstrasse in an attempt to shock them silly, which amused the boys.

The seedy sideshow produced the desired effect, but the girls were more shocked and initially speechless when Astrid Kirchherr appeared. They had been hearing endlessly about her since the Beatles’ brief homestand—Astrid’s beauty, style, sophistication, sexiness, and, on top of everything, her extraordinary photographs. Astrid, Astrid, Astrid: she seemed like a dream girl to her Liverpool counterparts, gifted and impossibly gorgeous—not to mention an A-number-one threat. “
She sounded as though she could
run rings around me in every way,” Cynthia recalled in a 1978 memoir.
Astrid and John gobbled Prellies together and gossiped like magpies; they even occasionally held hands
. Of course, few women could have satisfied John’s Brigitte Bardot fantasy more ably than Astrid. Like the art college beauty Johnnie Crosby, she was a blond, slim-hipped, heat-seeking woman oozing mystique. But as far as is known, John’s relationship with Astrid never got more physical than a brotherly hug. It wasn’t that he didn’t lust after her—he did, most likely in a big way, too. But she was Stuart’s girl, so that’s where it began and ended. And as it happened, the girls hit it off, which was fortunate since it had been arranged that Cynthia would board with Astrid, while
Paul and Dot bunked
on a houseboat owned by Rosa Hoffman, the Kaiserkeller bathroom attendant who, like Horst Fascher, had decamped to the Top Ten.

Even though she “felt uncomfortable around the boys,” with “no self-confidence” to ground her, the Hamburg nights were filled with a devil-may-care vitality that Dot had never experienced before. “Everyone was so alive,” she remembers, “so full of hope.” But despite the esprit, she detected cracks in the facade. “You could see it if you just watched Pete Best,” she says. “He was very quiet in those situations, unable to join in the conversation with the other guys. He was never fast enough for their comments. John and Paul were fierce, and George was no threat to them.” But Pete was not the main issue. “Even though the girls loved Pete, Paul wasn’t really jealous of him. But he hated Stu.” In fact, everything Stuart
did now seemed to enrage him. And after years of excusing this travesty, suffering Stuart’s arrogance and capitulating to John’s apologies—still, Paul was forced to swallow his anger. It wasn’t just the music and the hair and the clothes. “It’s true that Paul had his eye on Stu’s bass,” Dot says, “but, in fact, he was jealous of Stu, especially of Stu’s friendship with John.” What’s more, Stuart flaunted it. Time and again, he put it under Paul’s nose and gave it a scornful swish.

Dot must have sensed things were coming to a head, because the next night, while she and Cynthia were “dollying up” at Astrid’s house, the phone rang. It was Stuart, convulsed by a white rage, sounding completely irrational. When he learned that Dot was there, “he insisted that Astrid toss me out,” Dot recalls. Astrid calmed him down enough to determine what had happened: Paul and Stuart had finally had it out, not in private but onstage in the middle of a set, in full view of an astonished German audience.

They had been backing Tony Sheridan for the nine o’clock set. Paul, at the piano, where he had recently been pounding out guitar chords with innate flair, was muttering to himself, vexed by the enormity of Stuart’s mistakes. At some point he let go with an utterly outrageous comment about Astrid that hit a nerve. Stuart dropped the bass in the middle of the song, lunged at Paul, and caught him “
with such a wallop
that it knocked him off his stool.” The fight, which had been brewing for months, was wild and fierce. Stuart and Paul rolled around on the floor, punching and stomping each other, while the other Beatles and Sheridan soldiered on. “
They beat the shit out of each other
,” says an observer, and thrashed about until the song ended, when John, George, and Pete finally pried them apart.

Nothing was settled by the fight, but as Pete Best interpreted it: “
It was the beginning of the end
of Stu as a Beatle.” Sutcliffe realized the situation was untenable. There was no place for him on that stage anymore; Paul—and even John, by his neutrality—had made that absolutely clear. Stuart moped around for a few days, disillusioned with the band and with himself. The constant insults, the humiliation—he’d had enough. There were more important things than playing with the Beatles. He had barely touched a paintbrush in months. That alone struck him as absurd. He’d made a horrendous mistake in ignoring his art for so long and needed to reclaim that part of his life.

Despite the consequence of Stuart’s decision, there was no formal resignation. Later that week he simply turned up at the Top Ten and told the others he was through with the band. It was all very matter-of-fact, devoid
of lingering resentment or even drama. If any of the Beatles were surprised, no one let it show, nor did anyone try to discourage Stuart from leaving. Stuart, for his part, couldn’t have been more accommodating. In a magnanimous gesture, he even handed his bass over to Paul in an acknowledgment of proper succession, but as Paul pointed out, “
he was only lending it
to me, so he didn’t want me to change the strings around.”
^*

The departure of Stuart Sutcliffe coincided with the end of Cynthia and Dot’s Hamburg vacation, unburdening the band of any external distractions. The girls’ brief stay vibrated with many good feelings. Dot, especially, was given an unexpected boost when Paul presented her with a gift—
a gold band
—as a keepsake from Hamburg. The seriousness of the present caught everyone off guard. Dot remembers staring at it, unable to grasp its significance.
A wedding band!
She was speechless. Finally, Paul suggested smoothly that she try it on. “Turns out, it was an engagement ring,” Dot recalls. “He told me that in Germany you buy a ring that looks like a wedding band and, for the engagement [period], you put it on your left hand. When you get married you just change it to your right.”

Married: this was the first that she’d heard as much from Paul. All this time, she “felt [she] was never good enough for him,” and here he was in love with her. “I was thrilled,” Dot says. Paul had everything she secretly desired. He was charming, talented, as good-looking as any movie star, and from a solid, loving family. Dot made no secret of her happiness when she returned to Liverpool in May, moving out of her parents’ house and into a flat, in anticipation of Paul’s return.

Behind their pronouncements and gestures of love, the Beatles’ front men had more practical matters on their minds. Music remained the top priority. Now that their stage shows were sharp, next on the agenda was making a record.

The route to the recording studio in the early sixties was mazy and exclusive. Unlike the opportunities in America, where A&R scouts practically herded singing groups off the street corners and into the studio, European
openings were scarce. A scant four labels operated in all of England, each with one meager recording facility to its name. There were only a handful of independents on the order of Sun, J&M, Chess, Radio Recorders, or Atlantic, and none as exquisitely appointed or technically proficient. Although any yabbo with £5 could cut a disc at the HMV store in London, conditions there were less than primitive and not unlike the Quarry Men’s experience at Percy Phillips’s studio. Bands weren’t simply discovered and recorded in England; they underwent a long, involved process that meandered through interviews, courtships, showcases, auditions, rehearsals, teas, and finally the rare, exalted session. The Beatles were well aware of that; moreover, they knew that the inside track was clubby and that most opportunities fell to London bands or twinky acts like Cliff Richard, who’d showcased at Two I’s. Provincial rock ’n roll bands were regarded “
like lepers
.”

It was only a matter of time, however, before word of their talent spread past the ghetto of St. Pauli and into the stiff-necked musical establishment.
Tommy Kent
, a German rock ’n roll star on the magnitude of Billy Fury, was the first local celebrity to “discover” the Beatles. “
He said we were the best
group he’d ever heard,” Paul wrote to a friend in Liverpool, quoting the highlight of a backstage visit. It sounded, to be sure, like extravagant praise, but Kent’s enthusiasm was apparently sincere. Following a repeat visit to the Top Ten, he alerted Bert Kaempfert, a popular German bandleader whose company had struck a recent production deal with Polydor Records, a subsidiary label of mighty Deutsche Grammophon. Kaempfert was no ordinary kappellmeister. A handsome, charismatic composer and popular recording artist, he spent the postwar years stringing together an impressive array of instrumental hits, including “Wonderland by Night” and “Strangers in the Night,” and as an icon-turned-entrepreneur, he began building a small but accomplished pop talent roster.

Tommy Kent urged Kaempfert to go see the Beatles after his visit to the Top Ten.
Kaempfert’s response was polite
but noncommittal. He was more focused on Tony Sheridan, whose talent he recognized the minute he saw it. A performer such as Sheridan would add panache to his roster; the energy he put out would create its own demand. He offered Sheridan a recording contract, which included the Beatles as his backing band.
The Beatles were stunned
and overjoyed by the offer. Unable to restrain themselves, they scrawled their signatures on an undated contract written completely in German whose only copy was given to Kaempfert. The terms were simple: they’d be paid a total of DM 300 per person—comparable to a week’s wages at the Top Ten—which precluded them from a share of
future royalties; moreover, the contract would be in effect from July 1961 until July 1962, with an option—Kaempfert’s—for a year’s extension.

It was a sticky piece
of business, a kind of take-it-or-leave-it offer in the spirit of deals signed by doo-wop groups in the early fifties. Even among London musicians it was rare to receive anything more than a standard flat fee for studio work. It remains doubtful that they had legal counsel or that the terms were even explained to them. Not that it would have mattered. To their grand satisfaction, the boys felt: “
What the hell
, we’re recording!” A dream had come true: the Beatles were finally making records.

But they were records in name only—and not even in their name. As a concession to German slang, in which the word
peedles
skewed as “tiny dicks,” the band appeared as the Beat Brothers, the collective name used for all of Sheridan’s backing groups between 1961 and 1965. Otherwise, they performed a lineup of songs similar to the one played on the Top Ten stage six times a night, seven nights a week.

Kaempfert must have planned on a set that strove to rock out without offending his loyal mainstream audience. Why else would it have been weighted with souped-up standards like “My Bonnie” and “[When] The Saints [Go Marching In]?” Even the Beatles’ showcase—“Ain’t She Sweet”—was a retread of the old music hall number.
^*
As novices, the Beatles were too impressionable and excited to stage a protest, but Tony Sheridan, arguably no greenhorn, merely followed orders. Although it seems thoroughly out of character, it is reasonable to assume he viewed the session as a comeback opportunity and chose not to make waves. Kaempfert and his staff worked briskly and diligently, seldom requiring more than two takes on any song. Each track rolled out with Germanic precision, and
along with George’s instrumental
debut on the self-penned “Cry for a Shadow,” the whole session went down without so much as a hiccup. For a single release, “My Bonnie” sounded like the obvious choice, but it would be up to the suits at Polydor to make that decision. Convinced that the sound “
represented something new
” and unusual, the engineers and technicians left the session feeling upbeat about their work.

No one felt the flush more acutely than the Beatles. Not even guarded restraint from an experienced hand like Kaempfert put a damper on their sanguine outlook. However naively, they regarded the session as their big break, the break that would lead to inevitable stardom. It didn’t matter
that the release was still a ways off or that the spotlight, if it shone, would fall on Tony Sheridan.

In fact, the Beatles wouldn’t even be around to partake in the launch. Less than a week after the session, their engagement at the Top Ten concluded and, like it or not, they were on their way back to Liverpool.

Chapter 14
Mr. X