Shout! (30 page)

The black
exi
suits they had bought in Hamburg, and worn and slept in for more than a year, were Brian’s next concern. Black leather, to most people in 1962, still signified Nazis. He suggested an alternative that John Lennon, at first, doggedly refused to consider. Paul agreed with Brian that they should try it. Paul sided with Brian throughout the whole smartening process. George and Pete Best seemed not to mind, so John reluctantly gave way to the majority. On March 24, when they arrived for their twenty-five-pound date at Barnston Institute, each carried a bag from Burton’s, the chain-store tailor. That night, they took the stage in shiny gray lounge suits with velvet collars, cloth-covered buttons, and pencil-thin lapels.

Joe Flannery, having special knowledge, guessed at once what underlay Brian’s devotion. He had fallen in love with John Lennon. He was besotted, not by the pretty-faced Paul or Pete but by the boy whose facade of crudeness and toughness touched the nerve of his most secret rough trade fantasies. Joe recognized the look in Brian’s eye as he blushed and writhed under John’s pitiless sarcasm: “I’ve sat for hours with him in the car while he’s been crying over the things John’s said to him.”

Harry and Queenie Epstein, meanwhile, worried over the time and money Brian was spending, and his neglect of record-shop business in pursuit of his mad idea. To add to their anxiety, he had forsaken his smart lounge suits and white shirts and Horne Brothers ties, and taken to going around Liverpool dressed, like the Beatles, in a leather jacket and black polo-neck sweater. He even came to the Cavern dressed that way, not realizing that everyone was laughing at him. “He was champing a lot, too, that night,” Bob Wooler recalled. “They’d got him on the pep pills, the ones that dried up the saliva.”

Yet for all his efficiency, his headed notepaper, his expenditure on new lounge suits, his typewritten memoranda to the Beatles concerning
punctuality and cleanliness, he still could not move them outside the same old drab hemisphere of Merseyside. No one in London had heard of them, save through a brief mention in the music newspaper
Record Mirror
—and that was through a fan’s letter, not through Brian. The
Record Mirror
afterward sent up a photographer to see them. His name was Dezo Hoffman; he was a middle-aged Hungarian freelancer. To the Beatles, he seemed godlike. They all had a bath before they came to Whitechapel to meet him. He shot rolls of film of them around Sefton Park, and lent them a movie camera so that they could film each other, leaping up and down in the spring sunshine and driving round town in Paul’s green Ford Classic.

The only excitement on their horizon, after Hoffman had gone, was returning to Hamburg. On April 13, they were to open a new Reeperbahn attraction, the Star-Club. That was the European Tour grandly billed by Brian outside Barnston Institute. Another very grand thing was that they were to go to Hamburg this time by air. Brian insisted on it, knowing what an effect the news would have on
Mersey Beat
’s readership.

He would go to any lengths to convince them that, despite all appearances, a big, wonderful moment was only just around the corner. In Birkenhead, sitting around in the pub next to the Majestic ballroom, he whispered to Joe Flannery to go out of the room, then come back in and say that Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager, was trying to reach him on the telephone. “They believed it,” Flannery says. “They really believed that Colonel Parker had been trying to ring up Brian Epstein in Birkenhead.”

That Christmas of 1961, while Brian was still wooing the Beatles, their old bass player Stu Sutcliffe had come over from Hamburg with his German fiancée, Astrid. Stu’s friends at the Cavern, like Bill Harry, were shocked by his thinness and translucent pallor. Allan Williams, with typical forthrightness, told him that he looked “at death’s door.”

Stu admitted to his mother that, since settling in Hamburg, in his studio in the Kirchherr house, he had been suffering severe headaches, even occasional blackouts. He had fainted once at art college, during Edouardo Paolozzi’s master class. The news had already reached Mrs. Sutcliffe via worried letters from Astrid to Stu’s younger sister, Pauline. Astrid feared he was working too hard. For days at a time, she said, he would not come down from his attic to sleep or eat. And the headaches
were sometimes so violent, they seemed more like fits. Millie Sutcliffe had described the symptoms, so far as she understood them, to the dean of Liverpool University Medical School. He told her that she
did
have grounds for concern.

Stu still refused to believe that the headaches were a consequence of anything more than overwork and his and Astrid’s round-the-clock Hamburg life. He did agree, for his mother’s sake, to see a specialist in Liverpool. The specialist instantly sent him for an X-ray. No appointment could be made for three weeks: By that time, Stu and Astrid had returned to Hamburg.

From January to April the only news Mrs. Sutcliffe received was in Astrid’s photographs. One of these showed Stu seated, stiff as a waxwork, in a bentwood rocking chair next to a marble-topped table crowded with liquor bottles. Another was a close-up of Stu and Astrid together. The face, next to the dark-eyed, ravishing girl, was haunted and brittle. “When I looked at that,” Millie Sutcliffe remembered, “something told me that my son was dying.”

In February, Stu again collapsed during an art school class. This time, he did not return. Astrid’s mother forced him to leave his attic and be properly nursed by her in a bedroom downstairs. The Kirchherr family doctor, suspecting a brain tumor, sent him for X-rays. No tumor showed itself. Two further doctors who examined Stu were equally baffled. “We tried everything,” Astrid says. “One treatment was a kind of special massage under water. When Stu came home in the afternoon from his massage he told my mother he’d been looking in an undertaker’s window and seen a beautiful white coffin. ‘Oh, Mum,’ he said, ‘buy it for me. I’d
love
to be buried in a white coffin.’”

By March, the headaches brought with them spells of temporary blindness. The pain grew so intense at times that Astrid and her mother had to hold Stu down to stop him from throwing himself out of the window. Yet on other days, he could appear quite normal. Astrid would come home from work to find him sitting up in bed reading, sketching, or writing another long letter to John in Liverpool. He was looking forward eagerly to the Beatles’ arrival and the opening of the Star-Club on April 13.

On April 10, Astrid, at work in her photographic studio, received a call from her mother to say that Stu was much worse, and that she was sending him to the hospital. It was the day that three of the Beatles—
John, Paul, and Pete Best—flew out from Manchester Ringway Airport. George had the flu and was to follow with Brian Epstein a day later.

Stu died in the ambulance, in Astrid’s arms. “At half past four,” Millie Sutcliffe said, “I was in my bedroom at home in Liverpool. I felt as if a great strong cold wind came through that house, lifted me up, and laid me across the bed. For fifteen or twenty minutes not a muscle in my body was capable of movement. That was the time, I discovered later, when Stuart was dying.”

The news came in two telegrams from Astrid, out of sequence. The first said he had died, the second that he was seriously ill.

Stu’s father was away at sea. Mrs. Sutcliffe faced alone the ordeal of breaking the news to her two daughters, getting leave from the school where she was teaching, and booking herself on the first available flight to Hamburg. By chance, it was the one on which Brian Epstein and George Harrison were traveling to join the other Beatles. Brian gave her a lift to Manchester and sat with her on the flight.

At Hamburg Airport, Astrid was waiting with John, Paul, and Pete Best. Paul and Pete were red-eyed, but John showed no emotion. With unintended harshness then, the Beatles’ and Millie Sutcliffe’s paths diverged. Theirs lay to the Star-Club, where they were to open in a few hours. Hers lay to the mortuary, the formal identification of Stu, the receipts to be signed for his clothes, his watch, and his signet ring.

Cause of death was given officially as cerebral paralysis due to bleeding into the right ventricle of the brain. “The doctors told us,” Astrid says, “that Stu’s brain was actually expanding—getting too big for the space it floated in. It’s a very rare medical condition, but it can happen. Even if Stuart had lived, he would have been blind and probably paralyzed. He wouldn’t have been able to paint. He would have preferred to die.”

From the mortuary Millie Sutcliffe was taken to the Kirchherr house, to see the room that had been Stu’s last home, and the attic where he had worked. Scores of canvases, stacked against every wall, showed with what desperate energy his last months were spent. Mrs. Sutcliffe picked up, and never afterward let out of her sight, the palette on which Stu had mixed his final brilliant colors.

The shock expressed by such eminent figures as Edouardo Paolozzi bore witness to the tragedy that such a talent should be so brutally extinguished. At twenty-two, Stu left behind a body of work in which
mere promise already yielded to virtuosity. Those last visions, torn between agony and exhilaration, the blue and crimson carnivals, now left the city whose squalor and glamour had inspired them. So did a sketch of himself Stu had made at a time when the attacks were getting worse. Both his hands are pressed to a head that is almost a nuclear mushroom cloud of pain and confusion.

Millie Sutcliffe bequeathed Stu’s brain for scientific research at the hospital that had been treating him. Eighteen months later, a set of German X-ray plates, taken after his death, were brought across to Liverpool by Astrid. These revealed, for the first time, the presence of a small brain tumor. The Hamburg radiologist had attached a note in English: “Note the depressed condition of the skull.” Studying the tumor’s small shadow, and the cranial depression that seemed to press down on it, Mrs. Sutcliffe remembered a night, some three years before, when Stu had been playing bass with the Beatles, and she had found him in his room late at night with blood pouring from his head after being kicked in a scuffle outside Litherland Town Hall.

The Beatles were devastated by Stu’s death. Neither George nor Pete Best could stop crying. Paul felt especially bad, remembering his fights with Stu in the past. He tried to find words of consolation for Mrs. Sutcliffe but, unfortunately, they did not come out quite right. “My mother died when I was fourteen,” he told her, “and I’d forgotten all about her in six months.”

John alone showed no outward emotion, even though he felt the loss as badly as Stu’s own family. To the end of her days, Millie Sutcliffe would bitterly remember his failure to shed a single tear or show his feelings apart from one small detail. He asked for, and was given, the long woolen scarf that Stu used to wear in their winters together among the cold Liverpool streets and alleys.

In fact, John’s toughness and pragmatism helped others through the tragedy. “It was John who saved me,” Astrid says. “He convinced me, after Stu was gone, that I couldn’t behave as if I were a widow. He pretended to be heartless, but I knew what he said came from a heart. ‘Make up your mind,’ he told me. ‘You either live or die. You can’t be in the middle.’”

Thanks to the efforts of his mother and, after Millie Sutcliffe’s death in 1983, his younger sister Pauline, Stu would eventually achieve international renown as a painter who only incidentally happened to have
invented the Beatles’ name and most abiding image. His work would be shown in prestigious galleries all over the world and form an exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio; his drawings and sketchbooks would feature in the same blue-chip auctions as handwritten Lennon or McCartney lyrics. He would be the subject of numerous books, academic treatises, and TV documentaries and, in the mid-1990s, of a British-made film,
Backbeat
, although in a loutish and foulmouthed incarnation that few of his contemporaries can have recognized.

In 2001, Pauline Sutcliffe would come forward with further information bearing on her brother’s death. She said that while John and Stu were together in Hamburg in May 1961, John had flown into a sudden rage over his friend’s poor musicianship, knocking Stu to the ground, then kicking him repeatedly in the head as he lay there. The depression found in Stu’s skull after his death was consistent with such an attack—as much, Pauline believes, as that earlier fight outside Litherland Town Hall when John and Pete Best came to Stu’s rescue. She said Stu himself had told her of John’s assault, and that, many years afterward, John himself had owned up to it. To the end of his life, Pauline believes, he remained troubled by the thought of possibly having been an unwitting factor in Stu’s death.

Awful as the tragedy was for all of them, the Beatles could not stay miserable around the clock. They were, after all, the main attraction at the largest and newest of the Reeperbahn beat clubs. It stood in Grosse Freiheit, next door to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, in the bowels of what had formerly been a movie theater, the Stern Kino. As the Star-Club, it put Koschmider’s Kaiserkeller and Eckhorn’s Top Ten in the shade. Not that Koschmider or Eckhorn attempted serious competition. The Star-Club’s owner, Manfred Weissleder, a huge man with a dusting of golden hair, was the biggest strip-club owner on the Freiheit: His sex shows thrived owing to the particular predilection Weissleder had for filming naked girls under water.

During the Star-Club’s hours, from 4:00
P.M
. to 6:00
A.M
., as many as fifteen thousand customers could pass through it, most staying long enough to hear their favorite band, moving on to other bars or clubs, then returning later to hear the band’s second, third, fourth, and fifth spot. After midnight, the place would be swollen by the Freiheit’s own
population of whores, pimps, strippers, and transvestites. To maintain order, Weissleder had recruited Horst Fascher, the Kaiserkeller’s old chief bouncer who, luckily for the Beatles, “worshipped the bones of their bodies.” For the Star-Club Fascher recruited a new and even more deadly “Hoddel’s Gang,” including a much feared one-armed doorman and a waiter named Ali who would instantly floor any troublemaker with a wrestler’s dropkick.