The Beatles (55 page)

One thing Brian couldn’t hustle, however, was Martin’s ears. It didn’t take them long into a preview of the Decca tapes to determine that the Beatles weren’t worth more effort. Martin considered them to be “a rather unpromising group,” with tired material. Even the original songs, which Epstein had gone on about quite glowingly, were “
very mediocre
” in his opinion. But something in the vocalists’ delivery raised his antennae a few inches. Paul’s voice proved rather enjoyable, and “a certain roughness”—obviously John’s contribution—pleased him.

When the tape ended, Martin had to decide: bite or pass. It was too difficult. He remained on the fence; there wasn’t enough to go on—either way. Issuing a pass would have been simple enough, but what if he was wrong? What if there was more to this backwater band than a surface listen allowed? It wouldn’t serve him to make a snap decision. “
You know, I really can’t judge
it, on what you’re playing me here,” he recalled telling Brian. “It’s
interesting,
but I can’t offer you any kind of deal on this basis. I must see them and meet them. Bring them down to London and I’ll work with them in the studio.”

Another audition. Brian tried not to let his disappointment show. He had hoped to return to Liverpool with more positive news, but this slim overture would have to do. Unfortunately, it meant replaying the trip they had made to Decca, which had been hard on everyone involved, as well as his underwriting it, picking up hotels and expenses to the tune of several hundred pounds.

Money, however, was never an issue. According to Alistair Taylor, “
Brian’s investment in the band
had become quite substantial, without much return. In fact, it was growing more uncertain that he would ever recoup money from the Beatles.” But if he was having second thoughts about this undertaking, he never said so, and he certainly never complained. “
Brian was too captivated
by the whole experience, too into it,” says Peter Brown. He was caught up in what he perceived to be the exciting world of show business. And, as those close to him realized, he was drawn into the fantasy of rock ’n roll, intent on exploring its shadowy, rebellious, slightly amoral demimonde.
By February, he was taking amphetamines
. Initially, he blamed it on the gigs—it was the only way he could stay up that late—and to some extent that is true. But the crazy nights out with the Beatles, the pressures at NEMS, the anxieties of London, the desires he may have felt—the roller coaster of highs and lows—all required some form of
self-abuse. Preludin was the easy answer. They were in plentiful supply, and the Beatles took them. It was a subtle, if reckless, way for him to fit in. “
Brian didn’t want to go to gigs
dressed as Mr. Epstein from NEMS,” says Peter Brown. “He didn’t want to look like a prick in a suit, so he put on a turtleneck and a leather jacket to seem more like the boys.” Bill Harry even recalls him at the Cavern one night, “
with his hair combed forward
, looking completely ridiculous.” He was experimenting, looking for ways to square himself with the Beatles, to square himself with himself.

One thing he refused to share, however, was his sexual identity. The subject had never come up and Brian was loath to raise it. The military discharge, the brush with the police—not to mention the stigma attached to such unspeakable behavior—had already shaken his trust in confiding in anyone who wasn’t like-minded. There is no telling how he thought the Beatles would deal with the truth, but he was unsure enough not to try it out on them. In any case, they suspected as much from the start. “
We’d heard Brian was queer
,” Paul recalled, although this remark is disingenuous, at best. As Peter Brown recalls, the Beatles were never confused about Brian’s homosexuality. “
They always knew he was a queen
from the other side of the tracks. It was something they would tease him about.”

John could be especially tough on Brian, if not downright cruel. One night during the disc interlude at the Cavern, Brian stopped backstage, as he often did, to visit with the band. Instantly, Bob Wooler knew rough weather was brewing by the tart look on John’s face and the way he was slumped in his seat. It was a comportment the deejay recognized all too well, an ornery prestrike effect, forewarning that someone, unexpectedly, was about to get the royal treatment. The cloud burst, Wooler recalls, when John crooked one side of his mouth to reflect aloud: “
I see that new Dirk Bogarde film
is at the Odeon.” More than an observation, it was a cue for someone else in the room to respond: “Which one is that?” To which John replied: “
Victim.
It’s all about those fucking queers.”

But however hypocritical it sounds, while the Beatles entertained themselves regularly at Brian’s expense, they wouldn’t permit it from outsiders—ever. Ian Sharp, one of John’s art school chums, found out the hard way when he made an off-color remark about Brian during an afternoon bull session at the Kardomah Café. “
Within forty-eight hours
” Sharp had a letter from Brian’s solicitors demanding a formal apology. Frightened by its implications, Sharp shot back a response full of regret and penitence, thinking that was the end of the matter. But there was one final condition.
“I was told by Paul, consequently, that I was never to make any contact with [the Beatles] at all.” It was punctuated by “Sorry about that, mate. See you.” Much to Sharp’s surprise, the Beatles were faithful to the letter of Brian’s wish. Except for a wave when they passed in a car, he says, “that was the very last time I saw them.”

Chapter 17
Do the Right Thing

W
ith recording efforts at a standstill and the Beatles breathing down his neck, Brian Epstein gained something of a reprieve when the band left Liverpool in April for a third extended appearance in Hamburg. The Beatles were just as eager to leave as Brian was to be free of them for a while. “
The Beatles were home in Hamburg
,” says Adrian Barber. “It was their town.” Plus it would be great to see old friends: the exis, Tony Sheridan, Stu and Astrid, the ceaseless flow of musicians that funneled through neighboring clubs. Hamburg would help take their minds off the sorry state of affairs back home.

Brian had considered sending them overland with Neil Aspinall in the van, but as their departure loomed, he surprised the band with plane tickets, paid for out of his own pocket. The Beatles were clearly excited. Among them, only Paul had flown before. There was a sense of adventure from the get-go, but in more appreciable terms, it was reassuring that Brian had elevated their status, that they were to be treated more respectfully than in the past, in a manner befitting true artistes.

And yet, for all Brian’s attempts at accommodating them, the Beatles could not ward off misfortune.
An omen presented itself
when George came down with the measles, forcing him to miss the scheduled flight from Manchester. The rest of the band left without him. Clearing Customs in Hamburg, they charged through the airport, spotting Astrid Kirchherr across the hall. It was hard to miss her; she was majestic, a full sail in black linen. John, pulled into her orbit, windmilled his arms comically in greeting.

“
Where’s Stu
?” everyone wanted to know.

Her face was blank, still. Noting the guarded blur of her gaze, John asked, “
Oh, what’s the matter
?”

“Stuart died, John. He’s gone.”

The room went silent, out of focus. A vacuum gathered around them, beyond the uproar, the announcements, the multitudes hurrying past. Paul and Pete stumbled backward on their heels; unable to check their emotions, they caved in to the grief. John, seemingly impervious, had been dealt a sideways blow. He didn’t know how to process this news. Death: it took everything he loved—Uncle George, Julia, now Stuart. His grief was numbing. Nothing registered. Later, myth would have it that he “burst into laughter,” but laughter was beyond him. It was enough that he gave voice to a single word: “How?”

Astrid was forthcoming with details. Since their return from Liverpool, Stuart’s headaches had increased in intensity. They struck like electrical storms, sudden and scary, without warning. It was like “
a bomb going off in his head
.” There were times, she said, that he lapsed into such black swoons that nothing she did could dislodge him from the excruciating pain. It paralyzed him to the point of crippling agony. In a letter to his mother, he expressed the fear that “
he was going blind
.” There had been spells when he couldn’t see, couldn’t think. Creatively, physically, emotionally, Stuart was falling apart. The fancy clothes and sunglasses couldn’t conceal his haggard face, his sunken eyes, or his ghastly pallor. His nerves were shot. He couldn’t function in school; his work suffered. Once, he keeled over in class, which alarmed the other students, particularly because he was helpless during these attacks. Astrid was limited in her capacity to sit with him, reduced to stroking a hand or shoulder while he suffered wave after wave of pain. She spent many afternoons that way, with Stuart’s head cradled in her lap, scared for his safety.
Other times, she struggled to hold him down
, often with her mother’s help, to keep him from endangering himself.

Finally, in order to keep a close eye on him, Astrid insisted that he move into her house. She and her mother dressed up the attic so that it functioned as both a bedroom and an art studio, where Stuart could paint, but that, too, had its drawbacks.
According to one account, he’d blacked out
and fallen down a flight of stairs. What’s more, it was cold upstairs; he was constantly shivering.

On April 10
, a day before the Beatles left for Hamburg, Astrid was summoned home from work by her mother. Stuart was convulsed with pain, she said, and needed immediate attention. “
He has to go to the hospital
right now.” There was an adamant alarm in her voice; Astrid reacted to it as she might to an air-raid signal, with fear condensing into swift, definite action. An ambulance was already waiting, and without a word, Astrid leaped into the back a moment before it sped away from the curb.
Stuart was inside, curled up into a ball. Somehow Astrid managed to bundle his frail, dishrag body into her arms, and it was there, pressed against her, that Stuart died—of a brain aneurism or other disorder, it would never be certain—before they ever reached the hospital.

The Beatles were stunned, confused.
No one that close in age had died
so tragically. It was “
a real shock
,” especially for John, who “
looked up to Stu
” on so many levels.

But the Beatles were determined to open in Hamburg on schedule.
Even Astrid insisted that they go on
the next night, promising to be in the audience, as Stu would have wanted it.
^*

The Grosse Freiheit had changed remarkably in the six months since the Beatles had left Hamburg as a versatile but struggling rock ’n roll band. It was still sleazy, still an outpost devoted to the kind of wanton, vulgar behavior that demanded a rock ’n roll soundtrack. Nightclubs still provided the biggest take, and the most opulent of these was the Star-Club, set to open its doors with a bill called the “Rock ’n Twist Parade” headed by the Beatles.
^*
Its owner was a former pig farmer from Munich named Manfred Weissleder, who had risen to prominence by building the most efficient—and most fearsome—organization in Hamburg and eliminating the competition, one by one, so that by the spring of 1962 “
without [his] approval you did not work
on the Grosse Freiheit.” Weissleder, who stood over six foot seven and “
spoke English with a typical German World War II accent,”
and his partner, a “
ruthless” pit bull
named Paul Mueller, passed themselves off as impresarios, but their business was prostitution. Under various fronts and guises, they ran sixteen strip bars in the district—the Rote Katz, or Red Cat, among the largest—and a string of three hundred young girls recruited from across Eastern Europe and as far off as Mongolia.

The Star-Club was on the site of an old cinema, “
an immense, cavernous rock ’n roll cathedral
,” decked out in plush carpeting, an expanse of dark, polished wood, and, around the perimeter, a grouping of taupe-colored upholstered settees where people lounged between numbers, sipping from stubby bottles of local beer and plying the aggressive pickup scene. Sweating, wandering through a cloud of dense cigarette smoke, around-the-clock revelers explored the many levels of a hedonistic universe.
The floors were diverse planets, each with its own stellar personality: music and dancing downstairs, a small “
twistin’ base
” situated in an overhanging U-shaped balcony, a strip joint—the Erotic Film Night Club—above that, featuring movable, transparent panels that beheld a cinematic smorgasbord of sexual perversion, an old projection room with a sliding peephole that served as Manfred Weissleder’s private lair.