The Love You Make (9 page)

For Cynthia Powel
the trip to Hamburg was anything but a reason to celebrate. Certainly, she believed, the pleasures of the Reeperbahn would make her seem provincial and inadequate. She was already learning to stave off the flirtatious Liverpool girls who were after John; what with Hamburg’s reputation for loose women, she was sure their relationship wouldn’t endure the separation. She wept bitterly as she kissed John good-bye on the morning of his departure, then dolefully returned to her mother’s house in Hoylake, where Lillian Powell was delighted to have her truant daughter home again. Cynthia tried to make the best of it, reassuring herself that they were scheduled to be gone only six weeks. In the end, it turned out they stayed for over five months.

A compulsive doodler and letter writer, John’s missives arrived almost daily. The envelope would be covered with kisses and verses of love like “Postman, postman, don’t be slow/I’m in love with Cynthia so go man go.” Inside there would be twenty- and thirty-page handwritten epic accounts of his adventures, complete with cartoon drawings. The Beatles had set off from the Jacaranda in a dilapidated cream and green minibus along with Allan Williams, his wife Beryl, his brother-in-law Barry Chang, and his West Indian friend, Lord Woodbine. In the band’s suitcases were new costumes of black crewncck sweaters and short houndstooth jackets for which Allan Williams had advanced them £15 each. The trip was long and the van broke down. At a stop in Arnhem, Holland, John shoplifted a harmonica and added it to their act.

The letters describing Hamburg made it sound as if John wouldn’t need any help from his vivid imagination to improve upon the bizarre reality. They were playing not in the Kaiserkeller but in a dreary little dive called the Indra Club, with a neon sign in the shape of an elephant outside the front door. The Indra’s tiny stage usually featured strippers and sex shows, and the regular customers—a cross section of the Reeperbahn’s underbelly, including gun-toting gangsters, drug pushers, and tranvestites—weren’ t very happy to find a group of oddly dressed English boys on the stage instead of nude female mud wrestlers. The Beatles were expected to entertain from seven in the evening until two or three in the morning, sometimes seven nights a week. The club’s owner, Bruno Koschmider, was obligated to give them a place to live and put them up in the basement of a cinema he also owned called the Bambi Kino. The boys were given three dirty little cubby holes at the front of the theater just behind the screen. The cinema alternated porn films with gangster movies, and it wasn’t unusual for the boys to be awakened in the early afternoon by the sounds of fevered panting. The rooms were literally shit holes, and it wasn’t unusual to find human excrement under a newspaper, if one was brave enough to lift one. Only at Allan Williams’ insistence were they given clean blankets and bedding. No towels were provided, however, and the only toilet was the public one at the rear of the theater.

Five months went by with the boys hardly taking more than a sponge bath. Their meals consisted of a bowl of cornflakes and milk when they arose in the afternoon and an occasional dinner at the Seaman’s Mission, where the English manager had taken pity on them and was feeding them at cut-rate seamen’s prices.

At the Indra their dressing room was also the men’s toilets, and the attendant, an old lady in ankle socks named Rosa, was happy to sell them a prodigious supply of the German-made diet pills called Preludin she kept in a candy jar. Except for Pete Best, who seemed to disassociate himself from all their wildness, the Beatles quickly found they needed the “Prellys” to keep them going through the long nights of nonstop playing. The Prellys made them thirsty, which in turn made them drink more beer, which in turn was free and plentiful from the barmaids when Koschmider wasn’t looking. Also, it became quite common for customers to send drinks up to the stage to get them drunk, shouting
“Trinken! Trinken!”
The audiences came to be entertained, not to watch the Beatles stand around and play, so when Koschmider yelled
“mach shau!”
at them, “make show” they did. Their nervous systems electrified by the cheap amphetamines, their inhibitions demolished by the beer and booze, they were capable of anything on stage. John, in particular, would bring down the house with his speed-induced imitation of cripples and goblins. He would jump, crawl, and scream, sometimes taunting the audience with, “Bloody fuckin’ Nazis! Sieg
Heil!”
The audiences, usually at least as drunk or high as John was, only laughed and cheered and egged him on to be still more outrageous. John was so out of control one night that when a customer overenthusiastically approached the stage, John kicked him in the head twice, then grabbed a steak knife from a table and threw it at the man.

The Beatles’ (save for Pete Best who did not indulge in such things) favorite part of the St. Pauli district was the incredible fenced-in red-light district. Considering how young they were—John and Stu were twenty, Paul was eighteen, and George only seventeen—the Herberstrasse was like a sexual Disneyland. Here, all hours of the day and night, waited prostitutes of every size, shape, and description, sitting in the parlor window of house after house facing the narrow street, reading, arguing, gossiping with tradesmen. This is not to say that the boys had to pay for their sex very often; cute, young, and randy, they had any number of women available to them for free, from the barmaids to the customers. More than once they had a “knee trembler” with some sweet young thing in a doorway only to discover her the next day sitting in the window of a house in the Herberstrasse. Screwed, blewed, and tattooed, stoned any time of the day or night, the boys became a walking laboratory of venereal diseases. During his short stay in Hamburg, Allan Williams became the self-appointed “Little Pox Doctor.” The boys would come to him at the Gretle and Alfons, a small bar where they would spend their off-hours, and ask him to step into the back room for a spot examination. “I looked for swellings in the groin, a discharge from the end, and asked about pain on urinating, all the things I’d read about” He also taught them a witch doctor’s method of diagnosis by holding their urine up to the light in a beer glass. The public-health facilities in Hamburg were free and very accommodating, and the boys were cured, stricken, cured, and stricken at an alarming rate. As soon as they got a shot of penicillin, they were drinking and whoring again. It was only when they returned to Liverpool for good that a venereologist managed to clean them up.

Koschmider extended the Beatles’ engagement, and, after dispatching an exhausted and dissipated Derry and the Seniors back to Liverpool, he moved the Beatles to his big club, the Kaiserkeller. The Kaiserkeller was enormous compared to the Indra, with an incongruous nautical decor of portholes and fishnet. The Kaiserkeller was also much rougher than the Indra, and the club had its own highly efficient squad of bouncers. This small army, frequently called into service in the violent club, was headed by an ex-boxer named Horst Fascher who allegedly had spent time in jail for killing a sailor with his fists in a street brawl. Fortunately, Fascher took the Liverpool boys to his heart, particularly the crazy one, John, and as Kaiserkeller employees they were put under his special protection. With Fascher acting as Godfather, they felt invulnerable, and their provocative behavior increased accordingly One night, smashed on Prellys and beer, they tried to roll an English sailor who got drunk at the bar, but they only had the heart to hit him once or twice before giving up. When Rory Storm and the Hurricanes were also booked into the Kaiserkeller, a contest ensued as to who could stomp a hole first in the rotting Kaiserkeller stage. Rory won and was feted with a case of cheap champagne at a local spot called Willy’s cafe. When Koschmider heard about the contest that had pounded a hole in his stage, he dispatched a contingent of thugs to rough up the two bands. The Liverpool groups joined forces and, armed with chairs and table legs, managed to emerge from Willy’s with no broken bones. By the next day’s performance a truce had been called, and life went on as usual.

Summer quickly turned into autumn, and the boys’ engagement was extended yet again. In Liverpool, Cynthia waited patiently. John’s letters now talked about a beautiful girl named Astrid Kirchner and her room-mate, Klaus Voorman. As the story unfolded, bit by bit, Astrid and Klaus seemed to be having a tremendous effect on the boys. Klaus, a Berlin-born doctor’s son, was an art student in Hamburg. One night after an argument with Astrid, he had stumbled into the Kaiserkeller. He was astonished to find the Beatles with their funny-looking checkered jackets and wavy pompadours. He was particularly taken by Stu Sutcliffe, hiding behind those mysterious clip-on dark glasses, moodily playing his bass guitar. Two nights later, Klaus asked Astrid to come with him to see them and then the next night and the next, and soon Astrid was hooked on them herself.

Astrid was an exotically pretty girl with a blond pixie haircut and large, dark, sad eyes. She had met Klaus while studying art at a private academy called the Meister Schule. When she met the boys she was a photographic assistant, and Klaus was living in a room on the top floor of her mother’s house. Astrid was enchanted with these peculiar English boys, and despite the language barrier, she managed to strike up a friendship with them. The boys, in return, were delighted to meet some local people their own age. Astrid photographed them frequently and brought along other German art students to the club. These students, of a vogue called “exis,” after the existentialists, were a pale, intense, ascetic bunch. Like Astrid, they dressed in thick black leather trench coats and leather trousers and seemed to the boys to be half poets, half spies. It wasn’t long before the Beatles started wearing leather trousers and tunics, some that Astrid designed and made for them herself.

John seemed so in awe of Astrid that Cynthia was certain this was the fräulein who would steal his heart away. But only two months after her name first appeared in John’s letters, he wrote that Astrid had become engaged—to Stu! Although they hardly knew twenty-five words to say to each other, they had chipped in and bought engagement rings. Stu intended to live in Germany with her after they were married. Quite a change had come over Stu, too. Astrid was now making all his clothes, including a collarless sports jacket similar to the ones Pierre Cardin had popularized in Paris. Astrid had also talked Stu into combing his hair forward over his forehead and cutting it in bowl-shaped bangs. One by one, except for Pete Best, the other boys soon followed suit, and the Beatle haircut was born.

As their fifth month in Hamburg approached, Cynthia wondered if the boys would ever come home. From the way it sounded in John’s letters, they might have stayed right through the next year—if they hadn’t been thrown out by the police. The trouble began when a new club, the Top Ten, opened on the site of the old Hippodrome Club, and its owner, Peter Eckhorn, started luring employees away from the other Reeperbahn clubs. The Kaiserkeller’s famed bouncer, Horst Fascher, had already defected with some of his best men, as had Rosa, the lady in the washroom who sold the Beatles Prellys. The Beatles would have gone to the Top Ten, too, if Koschmider hadn’t pointed out a clause in their contracts forbidding them to take employment within thirty weeks and twenty-five miles of their employment at the Kaiserkeller. In fact, Koschmider let it be known that if the boys played at the Top Ten Club, it wouldn’t be safe for them to
walk
within twenty-five miles of the Kaiserkeller. Nevertheless, by early December, as their contracts with Koschmider ran out, the boys moved into accommodations provided by Peter Eckhorn and were seen on the stage of the Top Ten Club. Word quickly filtered back to Koschmider.

The following day the boys were dragged out of bed by several very unpleasant policemen from the Reeperbahn station house who were searching for George Harrison. Someone—no doubt Bruno Koschmider—had tipped them off that George Harrison was not yet eighteen and therefore forbidden by law to be in any club on the Reeperbahn past curfew. Besides which, he had no working papers. In fact, the police discovered that none of the band members had legal permission to be working. George was ordered to pack and leave the country within twenty-four hours. Stu and Astrid took him to the train station in her car that night. In an unusual show of emotion for him, he choked back tears when he hugged them tightly on the train platform, this great adventure ending for him. Then he got on the train with his guitar under his arm and a bag of apples and biscuits that Astrid had fixed for him, and he went sorrowfully off to Liverpool.

A few days later Paul and Pete Best went back to the Bambi Kino where they had left behind a few of their meager belongings. They had expected Koschmider to have thrown their things out, but everything was just where they left it behind the cinema screen. Not smart enough to let well enough alone, an unfortunate bit of mischief occurred on the way out of the theater. Paul unfurled a two-pfennig prophylactic and lit it with a match. The dry drapes hanging on the walls of the theater quickly began to smolder, and Paul and Pete hightailed it out of the theater without stopping to mention it might burn down. The fire was discovered and put out before much damage was done, but the suspicious origin was investigated by authorities who found some rather incriminating evidence; on the ceiling of the room where the fire started, written in carbon with the flame of a candle, was the name “The Beatles.”

The next morning the police were back, this time with arson detectives who escorted Pete and Paul down to the Reeperbahn police station where they were held and interrogated for several hours on suspicion of trying to burn down the Bambi Kino. Thanks to an undeserved kindness on Koschmider’s part, no charges were pressed, but the boys were ordered out of the country,
mit
haste. Paul and Pete found themselves on the next flight to England, without Pete’s drums or most of their luggage.

John and Stu were now the only ones left, and there wasn’t much reason for them to remain in Hamburg. John returned home the cheapest way—by train—defeated and depressed, looking forward to Cynthia and a warm bath and even Aunt Mimi. Stu, who had a touch of tonsillitis and a fever, was sent home by plane, his airfare scraped together by his concerned fiancée. He was expected to return to Hamburg in a few months to marry her.