The Love You Make Page 8

  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.

  John arrived home in the middle of the night and had to throw stones at Mimi’s bedroom window to wake her. When she answered the door, John just pushed right past her and said, “Pay the taxi, Mimi.”

  “Where’s your hundred pounds a week, John?” she shouted at him.

  John had promised her a large savings at the end of the Hamburg trip. He turned and sighed, exhausted. “Just like you, Mimi,” he said, “to go on about one hundred pounds a week when you know I’m tired.”

  5

  The five young men who returned to Liverpool that Christmas were so discouraged they didn’t even bother to speak to each other for weeks after they returned home. Paul took a job, working on a delivery truck for £7 a week to earn some extra money for Christmas, and John stayed in bed all day and slept, trying to escape the grim reality of being home in Mendips again. He was brought food and other sustenance by Cynthia. It was only by accident that they eventually discovered they were all in Liverpool and arranged to meet up again at the Casbah.

  It was a few nights before Christmas that they set up their instruments at the Casbah and played together for the first time since coming home. The audience in the Casbah was thunderstruck; a remarkable transformation had occurred in Hamburg. Those long, nightly hours of playing had paid off in the most unexpected way: professionalism. Although they were still unorganized and casual on stage, they were no longer the amateur band that had left Liverpool five months before. They were now a slick entertainment act, full of confidence and stage presence. In particular, they were visually like no other group in town; their clothing was now an unaccountable mixture of leather pants, cowboy boots, and denim jackets; their hairstyles featured feminine bangs combed over their foreheads.

  “It was Hamburg that had done it,” John said. “... it was only back in Liverpool that we realized the difference and saw what was happening.” What was happening was an instant snowballing of popularity as word spread about the new, improved Beatles back from Hamburg. Within a month they were recommended for a job as the lunchtime band at the Cavern Club on Matthew Street, which had just made a policy switch from jazz to beat groups. This was considered a plum job, although the surroundings left something to be desired. The Cavern was exactly what it sounded like, a slimy, subterranean cavern beneath a converted warehouse in the downtown business district. Eighteen steps below street level, it had three low-arched chambers. Because there was no ventilation, it was like descending into a sewer. The air was as fetid as a sweaty gymnasium, and the walls literally ran slick with condensation. No matter to the Beatles—at twenty-five shillings a day each they were ecstatic to be there; a steady lunchtime gig in a crowded club was exactly what the boys needed to build a following. In January of 1961 they began to play some evenings at the Cavern, as well as at lunchtime, and soon they were considered the house band.

  It became Cynthia Powell’s lunchtime routine to leave art school and go to the Cavern to hear John and the boys play. Occasionally some member or another of one of the boys’ families would also stop by at lunchtime to see them. Jim McCartney was no stranger to the Cavern, and Louise Harrison made herself a frequent and welcomed visitor, cheering the boys on with the rest of the kids, although she was horrified at how awful the club was. Mrs. Harrison was sitting there with crowds of kids around her one day when John’s Aunt Mimi turned up. Mimi had come not so much to cheer as to check up on where John was spending all his time. She had stormed past the owner, Ray McFall, refusing to pay admission, saying she had “come for John Lennon.” She was aghast at what she found. Hundreds of kids screaming in that foul air, singing and dancing. She would h
ave pulled John out of there by the ear if it hadn’t been for the large crowd by the stage.

  Louise Harrison, happy to see Mimi there, called over to her, “Aren’t they great?”

  “I’m glad someone thinks so,” Mimi shouted back. “You thing. We’d all have had lovely peaceful lives but for you encouraging them.”

  6

  By then all pretense of attending school was over, and music was a full-time occupation. The band had been back in Liverpool only a few months when George Harrison turned eighteen, and they set off for another stint on the Reeperbahn. Allan Williams fixed it with the authorities by writing a letter on their behalf to the German Tribunal and managed to arrange for legitimate visas. Peter Eckhorn at the Top Ten Club was offering them £40 a week, twice as much as they had earned at the Kaiserkeller. John promised Cynthia that this time it would only be a short trip and softened the pain of parting by inviting her to join him in Hamburg during Easter vacation from art school.

  Cynthia was joined on the journey to Hamburg by Dorothy Rohne, a pert, blond girl with a pixie haircut from the art college, whom Paul had been dating in Liverpool. Paul was “serious” about Dot, who worked part-time in a pharmacy, and he even contemplated marriage. The girls were sent off at the Lime Street station by Paul’s father and Cynthia’s mother. They were fortified for the trip with cheese butties and a thermos of tea, but they literally starved during the two-day ride. There was no restaurant car on the train, and the girls were afraid to get off at the food stops, lest they misunderstand the stopover time allotted for them to eat and find themselves stranded in some foreign city. They arrived at the Hamburg station one morning just after sunrise, exhausted and hungry.

  John and Paul were waiting for them, leaping and bounding about the station like a couple of lunatics stuffed full of speed. They had been up playing into the early-morning hours and were by then too full of Prellys to go to sleep, so they had been up all night. Cynthia had never seen either one of them like that, chattering on a mile a minute, slipping down the early-morning deserted streets. The boys assured the girls that everyone in Hamburg, save for Pete Best, was taking Prellys. “It’s the only way to survive,” John assured her, and by the end of the two-week visit Cynthia was on them too.

  It had been arranged for Cynthia to officially stay at Astrid’s parents’ house in the suburbs, since the attic rooms the boys shared over the Top Ten Club weren’t considered appropriate accommodations for a young English lady. Paul’s girlfriend Dot was staying with Rosa, the washroom lady, on her houseboat. To Cynthia’s great relief, Astrid turned out to be not only a warm and gracious host but a good friend to Cynthia as well. She loaned Cynthia her clothes, changed her hairstyle, and showed her how to put on makeup. Cynthia was fascinated by Astrid’s exotic tastes. Her room at her parents’ house was painted all in black, with silver tin foil accessories, and on the bed was a black velvet bedspread with black satin sheets. Concealed spotlights illuminated the stark room in an effect far ahead of its time. Every night after dinner, Cynthia and Astrid would spend hours getting dressed and primping in front of the mirror in Astrid’s room before setting out for the Top Ten Club to watch the boys perform. The girls sat stageside for hours, oblivious to the fights and screaming and mayhem around them, waiting for the boys to take their “powsa” or break. On some nights Cynthia would brave the attic room to sleep with John. They slept in the bottom bunk of a double-decker, the smell of dirty laundry heavy in the air, and made love while George Harrison snored blissfully away in the bed a few feet above them.

  Cynthia thought Astrid’s relationship with Stu Sutcliffe quite peculiar, although the rest of the Liverpool contingent didn’t find it as fascinating as she did. Stu and Astrid were so inseparable that Cynthia began to think of them as twins. They even started to look alike. They had the same haircut, they wore the same black leather outfits—both with an occasional bare midriff—and they even ordered the same food in restaurants. It was clear that Stu had no intention of ever leaving Hamburg without her and that his days with the band were numbered. It was a good thing, too. The closer Stu got to Astrid, the more the other boys seemed to dislike him. An enormous antipathy had developed between Stu and the others. From the start Stu had always been John’s friend, but now passive tolerance had turned into malignant disapproval. Paul in particular found a lot to be critical of in Stu. He picked on the way he played, the way he dressed, even the way he said things. Everyone was on edge a lot, partly as a side effect of the constant diet of amphetamines, and tempers were short. But now, even John, Stu’s perpetual champion, seemed to be taking his bad temper out on Stu with the rest of them. One night on stage at the Top Ten the boys were goading Stu unmercifully, until Paul finally went too far and said something nasty about Astrid. In front of a packed house, Stu tore off his guitar and jumped on Paul. Paul, much bigger and stronger, easily brought Stu to the ground and gave him a good walloping before the others pulled him off.

  Stu also suffered from frequent terrible headaches, which sometimes manifested themselves in irrational fits of jealousy over Astrid, who if anything, was inordinately loyal. Sometimes his headaches were so painful he would bang his head against the wall in frustration. With all this it was decided that Stu would officially leave the Beatles at the end of their engagement at the Top Ten. He was going to marry Astrid and stay in Hamburg with her, where he would get a grant from the Hamburg City Council and study art at the state art college.

  Stu, however, graciously took it upon himself to do a last dirty deed for the boys, since he wouldn’t be with them any longer to take the blame. He wrote to Allan Williams in Liverpool, telling him that the Beatles no longer felt he was responsible for their employment in Hamburg, since they had met Peter Eckhorn on their own and acquired the job themselves. Therefore, they would be withholding his 10 percent of their salary. The only contract Williams had with them had been lost in a fire, and he was legally helpless to force them to pay. Williams went on to become their long-term detractor. He spoke out against them for years to come, and when they became successful, he wrote a bitter book called The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away, describing their Hamburg days in detail. It must be of some comfort to him that a portion of his income is still derived by speaking at Beatle conventions, recounting his personal adventures with them.

  7

  When Cynthia returned to Liverpool after her Easter trip, her mother had surprising news for her; she was leaving England to live with Cynthia’s married cousins in Canada, where she would work as a nanny to their children. The house in Hoylake was being rented out to strangers, and Cynthia needed to find her own place to live. Her only alternative was to move in with an aging aunt who lived on the far side of Liverpool. Then she got what she thought was a brilliant idea; John’s Aunt Mimi was already boarding students at Mendips for a little extra income and there was still room for one more. It didn’t seem very hard to convince Mimi to let her move in. Cynthia even found a job on Saturdays working at the Woolworth’s in the nearby shopping district, Penny Lane. Once she had moved into her room at Mendips, she tried to help Mimi out with the household chores, hoping to fit in like a daughter. Then, when John came home in July, Cynthia plotted, she would already be living with him under the same roof. Could marriage be far away?

  Not many days went by before Cynthia discovered that living in the same house with Mimi Smith was far from the perfect arrangement. Mimi was a stickler for having the house run exactly the way she wanted it run and what’s more she was impossibly possessive of John. Mimi acted as if they were rivals for John’s affections and made it more than clear that Cynthia Powell was nothing but a stranger to her, just another boarder. The atmosphere in the house turned so sour that Cynthia moved out in less than a month and found herself living with her Aunt Tess on the far side of town. Undaunted, she had another plan; she would find her own flat near the Art College, and John would move in with her when he came home. She searched for weeks before she found one she could afford. It
wasn’t what she dreamed of as a love nest. It was a squalid, one-room flat, with pipes that ran rusty water, only a single bar of electric fire in the fireplace, and windows that rattled all winter. But it was hers; it was her first real place on her own. Remembering Astrid’s ingeniously decorated room in her parents’ house, Cynthia was inspired to make the flat as wonderful as possible for John’s homecoming. She bought a scrub brush and a pail, disinfectants, white paint, and pink lightbulbs. When John finally returned that summer, he found her in the clean but barren flat, sleeping on a lumpy mattress with only one set of sheets. As she hoped, he moved in with her. The Beatles resumed playing at the Cavern Club, and things seemed to go blissfully for a while.

  It was one night in autumn of 1961 that John came home to her room terribly excited. “Our struggling days are over,” he announced. The son of a rich Jewish merchant had stumbled into the Cavern Club, and he wanted to manage them. He was loaded, this guy. He was going to get them a recording contract. He knew Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and he said that the Beatles were going to be bigger than Elvis. Bigger than Elvis! For a while it was all Cynthia heard about, this new manager. John was possessed, the way he went overboard about things. This man seemed to consume so much of John’s thoughts that Cynthia was resentful at the mention of his name. For a week it was all she heard. Brian Epstein this, Brian Epstein that.