Throughout all these months John and Stuart wrote regularly to each other – as John had a crisis of confidence after the Decca rejection, and Stuart began telling of mystery headaches that he was suffering. Then in mid-February 1962 Stuart came back to Liverpool for a few days. His mother was recovering after an operation and he wanted to see her. But it was Stuart who didn’t look well.
With the Beatles now playing two venues on most days, there was, however, hardly any time for John and Stuart to get together and talk, and, after seeing the band a couple of times at the Cavern, Stuart returned to Germany. There would be better opportunities for them to catch up when the Beatles went back to Hamburg for another season in a few weeks’ time, they told each other. John was looking forward to it.
For the Beatles’ third Hamburg visit, Brian handled the negotiations, which meant that they flew there. But because George had contracted German measles and wasn’t quite recovered, John, Paul and Pete went out to Germany, via Amsterdam, on 10 April. The following day, they got up late and returned to Hamburg airport to meet Brian and George who were coming out to join them. Almost the first people they saw at the airport were Astrid and Klaus Voorman. That was a surprise.
‘Hello, where’s Stu?’ were John’s first words. Then he saw Astrid’s expression.
‘Stu’s dead, John.’
For a moment the three Beatles were mute. It didn’t seem possible. Then John broke down, shaking in shock and grief. Astrid and Klaus had assumed that John would have been informed by Brian, Klaus having telephoned him the previous day. But for some reason, and in those days news travelled far more slowly, the message hadn’t reached the three Beatles who had been en route to Germany.
John had known that Stuart was unwell. He’d never been a strong boy; sometimes it was his stomach that troubled him, and at other times Stuart had thought he had a grumbling appendix. Then the headaches had begun. At first doctors in Hamburg had put them down to exhaustion from painting into the night; or perhaps it was nervous strain. So Stuart had taken time off college. Tests had found nothing unusual. Later, however, Astrid would tell of how Stuart had become increasingly difficult in that the blinding pain in his head would affect his personality, and he had become convinced that she was seeing another boy. She wasn’t.
Then the previous afternoon, Stuart had gone into convulsions. An ambulance had been called, but it was too late. Stuart had lost consciousness and died while on his way to hospital. He was twenty-two. Astrid and Stuart had been living together and planning to marry later that year. Now she was an unmarried widow.
Momentarily out of control at the airport, John quickly managed to put away his tears. He would never want to show grief in public. But when Brian and George’s plane arrived, bringing with them Stuart’s mother, Millie Sutcliffe, whom Brian had collected in his car that morning, he didn’t know how to face her. She had blamed him for getting Stuart involved in music and taking him away to Hamburg. And now she had come to take her son’s body home.
John’s friendship with Stuart hadn’t been forged in the mill of shared ambition like his with Paul. There was never any competition between them. Privately they would admit to each other their worries about not being good enough at what they wanted to do, and they encouraged each other when doubts arose. Stuart was impressed by John’s original mind, and John had admired Stuart’s artistic talent, his intelligence and his honesty. ‘I looked up to Stu,’ he would one day reflect. ‘I depended on him to tell me the truth . . . He would tell me if something was good and I’d believe him.’
It wasn’t only John who was devastated. George, too, had burst into tears when told of Stuart’s death. Pete remembered how ill Stuart had looked on his visit to Liverpool a few weeks earlier, and now he sat in the airport crying. Young people never expect to encounter the sudden death of one of their own.
Nevertheless, thirty-six hours later the Beatles were back on stage in Hamburg, professionally hiding their loss in their music. ‘You have to decide if you want to die or go on living,’ John would tell Astrid when he went to see her. He would have been telling himself the same thing. That was John, grim-faced and angry at the loss of his best friend, but, once sufficiently recovered, restoring the armour he’d built around himself, ever determined not to let sentiment control him, or at least to allow it to show. Other than when Astrid asked him if there was anything of Stuart’s he would like by which to remember him, and he chose Stu’s navy blue and cream striped college scarf, only once did he let his mask of stone slip. Having insisted that Astrid went to see the Beatles at the Star-Club one night, he sang ‘Love Me Tender’ – the song Stuart had always sung when he’d been a Beatle.
Stuart’s funeral took place in Huyton Parish Church, just outside Liverpool. The Beatles were still in Hamburg, so they didn’t attend. Cynthia went. An autopsy would reveal that Stuart had died from a cerebral haemorrhage leading to bleeding into ‘the right ventricle of the brain’. The cause was unknown, but a small dent in one side of Stuart’s skull was also noted. It would later be speculated, by Stuart’s sister, Pauline, that the dent may have been caused by the kick to the head that her brother had received at Lathom Hall in 1961 from a group of Teddy boys after a Beatles gig. Whether that injury was the original cause of the haemorrhage, no one will ever know.
What we do know is that John’s behaviour in Hamburg now became more self-destructive than ever. From going on stage pretending to be a cleaner, or with a lavatory seat around his neck, or gabbling incoherently as amphetamines and beer bent his consciousness, sometimes he became violent, often he was sick, and frequently he had sex with different girls he picked up. The fabled permissive society of the Sixties had arrived early in the red-light area of the Reeperbahn, and, although his letters still pleaded with Cynthia to ‘wait for me’, he made no attempt to be faithful to her: quite the opposite. Was he behaving that way simply because he could? He probably never knew himself.
Back in Liverpool, Cynthia was still living unhappily at Mendips. Then one day, Mimi came across a love letter that John had written to his girlfriend, and read it. She was apoplectic. It was, she stormed to Cynthia, ‘pornographic’! That would certainly have been John’s intention when he wrote it.
It was the end for Cynthia with Mimi. They’d never got on. Soon after that, she moved in with an aunt, and then went on to have a bedsit in the same house as Paul’s girlfriend Dot.
The first time the Beatles had heard the name ‘George Martin’ had been when Brian had returned from London in March 1962 with what looked tentatively like good news. His meetings with the disc cutter and the music publisher had led him to Martin’s office at Parlophone Records, which, as music labels went, was the mongrel runt at EMI. Specialising for years in Scottish country dance Jimmy Shand jigs, light orchestral pieces and comedy records featuring the Beyond The Fringe satirist team and Peter Sellers, Parlophone was something of an oddity, almost an experimental corner of the record business save for the smooth voice of Matt Monro. Some rock musicians might have been affronted to be told that Parlophone was vaguely (no more than that) interested in them – but the Beatles weren’t. At least Parlophone wasn’t Embassy, the Woolworths budget label that John had half-jokingly suggested that Brian might try next.
What neither the Beatles nor Brian knew was that George Martin, the thirty-six-year-old head of Parlophone, was looking for a singer or a group that could deliver him the youth market. All the other EMI labels – Columbia, Capitol, HMV and MGM – had regular top ten records from rock stars, and it irked him that over on Columbia, Norrie Paramor had enjoyed four years of regular UK number one hits with Cliff Richard. Martin’s lack of success in finding anyone young and suitable probably wasn’t helped by the fact that he was a classically trained musician not a rock fan, who had never got Elvis Presley. ‘Rock and roll,’ he would later admit to me, ‘was alien to me.’
He knew he had to find someone, however, so when the very polite Brian Epstein from Liverpool had turned up in his office with a demo record of Paul singing ‘Like Dreamers Do’, and the boss of EMI’s publishing arm, Ardmore and Beechwood, wanted to publish one of the Lennon and McCartney songs, the least he could do was give these boys a listen. An alignment in the fortunes of several people was approaching.
There was no hurry, however, so George Martin took his time. Then, towards the end of May, with the Beatles approaching the end of their Hamburg season, they received a telegram from Brian in Liverpool: ‘CONGRATULATIONS BOYS. EMI REQUEST RECORDING SESSION. PLEASE REHEARSE NEW MATERIAL.’
The Beatles had been dismayed when Decca had turned them down. But Dick Rowe had unwittingly done them an enormous favour with his rejection, in that he’d saved them for someone far more suited to discover them – George Martin. The Beatles knew everything there was to know about rock and roll, Martin knew hardly anything. But he knew a great deal about all kinds of other music. They would teach him and he would teach them. They would make the perfect match.