The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  John Lennon starts singing, standing with his legs spread wide apart—a stance Wooler privately refers to as John’s trademark, that way “the girls up front would be looking up his legs, keeping a watch on the crotch.”

  After their set, Paul’s dad, Jim McCartney, who works nearby, stops by to hand over groceries and instructions for preparing dinner to Paul while John tries to cadge a “ciggie” from a girl. Then he notices George talking to “some very posh rich feller” who’s wearing a fancy suit and carrying a gold cigarette case. John heads toward them, but the man has disappeared by the time John gets there.

  “Who’s that?” John asks George.

  “Mr. Epstein. He’s the store manager at NEMS.”

  I thought he looked familiar. John spends a lot of time at NEMS buying records, especially obscure R&B.

  Mr. Epstein comes back on several occasions and chats with the band. John is flattered by the attention, but why the interest? The Epsteins own NEMS, and twenty-seven-year-old Brian’s got a big house on Queens Drive, drives a Ford Zodiac, and speaks like a member of the royal family—a skill no doubt acquired through his years spent at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

  When Brian invites them to come ’round NEMS on November 29, John’s still suspicious. There are a lot of con men around, and he’s not sure if Brian’s one of them.

  The boys, dressed in their leathers and cowboy boots, arrive late—and a bit drunk, after having first spent some time at the Grapes pub.

  John explains that they signed a six-page contract written in German, without the benefit of a translation, for Bert Kaempfert on June 19, 1961. As Paul will later say, “We signed all sorts of contracts when we were about eighteen, because we had no manager and we didn’t know what we were doing.”

  “It seems to me with everything going on, someone ought to be looking after you.” Brian asks how much the band earns.

  “75p each per night,” they reply. “That’s above the normal rate at the Cavern.”

  Brian looks shocked. He genuinely feels them to be worth far more, later saying, “I hoped that even if I were not to run their affairs completely I could at least secure a decent rate for their performances.”

  When at a second meeting, on December 3, they begin discussing contract terms—Paul and Brian going back and forth about percentages; should it be ten, fifteen, or twenty?—it’s clear that Paul isn’t that keen on Brian. The most he’ll concede is that Brian has “a good flair” and, like Paul, “is very into the look onstage.”

  As far as John is concerned, there’s nothing to think over. Brian is clearly smart. He’s wealthy and well read and has connections in London—all of which John likes.

  But most important, Brian Epstein is a risk taker.

  Where Paul is not.

  One time, John said to Paul, “Look, imagine you’re like on a cliff top and you’re thinking about diving off. Dive! Try it!” and Paul replied, “Like bloody hell I’m gonna dive. You dive and give us a shout and tell me how it is, and then if it’s great I’ll dive.”

  When John and Paul return to the table, they talk about the Cavern and the recordings they made with Tony Sheridan, including an original composition.

  That takes Brian by surprise. “You write your own music?”

  John nods and begins naming their Lennon-McCartney originals. “There’s ‘Like Dreamers Do,’ and ‘Hello Little Girl…’”

  “And a rock-ballad called ‘Love of the Loved,’” Paul adds.

  Brian pauses, as if thinking over how to weigh their songwriting abilities against their demonstrated value as live performers. He looks the band over, praising their “star quality,” before pronouncing, “You’re going to be bigger than Elvis, you know.”

  John is astounded. Speechless. They all are. George will later say about this moment, “This is where Brian was good. He knew how to get it happening. We had felt cocky and certain but when Epstein said “You’re going to be bigger than Elvis you know,” we thought, ‘Well, how big do you have to be? I mean, I doubt that.’ That seemed outrageous, yet he did have the right attitude.”

  That shot of confidence is exactly what John’s been looking for. They need someone like Brian to keep them in line. Truth is, he’ll later admit, “We were in a daydream till he came along. We’d no idea what we were doing, or where we’d agreed to be.”

  John knows they can make it. The Beatles want to be the biggest.

  And anyone can see that Brian has class, money, and connections in the music world.

  Plus, he’s from Liverpool. He’s one of them.

  “Right then, Brian,” John says, deciding. “Manage us.”

  Chapter 11

  Different strokes for different folks.

  —“Everyday People”

  On December 13, 1961, Brian Epstein invites Mike Smith, an A&R man at Decca, to the Cavern to see the Beatles play. Smith is impressed enough to schedule them to come to London on January 1, 1962.

  The Beatles win the Mersey Beat magazine poll naming them Liverpool’s top group, beating out Gerry and the Pacemakers and Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. For Christmas, Brian sends them each a gift—a traveling alarm clock. On the back of the business card he uses as a gift tag, he writes “My little bit to get you all on in time.”

  On December 27, the Beatles close out the year at the Cavern with “The Beatles’ Christmas Party,” but Pete Best is out sick.

  They need a drummer, and the other three band members have a particular one in mind: Ringo.

  When Ringo sits in, “it felt complete,” George will later say. “It just really happened, it felt really good. And after the show we were all friends with Ringo and we liked him a lot and hung out with him, whereas Pete—he was like a loner. He would finish the gig and then he would go.”

  But Ringo joins Tony Sheridan’s backing band in Hamburg, and Pete’s still their drummer that first day of 1962.

  Decca calls the studio recording a “commercial test.” For the Beatles, it’s the audition of their lives. The recordings they’d made in Germany were done in an auditorium connected to a high school. This is their first time in a real recording studio.

  John and the others plug their guitars into the studio amps, and Pete sets up his kit behind a screen, but the sound levels will all be controlled by the men standing behind the glass, adjusting the controls, watching the four of them.

  The red light goes on. The recording has started.

  Here we go.

  * * *

  “Look,” Brian tells the boys back in Liverpool as they wait to hear from Decca. “If I get a huge offer, they won’t take you in leather.”

  John says, “All right, I’ll wear a suit—I’ll wear a fucking balloon if somebody’s going to pay me! I’m not in love with the leather that much.”

  Paul nods. It’s time for a change. “It was a bit old-hat anyway, all wearing leather gear.” But…are they selling out?

  “I didn’t really see it as selling out,” George says. “I just saw it as playing a game: if it takes suits to get us on the television, and if we need to be on television to be able to promote ourselves, then we will put on suits. We would wear fancy dress, whatever it took to get the gigs.”

  “And while we’re on the subject,” Brian says, “if you really want to get into bigger places you have to stop eating onstage, stop swearing, stop smoking.”

  “We’ll stop,” John agrees. Onstage at least. “Brian was trying to clean our image up,” John later explained. “Fucking hell! It was a choice of making it, or still eating chicken onstage. We respected his views.”

  On Monday, January 29, Brian takes the band to Beno Dorn, his tailor in Birkenhead, where the senior tailor tsks over the Beatles’ insistence that “the lapels had to be narrow and they wanted their trousers extremely narrow.” But the boys enjoy the whole experience enormously and leave the shopgirls swooning.

  (The irony of John choosing—if unwillingly—to wear a suit and tie onstage delights Mimi. “H
a-ha, John Lennon, no more scruffs for you,” she cackles.)

  A week later, Brian heads to London to meet with Decca execs, alone. He is taken to the executive dining room, where he’s greeted by Dick Rowe, the head of A&R, sales manager Steve Beecher-Stevens, and Arthur Kelland, one of his assistants. Having all these important men here is certainly a good sign, he assumes.

  Not exactly.

  Rowe speaks first. “Not to mince words, Mr. Epstein, we don’t like your boys’ sound. Groups of four guitarists are on the way out.”

  Brian is gutted, but he quickly recovers. “You must be out of your mind,” he tells them. “These boys are going to explode. I am confident that one day they will be bigger than Elvis Presley.” He shows the execs a copy of Mersey Beat with the headline that reads BEATLES TOP POLL!

  “The boys won’t go, Mr. Epstein. We know these things. You have a good record business in Liverpool. Stick to that.”

  The insult—and the condescending delivery—is all about London snobbery. Brian’s sure of it.

  He pushes back at them. Hard. He goes through a detailed list of why Decca is making a major mistake.

  “How about this,” Rowe says. “Do you know Tony Meehan?”

  “The former drummer for the Shadows?”

  “That’s him. He’s with Decca A&R now. He has firsthand experience of what the teenagers want.”

  Brian takes the meeting, but when he returns to his office on Saturday, February 10, he fires off a letter declining the offer of Mr. Meehan’s producing services, boasting that “since I saw you last the Group have received an offer of a recording Contract from another Company.”

  This is an outright lie, but Brian is determined, with all his soul, to make Decca regret its decision.

  Decca could have signed the boys for what it cost them to take me to lunch.

  As Tony Meehan himself will say years later, “It was just a complete mess, as things generally are—a dreadful corporate blunder.”

  Chapter 12

  Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues…

  —“It Don’t Come Easy”

  The boys sit together at a pub, stunned by Decca’s rejection.

  “He’ll be kicking himself,” says Paul of Dick Rowe.

  “I hope he kicks himself to death,” says John.

  “I think Decca expected us to be all polished,” John later reflects. “We were just doing a demo. They should have seen our potential. I think a lot of halfwits were looking after it.”

  Then he delves into the music. “We didn’t sound natural,” he admits. The thirty-five-minute audition tape contains fifteen songs, and John can find fault on just about every single one: he sang like a crazed madman; Paul sounded like a woman. George, always the perfectionist, played well. But Pete’s a painfully average drummer. Plus, his stage presence is no presence at all. Pete never makes any eye contact, never smiles, just drums with his head down.

  They haven’t even bothered to tell Pete about the Decca rejection, as they are questioning his investment in the group.

  “At least the BBC thinks we’re good,” George says. Brian’s booked them to record in front of a live audience for a BBC radio program called Here We Go that will air them in a half-hour slot called “Teenager’s Turn.” It pays well and, even better, will reach millions of listeners.

  The boys arrive dressed in their new mohair suits, bright white shirts, and thin ties. Their trousers are trim, and they’re wearing Chelsea boots fitted with Cuban heels. Their hair is no longer slicked back with grease but clean and combed forward in a strange “mop-top” style. Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart’s fiancée, gave Stu the haircut first, and George liked it so much he asks her to cut his hair, too. Paul and John are more skeptical. “John was always a little bit sarcastic,” Astrid recalls, “so at first, even with the hairstyle, he couldn’t stop laughing, but in the end he just joined in. That was John. That was typical.” Which leaves only Pete still Brylcreemed, though Astrid points out, “Pete couldn’t have the hairstyle anyway because he had curly hair.”

  Shocking new look aside, the Beatles are on their best behavior. They play four songs—“Hello Little Girl,” Chuck Berry’s “Memphis,” Roy Orbison’s “Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream),” and the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman”—and win over the live audience of 250 young people, everyone cheering and clapping. As the band walks off, John feels happy, particularly with his singing on “Memphis” and their take on “Please Mr. Postman,” which introduced the “Motown sound” to much of the British listening public. Last summer, Bob Wooler had declared in Mersey Beat, “The Beatles were the stuff that screams were made of.” Tonight, when they finished their last song, nearly all the girls had indeed screamed.

  “We should listen to the broadcast at my house,” Pete suggests. They all agree, because the radiogram belonging to his mother, Mona, gets the best FM monophonic signals.

  Their songs sound great on the radio.

  The boys jump about the living room—even stoic Pete can’t contain his excitement.

  “We weren’t just recording stars,” Pete marvels, “but radio stars!”

  Chapter 13

  Life is very short…

  —“We Can Work It Out”

  Brian Epstein is despondent. He confides in Bob Wooler about his struggles with the London agents, who are saying that “as the name Beatles doesn’t mean anything they’ll have to change it.”

  Wooler disagrees, not only because the band already has a large local following but also because there’s power in a brief band name. He says, “When you put it on posters, the shorter the name the bigger the print.”

  John loses patience with Brian, lashing out that the manager is doing nothing and they’re doing all the work, though he knows that’s not true. After John cools down, he assures Brian that the band knows how hard he is working. “It was Us against Them,” John says later.

  But it’s hard to keep the faith when by March of 1962, every record label has turned down the Beatles.

  “Bloody hell,” Paul says. “What are we going to do?”

  They keep playing.

  They’re off to Hamburg again for April and May. Brian’s cleared their deportation troubles and has booked them at the Star-Club, Hamburg’s top rock venue. The Beatles feel like real headliners now.

  On April 10, 1962, John, Paul, and Pete fly from Manchester to Hamburg. The next day, the three return to the airport to meet Brian and George’s flight. They’re surprised to find Stu’s fiancée, Astrid, and their German friend Klaus Voormann also in the arrivals terminal.

  “Hello, where’s Stu?” John asks.

  Astrid answers, “Stu’s dead, John.”

  * * *

  This news makes no sense to John. He starts “saying ‘No, no, no!’ and lashing out with his hands,” Astrid recalls. Though in letters and during a recent trip home to Liverpool, Stu’d complained of debilitating headaches, he’s only twenty-one. How can he be dead?

  “Paul tried to be comforting; he put his arm around me and said how sorry he was. Pete wept—he just sat there and cried his eyes out. John went into hysterics,” Astrid says. “I remember him sitting on a bench, huddled over, and he was shaking, rocking backward and forward.” But none of them really knows how to react.

  “Not many of our contemporaries had died,” Paul later reflects. “We were all too young. It was older people that died, so Stuart’s dying was a real shock. And for me there was a little guilt tinged with it, because I’d not been his best friend at times.”

  It turns out that Stu’s nasty headaches were signs he had a growing brain aneurysm, and he’d had a massive seizure and died of a cerebral hemorrhage just the day before.

  Stuart’s mother, Millie, is on the same plane with Brian and George, coming to claim her son. John and the boys remain in Hamburg while Millie accompanies Stu’s body back home, but when Astrid returns from the funeral, she brings John and George over to her attic, where Stuart painted.

>   “Could you take a picture of me there?” John asks.

  Astrid readies her camera. She takes photographs of him and George throughout the afternoon. Decades later, when she views them, she’ll say John was “a little lonely feller,” while nineteen-year-old George “had so much strength in his face, like he was saying to John ‘I’ll look after you.’”

  “I looked up to Stu,” John says, mourning his friend. “I depended on him to tell me the truth.” He has long, long talks with Astrid about life, about relationships, about himself and Stuart, about their loss. “John used to say that Stuart was the second person to have left him,” she recalls. “First his mummy left him, then Stuart. I think it was the root of his anger…that people he loved the most always left him.” At the same time, though, John’s very pragmatic.

  “You have got to decide: either you die with Stuart or you go on living your life,” John tells Astrid. “Be honest and decide. You can’t just cry all the time, you’ve got to get on.”

  After all, that’s what he’s always done.

  Yet his own grief manifests itself in other ways.

  John drinks heavily and swallows “Prellies”—Preludin, German diet pills that act as stimulants—by the handful. “He’d take so many pills that he literally wouldn’t be able to shut his eyes to go to sleep,” Roy Young, a fellow musician in Hamburg, recalls. John appears onstage one night wearing a toilet seat around his head. Another night, he gets arrested and has to be bailed out. Though he writes often to his longtime girlfriend, Cynthia, there are plenty of other women to keep him occupied.

  And humor is always his go-to defense. When the Beatles take the stage for the first time at the Star-Club on Friday, April 13, just a couple of days after Stu’s death, Klaus Voormann is in the audience. “John came onstage dressed like a cleaning-woman,” he recalls. John does an over-the-top clown act, knocking over microphones and pretending to tidy up the other band members. “The people in the club were laughing—they didn’t know Stuart had died. They didn’t know Stuart. It gave me shivers to watch it, but this is what clowns do, bring humor to tragedy.”