“They’d come in about eleven in the morning and stay until three or four in the afternoon. They’d be quite subdued. I’d look over from the bar and see the five of them, always round that same table, not talking—just staring into space. I’ve seen the same look on men who’ve been away at sea in tankers for a long time. Not with it, if you know what I mean.”
One bleary-eyed morning when they emerged from the Bambi Kino, a piece of good news awaited them. Bruno Koschmider, bowing at last to the complaints of his customers and the old woman upstairs, was moving them out of the Indra and into his larger, better club, the Kaiserkeller.
The Kaiserkeller, at first, threatened to eclipse even John Lennon in noise and spectacle. The noise came from an audience several hundred strong, frequently containing entire ships’ companies from English and American naval craft visiting the port. The spectacle was provided by Bruno Koschmider’s white-aproned waiters, converging on any outbreak of trouble and quelling it with a high-speed ruthlessness that made Garston Blood Baths look like a game of pat-a-cake. If the troublemaker were alone he might find himself propelled not to the exit but into the office of Willi, the undermanager, there to be worked over at leisure with coshes and brass knuckles. Finally, as the victim lay prostrate, Bruno himself would weigh in with the ebony nightstick from his desk drawer.
Bruno’s chief bouncer, a tiny, swaggering youth named Horst Fascher, epitomized the breed. Horst had started life as a featherweight boxer and had represented both Hamburg and the West German national team before being banned from the ring for accidentally killing a sailor in a street fight. His squad, nicknamed locally Hoddel’s gang, recruited from his friends at the Hamburg Boxing Academy, were held among the Freiheit’s other strong-arm gangs in profound respect.
Horst took the Liverpool musicians—fortunately for them—to his heart. It became an unwritten rule at the Kaiserkeller that if a musician hit trouble Hoddel’s gang would swoop unquestioningly to his aid. Horst showed them the Reeperbahn’s innermost haunts and its choicest pleasures; he also took them home to Neuestadt to meet his mother and brothers and taste Frau Fascher’s bean soup. All he asked in return was the chance, sometime after midnight, to get up with the group on stage and bellow out an Eddie Cochran song.
“The Beatles were not good musicians at the beginning,” Horst Fascher says. “John Lennon was a very poor rhythm guitarist. I remember Sheridan telling me in amazement that John played chords with only three fingers. And always they are funny—never serious. But they steal from Sheridan, from the Seniors, all the time with their eyes. And all the time the bass drum is beating like your foot when you stamp.
“That John Lennon—I loved him, he was mad. A fighter. He is zyniker [a cynic]. You say to him, ‘Hey, John…’ He would say, ‘Ah, so fuckin’ what.’ Paul was lustig, the clown. He gets out of trouble by making a laugh. George was schuchtern, the baby one. I could never get to know Stu. He was too strange. And Pete—he was reserviert. You had to pull words out through his nose.”
Soon after the Beatles reached the Kaiserkeller, Derry and the Seniors finished their engagement there. The replacement group, brought out from Liverpool by Allan Williams, was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. When Rory, relaxed and suntanned from Butlin’s, saw the Hamburg living quarters, his stammer totally overcame him. Nor did his drummer, the little bearded one with rings on his fingers, show great delight at having to sleep on chairs covered with old flags. Ringo Starr, like all the Hurricanes, was used to a little more luxury. “You want to see what the Beatles have got to put up with,” Williams retorted.
Rory Storm’s flashiness and acrobatic feats increased the wildness of the Kaiserkeller nights. A contest developed between the Beatles and Hurricanes to see which group could first stamp its way through the already old and half-rotten timbers of the stage. Rory did it at last, vanishing from sight in the middle of “Blue Suede Shoes.” A case of junk champagne was the prize, washed down with more “Prellys” at their favorite bar, the Gretel and Alphons.
Bruno Koschmider fumed and fulminated—but they got away with it, as they got away with most things. John got away with standing out in the Freiheit in a pair of long woolen underpants, reading the Daily Express. George got away with it time after time in the Polizei Stunde, or midnight curfew hour when all under eighteen were supposed to have left the club. For their drinking, swearing, fighting, whoring, even vandalizing, Grosse Freiheit pardoned them all forms of retribution but one. Williams, the self-styled “little pox doctor of Hamburg,” received many a worried confidence in a back room at the Gretel and Alphons, and like a connoisseur, held many a beer glass of urine speculatively up to the light.
Pete Best figured in only a couple of shady Beatles exploits on the Reeperbahn. One night, chronically short of cash, John enlisted his help as the group’s most seasoned hard man in mugging a drunken sailor and stealing his wallet. Pete himself later confirmed John’s account of how the two followed the sailor from a club and managed to put him on the ground. As they started to go through his pockets, however, their victim pulled out a handgun. In fact, the weapon fired only tear-gas cartridges, but neither John nor Pete realized this and, empty-handed, ran for their lives.
Pete played drums well enough—or so it then seemed—hitting his bass pedal in the hard, stomping “mak show” beat, yet somehow always in a world apart from the unending frontal contest between John and Paul. He was, and knew it, the most handsome Beatle, with his athlete’s physique, his dark eyes, wry smile, and neat, crisp Jeff Chandler hair. Like the girls back home in West Derby, the Kaiserkeller girls were mad about him. Craning their necks to see past John and George, past even Paul, they would scream at Pete Best in English and German to give them a smile.
Being able to speak the most German increased Pete’s independence, and he was often away from the Freiheit in the daytime, sunbathing alone or buying new parts for his drums. His fellow Beatles grew accustomed to his absence. They had plenty afoot with Tony Sheridan and Rory Storm and the drummer from Rory’s group, whom they were growing to like more and more. Ringo Starr, in contrast with Pete Best, was friendly, simple, straightforward, and in his slow, big-eyed way, as funny as even John. They also liked the way he played drums. They were happy with Pete Best’s drumming until they began to notice Ringo’s.
When Allan Williams next hit town Paul and John met him, clamoring for his help to find a studio in which they could record. They wanted to try out some numbers with a member of Rory Storm’s group, a boy named Wally, whose prodigious vocal range went from bass to falsetto. Pete Best would not be involved. They had also fixed up to borrow Ringo Starr.
The studio Williams found for them was a record-your-voice booth at the rear of Hamburg’s main railway station. There, John, Paul, and George, with Ringo on drums, backed the talented Wally through two numbers, “Fever” and “Summertime.” The man who cut the acetate for their recording mistakenly handed back to Williams first an old-fashioned 78-rpm disk with a commercial message for a local handbag shop on its reverse. Eventually some 45-rpm discs were made, on the booth’s “Arnstik” label, of The Beatles mit Wally. Just for a few moments—subtracting Wally—the right four had found each other.
Astrid Kirchherr was born in 1938 into a solid, respectable middle-class Hamburg family. Her grandfather, a manufacturer of fairground slot machines, still owned the factory he had twice seen wrecked by war, and twice painstakingly built up again. Her father was a senior executive in the West German division of the Ford Motor Company. Three generations of Kirchherrs lived together in Altona, a comfortable Hamburg suburb. To Altona people, the dockyard and St Pauli, the Reeperbahn and Grosse Freiheit might as well be on another planet: They are mentioned only to warn children sternly never to stray in that direction.
Astrid Kirchherr was never like other children. At the age of four or five she would protest when her mother decked her out in the flounces and hair ribbons expected of little German girls. She preferred to wear plain black. She kn
ew that best became her white skin, her large, dark eyes, and the blanched-gold hair she would shake free of all encumbrances. Frau Kirchherr visited the nursery school to confirm that the child must have her curious wish.
Already, she had a strongly marked talent for drawing and painting; as she grew older, she would design and make clothes for herself. When the family assembled, as was traditional, to decide her future, her grandfather agreed that there was only one sensible course. Astrid should go to college and study dress design. Possibly that would encourage her to forsake her eccentric ideas for styles more widely acceptable.
She went not to the state art college but to a private academy, the Meister Schule. There she met an elegant boy of equally good family, a doctor’s son named Klaus Voorman. Klaus, a talented illustrator, passionately loved rock ’n’ roll music and wanted to be a designer of pop record covers. He became Astrid’s boyfriend, also moving in as a lodger at the hospitable Kirchherr house. Their friends were a set known as exis—from “existentialist”: intellectual, beautiful, ascetic, and avantgarde. Astrid and Klaus were the most beautiful, ascetic, and avantgarde of them all.
At the Meister Schule Astrid also struck up a friendship with Rheinhardt Wolf, tutor on the photographic course and a well-known contributor to various Hamburg-based magazines. The perceptiveness with which she commented on his work led Wolf to suggest that Astrid should herself try taking some pictures. These proved so impressive that, at Rheinhardt Wolf’s insistence, she changed courses from dress design to photography. After leaving the Meister Schule she was taken on by Wolf as his assistant.
One late summer evening in 1960, Astrid and Klaus Voorman had quarreled, and Klaus went off to the cinema on his own. Afterward, walking about aimlessly, he found himself in Grosse Freiheit. A blast of rock ’n’ roll music was issuing from the open door into the Kaiserkeller club. Klaus decided, against all the instincts of his upbringing, to go in and have a look.
The group on stage at the time was Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Klaus sat down nervously in the tough crowd, and was at once swept away with excitement and delight. He had never been in a club before, and certainly never seen rock ’n’ roll played with such crazy ebullience. At a table next to his some more English musicians, in houndstooth check jackets, with wondrously piled-up, greased-back hair, were waiting their turn to play. In due course this group was announced as the Beatles. Klaus stayed on to watch the whole of their four-hour performance.
Astrid, when he told her about it, was a little disgusted to hear that Klaus had been hanging around dives in St. Pauli. He could not persuade her to go back with him to the Kaiserkeller and be shown the amazing music. He went again on his own, determined to talk to the Beatles if he could. Shy and unsure of his English, he took with him a sleeve he had designed for an American single, the Ventures’ “Walk Don’t Run.” In a break between sessions he went over to the leader—so he had already identified John Lennon—and in halting English tried to explain about the design. John only muttered, “Show it to Stu—he’s the artist round here,” indicating the one who had interested Klaus most with his pointed shoes, dark glasses, and brooding James Dean face.
By the time Astrid did agree to go to the Kaiserkeller, Stu and Klaus Voorman had become good friends. Klaus brought her in at last one night, dressed in her black leather exi coat, white-faced, crop-headed, and spectrally cool. When the Beatles began playing she, too, was instantly won over. “I fell in love with Stuart that very first night. He was so tiny but perfect, every feature. So pale, but very, very beautiful. He was like a character from a story by Edgar Allan Poe.”
The Beatles, in their turn, were flattered by the interest of this in every way beautiful, ghost-eyed girl, so different from the usual Freiheit scrubber. They were still more flattered when, with her few words of English, Astrid asked if she could take their photograph. She met all five of them on the Reeperbahn next day and took them into Der Dom, the city park, where the twice-yearly fun fair was in progress. Astrid posed them with their guitars and Pete Best’s snare drum on the side of a fairground wagon, then on the broad bonnet of a traction engine.
The photographing over, she asked the five Beatles back to Altona for tea at her home. Pete Best declined; he said he had some new drum skins to buy. The other four readily piled into Astrid’s little car. “They met my Mum—she was as knocked out by them as I was. Directly she saw them, she wanted to start feeding them.”
Astrid took them upstairs to the black-and-white studio bedroom she had designed for herself. “I wanted to talk to them, but I knew hardly any English then,” Astrid says. “John seemed very hard—cynical, sarcastic, but something more than that. Paul smiled—he always smiled and was diplomatic. George was just a baby boy, with his piled-up hair and his ears sticking out.
“I wanted to talk to Stuart. I tried to ask him if I could take his picture, but he didn’t understand. I knew I would have to ask Klaus to help me speak better English.”
The flattery of being photographed by a beautiful blonde German girl was nothing to the flattery bestowed by the photographs themselves. These were not the usual little snapshots knocked off by some bystander, usually at the least flattering possible moment. These were big, grainy prints, conjured by the girl herself from the recesses of her black satin room and showing the five Beatles as they had never imagined themselves before. Astrid’s lens, in fact, captured the very quality that attracted intellectuals like Klaus and her—the paradox of Teddy Boys with child faces; of would-be toughness and all-protecting innocence. The blunt, heavy fairground machines on which they sat seemed to symbolize their own slight but confident perch on grown-up life. John, with his collar up, hugging his new Rickenbacker; Paul, with the pout he knew suited him; George, uneasy; Pete Best, self-contained, a little apart—each image held its own true prophecy. In one shot, Stu Sutcliffe stood with his back to the others, the long neck of his guitar pointing into the ground.
It was the first of many photographic sessions with Astrid in the weeks that followed. Each time she would pose them, with or without their guitars, against some part of industrial Hamburg—the docks or the railway sidings. She was lavish with the prints she gave them and with invitations to meals at her house. “I’d cook them all the things they missed from England: scrambled eggs, chips.” All the time, with Klaus Voorman’s help, her English was improving.
At the Kaiserkeller, a part of the audience now were exis brought in by Astrid and Klaus. It became a fad among them to dress, like the rockers, in leather and skin-tight jeans. The Beatles’ music belonged to the same intellectual conversion. Soon the exis had their own small preserve of tables next to the stage. And always among them the girl who followed no style but her own sat with Klaus Voorman, or without him, waiting for the moment, late at night, when John and Paul stood aside and Stu Sutcliffe stepped forward with his heavy bass to sing the Elvis ballad, “Love Me Tender.”
Astrid made no secret of the pursuit, and Stu, for his part, was shyly fascinated. Her elfin beauty, combined with big-breasted voluptuousness, her forthright German ways mingled with a yielding softness, were more than sufficient to captivate any young, inexperienced heterosexual male. Across the barrier of language, they found their passionate artistic and literary beliefs to be one. The talks by candlelight on Astrid’s black coverlet quickly led to other delights unenvisaged by a schoolteacher’s son from Sefton Park, Liverpool.
Astrid was the initiator and teacher, and Stu the willing pupil. With the skills of the artist and the practicality of the hausfrau she began to model him into an appearance echoing and complementing her own. She did away first with his Teddy-Boy hairstyle, cutting it short like hers, then shaping it to lie across the forehead in what was then called a French cut, although high-class German boys had worn a similar style since the days of Bismarck.
When Stu arrived at the Kaiserkeller that night John and Paul laughed so much that he hastily combed his hair back into its old upswept style. Next night, he tried
the new way again, ignoring the others’ taunts. Strangely enough, it was George, the least adventurous or assertive one, who next allowed Astrid to unpick the high sheaf of black hair that had previously so emphasized his babyish ears. Paul tried it next, but temporarily—he was waiting to see what John would do. John tried it, so Paul tried it again. Only Pete Best’s hair stayed as before, a crisp, unflappable cockade.
Astrid also began to design and make clothes for Stu. She made him first a suit of shiny black leather jerkin and sheath-tight trousers like the ones she wore herself. The other four Beatles so admired it that they at once ordered copies from a tailor in St. Pauli. Theirs, however, were of less fine workmanship, baggy-waisted and with seams that kept coming apart. At that point, for the moment, Astrid’s influence over them stopped. They laughed at Stu for wearing, as she did, a black corduroy jacket without lapels, based on Pierre Cardin’s current Paris collections. “What are you doing in Mum’s suit then, Stu?” became the general taunt.
Astrid’s mother, horrified to learn of Stu’s living conditions, insisted on giving him his own room, as Klaus Voorman had formerly had, at the top of the Kirchherr house. In November 1960, two months after their first meeting, they became engaged. They bought each other rings, in the German fashion, and went in Astrid’s car for a drive beside the river Elbe. “It was a real engagement,” Astrid says. “We knew from the beginning that it was inevitable we should marry. And so it should have been.”
Stu, despite his quietness and gentleness, was not always an easy person. At times he could be moody and jealously suspect Astrid of being in love with someone else. His emotion, when angry or passionate, could reach an intensity that was almost like a mild seizure. He suffered, too, from headaches, sudden and violent, that shut his eyes in agony behind the dark glasses that were not, she discovered, entirely for show. Then, with equal suddenness, the fit of pain would pass.