But she wasn’t really interested in John’s reaction. She wanted to get to know Stu. ‘I’d fallen in love with him at first sight. It’s true. It wasn’t slushy romance and all that. I just had.’
They all made a date to meet in the Reeperbahn next day. She took them to a fairground nearby and photographed them, then she invited them home with her for tea. Pete Best refused. ‘Not because I was being antisocial but simply because I had skins to buy for my drums which I’d broken the night before.’ But the four others went with her. She gave them tea and they were delighted. It was the first German home they’d been into.
The room Astrid gave them tea in was very dark and mysterious. After the first impression of darkness, all you could see were two colours, black and white. Everything, the walls, furniture and carpets, was either black or white. She had trees growing up the walls and across the ceiling and around the room. The window was obscured and the only light came from candles. There was a black cloth hanging down one wall. One of them drew it aside to see what was behind and found himself looking into a mirror. ‘It was my Jean Cocteau phase,’ says Astrid.
The tea was a little more prosaic — ham sandwiches. ‘Heh, look at these,’ said George. ‘Ham sarnies! I didn’t know the Germans had ham sarnies.’ Which shows how much George had seen of German life, stuck for twelve hours at a time at the Kaiserkeller. Then she drove them in her car back to the club for their night’s work.
Astrid began to bring her camera along all the time and took many photographs of them. They were the first professional photographs taken of them and, for many years to come, by far the most artistic. By clever lighting she managed to take them half in the shadows. This gimmick of a half shadow face, although not original, was used and copied by other photographers for a long time to come. Astrid was the first to see their photogenic potential, a factor which was later invaluable.
She took them out and around other parts of Hamburg to photograph them, lining them up once in the docks, then at a disused railway siding to get unusual photographs. It takes good quality printing and paper to get the best out of Astrid’s photographs, to see how excellent they are, but even on cheap newsprint they look dramatic and unusual. ‘They were great,’ says Paul. ‘Nobody could take our picture as well as Astrid.’
She was trying all the time, in those early sessions, to get talking to Stu, trying to say to him she would like to take his photograph on his own. But she couldn’t make him understand. He spoke no German. She spoke no English. So she got Klaus to start teaching her English. ‘He nearly went out of his mind trying to explain things to me. I just couldn’t learn.’
They all came for a meal at her place practically every night after that first tea and she and Stu slowly made more and more progress. Then Stu started to come on his own at other times and they would sit together on her black bed, talking to each other with the help of a German-English dictionary.
‘After Stu, I liked John and George. Then I liked Pete Best. I liked him very much, but he was so very very shy. He could be funny, but I didn’t have much contact with him. Even in those days one tended to forget him. He was on his own really.
‘Paul, I found hard to get close to. He was always friendly. He was by far the most popular with the fans. He always did the talking and announcing and the autograph bit. Most fans looked upon him as the leader. John of course was the leader. He was by far and away the strongest. I don’t mean physically, but as a personality.
‘Stu was the most intelligent one. I think they all agreed on that. John did.
‘George, we never thought about George’s intelligence one way and another when we were talking about them. We knew he wasn’t stupid, but he was just such a young lovely boy. He was so sweet and open about everything, like admiring the ham sarnies. He had a great following. Jurgen used to have a notice which said “I Love George”. He was one of the first to do that sort of thing.
‘I got on like a house on fire with George. He’d never met anyone like me before and he showed it, so openly and sweetly. After all, he was only 17. There was me, the sort of intelligent girl he’d never come across before, with my own car, working as a photographer, and wearing leather jackets. It was natural he would be very interested in me. I never fancied him or anything like that. It wasn’t that sort of thing. I was five years older, so it didn’t matter being open. We got on great.’
In November 1960, only two months after their first meeting, Stu and Astrid got engaged. They put their money together and went out and bought the rings — one for each of them, in the German fashion. Then they drove in her car along the Elbe. ‘From when we first started being able to communicate with each other we intended to get married.’
Stu was 19, not much older really than George, but much more developed and mature in his thoughts. He was as passionately interested in art as he’d always been, unlike John who had left it all behind, but he was also as passionate about the group. One night he had a fight on stage with Paul. Despite being much smaller and weaker than Paul, Stu’s anger was so intense that it gave him extra strength. ‘He could become really hysterical when he was angry,’ says Astrid. The fight was something to do with Astrid, something Paul had said about her, but no one remembers the details.
The relationship between Paul and Stu, the petty jealousies and rows, is not too difficult to explain. In a way, they were both competing for John’s attention. Paul had had it for a couple of years, until Stu came along. Stu was obviously very talented, more mature, more in touch. Even Michael McCartney, Paul’s younger brother, remembers how in Liverpool Paul had been a bit jealous of Stu.
The relationship between five Teds from Liverpool and a group of intellectual Hamburg students is harder to explain. They were highly fashionable in their clothes as well as in their thoughts. Klaus and Jurgen had their hair brushed forward in the French style as it was then called. But the Beatles had a rough, natural, undisciplined vitality which they were attracted to.
The exis had nicknames for them all — John was the Sidie Man, George the Beautiful One and Paul the Baby One. The name Beatles, in German, had had everyone amused from the minute they arrived. ‘The Peedles’, was how they pronounced it. This in German is also a small-boy vulgarity, meaning cock or John Thomas.
The Beatles now had two devoted sets of followers, the rockers and the exis. Their original six-week contract was extended several times by popular demand. Christmas was approaching and they’d been in Hamburg nearly five months. They were scheming to get into an even bigger and better club, the Top Ten. Once they realized they were a success in the Kaiserkeller, they wanted to branch out into a bigger club.
They asked the manager of the Top Ten, Peter Eckhorn, for an audition. ‘I liked them and offered them a contract.’ Then George was told that he would have to leave the country.
‘At all clubs,’ says George, ‘they used to read out a notice every night saying that all people under 18 had to leave. Someone eventually realized I was only 17, without a work permit or a resident permit. So I had to leave. I had to go home on my own. I felt terrible.’
Astrid and Stu drove him to the station, got him his ticket and a place on the train. ‘He was just standing there,’ says Astrid. ‘Little George, all lost. I gave him a big bag of sweets and some apples. He threw his arms round me and Stu, which was the sort of demonstrative thing they never did.’
The other four had moved to the Top Ten but had done only one night when more trouble struck them.
‘Paul and I were clearing out of the Bambi,’ says Pete Best. ‘John and Stu had already moved their things into the Top Ten. We were getting a light on to see what we were doing and we must have started a fire. It wasn’t much, but the police threw us in jail for three hours and then said we were to be deported as well.’ Which left John and Stu.