In Paris they met Jurgen Vollmer, one of their Hamburg friends. It was during this Paris visit, which was mainly spent hanging around the clubs till their money ran out, that John finally brushed his hair forward.
‘Jurgen also had bellbottom trousers,’ says John. ‘But we thought that would be considered too queer back in Liverpool. We didn’t want to appear feminine or anything like that because our audience in Liverpool still had a lot of fellows. We were playing rock, dressed in leather, though Paul’s ballads were bringing in more and more girls.’
John had learned from Stu that Jurgen was in Paris. Even though Stu had left them to study art in Hamburg, he and John sent long letters to each other.
At first the letters were full of jokes and daft stories, the sort John had written as a child, when he did those little scrapbooks. ‘Uncle Norman has just driven up on his moustache.’ ‘P.S. Mary Queen of Scots was a Nigger.’
He passed on to Stu any good bits of news about the group’s progress, such as a Beatle fan club at last being started in Liverpool. (Rory Storm already had one). But the letters soon became full of disappointments and moans. ‘It’s all a shitty deal. Something is going to happen, but where is it?’
John started including more of his serious poems, the sort he had never shown Mimi. They usually ended in obscenity or self-consciousness. He filled up his letters to Stu with them, when he could think of nothing else.
Stu in Hamburg was filling his letters with the same sort of wailings and anguish, only his began to be much worse than John’s. Stu wrote in his letters as if he were Jesus. John, thinking at first it was all a joke, pretended to be John the Baptist.
One day, towards the end of 1961, Stu collapsed at the art college in Hamburg and was brought home. ‘He’d been getting a lot of headaches,’ says Astrid, ‘but we just put it down to working too hard at college.’
Stu went back the next day but in February 1962, it happened again. He collapsed, was brought back to Astrid’s and was taken to his room. This time he stayed there. He wrote long 30-page letters to John, did endless drawings and paintings or just walked round and round his room. He had violent headaches and temper tantrums which made it difficult for Astrid and her mother to look after him. He did have medical treatment, but nothing seemed to help. ‘He came back from a specialist one day and said he didn’t want a black coffin like everyone else. He’d just seen a white coffin in a window and he wanted that.’
Stu died in April 1962 after a brain haemorrhage. ‘He lived so much in such a short time,’ says Klaus. ‘Every second of his short time he was doing something. He saw ten times more than other people. His imagination was fantastic. His death was a tragedy. He would have done so much.’
There is no doubt about Stu’s artistic talent. Professor Paolozzi thought he was obviously destined to succeed. He had won prizes in Liverpool at an early age. Since his death, his paintings have appeared in numerous exhibitions in Liverpool and London. He had had a great influence on John and the rest of the Beatles, leading their fashion in hair, clothes and in thoughts.
‘I looked up to Stu,’ says John. ‘I depended on him to tell me the truth, the way I do with Paul today. Stu would tell me if something was good and I’d believe him.’
Even today, they still miss him. It’s strange to think that by 1962, the one who was looked upon as the cleverest Beatle had died.
The death of Stu was in a way a macabre climax to their year of apparently getting nowhere and feeling depressed. But back in Liverpool, just before Stu collapsed, the something John was looking for was at last about to happen.
It happened, just to be precise, at three o’clock on the afternoon of 28 October 1961. A youth in a black leather jacket called Raymond Jones walked into the NEMS record store in Whitechapel, Liverpool, and asked for a record called ‘My Bonnie’ by a group called the Beatles. Brian Epstein, who was behind the counter, said he was terribly sorry. He’d never heard of that record, nor of a group called the Beatles.
15 brian epstein
The Epstein family fortunes were founded by Brian’s grandfather Isaac, a Jewish refugee from Poland, who came to Liverpool at the turn of the century. He opened a furniture store, later called I. Epstein and Sons, in Walton Road, Liverpool. This in turn was taken over by his elder son, Harry, Brian’s father.
It is assumed by many people in Liverpool that the Epsteins have always owned NEMS, North End Music Stores, the name which Brian later made famous locally, through the record shop. But NEMS had been going long before the Epsteins. Jim McCartney, Paul’s father, remembered having a piano which came from NEMS during the First World War.
The Epsteins didn’t take over NEMS till the thirties. It was at the end of the block in Walton Road which contained
I. Epstein and Sons and they had always had an eye on it for expansion. Harry saw that its record and music business would fit easily into his furniture firm, but it was the site as much as anything that he wanted when he eventually bought it.
Harry married into another highly successful Jewish furniture family, the Hymans from Sheffield. He married his wife Queenie in 1933 when she was 18 and he was 29.
Brian, their elder son, was born on 19 September 1934, in a private nursing home in Rodney Street, the Harley Street of Liverpool. Their second son, Clive, was born 23 months later.
With two sons, the fortunes of the Epstein furniture firm seemed assured for many decades to come. Harry and Queenie were living in a large five-bedroomed detached house in Childwall, one of Liverpool’s most desirable residential areas. The Epsteins lived in this house, 197 Queen’s Drive, for the next 30 years, until Clive left to get married. Today it is lived in by the Dean of Liverpool.
The Epsteins lived in some style up to the outbreak of the war. They had two living-in staff — a nanny for the boys and a general help.
All that Mrs Epstein can remember of Brian as a baby is that he was the most beautiful child she’d ever seen. ‘As he began to walk and talk, he developed a very inquiring mind. He always wanted to know everything.’ Brian’s earliest memories are of the great excitement of being taken to visit his relations in Sheffield.
His first school of any sort was the Beechanhurst Kindergarten in Liverpool where he hammered wooden shapes into a plywood board. In 1940, when he was six years old, Liverpool was under heavy bombing and the family were evacuated first of all to Prestatyn, in North Wales, and then to Southport, where there was a large Jewish community. Brian was sent to Southport College where he began his formal education, the beginning of a very long and very unhappy process.
‘I was one of those out-of-sorts boys who never quite fit,’ so he recorded in his 1964 autobiography (A Cellarful of Noise, Souvenir Press). ‘I was ragged, nagged and bullied by boys and masters. My parents must have despaired of me many times.’