Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney

THE CAVERN

Paul arrived home at 20 Forthlin Road early on Friday 2 December 1960, full of stories of his German adventures, but Dad soon brought his eldest son down to earth. Having had his fun, Paul was now expected to get a proper job. For once in his life Jim McCartney played the stern father. ‘He virtually chucked me out of the house,’ Paul later remarked with surprise. Paul had had pocket-money jobs in the past: working on a coal lorry, a delivery van, and as Christmas relief at the Post Office. Now the Labour Exchange sent him to his first real job, at the electrical firm of Massey & Coggins Ltd in Edge Hill. Here he was set to work coiling electrical cables, though the personable McCartney soon caught the eye of management, who expressed interest in training him up as a junior executive. Paul was at the Edge Hill works when John Lennon and George Harrison slouched by to ask what he was doing. Paul explained what Dad had said: Get a job or else! John told Paul not to be so soft. He took the view that Paul was too easily cowed by his father, and persuaded him to come back to the band. Paul agreed, but held on to his job as well for the time being.

After a couple of warm-up gigs, the Beatles played a memorable Christmas dance at the Litherland Town Hall on 27 December 1960. Stu was still in Germany, so the boys got Pete Best’s mate Chas Newby to play bass. It was at Litherland that the Beatles showed how much they’d learned in Hamburg. They were much better musicians now, their act honed by hundreds of hours on stage. Billed as ‘Direct from Hamburg’, they were assumed by many of the girls to be German. ‘The girls used to say to Paul McCartney, “You speak very good English for a German,”’ recalls Allan Williams, who was still nominally their manager. ‘And of course Paul is a bit clever, he could speak a bit of German, he used to go along with it.’ Not long after this triumphant home-town show, Stu returned from Germany and the re-formed Beatles gigged virtually daily in January and February 1961, building a Merseyside following. So busy did they become in this short period that Paul’s old schoolmate ‘Nell’ Aspinall gave up an accountancy course to drive the boys around.

The Cavern, where the Beatles first performed in early February 1961, was a warehouse cellar, essentially; three barrel-vaulted storerooms under the pavement of Mathew Street, a short, cobbled lane off Whitechapel in the middle of Liverpool. The warehouses in the area were used to store fruit and vegetables, the smell of rotting fruit adding to the distinctive aroma of the club (rotten vegetables plus cheap scent, plus sweat and drains). The Cavern had first come into existence as a jazz club in 1957, its stage constructed coincidentally by Paul’s carpenter Uncle Harry. The Cavern proved a popular but claustrophobic venue. Deep underground, without air conditioning or a fire exit, in an era when many people smoked, the club quickly became stuffy, while condensation caused the limewash to flake off the ceiling and fall like snow on the revellers. On the plus side, the cellar had good acoustics, and the narrow quarters engendered a sense of intimacy. One could feel the throb and thrum of the music as the jazzmen plucked, struck and blew their instruments. Bodies pressed close. One felt connected to the music and to the other patrons.

Ray McFall, the owner, started to open the Cavern at lunchtime as a place for office and shop workers to come for a snack, with the attraction of live bands on stage. The boys had already played the venue as the Quarry Men. They performed there as the Beatles first on Thursday 9 February 1961, and almost 300 times over the next two and half years, the Cavern becoming inextricably linked with their rise to fame. Here the band met their manager, finalised their line-up and tasted success; while the intimacy of the venue helped the Beatles bond with their audience. They were performing in what was virtually a tunnel face to face with their public, with whom they had to engage simply to get to the dressing room, or drezzy (‘three coat hangers and a bench,’ recalls ‘Measles’ Bramwell), standing close enough to the patrons when on stage to talk to them without raising their voices. Sometimes they plucked cigarettes from the lips of girls, took a drag, then handed the ciggies back.

The audience was not exclusively female. Boys also liked the Beatles from the start. ‘Their sound was different and they looked different … they were an outrageous lot,’ recalls Cavern regular Ray O’Brien.

Whereas all the other bands, like the Remo Four, were reasonably well dressed, and you knew what they were going to do next, you never knew with the Beatles. It was sort of off-the-cuff stuff they were doing at the time. There was a lot of repartee with the audience – I was attracted to that.

For girls, the Beatles were of course also objects of affection. ‘I used to think Paul was the best-looking,’ muses Frieda Kelly, a fellow Cavern-dweller who founded the Beatles’ fan club, though Frieda changed her favourite Beatle almost as often as her socks; ‘then I’d look at John – he’s got like a strong face … then George was the youngest and he was sort of attractive [too].’ Like most girls, Frieda relished the direct, friendly contact with the boys at the Cavern. Nobody became hysterical. The original female Cavern fans disdained the crazed girls who came later, when the Beatles became a nationwide, then worldwide sensation. ‘I never screamed. Liverpool people didn’t scream in the beginning,’ says Frieda. ‘If you start screaming, you can’t hear what they’re saying … I was a fan. But I wasn’t a maniac.’

BACK TO HAMBURG

Since being deported from Germany, Paul had paid a visit to the German Consulate in Liverpool and written to the German police giving his account of the fire at the Bambi Kino, all to try and get permission for the band to return. The reply now came that the Beatles could return to Germany as long as they obtained work permits. They did so without delay. George had also turned 18, so there was no further difficulty there. Paul quit his job with Massey & Coggins, and returned to Hamburg with the Beatles in March 1961, gambling his future on the success of the band.

This time the Beatles would be playing for Peter Eckhorn at the Top Ten, sleeping in the club attic, which was a slightly better arrangement than before, though the conditions were still basic and the hours very long. Taking the view that they had secured this gig themselves, the boys wrote to Allan Williams informing him that he would not receive a commission. Williams wrote a two-page letter of reply, dated 20 April, that was by turns indignant, threatening and pleading: he claimed he had a deal pending to book Ray Charles, whom he knew the Beatles admired. ‘I had thought of you going on tour with him.’ The Beatles evidently didn’t believe Williams, or didn’t care. They had outgrown Allan, who would have to live with the fact that he had briefly had the biggest band in the world in his hands, but had let them slip away. ‘And if you think I lose sleep over this, you are on the right track,’ he wrote in his book The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away. ‘I often wake in the night and stare at the wall, and I can feel my teeth grinding together …’

Paul and John’s Liverpool girlfriends, Dot and Cynthia, came over to Hamburg for a visit. John was willing to bed down with Cyn in the band’s communal room above the Top Ten, along with Paul and Dot, Tony Sheridan and his girlfriend Rosi, but Paul didn’t want to bring Dot into this overcrowded den. ‘Paul thought it’s not good for Dot,’ recalls Rosi. The boys were friendly with an older woman who looked after the toilets at the club, and she kindly allowed Paul and Dot to sleep together alone on her houseboat on the Elbe, a happy and romantic visit culminating in Paul giving Dot an engagement ring.

It was while Dot was in town that the problem of Stuart Sutcliffe came to a head. Paul’s relationship with Stu was increasingly strained. While being an enviable young man in many ways, Stu was a useless musician who had failed to improve. Paul was now not only proficient on lead guitar, but could turn his hand to playing bass, piano and drums. Stu couldn’t even master the simplest of rock instruments. The Beatles were carrying Stu, who was only in the band because he was John’s mate. ‘Very much later I understood that Paul sometimes was very angry with [Stuart], because he never practised. And when Paul moaned about it, John said, “It doesn’t matter. He looks good.” That was John’s answer,’ notes Stu’s lover Astrid Kirchherr. ‘Paul was a professional, [so] it was hard for him to [put] up with a guy who just looked cool, and his best mate John protected him all the time.’

Paul had recently dropped and broken his cheap Rosetti guitar. Having decided the guitar was a write-off, the boys enjoyed stomping it to pieces, after which Paul had little choice but to play the Top Ten piano during their set. One night when he was at the keyboard, Paul made a rude remark about Astrid. Nobody remembers exactly what he said, but it was bad enough to cause Stu to lose his temper. Slightly built though he was, Stu swung a punch at Paul. ‘Don’t you ever say anything about Astrid again!’ he said, defending his sweetheart.

‘I’ll say what I like!’

This altercation is often presented as the only time Paul and Stu came to blows. In fact, ‘they were always fighting,’ says Ruth Lallemann, who remembers the boys regularly pushing and shoving each other. ‘You didn’t talk about things. You fought.’ George Harrison said he had ‘a lot of fist fights with Stuart’ to establish a pecking order. Tony Sheridan adds: ‘Paul didn’t get on with [Stu]. There was animosity. There was open fighting on stage … Some ugly stuff went on.’ This particular fight over Astrid was bad enough to signal the end of Stuart’s tenure as a Beatle. He quit the band soon afterwards to live with Astrid and study art in Hamburg, remaining friendly with the boys. Indeed, as soon as Stuart left the band Paul seemed better inclined towards him. As a musician, Stu held them back; now he could just be a mate. As neither John nor George wanted to take up Stuart’s bass – the least glamorous instrument in a band – this job fell to Paul, who needed a new instrument. To get him started, Stu generously leant him his expensive Höfner. Later Paul bought the smaller, cheaper Höfner violin bass, which became his signature instrument. It is a mark of Paul’s talent, and strength of personality, that despite being on a backline instrument he remained an equal front man with John.

Soon after Stu’s departure the boys were talent-spotted by a German music publisher, who hired them to back Tony Sheridan on a recording session for Polydor. The result was a single, ‘My Bonnie’, released locally in August 1961. Credited to Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers, the track is a lively cover of the traditional song ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’, starting quietly, then breaking into a rave-up, Paul hollering with joy in the background. It made number 32 in the German singles chart that year, and remains a very engaging record.

The band returned to Liverpool before ‘My Bonnie’ was released, finding themselves increasingly in demand on Merseyside where there were now scores if not hundreds of similar ‘beat bands’. The stock in trade of nearly all these groups was American songs, often learned from discs brought into Liverpool by sailors, becoming proprietorial about tunes they considered their own, though bands would swap songs. ‘I remember swapping with George “Roll Over Beethoven”; and I let him do “Jambalaya”,’ recalls Gerry Marsden, leader of Gerry and the Pacemakers. Bands were rivals – for gigs, exposure and the El Dorado of a record contract – but also mates. One memorable night at Litherland Town Hall the Beatles and the Pacemakers joined forces. ‘We said, “Let’s have one band for tonight.” And we called it the Beatmakers: the Pacemakers and the Beats [sic],’ remembers Marsden. The musicians swapped instruments. Paul played the town hall piano, the Pacemakers’ pianist played sax. ‘We had a ball.’

THE MOP-TOP

When John turned 21 in October 1961 he received £100 ($153) as a gift from a well-to-do aunt, an act of such munificence Paul never forgot it, often remarking that nobody had ever given him a hundred quid. The gift highlighted a subtle but significant class difference between the friends. ‘To us John was upper class,’ Paul commented for the Beatles’ multi-media documentary project, the Anthology. ‘His relatives were teachers, dentists, even someone up in Edinburgh in the BBC. It’s ironic, he was always very “fuck you!” and he wrote the song “Working Class Hero” – in fact he wasn’t at all working-class.’ Still, John generously used his birthday money to treat him and Paul to a trip to Paris which, despite having money to spend, they decided to see on the cheap, hitch-hiking from Liverpool to the French capital where they arrived dressed in rocker gear, their hair in long, greasy quiffs.

One of the first things John and Paul did when they got into Paris was look up their Exi friend Jürgen Vollmer, who was now working in the city as an assistant to the American photographer William Klein. Jürgen met the boys outside the church of St Germain-des-Prés. Having established that they had no place to stay, he took them to his digs in the nearby Hotel de Beaune. As Jürgen tried to sneak the boys up the stairs of this cheap hotel, he was discovered by his landlady, who threw the Englishmen out. ‘We didn’t like the service here, anyway,’ Lennon told the biddy, with mocking hauteur.

‘Shall we try the Ritz?’ Paul asked his friend, readily falling into a double act.

Jürgen met up with John and Paul the next day, and started showing them around Paris. The English boys were full of fun and good humour, picking Jürgen up and running with him past L’Opéra singing nonsense arias, and generally behaving like a couple of Marx Brothers. Jürgen decided they should meet his girlfriend, Alice, arranging a rendezvous. But Alice was horrified by the English boys, whom Jürgen now saw, through her eyes, as scruffy, even dangerous-looking rockers. ‘She didn’t even sit down.’ John and Paul weren’t going to pull any Parisian birds the way they were dressed. So Jürgen took them to the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt, where they bought beatnik-type outfits. Next they wanted their hair cut like Jürgen’s – combed forward over their eyes and cut in a fringe.

‘They asked me, “We like that funny haircut, Jürgen, can you cut ours?” Because they knew that I always cut my hair myself.’ Jürgen took John and Paul back to his hotel, managing to sneak them up to his room this time. He sat Paul down first in front of the mirror, draped a towel over his shoulders, and snipped away at his rocker quiff, changing it into a softer, floppy Left Bank mop-top. For years the Beatle mop-top was credited to Astrid Kirchherr, who said she first styled the boys’ hair this way in Hamburg, a claim that infuriates Vollmer, who asserts he was the true originator of the hairstyle, and indeed Paul has backed him up in this. A trivial enough matter, one might have thought, but for a man to wear his hair like this in 1961 was rebellious. ‘Very difficult for people to imagine that there was a time like that,’ says Jürgen.

BRIAN

John and Paul were soon back in Liverpool where they now met one of the most important characters in the Beatles story. A short stroll from the Cavern, in Whitechapel, was a branch of NEMS, a local chain of family-owned electrical stores that also sold records. NEMS was originally a furniture shop founded in 1901 by a Jewish-Polish immigrant named Isaac Epstein, the business carried on by his son, Harry, who lived with his wife Queenie in a large, detached house in Queens Drive, Childwall. Harry and Queenie Epstein had two sons, the elder of whom, Brian, was ‘one of those out-of-sorts boys who never quite fit in’, as he wrote in his memoirs, a coded acknowledgement that he was homosexual.

Born in 1934, making him only seven years Paul McCartney’s senior, though he always seemed much older, Brian Epstein was expelled from his first secondary school aged 10, then passed through five more schools before 16, when he told his parents he wanted to be a dress designer. Although frank with his parents and friends about his sexuality, Brian was necessarily guarded with strangers, at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, and sex caused him problems. He was ‘very mixed up’, as his mother said. ‘He wasn’t at all happy with it; his love affairs were disastrous.’ In appearance, Brian possessed a soft, bashful face, with gappy teeth, a weak chin and a childhood squint that manifested itself when he felt under pressure. He dressed immaculately, his hair carefully styled, and affected an upper-class accent with a penchant for ornate and pompous expressions. Brian liked to think of himself as artistic. He enjoyed classical music and the theatre, giving the impression all in all of being a rather precious young man. ‘I thought he was a popinjay. Narcissistic,’ comments the family lawyer E. Rex Makin, who found himself called upon professionally when Brian’s sex life got him into trouble.

After the ordeal of school, it was Brian’s further misfortune to be called up for National Service, a duty Paul McCartney narrowly avoided when conscription ended in Britain in 1960. Brian was soon ejected from the military, classified ‘emotionally and mentally unfit’. Next he attempted to become an actor, studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London, but he didn’t do well here either. During his sojourn in the capital, Brian was arrested for importuning a policeman. Having quit RADA, he was blackmailed by another homosexual pick-up in Liverpool. Brian had developed a taste for rough trade. Makin recalls:

Brian came to me one day … in great distress with a black eye and a broken this, that and the other. He’d picked up a lad at the Pier Head and he’d taken him to Sefton Park, where the customer, put it like that, turned rough on him and he handed over his wallet and didn’t know what to do. I said, “The first thing you have to do is to tell your father. If you won’t do it, I’ll do it for you.” And I did it, and we went to the police [who arrested and charged the blackmailer]. He was convicted and got a jail sentence.

Brian stayed in Liverpool after this episode, helping to manage the family businesses. For years there had been an annex to the original furniture store on Walton Road selling sheet music, records and pianos. This was North End Music Stores (NEMS), suppliers of the McCartneys’ piano. During the consumer boom of the late 1950s, the Epsteins opened additional branches of NEMS, selling electrical goods and records. Brian managed these stores, and in doing so employed people who become significant in the Beatles’ story. He hired Peter Brown for one, a former sales assistant at Lewis’s, the biggest department store in Liverpool; also a young man named Alistair Taylor as his personal assistant. Both went on to work for the Beatles.

Mr Brian, as Brian Epstein liked to be known to his staff, invested a great deal of energy in the record division of NEMS, creating elaborate window displays in the Whitechapel shop to promote new releases, adopting a policy of ordering any record any customer requested. He prided himself on being attuned to the tastes of the public, but claims in his autobiography to have been ignorant of the existence of the Beatles until a young man named Raymond Jones walked into his shop asking for ‘My Bonnie’. It has since become clear that Brian almost certainly knew who the Beatles were by this stage, and may well have seen them in NEMS, which they frequented to listen to new releases and chat up the shop girls. The truth may be that Brian had been watching the Beatles from afar, with a glad eye, before he summoned the courage to meet them.

In any event, Epstein placed an order for ‘My Bonnie’ for Jones. When a girl came in asking for the same record, he ordered 200 more, and it was as this point he decided to meet the band. Bill Harry informed him, if he didn’t already know, that the Beatles were to be seen five minutes’ walk away in Mathew Street, playing lunchtime sessions at the Cavern. Fearing he would be out of place in a cellar full of teenagers ‘talking teenage talk’, Brian went over the road with his assistant Alistair Taylor. The Beatles were performing when the two men descended the stairs to the Cavern, on 9 November 1961, the boys acting the goat on stage between bursts of energetic rock ’n’ roll. The Cavern MC, Bob Wooler – ‘Hello, Cavern dwellers, and welcome to the best of cellars’ – promptly announced that Mr Epstein was in the room, as if that was a big deal, and all eyes turned to the gentleman at the entrance. Brian was only 27, but must have appeared middle-aged to the denizens of the Cavern, though many were likewise in their twenties. It was the way Brian dressed, carried himself and spoke. ‘He could speak English, which none of us could,’ comments Tony ‘Measles’ Bramwell with hyperbole. ‘Brian had been elocuted [sic].’

George Harrison asked what brought Mr Brian down to see them. Epstein asked in reply about their song, ‘My Bonnie’, and they proceeded to banter back and forth. ‘They were extremely amusing and in a rough “take it or leave it way” very attractive,’ Epstein later wrote, giving the clear impression of a flirtation. ‘I will never know what made me say to this eccentric group of boys that I thought a further meeting might be helpful to them and me.’ Still, a meeting was scheduled at his office, which was over the NEMS shop, for 3 December. The Beatles approached the date with a mixture of hope and scepticism. After all, what could the manager of an electrical shop do for them in show business? At least they’d been to Germany, played on stage and cut a record. Brian hadn’t done much except get kicked out of the army and RADA. He only had his current job because Daddy owned the store.

When the appointment came, Paul couldn’t even be bothered to be punctual, which was out of character, though it wouldn’t be the last time he would keep Brian waiting. Brian asked George to telephone Forthlin Road and ask what had happened to young McCartney. ‘Paul’s just got up and he is having a bath,’ Harrison reported.

‘This is disgraceful!’ fulminated Epstein, who took himself far too seriously. ‘He’s very late.’

‘And very clean,’ quipped George, who though not academically bright possessed a lively wit.

When Paul finally showed up they adjourned to a milk bar to talk business. Brian asked the boys if they’d considered professional management. They talked about how this might work and agreed to meet again. In the meantime, Epstein asked around town about the group. He consulted Allan Williams, who was so bitter about the way the band had treated him that he’d banned the boys from the Jacaranda. He advised Epstein not to touch the Beatles with a barge pole. ‘Then I clarified it. I said, “Look, they are good musicians. But believe me they’ll walk all over you once they’ve used you.”’ Not put off, Epstein went to see Rex Makin, asking his lawyer to draw up an ‘unbreakable’ contract for himself and the Beatles. ‘I told him there was no such thing,’ said Makin, who thought Brian’s latest brainwave stupid. So Brian went to another lawyer and duly presented the four Beatles – that is John, Paul, George and Pete Best – with a contract that bound them to him for five years, during which time Brian would have a hand in every part of their act, taking up to 25 per cent of their gross earnings in commission. It was a key decision. Paul was hesitant, weighing up the pros and cons. Then he said he hoped the Beatles would make it. ‘But I’ll tell you now, Mr Epstein, I’m going to be a star anyway.’

* Ruth Lallemann wasn’t.

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