I Filled My Beatle's Last Days With Love
By Ed Blanche
Rave Monthly
September 1964
Tenderly, the girl with long blonde hair picks up the photograph. From it, the proud, sensitive eyes of Stuart Sutcliffe gaze up into hers. Shadows fall across her face as she says huskily, "It was a beautiful moment when my Beatle asked me to marry him. We were so very much in love." A long silence, then she breathes. "I never dreamed he would... die."
In the quietness of the darkened room. I know that she is once again inside that ambulance in its sickening, jolting race to the hospital, staring down with anguish, foreboding at the white, motionless face of the boy she loved.
The photograph slides from her fingers and falls face down on the floor. On the back, I read "photograph by Astrid Kirchherr." This girl is Astrid. The photograph is one of many brilliant pictures she took of Stuart and the other Beatles, John, Paul, George, and Pete Best in their riotous days in her hometown of Hamburg, Germany, before they became international stars.
Astrid is dressed in all black. She says simply that she just prefers black. Time has soothed away the emptiness and the sorrow. Now she can tell quietly, almost unemotionally, the full story of her tragic love for Stuart, the fifth Beatle, for she is happy again.
She has been engaged to another Liverpool musician, drummer, Gibson Kemp, since January. Astrid sits curled up on the floor in front of 19-year-old Gibson in the living room of his home in Litherland, a suburb of Liverpool, within a mile of the town hall where the Beatles' story got underway more than six years ago.
Gibson, who occupied the vacant drum stool with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes when Ringo left to join the Beatles, later played at the Star Club with King Size Taylor and the Dominoes. He now has his own group, the Eyes.
Astrid is 25 now, and doesn't take photographs anymore. She lives with her mother in their Hamburg flat. She dresses in black, but not because she is still mourning the death of Stuart. "I always dressed in black. I like it. I even buy colored dresses and dye them black," she explains.
She speaks very good Scouse. Her knowledge of English slang is prolific and expert. Learned from Stuart, The Beatles, and practically every visiting Liverpool musician. There is very little trace of German when she speaks. Only occasionally does she falter over a word. Then she will turn to Gibson, who is never far from her side, and ask, "What is that word, dear?"
She first met the Beatles in 1959, when they were a wild gag-pulling gang of beat musicians who thrived on playing 12 hours a night at Hamburg's crowded Kaiser Keller club for £16 a week. There were five of them then. Stuart, the bass guitarist; John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and drummer Pete Best, living and thinking like one person. "The stage was about as big as a sofa," laughs Astrid, "and there they were, the five of them crowded on it with all their equipment. The first time I saw them, the club was packed, and I was with a boyfriend of mine. I couldn't take my eyes off these lean, wildly exciting boys. I'd never heard anything like them before," she says, excitedly, remembering an old enthusiasm.
She remembers that Stuart was wearing dark glasses. "I could see he was looking at me all the time," she says. "At first, there was nothing special between us, but later, we wanted to be with each other all the time. He was different than the rest in a way, more gentle and quiet. Seemed to think a lot more. Stuart and John were old friends, close friends. They had studied together at Liverpool College of Art before forming a beat group and asking George and Paul to join them. They liked the same things, laughed at the same jokes, but their outlooks and ambitions were different.
"Whereas John tended to be cynical, sometimes hard, Stuart was more gentle and sympathetic. He had only one ambition: to paint. He found peace in it." Astrid remembers that in Hamburg, he painted day and night for months in a converted studio in her mother's flat, searching for a beauty he never seemed to find.
He painted more than 500 pictures in less than a year. She says it was after those first few riotous months at Hamburg that Stuart asked Astrid to marry him. "It was a beautiful moment," she says, reverently. "Stewart was very quiet when he came to the flat. He knew that he would be leaving me in a few days to go back to Liverpool when the group's contract ran out. When he asked me, I wanted to cry. I said, 'Yes.' I think he had wanted to ask me for some time, but just couldn't work himself up to it."
It was a silent and lonely Hamburg after the Beatles left, and not just for Astrid; the whole city was buzzing with the question, "When are the Beatles returning?" But for Astrid, it was something more than just listening to a good group. Within weeks, they were back, this time at the rival Top Ten Club.
Astrid and Stuart were overjoyed at being together again, but trouble wasn't far off. The tough city police were after them. They had been accused of burning the small, cell-like room. They had stayed in the projection room of a converted cinema while they were playing at the Kaiser Keller. Beat groups were not the Hamburg Police Department's favorite people, so they searched the city for the Beatles. Within hours, they were all in jail, and Peter Eckhorn, manager of the Top Ten, had to bail them out.
Astrid said, viciously, "The police were terrible. They weren't going to release the boys, but Peter said he would pay anything to get them out. He liked them a lot, but it was the Beatles who were filling his club every night. He couldn't afford to have them in jail." Now, Stuart was painting more and more, drifting away from the group during the daytime. He couldn't afford to buy expensive oils, so he drew with ink, crayons, and pencils on cheap art paper. He began to miss sessions at the club all the time.
He was painting as though his life depended on it. He'd paint anything, the grimy Hamburg skyline, the forest of cranes in the docks, the drab back alleys, and for a model, Astrid always sat for him. Many of these works were exhibited at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool this spring.
The Beatles returned to Liverpool when their six-month contract to the Top Ten expired in 1960, but Stuart stayed behind. He had been awarded a scholarship to Hamburg University to study art.. When John Paul, George, and Pete came back to the Top Ten later in the year, Stuart was a different person. Art and Astrid were his whole world, his whole life. His parents and sisters, Pauline and Joyc, in Aigburth Road, Liverpool, belonged to another life.
"Stuart was so sensitive," Astrid quietly recalls. "He liked beautiful things. When we used to go out, which wasn't very often, because I wasn't making much money and he only had his grant to college, we went to the ballet or classical concerts."
Astrid lights another cigarette and almost whispers through a cloud of gray smoke. "He used to write stories and poems, too strange things to me. They were often incomprehensible. I would read them and say how good they were, but Stuart would read them again and then tear them up. I'm sure they were his philosophy, but I couldn't always understand them."
She speaks faster now, as though the dam had been broken, and at last she could talk about Stuart. She sounds relieved. "He was very intelligent, "she says proudly, "very sensitive with a wonderful sense of humor. He was always doing something. He couldn't sit still for long. If he wasn't painting, he was writing or playing the guitar. He used to spend hours writing letters to John in Liverpool. Put down all his feelings, all his experiences, even put in illustrations and pages of poetry. These letters used to run to 20 pages or so, and John's were just as long and deep."
Stuart and Astrid were not to have much longer together. Within a few months, he would be dead. He began to have sudden, painful headaches, which would almost drive him mad. They would go as suddenly as they had come. Astrid thought it was overwork and fatigue. "He would study all day, then come home and go straight up to his studio and paint all night," she says. "But the pains got worse and the headaches more frequent. Once he fainted in class and had to be brought home. He was put to bed, and the doctor who examined him couldn't find anything wrong. "
Astrid's mother made him stay in bed and rest, but the pain did not go away. Several top specialists examined him, but the answer was always the same. 'We can't find nothing wrong.' A brain tumor was suspected, but a long series of X-ray tests showed nothing. The stabbing pains got so bad, Stuart had to have morphine to deaden the pain.
"Sometimes he'd get up and be walking around, laughing and talking as though nothing was wrong. Then, suddenly, he clutched his head and groaned with the pain," she said. She stops, puts out the cigarette in the glass ashtray, already overflowing with stubs. She looks out the window on the small, square green lawn behind Gibson's suburban home. Perhaps she is thinking that she and Stuart may have lived in a house just like this.
She continues trying to sound as matter-of-fact as she can. "The day before he died, Stuart was up and around the flat. He wanted to go and meet the Beatles at the airport. This was their fourth trip, just after they had signed with Brian Epstein, but I wouldn't let him. He said that 'I must go'. Then he went to bed."
The next morning, Astrid found Stuart in bed, unconscious, deadly white, and breathing very shallowly. As she made an emergency call for the ambulance, she sat with him. On the way to the hospital, watching him get worse, she shouted to the driver to hurry. But when they got to the hospital, Stuart was already dead. "They put his body on a trolley," said Astrid, "and wheeled him to the lift to the operating theater. A doctor poked at him and told me he was dead. I just couldn't believe it."
Astrid wandered out of the hospital dazed and alone. She cried softly to herself, still unable to grasp that Stuart was dead. No more peaceful evenings sitting for him in the studio, no more cooking his meals, no more concerts. Stuart was dead. But the tragedy was not over yet. There were to be more tears. Astrid cabled Stewart's mother, the appalling news, the grief-stricken Mrs. Sutcliffe caught the first airplane to Hamburg. Also on it was George, who had been ill and missed the earlier flight with the other three.
The jubilant Beatles, who had arrived the day before, were there at the airport to greet George. They were happy and confident. Things were beginning to move with Brian Epstein handling them, they were booked for a two-month date at the new Star Club at £45 a week, a fortune. And then they saw Astrid with George and Mrs. Sutcliffe, "Where Stu?" they asked. Tears streaming down her face, Astrid sobbed out that he was dead.
John, Stuart's biggest chum, cried hysterically when he heard. Paul and Pete wept unashamedly. George and Stuart's mother held Astrid and wept also. She lights another cigarette and continues. "The boys had to play at the club that night. I thought they wouldn't be able to go on, but somehow they managed it. They said very little, and they didn't gag about much like they usually did."
A few months later, when the Beatles were back in Britain with an EMI recording contract, John wrote to Astrid. It was a long letter, a very personal letter. It meant a lot to her. For John wrote how close he and Stuart were, how Stuart told him how much he loved Astrid and wanted to marry her, how John was happy for them both. How empty it must seem now that Stuart was dead. How lucky he himself was to find Cynthia. "It was a very beautiful letter," said Astrid. "John will never know how much it meant to me. It's the only letter I've ever had from him, but it doesn't matter; he knew how I felt and said some very wonderful and true things in it. I'll always treasure it, for it's like something of Stuart to me.
"After he died, I sat down and told myself, 'I must live again'. I made myself think of Stuart's family and the way they must feel." Gradually, Astrid learned to live her life again, knowing that she must mingle with her friends, learn to laugh and smile, and make her memories of the happiness she shared with Stuart.
Part of Stuart's cluttered studio in the Kirchherr home is still more or less as he left it: dozens of his paintings, some unfinished, lean against the black-painted wall. Astrid's pictures of the Beatles and other Mersyside singers and musicians hang on the wall alongside a giant photo portrait of Stuart. In the corner stands his high-backed chair. "I used to sit in that room", said Astrid, "because Stuart and I had had so many happy moments there, but I had to go on living. I had to look ahead, not living in the past. But nothing much has changed in that room."
She still saw as much of the Beatles as she could, but it was becoming difficult. As the group became more famous, they visited Hamburg once more at the end of 1962 before they exploded onto the British pop scene. Till then, they hadn't been known outside of Hamburg and Liverpool, and always it was John she found she was most relaxed with. John, Stuart's closest friend, with whom he had shared all his hopes and dreams.
When John and Cynthia were in Paris, it was John who paid for Astrid to visit them. "He insisted," she said. "It gave him so much pleasure now that he could afford it, and I was very grateful."
This spring, she flew over to stay with George and Ringo and their fifth-floor Mayfair flat. "I knew Ringo when he was in Hamburg with Rory Storm, and later when he came over with the Beatles in Pete Best's place," she said. "He's a marvelous character, always laughing and dancing. George and he are very close." She also visited John and Cynthia while she was in London. "John is a wonderful husband and a devoted father," she smiles. "He thinks the world of his family. He hasn't changed at all since I first knew him, a bit quieter, maybe, but still as funny and witty as ever. He'll never change. He's too intelligent and aware of himself and the things around him to do that."
Astrid is quiet now. Her memory is exhausted. She sighs and leans back in her chair, lights another cigarette. The room is silent. Photographs she took of Stuart, which she had shown me while she talked lie on the carpet. She runs a hand through her long, straight golden hair and says quietly the trace of a wistful smile touching the corner of her mouth. "You know, I would have liked to live over here in a little house with Stuart."
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