The Beatles' Shadow by Pauline Sutcliffe

Author:Pauline Sutcliffe [Sutcliffe, Pauline and Thompson , Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509834969
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

eight

Torture

‘To the very end, Stu Sutcliffe had lived out the myth of the “poète maudit”.’

Albert Goldman in The Lives of John Lennon

JOHN AND PAUL had to ease up on the local attractions at Easter in 1961 when Cynthia and Paul’s on-and-off girlfriend Dot Rhone arrived in Hamburg for a holiday. The girls stayed with Astrid and her mother. Astrid was very fond of Cynthia and took her and Dot on a tourist trip of the city and to all the best shops. If Cynthia didn’t have something to wear for the evening, Astrid would gleefully produce something from her own wardrobe. Cynthia has always been careful and in a situation like this would have been inhibited. But she got into the spirit of it and they seemed to have a lot of fun together. Astrid would take them on a drive to Ostsee, which is a beach resort – I have lovely photographs of Stuart and John, if not exactly building sandcastles, attempting some sand-based architecture. Stuart’s wearing a silly hat and has a half-smoked cigarette in one photograph of him and John. In another he has that hat on and is gazing out at the water. That was his summer of 1961, his last summer. It doesn’t seem possible, for he looks so self-assured, so in control in the photographs. I presume he felt his life was on track: he had Astrid, he was going back to his art work, therefore pleasing his parents, and John was being a terrific friend. Stuart was also having fun with fashion. The James Dean rocker image was getting a mellow makeover.

Astrid would wear his leather jacket while he wore her collarless blouse, knotted at the front and displaying his lean if not six-pack figure. He always wore the mock-crocodile winklepickers from England. Klaus loved them and wanted a pair. Stuart did a cardboard cut-out of Klaus’s foot, and sent it to Mother to go and buy him a pair of grey, artificial-crocodile boots – the same as Stuart’s. Klaus has said that his relationship with Astrid was more like siblings when Stuart came into the picture, so it was no emotional upheaval for him. Stuart and Klaus liked each other, but I suspect that below the surface there were undercurrents or unresolved issues. Klaus and Astrid wrote a book for Genesis Publications, which is based in Surrey and is associated with George Harrison. In that book, Klaus makes the point about Stuart not having been one of Astrid’s clones but someone who had kept his own identity and sense of self even if he had been restyled by Astrid. This suggests to me that Stuart resolved the doubts for himself, yet Astrid and Klaus have returned to one another, on and off, throughout their adult lives, which is interesting and intriguing.

The other member of the Hamburg trio that Stuart encountered, Jurgen Vollmer, holds a fiercely different attitude. In several conversations I have had with him in London, he became incandescent at the mere mention of Astrid’s name.

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