“Could you take a picture of me there?” John asks.

Astrid readies her camera. She takes photographs of him and George throughout the afternoon. Decades later, when she views them, she’ll say John was “a little lonely feller,” while nineteen-year-old George “had so much strength in his face, like he was saying to John ‘I’ll look after you.’”

“I looked up to Stu,” John says, mourning his friend. “I depended on him to tell me the truth.” He has long, long talks with Astrid about life, about relationships, about himself and Stuart, about their loss. “John used to say that Stuart was the second person to have left him,” she recalls. “First his mummy left him, then Stuart. I think it was the root of his anger…that people he loved the most always left him.” At the same time, though, John’s very pragmatic.

“You have got to decide: either you die with Stuart or you go on living your life,” John tells Astrid. “Be honest and decide. You can’t just cry all the time, you’ve got to get on.”

After all, that’s what he’s always done.

Yet his own grief manifests itself in other ways.

John drinks heavily and swallows “Prellies”—Preludin, German diet pills that act as stimulants—by the handful. “He’d take so many pills that he literally wouldn’t be able to shut his eyes to go to sleep,” Roy Young, a fellow musician in Hamburg, recalls. John appears onstage one night wearing a toilet seat around his head. Another night, he gets arrested and has to be bailed out. Though he writes often to his longtime girlfriend, Cynthia, there are plenty of other women to keep him occupied.

And humor is always his go-to defense. When the Beatles take the stage for the first time at the Star-Club on Friday, April 13, just a couple of days after Stu’s death, Klaus Voormann is in the audience. “John came onstage dressed like a cleaning-woman,” he recalls. John does an over-the-top clown act, knocking over microphones and pretending to tidy up the other band members. “The people in the club were laughing—they didn’t know Stuart had died. They didn’t know Stuart. It gave me shivers to watch it, but this is what clowns do, bring humor to tragedy.”

Voormann adds, “It was hilarious.”

*  *  *

On May 9, 1962, George explodes into the room, wide-eyed, bursting at the seams with excitement and waving a telegram.

“We’ve got a record contract!”

CONGRATULATIONS BOYS EMI REQUEST
RECORDING SESSION PLEASE REHEARSE NEW MATERIAL.

The boys fire off telegrams back to Brian:

[JOHN:] WHEN ARE WE GOING TO BE
MILLIONAIRES

[PAUL:] PLEASE WIRE TEN THOUSAND POUND ADVANCE ROYALTIES

[GEORGE:] PLEASE ORDER FOUR NEW GUITARS

Most significant is the line “Please rehearse new material.” Usually the record companies choose the material—but the Beatles are going to get to play their own songs.