John Lennon, Icke Braun and Bettina Derlien, Hamburg 1966
Hans-Walther (Icke) Braun was a friend of the Beatles in Hamburg. He is the source of one of the main bootlegs of the early Beatles music (the Braun tape -- given to him by Paul) and his name can be heard on the Star Club recording (Paul dedicates Till There Was You to him). He wrote an autobiography in German in 2018, which includes the following:
“And you, Icke?” asked Paul. “Who’s your favourite author?”
“Henry Miller. I think he’s very good,” I said.
In that moment John suddenly looked over at me. Until then he had been watching Bettina, the bar lady, rinsing glasses and tidying up the bar, with his typical somewhat blasé expression. Our discussion hadn’t seemed to interest him much. Now he was looking directly into my eyes. Quietly and without taking his eyes off me, he walked around the whole counter over to me, planted a kiss on my mouth and went back to his spot. At first, I was quite surprised and didn’t know what to do about it, then I found it rather funny and thought little of it. A few days later, it happened again. I happened upon* him in the hallway behind the stage and again he took my hand and kissed me. At some point the thought occurred to me, “man, he thinks I’m gay, but I can’t help him with that.” What was really going on, I don’t know. Maybe he meant the kisses as overtures; he was even treated as a closet case by homosexuals. No idea. In any case, I saw his girlfriend Cynthia, who visited him in Hamburg in 1961 and whom he married a year later. Apart from that, as far as I know, he spent his time ...
Note:
*treffen (traf, in the past tense) is usually translated as meet, but it can mean “happen upon” and probably that’s what’s meant here, from context
Translation by @idontwanttospoiltheparty (thank you!)
Emphasis mine.
Thanks also to @paulsrighthand and her Mum for working on translating the book for us.
Original German:
„Und du, Icke? fragte Paul. Wer ist dein Lieblingsautor?"
„Henry Miller. Den finde ich richtig gut," sagte ich.
Im selben Morent blickte John ruckartig zu mir rüber. Bis dahin hatte er mit seinem üblichen, leicht blasierten Gesichtsausdruck Bettina, die Barfrau, beobachtet, wie sie Gläser spülte und die Bar aufräumte. Unser Gespräch schien ihn nichtbesonders zu interessieren. Jetzt sah er mir direkt in die Augen. Schweigend undohne den Blick von mir zu nehmen, kam er um den ganzen Tresen zu mir, gab mireinen Kuss auf den Mund und ging wieder zurück zu seinem Platz. Im ersten Mo-ment war ich ziemlich überrascht und wusste nichts damit anzufangen, dann fandich es her witzig und dachte mir weiter nichts dabei. Ein paar Tage später pas-sierte es nochmal. Ich traf ihn auf dem Gang hinter der Bühne, und wieder nahm ermeine Hand und küsste mich. Das hat mich irgendwann auf den Gedanken ge-bracht, Mensch, der denkt, ich bin schwul, aber damit kann ich ihm leider nichtdienen. Was wirklich dahinter steckte, weiß ich nicht. Vielleicht hat er die Küsse als Annäherungsversuche gemeint, unter Homosexuellen wurde er soar als Klemm-schwuler gehandelt. Keine Ahnung. Auf jeden Fall habe ich einmal seine FreundinCynthia gesehen, die ihn 1961 in Hamburg besuchte und die er ein Jahr späterdann ja geheiratet hat. Abgesehen davon trieb er sich, soweit ich das beurteilen kann, oft und gern mit anderen Mädchen rum.
(this text is taken from OCR, so there may be small errors in the German).
The term 'closet case' is Klemm-schwuler.
Icke, Evelyn Hamann und die Beatles: Eine Art Biografie by Hans-Walter Braun (Author), Volker Neumann (Author)
Working on @takeasadsongandanalyzeit with @ilovedig continues to be a source of incredibly interesting rabbit-holes.
The chapter of Royston Ellis meeting the Beatles is so wild.
He first hits on George at the Jacaranda. George responds to this with a casual “oh, you’d love my friends” and brings him to Gambier Terrace:
Also dropping into the Gambier Terrace pit was a special guest, Royston Ellis, “King of the Beatniks.” The bearded bard, who featured in TV documentaries and press articles whenever an offbeat teenage angle was needed, was in Liverpool to read his poetry at the university on June 24/25, and he swiftly found himself drawn into the Beatles’ company. The conduit was George, who (with nothing else to do while John, Stu and Paul were in school) was hanging around the Jac when the wandering coffee-bar poet traipsed in, drawn by hip radar to “the happening place.” Avowedly “trying everything,” Ellis was an active bisexual in this period of his life and he took an immediate fancy to George: “He looked fabulous with his long hair and matelot-style striped T-shirt, very modern, which is why I deliberately spoke to him. I was nineteen and he was seventeen and we clicked right away.”15
George took Ellis, his typewriter and his duffel bag back to Gambier Terrace to meet John and Stu. A rapport was quickly established and Ellis was invited to “crash” for a few days—yet another occupant for the filthy back room.
Then Ellis hits it off with John and Stu and wants them as a backing band:
Ellis says he developed a particular rapport with John and Stuart and that they discussed poetry, art and London. When he left, they spoke of doing it again sometime: “We were talking about how I wanted a band to come to London and back me on my Rocketry performances, and they were thrilled at the idea.” Art school studies finished the following Friday, July 1, marking the end of Stu’s fourth year and John’s third and last because the college was waving him goodbye. The exam results, when they came through on August 1, were just as expected: John failed and was out, Stuart passed the NDD, for which he received a certificate. The option was there for him to do a fifth year and attain the highest available qualification, the Art Teacher’s Diploma (ATD), akin to a degree and entitling him to become a teacher … but both he and John were pondering a period as prospectors, and doing something again with Ellis was a definite possibility.
So much so, Ellis is responsible for the first* two mentions of the band in the newspaper:
As for Ellis, so much was he enthused by the possibility of appearing with them again that he soon got the Beatles their first mention in a music paper. It was the July 9 edition of Record and Show Mirror, where a supercilious little article about “the bearded sage of the coffee bars” ended “he’s thinking of bringing down to London a Liverpool group which he considers is most in accord with his poetry. Name of the group? ‘The Beetles’”
….A born publicist, Royston Ellis knew how to manipulate a follow-up, writing a letter for publication that clarified a point in the first. He expressed his intention to find a group that would join him on TV appearances with Bert Weedon and the Shadows, and reiterated, “For some time I have been searching for a group to use regularly, and I feel that the ‘Beetles’ (most of them are Liverpool ex-art students) fill the bill.”
John and Stu decide to go to London on their own to join Ellis…but then chicken out:
By July 10, at the end of his three-year art school vacation, John had arrived at a key decision in his life: he would try to earn his living from the guitar. “I became a professional musician the day I got a red letter from the art college saying ‘Don’t bother coming back next September,’ ” he later said.31 Cyn would remember, “John decided that this [music] was very definitely the life for him. All the ideas that everyone else had for him of making an impact on the art world faded into the back of beyond with incredible rapidity, and with almost no regret at all. Aunt Mimi was distraught. Her view of his future couldn’t have been blacker at that time.”32
These events coinciding, it seems John and Stu decided to head south and hang out with Royston Ellis. Allan Williams is emphatic on the matter: he says John and Stu “split the Beatles and went down to London.”33 Norman Chapman would remember Stu asking him for a lift through the Mersey Tunnel one day so he (or he and John) could hitchhike to London—“They wanted to go down to London and become involved in this poetry-music scene.” Beat poets led a nomadic life by definition. Ellis lived for periods in all sorts of places, but his main base was still his parents’ house, at 31 Clonard Way, Hatch End, Pinner, Middlesex, a pleasant detached villa with the name Denecroft. This was the address he gave John while staying at Gambier Terrace. When Ellis arrived home one day his mother said he’d missed a visit from his “beatnik friends from Liverpool.” He never knew how many or who had come, but—as insane as it appears—John and Stu (and/or as Ellis always thought—hoped—George) had hitched the best part of two hundred miles, taken the trouble of locating his house in leafy Metroland, not stayed or left a message and then gone home again, never returning or making further contact. It makes no sense, but there it sits, illogical and incomplete.
Allan Williams remembers them being “back in Liverpool within a week, because it didn’t work out,” at which point the Beatles “reformed” as if they’d never been away. With bookings only every Saturday, it’s conceivable they did all this without missing one, and perhaps that was always the intention. However, while three independent witnesses (Ellis, Williams and Chapman) all remember something happening, none of the Beatles ever mentioned it—though in their interviews they talked with candor about everything. So it must remain in doubt, an intriguing puzzle unlikely to be solved.
There are two additional curiosities that may or may not be incidental. One is that, in the last days of July, a group of Liverpool art school students, apparently including John and Stu, went to London (or tried to go) to see a Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery. Second, and most fascinatingly, a set of photographs taken at this very time (mid-July 1960) in Stu and John’s studio-bedroom-slum at 3 Gambier Terrace includes several people they knew but not John and Stu themselves—perhaps because they were on the Hatch End trip. It was published on July 24 in the national Sunday rag the People in a sensation-splash headlined THIS IS THE BEATNIK HORROR. It’s as if a man on a flaming pie was pointing down at Flat 3, Hillary Mansions, Gambier Terrace, Liverpool 1. In six months, three Beatles moved in and the fourth was hanging out, the nation’s best-known beat poet had come here to get them high, and now, when a Fleet Street journalist and photographer were looking to substantiate a load of old tosh about dirty beatniks—reportage that could have been cooked up anywhere in the country—they landed in Stu and John’s room.34
Though hugely amusing, the feature had one unfortunate side-effect: because the address was given (a “three-roomed flat in decaying Gambier Terrace in Liverpool”) and some of the occupants (“well-educated youngsters”) were named, the landlord gave the tenant, Rod Murray, notice to quit. On August 15, everyone—Rod, Diz, Ducky, Stuart, John and sundry other bodies who’d joined them—would be out on the street.
—Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, Ch 15 (May 31–Aug 15, 1960)
And Lewisohn is just like yup nothing to see.
So what the hell happened here? Was it just a school trip? Or was it a deliberate split?
The video for "Free As a Bird" is chockablock with references to Beatles songs. We believe every one of their songs is in there somewhere, maybe even including songs that they didn’t release, and we’re working on putting together a comprehensive list.
However, true to form, we got waylaid by a tangent. (Stick with us to the end, we promise it's worth it).
In the scene representing "Paperback Writer" a book is seen on the table closest to the camera:
Tragically this is the clearest shot of the book (you can watch the video here, the book appears at the 3 minute mark). It seems as though it has been intentionally blurred. We’re not ones to back down from a research challenge though!
We tried all the obvious things: it’s clearly not Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, but we weren’t having much luck finding a book with a two-word title (first word slightly shorter), whose author had a longer first name and shorter surname. (Did you know there are 1.5 million books in the Penguin archive collection?)
So we contacted [email protected] (because of course we did). They got back to us quickly, and were very helpful.
Our correspondent Esmé tried to find a contract for any Penguin book being used in the video, but came up empty. So the Beatles didn’t get permission to use this book. Very interesting, especially since it seems to have been obscured.
She pointed out that the combination of:
Two line book title
One line author name
Dancing penguin figure (only used between 1940 and 1950)
Is quite rare, so that really narrows the search.
She suggested that, since it doesn’t appear to have “genre markers” on the sides, it would be from 1947 or later. However when you watch the video there may be compression artifacts (smudges) remaining of genre markers that are on the book, but not clearly visible (more on that later).
She proposed Silas Marner after having done a bit of research on her own (have we mentioned what a star she was?):
Armed with all this information we trawled the website given to us by Esmé for more suitable candidates.
The shape of the author name seriously narrows it down, and where a book might match by name, it fails to match by title. In fact, we only found three real candidates, plus the book Esmé gave us:
Holy Terrors by Arthur Manchen
Paper Houses by William Plomer
And
Peter Waring by Forrest Reid
Just on first glance, only one of these books really had the shortness of the surname seen in the video,
But just to be sure, since the book in the video is blurred and very under saturated, we tried to replicate it:
Silas Marner, Holy Terrors
Paper Houses, Peter Waring
These are the settings we used if anyone wants to check our work:
And that blurred and compressed, the “fiction” marker really is more like a smudge, so we feel confident that we don't need to find a book with no genre marks.
Here’s that screenshot of the book again, to save you scrolling back to the top:
Only one of these books has the right surname length. We actually measured with a ruler on screen, and the ratio of length between the Author names on our mystery book is 2.333. The ratio between Forrest and Reid (in the font on the Penguin edition): 2.3. Given the inaccuracies of measuring on a screen that’s remarkably close.
We found it. The book is Peter Waring by Forrest Reid.
After watching the relevant section of the video through, with this book in mind, we’re now totally convinced this is the right book. (Please let us know if you can find another candidate!)
But why? Why that book? It’s not like they’d ever mentioned it, as far as we could find, at least.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
Peter Waring (1937) is a full-scale revision of Reid's earlier Following Darkness (1912) in which Peter, a sensitive boy with literary inclinations, grows up unhappily in the household of his father, a cold village schoolmaster in Newcastle, County Down, and among his Belfast relatives whom he finds intolerable.
'An acute and subtle story of adolescence. . . . A delicacy and a grave beauty which make their own quiet appeal.' Times
'Reid has written one of the finest studies of the mental, sexual, spiritual life of the adolescent without ever mentioning the words.' Glasgow Herald
Sound like the family background of anyone we know? (hint: replace father with Aunt)
But, oh wait, it gets better.
Forrest Reid was a gay man (very repressed by many accounts but seemingly just ace, or the equivalent at the time, by others) who wrote novels about the queer adolescent experience, more emotional than sexual, in the early 1900s.
He was good friends with EM Forster, another queer writer of his time and other suspected but never confirmed queer writers as well such as Arthur Greaves. His works are not really well known still, and frankly weren’t even well known in the 50s and 60s, except in queer circles, according to our research.
Perhaps the choice of this specific Reid book is related to one or more of the Peters in their circle? Shotton, Best, Brown, and Asher. That's a lot of Peters!
As we said at the start, in the music video the book appears in a scene depicting the song "Paperback Writer". And you know what fits better than “Lear” in the lyrics of that song?
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It's based on a novel by a man named Reid
And I need a job
So I wanna be a paperback writer
Paperback writer
(note: Lear never wrote any novels).
Knowing how they liked plays on words (read, Reid), half rhymes (Reid, be), and internal rhymes (Reid, need) we think it’s very likely the novel in the first draft of the song was by a man named Reid.
Much to think about!
Thanks again to Esmé Library and Archive Assistant at Penguin Random House Archive
I believe it's very likely that Elton guessed that there was SOMETHING between John and Paul.
To start with, I want to quote an excerpt from my Walls and Bridges post: "Let's sum it up: Lennon spent a lot of time with Elton, gay (at the time he was 28, and he realized his sexual orientation at about 23 yo), and a musician connected to the glam rock scene (and glam rock is inherently queer). I guess that Elton knew or at least suspected what John feels towards Paul. And let's remember that at that time Lennon was coming to terms with his bisexuality which he already signaled in 1972. In 1974 John interviewed himself for Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine to promote Walls and Bridges. Here comes the question: "Have you ever fucked a guy?". The response: "Not yet, I thought I’d save it til I was 40, life begins at 40 you know, tho I never noticed it". Further dialogue: "Q. It is trendy to be bisexual and you’re usually 'keeping up with the Jones’, haven’t you ever… there was talk about you and PAUL… A. Oh, I thought it was about me and Brian Epstein… anyway I’m saving all the juice for my own version of THE REAL FAB FOUR BEATLES STORY etc.. etc.."".
Page 2nd of that interview contains a photo of John and Elton:
On November 28, 1974 they were performing together in Madison Square Garden. Announcing "I saw her standing there", John said: "And we thought we do another number of an old enstraged fiancee of mine, called Paul" (Tony King stated that Lennon often referred to McCartney that way).
As we can read in "Christies Auction; Rock & Pop Memorabilia" (July 2008): "Paul Gambaccini [PG] recalled that when he was waiting in the wings that evening, Elton passed him and said cryptically…"The Third Number". PG felt that Elton was probably remarking on the significance that Lennon was performing a Beatles song at this time, especially one written by Paul McCartney. [Lennon only sang a Beatles song in public on three occasions after the split]".
@paulsrighthand analyzed this excerpt perfectly: "I really do feel like he is trying to convey something significant, and the anecdotes and phrasing he chose are purposeful. The very fact that he shares the story of Elton passing him and saying, "cryptically".. the third number, is IMO, no accident. Elton, I'm sure, would have been aware that Paul Gambaccini is gay. Paul G would also know that Elton is gay. I believe that it was probably known that John was going to used the estranged fiancee line (I'll get to that in a second). So, in my theoretical scenario, a gay man is cryptically telling another gay man that his male friend will shortly be dedicating an overtly romantic message to his male friend… to phrase it another way, its just gossip! Like, OMG, you won't believe what John's about to do. It's the simplest explanation, I think?".
What's more, when Elton recalled this event years later, he said that John used the words: "an old FRIEND of mine" but pay attention to his body language. As @paulsrighthand summed up: "If you want to hide your love away , Sir Elton John will be the man to keep your secret, but he will have a little fun whilst doing so imagines a little tee hee thought bubble above his head every time he mentions John and Paul".
And last but not least: a birthday collage to Elton sent by John in 1975!
In a nutshell: John made a tone of queer references here, for example used polari. He also made references to McLennon; one of them is photo of a naked man who reminds Paul. The man is standing backwards so we can't say if that's Paul for sure but even if not, it might have been a sign for Elton. Or maybe John just liked guys of this type?
Even if we assume that Elton did not understand the references to McLennon in this collage (which is unlikely), we know (as seen from the previous points) that he knew John was very interested in queer topics. Elton would have been stupid not to know that John was probably bisexual too; and if so, he probably feels something gay for Paul (I suppose John talked a lot about Paul at the time).
I highly recommend you check out the original post about the birthday collage. There are more quotes there. People were reblogging and commenting on this post, sharing some really interesting reflections.
So... did Elton know what was going on? You may not believe it. But you can also believe in Santa Claus and fairies.
I think it's really interesting that John said "I Dig a Pygmy, by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids" before they sang "I Dig a Pony" (a song that, imo, is definitely about Paul). And then Phil Spector put it before "Two of Us" (a song that, imo, is definitely about John).
Charles Hawtrey was very obviously gay (Kenneth Williams said: "He can sit in a bar and pick up sailors and have a wonderful time. I couldn't do it.")
