Beatles' Shadow
Stuart Sutcliffe & His Lonely Hearts Club
By Pauline Sutcliffe with Douglas Thomas
247 pages, illustrated, 6 ¼ X 9 ½"
December 2001
Sidgwick & Jackson
ISBN: 028307342X
$33.50 hardcover OUT OF PRINT
Paper Edition, September 2002
ISBN: 0-330-48996-8
$19.95
Stuart Sutcliffe's sudden, strange death in Hamburg is part of the Beatles folklore, a poignant story of a young man whose promising career was tragically cut short. But Stuart's importance to the Beatles - he was one of the founding members and aclose friend of John Lennon - has never been fully examined. Now, for the first time, his sister Pauline feels free to talk openly about her brother's life and death. Drawing on her own memories of growing up with the Beatles in post-war Liverpool, as well as the many letters in her possession, Pauline paints a revealing portrait of the Beatles' formative period, giving us a totally new perception of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
The author tells the full truth about Stuart's relationship with John Lennon and why John was haunted by guilt over her brother's death. Pauline also describes how people life herself and Cynthia Lennon have been forced to live in the shadow of the Beatles all their lives, and how she has battled to protect Stuart's memory against the Beatles' need to sanitize their early history. And she writes movingly about how, forty years after his death, Stuart's talent as an artist is being recognized. Wise and witty, Pauline writes with the mature perspective of an eminent psychotherapist, sharing her unique insight into the young men who became the Beatles. But above all this book is a loving tribute to Stuart, who died at the age of twenty-one, but whose contribution to the Beatles' legend lives on.