John Lennon Destroyed a Woman’s Clothes When He Walked in On Her Sleeping With Paul McCartney
When The Beatles played shows in Hamburg, Germany, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Pete Best, and Stuart Sutcliffe slept in the backs of clubs. These were cramped quarters with very little privacy. As a result, the band members were always aware of what the others were doing. They frequently walked in when a bandmate brought a woman back to the room. Once, when Lennon did this, he cut up all the woman’s clothing.
John Lennon behaved erratically toward Paul McCartney and a woman
The Beatles slept in bunk beds while in Hamburg, meaning they had very little privacy. When they brought women back to the room for sex, they had to hope their bandmates would either clear out or be quiet.
“We kept quiet, kept our faces to the wall and pretended to be asleep,” McCartney said in The Beatles Anthology about the night Harrison lost his virginity. “The rest of us were a little more experienced by then. George was a late starter.”
According to McCartney, he would typically get out of the room quickly if Lennon was in there with a woman.
“That was the intimacy we had. We would always be walking in on each other and things. I’d walked in on John and seen a little bottom bobbing up and down with a girl underneath him. It was perfectly normal: you’d go, ‘Oh s***, sorry,’ and back out the room.”
Lennon had a markedly different reaction to walking in on McCartney, though.
“One time Paul had a chick in bed and John came in and got a pair of scissors and cut all her clothes into pieces and then wrecked the wardrobe,” Harrison said. “He got like that occasionally; it was because of the pills and being up too long.”
John Lennon took more pills than Paul McCartney
Because of the late-night shows and terrible sleeping conditions, The Beatles began taking stimulants to keep them awake during the day. Lennon took more than his bandmates, and they tended to make him aggressive.
“He got pretty wired,” Harrison said. “The down, adverse effects of drink and Preludins, where you’d be up for days, were that you’d start hallucinating and getting a bit weird. John would sometimes get on the edge. He’d come in in the early hours of the morning and be ranting, and I’d be lying there pretending to be asleep, hoping he wouldn’t notice me.”
McCartney was far more cautious about the pills.
“My dad was a very wise working-class guy, so he saw it all coming,” McCartney said. “As a lad going out to Hamburg on my own, I’d been forewarned: ‘Drugs and pills: WATCH OUT, right?’ So in Hamburg, when the Preludin came around I was probably the last one to have it. It was: ‘Oh, I’ll stick to the beer, thanks.'”
While he eventually did take the Preludin, he was always “frightened” of the way it would impact him.
The Beatles bassist found the availability of sex overwhelming
McCartney also found the availability of sex overwhelming, but he was more inclined to indulge in this.
“Hamburg was quite an eye-opener,” he said. “We went as kids and came back as … old kids! It was a sex shock.”
Sex had been far more taboo in Liverpool. When the band arrived in Hamburg, they could hardly believe how much freer things were.
“So we got a fairly swift baptism of fire into the sex scene,” McCartney said. “There was a lot of it about and we were off the leash.”
