John Lennon Tried His Best to ‘Hurt’ 1 of the Beatles He Admired the Most
Each of the Beatles was well acquainted with John Lennon’s vicious streak. Lennon had a temper and could be biting in his treatment of others. He could even be callous towards people he liked. In the earliest days of The Beatles, Lennon could be quite cruel to the bandmate with whom he was the closest.
John Lennon wasn’t kind to one of the Beatles
One of the original Beatles was Stuart Sutcliffe. He and Lennon became friends at art school, and they named the band together. While they were close, Lennon had a habit of treating him poorly.
“He used to treat Stuart [Sutcliffe] really badly at times, humiliate him in front of people,” Lennon’s friend, Bill Harry, told The Guardian. “At college girls would be chatting in the corridor, and when John walked by they’d shut up and shiver. He had a bit of an acid tongue. But if you stood up to him he liked that.”
Hunter Davies, who spent time with the band while writing the only authorized biography about them, also noted Lennon’s treatment of Sutcliffe. He added that Paul McCartney and George Harrison weren’t all that kind to him either.
“George and Paul appear to have been slightly jealous of Stu and his influence with John, not that outsiders could see how much John admired Stu,” he wrote in The Beatles. “John picked on Stu all the time and hurt him when he could. Paul, following John’s lead, also began to pick on Stu, even though he was interested in art and, like John, was getting from Stu a lot of new ideas and fashions.”
Sutcliffe’s girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr, said that while Lennon loved Sutcliffe, he didn’t treat him well.
“They had similar outlooks on life, and attitudes,” Sutcliffe’s girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr said in the book Lennon: The Definitive Biography by Ray Coleman. “John really loved Stuart, in the best sense, but Stuart was never made aware of that love and worried about it. John always had to be the hard man, teasing Stuart about his looks, his bass playing, his singing, anything. Stuart took it all, and, being highly intelligent and sensitive, never replied much. John would know how far he could go.”
John Lennon felt a level of guilt about the Beatles’ death
Sutcliffe left the band to pursue art. Not long after, he unexpectedly died of a brain hemorrhage. His death devastated Lennon, and his wife, Cynthia, noted that he felt some guilt about it.
“He found it so hard to talk about, or show, his true feelings,” Cynthia wrote in her book John. “Later he talked to me sometimes about Stuart and about the awful sense of loss and guilt he felt. He agonized over why he had lived and Stuart had died, and whether there was anything he could have done. But these glimpses of his real feelings were rare. Most of the time he kept it all deep inside himself. In that letter he also told me that he had lost his voice — perhaps a symptom of unexpressed grief.”
He wrote about Stuart Sutcliffe in ‘In My Life’
According to Yoko Ono, Lennon spoke about Sutcliffe often throughout his life. He also referenced him in the song “In My Life.”
“All these places have their moments/With lovers and friends I still can recall/Some are dead and some are living/In my life I’ve loved them all,” he wrote.
