Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles

It wasn’t until a chance meeting in Sefton Park, where he and a friend had gone one midsummer afternoon to pick up girls, that Freddie and Julia struck up a fast acquaintance. Their encounter, as Freddie related it, read like a romantic-comedy script. He was strolling jauntily along a cobblestone path, dressed in a black bowler and fingering a cigarette holder, when he came upon “this little waif” perched on a wrought-iron bench. “As I walked past her, she said, ‘You look silly,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘You look lovely!’ and I sat down beside her.” Casting him a playful sidelong glance, Julia insisted he remove his “silly hat,” so, with impeccable timing, Freddie promptly flung it into the lake. It was the perfect gesture to win an invitation to go dancing and, ultimately, her heart. Julia had long been attracted to the kind of slapstick sensibility that Freddie Lennon personified. Like Freddie, “she would get a joke out of anything,” recalled an adoring nephew. “If the house was burning down around Judy, she’d come out laughing and smiling — she’d make a joke of it.”

Of all the Stanley sisters — all “real beauties ... real stunners,” according to a relative — only Julia knew how to exploit her precious asset. Instead of turning up her chin when a stranger gave her the once-over, Julia would flash a broad smile and wink knowingly at him. Men ogled her as often as they passed her. Only five foot two in high heels, with a full figure and large brown eyes that seemed to float in her face, Julia had an obvious, provocative beauty that exaggerated her appeal. “Judy was very feminine, she was beautiful,” explained her niece, “. . . never untidy. You never saw her with her hair undone. She went to bed with makeup on so that she’d look beautiful in the morning.”

But all the makeup in the world couldn’t attract the right kind of man. From the time she stepped out from her family’s grasp, Julia Stanley kept company with a succession of good-looking rascals with fast come-on lines and even faster escapes. Night after night, humming with energy, she made the rounds of local dance halls and breezy clubs, where the rootless crowd of dockers, soldiers, waiters, laborers, and after-hours sharks congregated. A spry dancer with a carefree sensuality, Julia found herself in great demand as a partner in the stylish jitterbug competitions that lasted into the early hours of morning. She could tell a joke as hard and bawdy as any man, which won her no shortage of admirers. And she sang—“with a voice like Vera Lynn,” it was said — at the drop of a hat.

At first glance, Freddie and Julia seemed like an improbable pair, but from the moment they met they were inseparable. Both tireless dreamers, they spent long days walking around Liverpool, hatching improbable schemes. They would open a shop, a pub, a café, a club where they’d take turns performing, Julia cracking one-liners, Freddie singing and playing the banjo. He had a pretty good voice, a husky tenor, and no shortage of charisma. The legendary Satchmo was a favorite, and Freddie had Jolson down cold, with all the gesticulations. Given the chance, he could rattle off crowd-pleasers all night. Given the chance. But Julia’s father not only disapproved of the marriage but demanded some sign of the couple’s self-support. Despite Freddie’s extravagant plans to perform, which earned his father-in-law’s indignation, there was nothing concrete. Instead of working, he spent his afternoons taking Julia’s young nephew, Stanley, for walks in the park: talking, thinking, dreaming, worrying.

Finally, Freddie escaped the dilemma by the route chosen most often by Liverpool men: he put to sea. He signed on to a ship headed toward the Mediterranean, working as a merchant navy steward. On board a succession of ocean liners, traveling between the Greek Islands, North Africa, and the West Indies, Freddie gained security, first as a bellboy and later as a headwaiter. He became a crew favorite because of his personable nature. Freddie was “a real charmer,” Julia told Mimi, “a people pleaser,” who never forgot a name or a passenger’s favorite song. People remembered seeing him weave among tables, “with a smile that sparkled in a room.” But seafaring, though pleasant, was an erratic interlude. Relatives recalled seeing Freddie back in Liverpool a few months after his first voyage, hoping without any real prospects to sail on another steamer. In the meantime, Freddie moved in with Julia’s family, allegedly at George Stanley’s behest, living off the fumes of his last paycheck. Calling himself by some stretch of imagination a “ship’s entertainer,” he auditioned for local theater managers, but without any luck. Julia urged Freddie to get something more solid, if only to appease her irascible father, but the situation became more dire by January 1940, at which time it was discovered that Julia had become pregnant.

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