Renata
Renata was a German girl who lived near where the Beatles played in Hamburg. In the early sixties when they were playing there she was under eighteen years old, and could only stay in the clubs watching The Beatles play until ten o'clock at night when the curfew was enforced by local policemen and all those under eighteen years old had their identification checked and were removed from the clubs.
She was different from most of The Beatles' girlfriends in the Hamburg days in that she didn't work in the Reeperbahn as a striptease artist or a hooker, and was just a regular young local girl.
While she sat watching the band play and they scanned the audience, she caught John Lennon's eye, and night after night as she sat there watching him, he started to fall for her. As John's bandmate Paul remembers: "There were some really nice chicks that we had our eyes on who would have to go home. There was one called Renata, who John fell for quite heavily."
Due to the fact that John slept til late in the day due to his exhausting late night work, and Renata having to follow the curfew they could spend little time together, and this coupled with the fact that John had a girlfriend at home that he very much loved called Cynthia who would come to visit him in Hamburg now and then, the relationship never progressed very far and wasn't pursued at all after The Beatles stopped playing Hamburg gigs and went on to worldwide fame.
SOURCES: various Beatles and solo biographies
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