Two letters foreshadowing the breakup of The Beatles have gone on sale for a combined asking price of $550,000 (over £420,000).
Sent in 1969 to John Eastman and Lee Eastman – father and brother of Linda Eastman, who would marry Paul McCartney that March – the letters discuss the band’s split in legal terms.
One letter, dated January of that year, carries the signatures of all four Beatle members and is addressed to their lawyer, John. It reads: “We retain you and authorise you to act on our behalf in negotiations in respect of all contracts proposed.”
The second letter, sent just three months later, bears only the signatures of John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. Its purpose was to sever their professional relationship with Lee Eastman, who was then their business manager.
The letter states: “This is to inform you of the fact that you are not authorised to act or to hold yourself out as the attorney or legal representative of ‘The Beatles’ or of any of the companies which the Beatles own or control.”
The two letters are priced at $225,000 and $325,000 respectively, by the historic document preservation group Moments in Time.
McCartney would keep working with the Eastmans – having married Linda in the interval between the letters – but the rest of the band would move to The Rolling Stones’s manager Allen Klein.
The tersely worded letter, as reported by Rolling Stone, was referred to as the "split letter" when it initially went to auction in 2005, selling for £48,000 to a private collector. The group didn’t announce their dissolution until almost a year after the second letter was sent.
Beatles memorabilia is notorious for fetching high amounts at auction. In 2011, a Canadian dentist made headlines when he paid nearly £20,000 for one of John Lennon’s discarded teeth.
The breakup letters make pretty banal keepsakes by comparison, but they offer the chance to witness the end of a historic collaboration, typed out in black and white.
