John Lennon’s ‘Smutty’ Love Letter to First Wife Going up for Auction

A piece of John Lennon’s romantic history is up for sale. Christie’s is auctioning off a letter the late musician penned to his first wife, Cynthia Powell, in 1962, before the Beatles hit it big. The auction house is expecting it to fetch between $40,000 and $50,000.

Lennon was 21 when he penned the note to Powell from Hamburg, where he and his bandmates were performing their first residency.

The note is “a stream-of-consciousness letter written over five days.” It included both personal thoughts and news for Lennon’s then-girlfriend.

Lennon got cheeky as he wrote parts of the letter—”I wish I was on the way to your flat with the Sunday papers and chocies and a throbber”—and serious in other passages, including when referring to the death of his the Beatles’ original bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe.

In the letter, Lennon discouraged Powell from moving in with Paul McCartney’s girlfriend, Dot Rhone. He also wrote about his band’s shows at the club, wished his girlfriend a Happy Easter, and expressed how much he was missing her while away.

Christie’s Expert Explains John Lennon’s Letter

“It shows us Lennon and Cynthia as two young people in love, and gives us a wonderfully carefree, unguarded view of Lennon in particular,” Thomas Venning, Christie’s head of books and manuscripts, told CNN. “You sense that life is quite simple for him at this point. It’s about playing music with the Beatles and going home to see Cynthia.”

According to Christie’s, the letter is from “a formative period” for the band. At the time, they were “honing their musical skills and defining their look.”

“He is absolutely living in the present, exhausted but happy, worried about nothing more pressing than Paul snoring in the bunk above him,” Venning said. “Within six months everything would change, and life would never be as simple again.”

At the time of the letter, Lennon and Powell had been together four years. They tied the knot about four months after Lennon penned the note. A year after that, the couple welcomed their son, Julian. They called it quits in 1968, one year before Lennon married Yoko Ono.

Lennon was assassinated in 1980. Powell, who got married three more times during her life, died of cancer in 2015.