Fact Check: Posts Say Paul McCartney Returned Love Letters to John Lennon's Former Wife After She Sold Them. Here's What We Found
Claim:
Viral social media posts shared in 2024 authentically describe Paul McCartney buying letters from John Lennon’s first marriage and returning them to Lennon’s former wife with a note telling her not to sell her memories.
Rating:
What's True:
Cynthia Lennon sold several letters from John Lennon after the couple divorced in 1968, and Paul McCartney did purchase one, frame it and return it to her. However …
What's False:
… McCartney returned a single John Lennon letter, not multiple letters, and he did so several years, not several days, after the letters were sold. There is no evidence that McCartney included a note telling Cynthia Lennon not to sell her memories.
In May 2024, a number of viral posts on Facebook, X, LinkedIn and other social media platforms claimed that after John Lennon's first wife, Cynthia Lennon, sold the couple's love letters following their divorce, John Lennon's Beatles bandmate Paul McCartney bought the letters and returned them to her.
The claim has circulated in various forms since at least December 2014, when a Redditor made a post in the r/TodayILearned subreddit reading, "TIL that Paul McCartney bought letters from John that Cynthia Lennon was selling at an auction and then returned them to her."
TIL that Paul McCartney bought letters from John that Cynthia Lennon was selling at an auction and then returned them to her
by u/Mississippi_Queen14 in todayilearned
The exact version of the claim that circulated in May 2024, which includes the details of McCartney purchasing the letters only days after Cynthia Lennon sold them and including a note encouraging her not to sell her memories, appears to have been first posted by X user @An3ita5, who shared it in a thread on May 6, 2024.
By the end of that month, posts repeating the same text appeared across multiple social platforms. One Facebook post dated May 15, 2024, had garnered more than 140,000 reactions and 31,000 shares at the time of this writing.
It is true that McCartney purchased, framed and returned one of the letters Cynthia Lennon sold after her 1968 divorce from John Lennon. However, some details of the viral posts were incorrect or unproven. First, McCartney bought and returned only one of the letters, not all of them. Second, there is no evidence to support the claim that McCartney included a note reading, "Never sell your memories. Love, Paul McCartney." Finally, the posts do not accurately reflect the timeline of the events, which took place over several years, not a few days. Because of these inaccurate or unproven details, we have rated the claim a "Mixture" of truths and falsehoods.
Cynthia Lennon, who married John Lennon in 1962 and gave birth to their son, Julian, in 1963, told the story of the sold-and-returned letter in her 2005 memoir, "John":
When John and I had divorced, I sold this letter, along with several others John wrote. I was touched and delighted when, some years afterwards, the owner put it up for sale again and Paul McCartney bought it. He had it framed and presented it to me and Julian as a gift.
Cynthia Lennon went on to describe McCartney's gift as "an immensely thoughtful gesture which we appreciated deeply."
An Oct. 2, 2005, Washington Post article about Cynthia Lennon's memoir repeated the anecdote:
Her divorce settlement with Lennon left her far from wealthy, and she has worked as a restaurateur, bed-and-breakfast owner and TV personality. She sold her old drawings and Lennon's love letters (Paul McCartney once bought one, framed it and sent it to her as a gift), and wrote a thinner, halfhearted account in the late 1970s that succeeded mostly at enraging John and Yoko.
Although Cynthia Lennon's memoir and the Washington Post article corroborate the broad strokes of the claim made by social media posts, both make it clear that McCartney bought and returned only one letter, not the couple's entire correspondence.
Additional details included in the viral social media posts, namely McCartney's inclusion of a note and the assertion that these events took place over a few days, appear to be later embellishments to the story and are not backed up by the evidence.
The Letter
John Lennon wrote the letter in question on Aug. 23, 1965, while the Beatles were on tour in the United States. In it, he primarily described how much he missed his and Cynthia Lennon's son, Julian, who was 2 years old at the time.
In her memoir "John," the same book in which she first told the story about McCartney's thoughtful gesture, Cynthia Lennon included a lengthy excerpt from the letter, which reads in part:
I spend hours in dressing rooms and things thinking about the times I've wasted not being with [Julian] — and playing with him — you know I keep thinking of those stupid b*st*rd times when I keep reading bloody newspapers and other s*** whilst he's in the room with me and I've decided it's ALL WRONG! He doesn't see enough of me as it is and I really want him to know and love me, and miss me like I seem to be missing both of you so much.
"His letters weren't always so reflective," Cynthia Lennon wrote of her former husband, "but that one wasn't unusual. He found it easier, in many ways, to say what he really meant in a letter."
The memoir isn't the only book that reproduces text from the letter. Several years later, the 2012 book "The John Lennon Letters" republished it along with 284 other letters written by the onetime Beatle.
In an introductory paragraph, the book's editor, Hunter Davies, mentioned that although the letter originally ran seven pages long, only the two final pages survive. Davies speculated that Cynthia Lennon may have either destroyed the letter's first five pages, "finding them too painful to read," or simply lost them in one of her many moves.
Sold Again
Davies also noted that Cynthia Lennon sold the letter a second time in 1991, which means it was no longer in her possession by the time she made the story public in her 2005 memoir. According to auction house Christie's, which handled the sale, the letter ended up selling for £3,080, roughly the equivalent of $12,000 in today's currency, according to currency converter websites Oanda and US Inflation Calculator.
Although Cynthia Lennon did not mention in her memoir that she had once again sold the letter, she noted that she harbored mixed feelings about the letter despite her appreciation for McCartney's generosity in returning it to her. "I know John loved and missed us and that he meant every word," she wrote. "But he didn't change."
In sum, viral social media posts from May 2024 telling the story of McCartney's decision to return John Lennon's love letters to Cynthia Lennon included both true information and incorrect or unsubstantiated information. Cynthia Lennon did sell letters from her former husband after their divorce, and McCartney did purchase one, frame it and return it to her. However, details regarding the number of letters involved and the timeline of events are incorrect, and we have found no evidence to support McCartney including a note telling Cynthia Lennon not to sell her memories. As such, we have rated this claim as a "Mixture" of true and false or unproven information.
Sources:
"And She Loved Him." Washington Post, 31 Jan. 2024. www.washingtonpost.com, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2005/10/03/and-she-loved-him/008ecd42-1d14-4a48-a7d5-29ca5c684862/.
Currency Converter | Foreign Exchange Rates | OANDA. https://www.oanda.com/currency-converter/en/. Accessed 5 June 2024.
Inflation Calculator | Find US Dollar's Value From 1913-2024. 15 May 2024, https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/.
JOHN LENNON, An Important Two Page Fragment of an Autograph Letter, Signed, [n.d. but August 23rd 1965] to Cynthia, Telling Her of His Feelings for Their Son, Julian. Christie's. https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-3440384. Accessed 5 June 2024.
Lennon, Cynthia. John. Hodder & Stoughton, 2012.
Lennon, John. The John Lennon Letters. Little, Brown, 2012.
