The Complaint Letter That Yellowed

At the O Street Museum in Washington, D.C.—a warren of secret doors and stacked memorabilia inside a Dupont Circle mansion—hangs a piece of paper that quietly undermines a very famous song. It is a complaint letter from John Lennon to his laundry service, dispatched with the particular fury of a man whose whites had come back yellow.

The man who asked us to imagine no possessions was, it turns out, quite attached to his own. There is a fitting comedy in this. "Imagine no possessions" is the line people most often use to prove Lennon was either a saint or a hypocrite, depending on which pew they occupy. The laundry letter lands squarely in the second camp, though it does so gently. It is not the crime of a monster; it is the small, human irritation of someone who paid to have his shirts cleaned and received them discolored instead.

The best detail is the signature. Having filed his grievance, Lennon signed off with an autograph roughly the size of the complaint itself—a great looping flourish at the bottom of the page. Whether this was reflex or a small flex is hard to say. A Beatle spends years learning to sign fast and large for crowds; perhaps the hand simply defaults to performance even when addressing a dry cleaner.

The document belongs to the peculiar genre of the celebrity gripe, artifacts that survive precisely because ordinary annoyance looks strange coming from someone extraordinary. Beethoven left behind furious notes to copyists over botched manuscripts. Marilyn Monroe kept receipts. The famous, we forget, still have to deal with the machinery of daily life—the plumbing, the invoices, the shirts that come back the wrong color.

The O Street Museum, run by the nonprofit Mansion on O, is the right home for such a thing. The building holds more than 100 rooms crammed with objects, plus around 70 hidden doors disguised as bookcases and mirrors. In a place built on the pleasure of finding what you weren't looking for, a peevish note about laundry sits comfortably beside grander relics.

Somewhere, presumably, the offending shirt is long gone. The letter about it outlasted the man, the marriage, the laundry service, and possibly the shirt itself—preserved because he happened to be John Lennon, and because he couldn't resist signing it big.