LONDON — Eleanor Rigby: fact or fiction? That question, which has bedeviled Beatles fans for decades, may be answered in part by a 1911 hospital payroll sheet to be auctioned Thursday in London.
The document, sent by Paul McCartney in 1990 to the director of a music charity who had asked for funding, contains the signature of a scullery maid named “E. Rigby” who worked in a Liverpool hospital.
The director of the company auctioning the document thinks the woman who signed the payroll is the same Eleanor Rigby buried in 1939 in a Liverpool graveyard next to the church where McCartney met the young John Lennon.
“It’s intriguing that McCartney owned it because he says he created the song around a fictitious figure,” said Tom Owen of the Fame Bureau auction house.
Interest is so high that it’s estimated the document may fetch $750,000.
