A piece of wall from The Ed Sullivan Show’s set, signed by all four Beatles members when they made their historic first appearance on the program on February 9, 1964, is going up for bid as part of a Fab Four memorabilia auction this month.
The auction, which will feature over 20 Beatles-related collectibles, will take place on September 24 at Heritage Auctions’ Dallas location and at HA.com.
The 16-inch-by-48-inch wall section features the autographs of Ringo Starr, John Lennon, George Harrison and “Uncle” Paul McCartney along with doodles drawn by each Beatle.
“Put simply, no other autographed piece of Beatles memorabilia is as historic and well-documented as the wall from The Ed Sullivan Theater,” says Heritage Auctions executive Garry Shrum. “It’s … a treasure from the day music changed forever."”
According to the 2016 publication The Beatles Book, a Sullivan Show stagehand named Jerry Gort asked the band to sign the wall before they played their second set. Then, in September of ’64, the wall section wound up in a bin that was set to be dumped, but Gort rescued the historic item. He later gifted it to a wheelchair-using Beatles fan named Lofton Sproles, and the wall section was eventually sold multiple times in the ensuing years.
Bidding for the historic item will start at $600,000.
Also going on the block as part of the auction is a pair of Beatle boots owned and worn by Harrison, who gifted them to Stray Cats drummer Slim Jim Phantom in 1985 when they both were working on the album Blue Suede Shoes: A Rockabilly Session.
The boots, which feature an opening bid of $40,000, also feature Harrison’s humorously signed dedication “to Slim Jim with love from Fat George.”
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