Jun 25, 2024 - Sale 2674

Sale 2674 - Lot 18

Price Realized: $ 3,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
(MUSICIANS.) JOPLIN, JANIS. Autograph Letter Signed, "I love, loved?, you, / Janis," to Peter De Blanc, in purple pencil, expressing sadness and resentment at his having preferred to be with his other friends and their drugs to being with her, complaining that he did not come to comfort her after he received her note, and explaining that finding him at Maryanne's place instead of keeping their date was devastating enough for her to go home with a bottle and cry. 3 pages, 4to, written on two sheets of onionskin paper; faint dampstaining along right edge, scattered wrinkles and folds. With the original envelope, addressed in holograph and dated: "7-12 4:30 P.M. / Peter." Np, [12 July 1965]
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"Well so it's happened again. I didn't think it would. I thought I wouldn't ever hurt & cry for you again. But I am, so...? Why?
"Well, just the fact that you are loaded again & identifying in that would still would [sic] be enough to make me sad. (As it did this morning... I woke up & of course you weren't there . . . .) . . . . Too busy, I trust. 'Amphetamine imperative.' So, I cried then. Because I was hurt. Not only because you had been so uncaring about my feelings . . . but also because you had preferred your friends, duties, & associated crystal to my love & company.
". . . [M]y back-of-my-head that was smiling & thinking of you was beginning to be hip to the fact that you weren't concerned and hadn't come by & indeed must be perfectly happy where you were . . . !
". . . I wanted to . . . disprove my feeling that you were--as I had thought--over at Maryanne's just sort of happily not even thinking or caring about me! So I went . . . to see & you were, and, with bottle, I returned home--now to cry . . . . [W]e even had a date, JEEZ!--but diggit, you haven't come by.
"Wow Peter, I'm crying... where are you & all my hopes?"
Janis Joplin (1943-1970), whose blues-belting voice assaulted the psychedelic scene of the late 1960s, hid a tumultuous inner life, whose revelation in this letter helps explain how she became the symbol of power and passion that she remains today. Before her rise as the lead of Brother & the Holding Company in the summer of 1966, Joplin had taken a break from her life in San Francisco, leaving behind a lover there: Peter De Blanc. De Blanc supported Joplin's determination to sober up by moving to her home town of Port Arthur, TX, where she attended school and wrote to her lover. Their plan to marry was broken off when she learned that De Blanc was expecting a child with another woman, after which she returned to her former life in California and where, five years later, she died from a heroin overdose.