A pair of red ruby slippers worn by the actress Judy Garland while playing Dorothy in the classic 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz sold at auction for $28 million on Saturday.
Heritage Auctions, based in Dallas, slapped a $3 million estimate on the slippers. Pre-sale bidding had taken the price up to $1.55 million before fierce phone bidding drove it up to $10 million within three minutes. After 15 minutes of drama, the gavel finally came down at the astonishing sum.
With the auction house’s fee tagged on, the unknown buyer will pay a total $32.5 million for the sequinned shoes.
Robert Wilonsky, Heritage Auctions’ vice-president, said almost 1,000 people had been tracking the slippers, with the house’s webpage displaying them hitting nearly 43,000 views by Thursday.
The red shoes were on show at the Judy Garland Museum in the late actor’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in 2005, when they were stolen after a thief smashed their glass display case. Their whereabouts was unknown until the FBI found the shoes a decade later. It turned out a man called Terry Martin, 77, was guilty – he had a long history of burglary and reportedly said he wanted to pull off “one last score.” He claimed that an old mob associate had told him that the slippers were adorned with real jewels. However, when he found out the “rubies” were in fact glass, he got rid of them.
As a result, Rhys Thomas, the author of The Ruby Slippers of Oz, wrote that the shoes have seen “more twists and turns than the Yellow Brick Road.”
The Judy Garland Museum was one of the bidders on Saturday. It had campaigned for donations to boost the cash raised by the city of Grand Rapids at its annual Judy Garland festival to buy them back. Minnesota lawmakers had also set aside $100,000, but $28 million ultimately proved too much.
After they sold, the auctioneer told the room that the previous auction record for a piece of entertainment memorabilia was $5.52 for the windswept white dress famously worn by Marilyn Monroe.
The auction in Dallas also included a hat worn by Margaret Hamilton, who played the original Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. It sold for $2.93m (buyer’s fees included).
One of the most memorable scenes in the movie involving the shoes is when Dorothy must click her heels together three times while repeating “There’s no place like home,” so she can leave Oz.
Several pairs of ruby slippers were worn by Garland during filming, but only four are known to have survived. One pair is on show at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
