For a cool million-dollars-plus, a pair of the famed and uncommon Ruby Slippers from The Wizard of Oz can take a hallowed place in your very personal shoe rack.
The slippers, worn on-screen by Judy Garland within the 1939 basic MGM musical, are up for public sale at Heritage Auctions, with the present bid at $812,500. Add within the purchaser’s premium – a payment paid by the profitable bidder to the public sale home – and the value is at the moment at $1,015,625.
The public sale continues by way of December 7.
With 4 pairs of Ruby Slippers identified to exist – together with a pair within the Smithsonian – the footwear up for public sale are seen in probably the most iconic scenes of the movie, together with the “We’re Off to See the Wizard” dances, the Poppy Area scene, the Faucet Your Heels scene and the shot through which the Depraved Witch practically electrocutes herself by attempting to take away the slippers from Dorothy’s toes prematurely.
However right here’s the place it will get sophisticated: The 2 slippers – a proper and a left – up for public sale belong to 2 separate pairs used within the movie, with the Smithsonian proudly owning the mismatched “sister” pair.
In any case, the client of the footwear on the market can relaxation assured of the display screen lineage. The public sale description states, “Taken collectively, these are the first pairs of footwear worn by Judy Garland by way of many of the movie, together with all however just a few of probably the most memorable scenes.”
The Heritage Public sale pair additionally has an enchanting post-movie historical past: After the now-legendary MGM Public sale in 1970 when an enormous trove of MGM objects have been offered off by the studio, a person named Michael Shaw took possession of footwear. From the Eighties on, Shaw displayed his Ruby Slippers across the nation, together with on the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, the place they have been stolen in 2005.
The Shaw slippers remained lacking till 2018, when the FBI, performing on a tip, recovered the footwear, which, in line with the Related Press on the time, had been taken by an “ageing reformed mobster” named Terry Jon Martin, who mistakenly believed that the footwear have been lined in actual jewels quite than rhinestones. (Martin was indicted in 2023 and pleaded responsible to a cost of theft of main art work; earlier this 12 months, Martin, in hospice care with most cancers, was spared jail time as a result of his ailing well being, although he was ordered to pay $23,500 – in $300 month-to-month installments – in restitution to the museum.)
The subsequent chapter within the slippers’ historical past might be made on December 7, but when $1M isn’t in your price range, possibly think about one other Oz merchandise on sale on the public sale: One of many pointed hats worn within the movie by Margaret Hamilton because the Depraved Witch of the West. Often called the “Flying Hat,” the hat on the market may be seen within the movie’s twister scene, when, in line with the public sale description, “a terrified Dorothy (Judy Garland) friends out the window of her room to see Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) using her bike within the whirlwind of the twister that has lifted the home into the sky. Earlier than Dorothy’s eyes, Miss Gulch morphs from the bike-peddling spinster into the Depraved Witch flying on her broomstick.”
The beginning bid: $100,000.
Hat For Sale
Heritage Auctions
