A film clip from the day John F Kennedy was killed in Dallas and his widow’s wedding dress have been sold at separate auctions for more than their estimates.
RR Auction sold a previously unseen, silent 8mm colour film clip showing the ill-fated Kennedy motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963. In New York, Bonhams auctioned Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s second wedding outfit.
The Dallas film also showed the limousine, with its police escort, carrying the mortally wounded Kennedy as it sped away from the murder seen to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where JFK was pronounced dead.
The clip, together with rights to show it, was sold for $137,500 on September 28. It went into the sale with a $100,000+ estimate.
Just 50 seconds in length, the Kennedy film was shot by a truck driver and remained in his family – the film cuts back to a family party scene – undiscovered for decades. It was sold by his grandson. A short clip has been aired in a new documentary, but the sale included otherwise exclusive rights.
Most film and photographs taken of the motorcade were confiscated as evidence, and this is the only known footage of the motorcade on North Stemmons Freeway, heading to the hospital.
Jackie Kennedy in 1961 as First Lady, she remained in the public eye after her husband’s murder.
After her husband’s murder, Jacqueline Kennedy remained a figure of public fascination. It’s thought her wedding to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, in 1968, was in part an attempt to secure the privacy the paparazzi wouldn’t grant her.
The Valentino wedding outfit she wore at the ceremony sold for triple its estimate to realise over $24,000.
The two-piece ensemble was unconventional and modern for the time, as Bonhams’ Marissa Speer explains:
“Jacqueline Kennedy’s 1968 couture ensemble is not only an important piece of fashion history marking the emergence of one of the most stylish women in the world—Jackie O—but it also showcases an important design in maison Valentino’s history. The eventual selling price of the dress of $24,320 was a testament to the rarity of the piece,” she said in a statement.
The dress came from friends of the Onassis family, who were given it after Aristotle’s death in 1975.
The Kennedy-Onassis wedding ring had been sold at auction for $2.6 million in 1996.
The Kennedy family remain in the public eye as a dynastic political force in the US.
John Kennedy’s short presidential term and murder has made him the most collected president in modern American history.
