With a thrilling finale suitable for the movies, a prop sledge, the legendary Rosebud, from the 1941 movie Citizen Kane has auctioned for $14.7 million including fees.
The piece was sold by Heritage Auctions in their Hollywood Signature Auction and now becomes one of the most valuable movie props ever sold.
The sledge is a key plot device in Citizen Kane, often described as the greatest movie ever made. As media tycoon and politician Charles Foster Kane dies, he says a single word, “Rosebud”. A newsreel reporter is sent to find out what he meant. His hunt for the meaning of Rosebud tells the story of Kane’s life.
Finally, audiences discover that Rosebud was the toy sledge he feared losing as he was taken from his newly wealthy family and into the care of his new guardian, Thatcher, the banker.
In some of the most famous images in cinema history, the little child’s toy is shown being burned in a furnace after Kane’s death.
A number of sleds were made for the movie and three have now been sold.
Three sleds were made in balsa wood to be burned at the end of the film. One survived and was bought by director Steven Spielberg for $60,500 in 1982.
Orson Welles’ masterpiece is full of arresting imagery. Here Charles Foster Kane goes on the campaign trail.
More robust sledges were used for scenes earlier in the film. One of these was given away in a fan competition. The winner, Arthur Bauer, kept it for half a century before auctioning it for $233,500 in 1996.
This Rosebud seems to have been returned to storage in the Paramount lot where RKO Pictures, who made Kane, were based. It probably lost its rails to a wartime metal drive, but survived until 1984, when it was handed to an astonished Joe Dante, the director of The Gremlins, during a clear-out.
“One of the crew who knew I was a fan of vintage films came to me with a wood prop and said, ‘They’re throwing out all of this stuff. You might want this,’” Dante recalled in a recent interview. “I’m not sure he knew what the sled was, but he must have had some inkling, or why else would he have asked me?
“I was astonished. Since I am a huge fan of the movie, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll be glad to take it.’”
Dante, who placed the item in some of his own movies, paid for testing to confirm the prop’s authenticity.
The item was sold without an estimate before sale, but Citizen Kane items are extremely valuable. The Oscars won for the film, by director, star, and co-creator Orson Welles, and co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz have both been sold, making $861,542 and $588,455, respectively.
The Rosebud sledge is now the second most valuable movie prop ever sold. Last December Heritage sold a pair of the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland as Dorothy in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. The shoes made $32.5 million.
