Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz – one of four remaining pairs – have been auctioned for $28 million ($32.5 million with fees) to become the most valuable piece of movie memorabilia ever sold.
They replace the billowing white dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in the Seven Year Itch says Heritage Auctions, who sold the shoes last Friday, December 6.
The journey from Oz to their new unnamed owner, via a frantic 15-minute bidding war, was long and perilous.
And, it’s a story worthy of Hollywood’s most famous fairy tale.
The shoes were sold in 1970 – for $15,000 – and travelled the US in an attraction run by owner Martin Shaw. While on loan at the Judy Garland birthplace museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota in 2005 they were stolen.
The FBI tracked them down in 2018 and staged a sting operation to catch the thief.
Unfortunately for that thief, Terry Jon Martin, the shoes were not valuable because, as he believed, they were studded with real rubies, but because of their extraordinary place in American popular culture.
That made them worthless to him. How could you sell the best known pair of shoes in American history secretly? So, he passed them to a friend.
Martin was convicted of the theft after a guilty pleas last year. A career criminal in terminal ill-health who had been goaded into the theft by a friend, Martin will not have to spend any more time in prison as a result of the conviction.
Back in Shaw’s hands, the sale could go ahead.
Dorothy trips down the Yellow Brick Road in the sparling shoes, made by Innes Shoe Co.
It’s believed that six pairs of ruby slippers were made for the filming of the Wizard of Oz.
In the movie they play a vital role, helping Dorothy leave Oz for her home in Kansas. The shoes were written as silver, but ruby red made a better impression on the cutting-edge technicolour film used in 1939.
Two pairs of the shoes are at the Smithsonian. But they don’t match, and this pair are made up of the missing shoes from those two pairs.
In 2000, another of the surviving pairs was sold in New York, realising $666,000. A pair donated to the LA Museum of Motion Pictures was bought by Steven Spielberg and Leonardo DiCaprio for $2 million in 2012.
Heritage Auctions executive vice president, Joe Maddalena, told the New York Times: “There is simply no comparison between Judy Garland’s ruby slippers and any other piece of Hollywood memorabilia.”
On this evidence he is right.
