TIME Magazine May 6, 1996 Volume 147, No. 19 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return to Contents page ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT PRICE CAMELOT? An auction of Jackie Kennedy's personal belongings draws throngs eager to pay a premium for history PAUL GRAY We like to think that we are the residing beneficiaries of humankind's slow, lurching ascent from the fens of superstition toward the cool empyrean of reason. Isaac Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants, the thinkers who preceded him, and we stand on Newton's, plus his successors'. Because of them, we can map the human genome system and fling spacecraft past Jupiter. We are much too busy and progressive, thank you, for the magic charms and potions and amulets that so bedazzled our dim ancestors. We clasp at this faith and manage to hold on in spite of the myriad irrationalities of daily life. But every so often some public event gives our congratulatory self-image a sharp blow to the chops. That happened again last week during a four-day mania on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The setting was the U.S. showroom of the auctioneer Sotheby's; the occasion, the public sale of 5,914 personal items belonging to the estate of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. And the outcome was not only a bewildering binge of conspicuous consumption but a perverse tribute, crass in some eyes and innocently romantic in others, to the allure of nostalgia and of the woman who single-handedly, and in many ways involuntarily, redefined the culture of celebrity. Everyone knew that Jackie's belongings would draw crowds. Sotheby's auctions of the effects of the Duchess of Windsor in 1987 and of Andy Warhol did so, and those people were not as famous and charismatic as Jackie, who hovered, Cheshire cat-like, in the public imagination for more than 30 years, her enigmatic smile evanescing into an invisible privacy where admirers were not welcome or allowed. The posthumous chance to enter this forbidden space and ooh and aah over--and maybe buy one of--Jackie's personal possessions figured to be irresistible to plenty of people, and Sotheby's was not disappointed in its expectations. Its fat, glossy catalog of the lots up for auction sold more than 100,000 copies (at $90 hardback, $45 paper). During the five days that the objects were on public view before the sale, roughly 40,000 people stood in line to make their way through Sotheby's galleries, eyeing the merchandise. But the hype and expectations fell stunningly short of what actually happened when the bidding finally began last Tuesday night. Ticket holders who had braved a gauntlet of security guards, bag searches, metal detectors and TV reporters to reach the auction room quickly realized they had boarded an elevator going nowhere but up. Experienced auctiongoers understood that the estimated sales prices in the Sotheby's catalog reflected an assessor's evaluation of fair market value, i.e., what an object would bring if it did not possess the added cachet of having belonged to someone famous. For things owned by Jackie, fair market value was obviously, at least to those familiar with the occult workings of renown, just the starting point. The tension and electricity in the auction room hummed around the question: How high the markup? Once the bidding and gavel pounding began, an answer quickly emerged: very high, unbelievably high. Perhaps the best indication on the opening night of the stratospheres ahead came with the offering of a small stool with a torn, faded and stained satin cover. Sotheby's had estimated its market value at $100 to $150. After a furious competition between three bidders, two in the room and one on the phone, the homely little piece was sold for $33,350. And so it went for the next three days of cascading inflation. Many of those who showed up to bid on the desiderata of celebrity were themselves celebrities. Film star Arnold Schwarzenegger, spouse of J.F.K.'s niece Maria Shriver, muscled up $772,500 for J.F.K.'s MacGregor Woods golf clubs, $134,500 for a Norman Rockwell painting of the President and $189,500 for a leather desk set. From a different latitude, singer Jimmy Buffett telephoned in a winning bid of $43,700 for a Jamie Wyeth lithograph of the President in a sailboat. Other buyers, though something less than household names, represented the glittering ranks of industry and society. Anthony J.F. O'Reilly, whose day job is ceo of the H.J. Heinz Co. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bought his Greek shipping-heiress wife Chryss the 40-carat diamond ring that Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis bestowed on Jackie for their engagement. Sotheby's had set its value at $500,000 to $600,000. O'Reilly paid $2.6 million. On the first day of the auction, Manhattan interior designer Juan Molyneux bought Jackie's engraved sterling-silver Tiffany tape measure for $48,875. Sotheby's ruled it would be worth $500 to $700. "When I bought the tape measure," says Molyneux, "the first thing I measured was my sanity." Wednesday's sale featured one of the auction's few pieces of genuine historical significance, the Louis XVI desk on which President John F. Kennedy signed the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Estimate: $20,000 to $30,000; sale price: $1,432,500. The buyer was that frequent successful bidder, Anonymous. And then there was the suddenly famous cigar humidor given to J.F.K. in 1961 by comedian Milton Berle. Marvin Shanken, publisher of the magazine Cigar Aficionado, set his sights on it because he worked as a high school volunteer during Kennedy's 1960 campaign for the presidency and, well, because he's the publisher of Cigar Aficionado. "I didn't think about what it would cost me," he says. "I only thought that I wanted it very badly." He expected to "pay a lot," he says, "but to me a lot was under $100,000." He wound up shelling out $574,500. Berle himself joined in the bidding for the humidor, which cost him $800 in 1961, but dropped out at $180,000. "Who knew at that time," he said of the days when he occasionally lunched and smoked with J.F.K. and contributed gag lines here and there to his speeches, "that the value would be that much. Who knew?" The same question reverberated after the Thursday sessions, which produced more eye-popping numbers. In 1962 a young John F. Kennedy Jr. was photographed toying with a pearl necklace around the neck of his smiling mother. Lynda and Stewart Resnick, owners of the Franklin Mint Museum, based in Philadelphia, bid $211,500 for what looks like the same triple-strand necklace of simulated (read fake) pearls, offered at $700 to $900. Says she: "I'm a child of the '60s, and the John Kennedy Camelot years were the last time a lot of us were really innocent. That's what this whole auction brings back." She innocently adds that the Franklin Mint will probably replicate the pearls, at $195 a set. Auction fever crossed time zones faster than Air Force One. In Chicago Ralph Goldenberg, whose wife Helyn is a senior vice president of Sotheby's, spent $63,000 to buy J.F.K.'s putter, a Robot K-44, and gave it to his business partner, Christopher Heymeyer. The latter is now a minor celebrity at the Board of Trade, where the two work. "Everybody on the trading floor says, 'There's the guy; his partner bought him the putter.' There's a huge excitement," Heymeyer says. "Everybody on the trading floor says, 'Can I see it? Can I touch it? Are you going to bring it down here?'" In Los Angeles, where the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz are worshipped, the denizens feasted on such an ephemeral moment. Attorney Ronald Palmieri, whose clients include Zsa Zsa Gabor, spent close to $5,000 on a set of 12 Wedgwood creamware dinner plates that he thinks will spice up interest in his dinner parties. "I would not buy a creamware dinner service for myself," Palmieri explains, "but it's hard to bring the A list to dinner in a party of 12, and this will certainly draw them. With the Kennedys' dinnerware, they will be there." By late Friday afternoon, with the final session winding down and the supply of Jackie and Camelot memorabilia drying up, the feeding frenzy at Sotheby's reached a climax. Three modest cushions, assessed at $50 to $100, were snapped up for $25,300. When it was all over, the total proceeds from the auction, which the upper ranges of Sotheby's estimates would have placed at about $4 million, came to $34.5 million. Even before the auction's astronomical proceeds had materialized, there were some nasty returns for the principal beneficiaries, Jackie's children Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and John Jr. "How viscerally cruel it was," wrote New York magazine, "for Caroline and John to auction off their mom as Home Shopping Network fodder." Last week, as the buying orgy intensified, a Kennedy family intimate who would comment only off the record called the auction "the pits." The source denies reports that the children, thanks to the complex terms of Jackie's will, are cash poor. "This auction is going to make them rich, rich, rich. They have a lot, but in this day and age does anyone have enough?" But other insiders assert that the auction, while its public garishness might have mortified Jackie, was her idea. Nancy Tuckerman, Jackie's White House social secretary and close friend until the former First Lady's death in May 1994, told Time that "Jackie did mention in her will that the children, if they wanted to, should have an auction. She said that would be the practical thing to do." Tuckerman remembers accompanying Jackie on periodic visits ("she was sentimental about possessions") to storage rooms housing her belongings. "She would say to me, 'I keep thinking about my children with all these things that have accumulated.'" Pierre Salinger, J.F.K.'s press secretary, confirms that Jackie discussed the idea of an auction with her children. "There were a number of things that were not for sale, that were given to the kids," says Salinger. He adds that the children rigorously culled their mother's mountains of things to select important and appropriate items for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston (which will also receive most of the $2.5 million from the catalog sales). In April 1995, Caroline and John donated a huge trove of items to the library, including Jackie's wedding dress, 38,000 pages of documents, 4,500 photographs and 200 artifacts and works of art. That there was still enough left over to fuel a four-day auction seems an important consideration to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose husband Richard was an insider in J.F.K.'s Administration and who herself is friendly with a number of the Kennedys. "There's a sense that all of the Kennedy family homes are so filled with mementos and pictures from the past that you do feel when you set foot in them as if you're drawn backward in time. While that is very interesting historically for people who visit, I've often wondered what it's like to live surrounded by so many memories and not be able to have your own family and future as the core of your home. It may well be that [the auction] was a way of not having [Caroline's and John's] own homes become museums." But what can explain the behavior of those who spent such outlandish sums to relieve Jackie's children of parcels of their property? Someone with the taste and means to drop a fortune on an Impressionist painting has at least the pleasure of owning and looking at something beautiful. What is the person who paid $85,000 for a cigarette lighter with an inscribed J on it supposed to do with the thing? Light cigarettes? Take it out at dinner parties and mention casually that it once belonged to Jackie? And wouldn't the other guests immediately loathe the confidence and the confider? The answer to the last question, not so many years ago, would have been a resounding yes. Class and taste are not, by definition, available for purchase. But the Jackie auction represents an apotheosis of a new sort of cultural aspiration--a personal connection to celebrity at, quite literally, any cost. A common refrain expressed among the crowds snaking around Sotheby's last week was the desire "to buy a piece of history." These were not, by and large, run-of-the-mill collectors, people who amass hordes of stuff centered on a particular interest or obsession. Nor were most of them there in the hope of turning a profit later on their acquisitions. Bruce Wolmer, editor in chief of Art & Auction magazine, says of the high-priced Jackie items, "Most of them will probably not hold their value over the long haul. They won't lose it completely; they won't go back to being $150, say. But a couple of years down the road it will be very hard for people to get all of what they've spent on this." Selling was the last thing on the mind of many of the triumphant bidders. Still, how long can even the euphoria of possession last? Louise Grunwald, a Manhattan friend of Jackie's, questions the motives of the eager buyers: "Some of it's got to be greed. Or is it to show your grandchild in 20 years, 'Look what I bought!'? But in 20 years that grandchild is not going to know who Jackie Kennedy was." The fear of this coming to pass may provide the best explanation for last week's Sotheby's shenanigans. Most Americans have never been keen on history--looking forward gets in the way of looking back--and the national memory bank seems to be shrinking further under the onslaught of instant electronic gratifications. But the post-World War II baby boomers--the ones who were in their mid-teens when Jack and Jackie entered the White House in 1961--formed a unique generation in the national progression. They were the first ones born in the era of commercial TV, the first to be identified and courted as a lucrative sub-adult market. They viewed the carefully polished romance of the Kennedy Administration during the years when they themselves were most passionate and idealistic. Then came Nov. 22, 1963, and the four days following, when the widowed Jackie stood erect, masking her grief under the gaze of a nation convulsed by it. After that, it seemed to some that things pretty much went to hell in the country at large, although Jackie lived on in glamorous and very public seclusion, and a lot of boomers wound up making a lot of money. Jackie's death two years ago saddened everyone, but it also reminded the boomers that they were entering their 50s and being crowded from below by younger people with different cultural experiences and no special fondness for the shared memories of their elders. The Jackie auction promised an opportunity to halt the slide toward death and anonymity, to grab some tangible relic from the days when the world seemed filled with hope and high spirits. This impulse was vain, of course, in two meanings of the word, if also understandably, foolishly human. Ennobling myths and fairy tales are not passed on through the knickknacks of heroes and heroines. --Reported by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Julie Grace/Chicago and Georgia Harbison and Ratu Kamlani/New York ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Image] Related Articles in Britannica Online [Image] Text Only