The sidewalks of Lower Broadway in downtown Nashville are filled with people moving among neon-lit venues owned by celebrity musicians: Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock ‘n’ Roll Steakhouse, Jason Aldean’s Kitchen & Rooftop Bar, Miranda Lambert’s Casa Rosa. The Hard Rock Café, which opened in 1994, when the neighborhood could still reasonably be called eclectic, sits at the far edge of the strip, overlooking the Cumberland River. One evening last November, Julien’s Auctions took over a private room at the restaurant for a three-day sale in honor of the company’s twentieth anniversary. There was a spotlighted stage full of objects that musicians had worn or touched or played: a scratched amber ring that Janis Joplin wore onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival, in 1967; Prince’s gold snakeskin-print suit, small enough to fit on an adolescent-size mannequin; ripped jeans that had belonged to Kurt Cobain.
In the past year, the fine-art market has cooled, owing to uncertainty about the economy, but prices for celebrity-adjacent objects keep going up. A few weeks before the Julien’s event, Sotheby’s had auctioned off Freddie Mercury’s estate, drawing the most bidders the house had seen in two decades. “There was zero rationality to the valuations,” Chase McCue, the director of memorabilia at Hard Rock International, told me. “His mustache comb went for almost two hundred thousand.” The sale brought in more than fifteen million dollars, nearly quadruple the high estimate.
When a blue-chip auction house such as Sotheby’s or Christie’s handles a celebrity estate, it’s often because the estate includes valuable collections of contemporary art, like David Bowie’s, or jewelry, like Wallis Simpson’s. From its start, in 2003, Julien’s, which is based in Los Angeles, has focussed on pop-culture ephemera. In 2014, the company’s co-founder Darren Julien appeared on a short-lived A&E show, “Celebrity Home Raiders,” visiting the homes of third-tier stars—Debbie Gibson, David Cassidy—and appraising their possessions. On the program, Julien, then in his mid-forties, looked fresh-faced and nervous, like a J.V. football coach in his first huddle. When I met him in Nashville, he wore a designer shirt and spoke with relaxed confidence. Julien’s holds the record for selling the most expensive glove (Michael Jackson’s) and the most expensive gown (Marilyn Monroe’s) at auction. Thirteen guitars have sold publicly for more than a million dollars; Julien’s sold five of them. “This is the only specialty auction house in the world that does entertainment at this level, and with such a wide breadth and depth—I mean, anyone from Mary Pickford to Amy Winehouse,” Leila Dunbar, a former director of collectibles at Sotheby’s, told me. “They did the Ringo Starr sale! You don’t get much better than a Beatle.” And yet Julien has a remarkably unfraught relationship to objects. He doesn’t own much memorabilia himself, and the particular excesses of the collector’s mind-set—the pride of the completist, the devouring appetite of the superfan—seem at odds with his cheerful, pragmatic demeanor.
Hours before the Nashville sale began, I found Julien bent over his laptop. He apologized for being distracted. “People have this vision of us as this massive company,” he said. But he handles many administrative tasks himself. Bidders for the auction’s highest-profile lots had to register in advance, and Julien was trying to ascertain whether the prospective clients actually had enough money to pay for them. “Sometimes it’s obvious, and sometimes you have to poke around on LinkedIn,” he said.
As the room started to fill, I talked with Chad Cobain, an affable man in a flax-colored cardigan and checkered Vans. Chad had consigned a custom-made, left-handed sky-blue Fender Mustang, the last guitar played by Kurt Cobain, his brother. Kurt died, by suicide, in 1994, when Chad was fifteen. After the memorial service, Courtney Love, Kurt’s widow, presented Chad with the guitar. Black masking tape covered the logo on the strap—Kurt’s gesture of anti-corporate protest. Chad, who is right-handed, could never play the guitar very well. By the early two-thousands, he had stashed it in the closet of the one-bedroom apartment that he shared with his wife in Seattle. The sentiment had worn off; the guitar mostly made him nervous. “I couldn’t afford to insure it—I was just worried about it all the time,” he said. Chad reached out to Sotheby’s, where Julien was working as a contractor. At the time, Julien’s appraisal—thirty thousand dollars—struck Chad as too low; he held on to the guitar, eventually lending it to the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, which kept it on display, alongside Grandmaster Flash’s turntables and Jimi Hendrix’s silk kimono, for eighteen years.
In 2015, the cardigan that Kurt wore during Nirvana’s appearance on “MTV Unplugged” sold for a hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars; four years later, it went for more than twice that. (Both sales were handled by Julien’s.) Two of Kurt’s guitars, a 1959 Martin D-18E, from the “Unplugged” show, and a 1969 Fender Mustang, from the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, also auctioned by Julien’s, became the most and second most expensive guitars to be sold publicly—going for six million and four million dollars, respectively. (Material owned by celebrities who died young, like Cobain, often fetches a premium; an early death imbues objects with an added allure, and also means that supplies are limited. Julien told me that Cobain memorabilia is particularly collectible, because Nirvana’s music appeals both to baby boomers and to wealthy millennials, increasing the likelihood of a bidding war.)
In September, 2023, Chad left Julien a voice mail. “I was thinking, Maybe in five years I’d sell it,” he told me. Julien returned the call within minutes; a few weeks later, Chad agreed to consign the Fender. In Nashville, he seemed a little stunned. “It feels like this all happened two weeks ago,” he told me. Julien’s had given the guitar a low estimate of a million dollars. Chad told me that he had asked what kinds of people were likely to bid, and was told, basically, hedge-fund managers. “I was, like, ‘O.K., gross,’ ” he said, shrugging. “But it makes sense.”
The Fender was onstage, surrounded by a collection of Kurt ephemera: notebook pages covered in doodles and tortured ramblings, an empty pack of American Spirit cigarettes, an argyle sweater. These objects had come to Julien’s from a man who had been Kurt’s roommate in rehab. In early April, 1994, Kurt climbed over a wall to escape the facility, leaving his possessions behind; a week later, he was dead. Whereas certain kinds of memorabilia—baseball cards and comic books among them—are more valuable in pristine condition, the opposite is often true of celebrity-owned objects, whose buyers prefer a bodily trace of the former owner. (The “Unplugged” cardigan, which was until recently the most expensive sweater ever sold at auction, had a small amount of something brown and crusty, possibly dried vomit, in a pocket.)
Chad looked up at his brother’s jeans on the stage. The auction house’s high estimate was twenty thousand dollars. (They ended up selling for more than four hundred thousand.) “Courtney gave me a bunch of his clothes, too. I just wore them, and then I probably gave them to Goodwill,” Chad said. “Looking at this, I’m, like, Oh, man. But I wasn’t thinking about the hedge-fund managers when I was sixteen.”
Two years ago, Kim Kardashian, an occasional bidder at Julien’s auctions—she once bought a velvet jacket owned by Michael Jackson as a gift for her six-year-old daughter—reached out to Julien with an idea. For the red carpet of the Met Gala, Kardashian wanted to borrow the backless columnar dress that Marilyn Monroe wore when she serenaded John F. Kennedy at his forty-fifth-birthday party. In 2016, Julien’s had sold the dress for nearly five million dollars. Julien approached the owner, the L.A. Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum, on Kardashian’s behalf. The negotiations were delicate. The dress was fragile; Monroe had been sewn into it hours before she sang to Kennedy. Ripley’s suggested that Kardashian wear a replica. “Kim doesn’t do replicas,” Julien told them. The museum ultimately agreed to lend the original. Julien said that he “caught a lot of grief” from fashion historians for facilitating the loan. (A Fashion Institute of Technology professor told People that Kardashian’s wearing the dress was “irresponsible and unnecessary.”)
Celebrity is an elusive and unstable form of currency. Reputations can change quickly: Barbara Walters’s estate sale, at Bonhams, netted millions less than the auction house had estimated; at Kirstie Alley’s recent estate auction, many objects didn’t meet their reserve prices. A lot of the objects that Julien’s sells are mass-produced, with little intrinsic value. “We’re more of a marketing company than anything,” Julien told me. By this reasoning, procuring the dress for Kardashian was worth it. It generated headlines, plus it shored up Monroe’s value for potential future bidders. “In a hundred years, the dress isn’t going to be—it’s a mesh, it’s going to be disintegrated,” Julien said. But, he added, of the dress’s appearance at the gala, “it was fun, and it introduced Marilyn to a whole new generation.”
Julien grew up in Indiana, where his father operated several granaries. His family expected that he would work in agriculture, but his attention was elsewhere. “Indiana is an auction state,” he told me. Farmers bid on livestock in echoing barns; if a couple can’t agree on a divorce settlement, a judge might order an auction of their marital property, with the proceeds split down the middle.
Julien was enthralled by the auctioneers’ incantatory patter and their casual command of the room. He was an indifferent student but an enthusiastic entrepreneur, hawking his father’s castoffs at flea markets on the weekend. “I’d be this seven- or eight-year-old kid with a Weedwacker, telling people, ‘Let me tell you why you have to buy this,’ ” he said. At sixteen, he moved into an apartment by himself in Auburn, in the heart of auction country, to attend a better high school. The town was home to the Reppert Auction School, which taught students how to perform the auction chant—the rhythmic, repetitive solicitation of bids that’s sometimes called the cattle rattle. Auburn was the headquarters of Kruse International, whose vintage-car auctions became a worldwide phenomenon in the eighties. Its annual Labor Day auction featured rotating stages, celebrity attendees, and a parade of historic vehicles; it was, at one point, the third most attended event in Indiana. Mitchell Kruse, the company’s former owner and C.E.O., worked his first auction in Tulsa, in 1981, when he was a sophomore in high school. “It was the peak of the oil boom, and I’m telling you, it was incredible,” he told me. Buyers were hungry for rarities. “It was like a Who’s Who of the rich and famous—hundred-thousand-dollar watches, everyone wanting to one-up the other guy.” Four years later, when Kruse was twenty, he sold the first car to go for a million dollars in cash. One year, when the featured Labor Day lot was the Batmobile, Kruse received a call from Ross Perot. “He said, ‘I’m looking at your catalogue, and I’m looking at this Batmobile. Can fire come out of that?’ ” Kruse told me. “And I said, ‘Yes, it can shoot flames, sir.’ ”
Julien started working for Kruse. He knew that he didn’t have the confidence to be an auctioneer, so he dreamed of being a ringman—the person who keeps an eye on bidders and relays information to the auctioneer with hand signals.
After he graduated from high school, Julien expanded a business selling pneumatic tennis-ball-serving machines which he’d started as a teen-ager, with a friend’s father. The work got him out of the Midwest—once, he went to the U.S. Open with Andre Agassi, whose father had advised on the machine’s design—but the upside was limited. “The tennis-ball-machine business wasn’t going to take me anywhere,” he said. In the mid-nineties, Julien returned to Indiana to run Kruse’s Labor Day auction. A few years later, he was on Johnny Cash’s tour bus, celebrating a successful auction of the singer’s classic cars, when Cash asked him what he planned to do with the rest of his life. Julien confessed that he loved auctions but hated cars. It was the stuff that appealed to him.
In August, 1926, Rudolph Valentino died, at the age of thirty-one, from complications of a ruptured ulcer. Three months later, his business manager, George Ullman, put Valentino’s possessions up for public sale—not only his speedboat, his onyx pocket watch, and his black velvet riding habit but also his spats and silk underwear and a hundred and forty-six pairs of his socks. The auction drew oil millionaires, “flapperish girls,” and “tourist wives of Middle Western farmers,” according to newspaper accounts. Almost everything the actor owned—even his pet dogs and horses—was for sale. But Ullman held a few things back: collar buttons, cuff links, certain pairs of shoes. The items “almost talked to me,” Ullman told a friend. “I couldn’t stand to watch them go to strangers.”
Celebrity auctions typically used to be a result of “the three ‘D’s—death, divorce, or debt,” Laura Woolley, a longtime pop-culture appraiser and a managing director at Julien’s, told me. The most iconic sales involved celebrities who were elegant, wealthy, and no longer living. When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s estate was auctioned off, in 1996, Sotheby’s sold more than a hundred thousand copies of the catalogue. In 1987, Wallis Simpson’s jewelry collection brought in fifty-five million dollars from bidders including Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Collins.
According to George Newman, a professor of organizational psychology and marketing at the University of Toronto who has studied celebrity auctions, the psychological principle driving buyers is the idea of contagion, sometimes summarized as “once in contact, always in contact.” On some level, we are convinced that a person’s essence passes into the objects that he handles. “It’s nothing material—it’s more like a magical belief that these objects have acquired . . . something,” Newman told me. “And that belief seems to have a real effect on the amount of money people are willing to pay.” A researcher who interviewed members of the Central Midwest Barry Manilow Fan Club in the nineties found that their most valued items were “things in the collection that actually touched Barry”; in an experiment, when subjects were told that a celebrity-owned sweater had been sterilized, their willingness to pay for it declined significantly. (The opposite was true when it came to infamous people. Subjects tended to say that they wouldn’t wear a sweater owned by Hitler; sterilizing the hypothetical sweater, though, made them regard it more favorably.)
Julien eventually left Kruse and moved to California, where he made connections with the collectibles department at Sotheby’s. “He was extremely persistent and very earnest,” Dunbar, of Sotheby’s, said. In 2003, Julien established his own auction house; Martin Nolan, a tall, droll Irishman with a background in finance, later joined him as the company’s chief financial officer and, eventually, its co-owner.
In 2006, Cher enlisted Julien’s, which had a half-dozen employees, to run a sale. She was redecorating her home—“going from a neo-Gothic look to Zen Buddhist,” Nolan recalled—and had lots of candelabras and heavy oak lecterns to off-load. She also understood that an auction could promote a living celebrity. “She said she’d rather put needles in her eyes than have a bad catalogue,” Nolan said. Specialists from Sotheby’s, which co-sponsored the sale, appraised the obviously high-value items—diamond jewelry, Bob Mackie gowns—while Julien kept an eye out for objects with more personal qualities, such as her dictionary and her high-school biology workbook. He fished a table lamp made from a taxidermied armadillo out of the dumpster after Cher told him that it had been a gift from Gene Simmons, whom she had dated. On the day of the auction, Cher was so nervous that she’d be judged for selling her stuff—or, worse, that no one would want to buy it—that she arranged to be out of the country. But the lots sold even faster than Julien had expected; the armadillo lamp went for upward of four thousand dollars, more than ten times the estimate.
These days, any sense that it’s unseemly for living stars to auction off their things has evaporated. “Ringo, he was the last person who was really concerned about that. Now nobody cares,” Julien said. “All these people have storage units. And Live Nation doesn’t take a cut of memorabilia sales.” As streaming has reduced the revenue that comes from making albums, such sales have proved appealing to musicians. When I visited the Julien’s Auctions headquarters, in a warehouse building on the industrial fringes of Los Angeles, I spied a stack of glossy catalogues featuring various celebrity names, Dolly Parton and Bob Dylan among them. These were mockups that Julien’s uses to entice potential clients: the auction catalogue as a kind of ghostwritten autobiography, a life told through objects.
Wringing money out of a star’s image and objects can be emotionally and ethically precarious. In 2008, Julien’s was hired to clear out Neverland Ranch, Michael Jackson’s fantastical estate near Santa Barbara, and prepare its contents for auction. The job had an air of desperation to it. Jackson was in dire financial straits. The property—twenty-seven hundred acres—had sat empty for some time, and the on-site amusement park had an eerie, weathered atmosphere. Julien’s hired a crew of thirty to sort through everything. “There’s the house, the theatre, the zoo, the tepee village, the big railroad station, the small railroad station,” Nolan said. “We were working day and night.” Julien thought that the auction would net at least fifteen million dollars, so the company took out loans to finance the job. (Julien’s typically receives about a thirty-five-per-cent commission.) “Everything was dependent on this,” Julien said. “How we agreed to take it on, I have no idea. We were naïve.”
In April, 2009, a month before the auction, Jackson’s production company, M.J.J. Productions, sued to stop it, claiming that Julien’s was attempting to sell items that were “priceless and irreplaceable,” and which Jackson had intended to keep. (“We have been accommodating any requests made by Michael Jackson for the past eight months,” Julien told CNN. “If it is true, and he is stating that there are items he does not want sold, why would he have ever given us the items in the first place? We are an auction house, and that is all that we do. We are not a mover or storage facility.”) As the case made its way through the courts, Julien’s installed an elaborate auction preview in a former department store in Beverly Hills. Ultimately, Julien’s and M.J.J. Productions agreed to a settlement, and the possessions were returned to Jackson; two months later, he died.
By the time the auctioneer, wearing a bow tie and thick-rimmed glasses, introduced the first lot at the Hard Rock Café, the room was fizzy with anticipation. The big item that night was Eric Clapton’s 1964 electric Gibson, believed to have been a gift from George Harrison. “You feel like you’re going back fifty years by just picking it up,” one middle-aged man told me reverently. Most bidding at Julien’s auctions happens remotely, either online or over the phone, but some prospective buyers still like to show up in person. A group of chatty, buoyant people sat at a table cluttered with drinks. Across from them, a man in a dark suit sat alone, a sheaf of papers in front of him, his shoulders braced in the tense posture of someone who has been authorized to spend a million dollars of his boss’s money. This was Larry Hall, who was bidding on Clapton’s guitar on behalf of Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts and a major collector of pop-culture objects. Irsay’s collection, which he hopes to turn into a museum one day, includes the original scroll manuscript of “On the Road,” Muhammad Ali’s boxing shoes, John F. Kennedy’s rocking chair, and a “Wanted” poster for John Wilkes Booth.
Various people in the memorabilia world had pitched me on the idea of celebrity-owned objects as undervalued assets. “Clients are looking at these pieces like they would a piece of art,” Dunbar, who left Sotheby’s to run her own business appraising pop-culture memorabilia, said. “You could have a Warhol on your wall, or you could have Michael Jordan’s Game One 1998 N.B.A.-finals jersey.” Some of Julien’s clients have bought high-profile pieces and flipped them a few years later for a significant profit. Earlier that week, Julien had spoken with a bidder interested in the Clapton guitar. “I said, ‘Look, if you got this for two million, it would be a steal,’ ” he told me. “ ‘You could probably resell it in a few years.’ ” As we waited for the guitar to come up for sale, I asked one attendee, a vice-president at Credit Suisse, who didn’t want to be named, if he thought of his purchases as investments. He gave me a pitying look. “That’s what you tell your wife,” he said. “No, this is purely a passion business.”
The auctioneer, straight-faced, declared the Gibson, with its “custom psychedelic finish,” to be “the greatest guitar in the history of guitars.” Within seconds, Hall had bid a million dollars. Julien conferred on the phone with another prospective buyer, then gave a decisive negative shake of his head. The auctioneer swooped his hands like an orchestra conductor, trying to coax more money from the room. Even the boozy table grew hushed. “Clapton became the man he is, the guitarist he is, on this guitar, and you can have that for $1.25 million,” the auctioneer said. No one moved; it seemed as though we might be cheated of the drama of a bidding war. The auctioneer banged his gavel and declared the lot sold, and Hall’s face spasmed with joy. “We got it!” he said to no one in particular. “We got it!” Later, I watched him grasp the hand of a well-wisher. “I feel like I just stole a guitar,” he said.
Chad Cobain left the auction early. Kurt’s guitar was slotted to come up for sale the next day. “I’ll probably just watch from the hotel room,” he told me. “It’s going to be emotional.” (The Mustang ended up selling for $1.5 million, to a Japanese businessman who plans to put it on display in a music-themed café.)
Although the market for seven-figure guitars is limited, auction houses see memorabilia, and collectibles more broadly, as an area of “great growth potential,” Natasha Degen, the chair of the art-market-studies department at F.I.T., told me. “It appreciated dramatically during Covid,” Dunbar said. “People were at home, they were nostalgic, they had money, the auctions were accessible. And it was sort of a circle—the more people bid the prices up, the more people got interested.” Celebrity auction houses like Julien’s have been taking cues from the world of sports. Fanatics, the sports-collectibles juggernaut, has been particularly ingenious at capitalizing on the fandom economy. The company sells collectibles featuring small slices of balls, bases, pucks, and nets from N.H.L. and M.L.B. games; for fifty dollars, you can buy a Yankees-branded pen that comes with a sprinkling of “authentic game-used dirt.”
Nolan spoke about the machinery of sports-memorabilia sales with some envy. “Players are sometimes wearing a different jersey each quarter,” he said. “It’s sent off and available in the market tomorrow.”
Julien’s has begun encouraging the musicians it works with to think of their clothing as a commodity. “We encourage, we educate them: ‘When you get done with the concert, put the jeans, the shirt, the shoes in a bag with the date and the city to put in the archives, because that could be ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars,’ ” Julien said. “It’s like printing money for a lot of these celebrities.”
In Nashville, I chatted with Ricky Limon, a genial, tattooed man who’s worked at Julien’s since the Neverland Ranch days. He was idly looking through the auction lots online, scrolling past the guitars to the items with three- and four-figure estimates: Elvis’s Phillips 66 charge card, Elvis’s membership card from the International Kenpo Karate Association, Elvis’s father’s Bible. In Limon’s years at Julien’s, he has bid on and won a handful of items, including David Hasselhoff’s leather-lined trenchcoat and a scepter that once belonged to Marlon Brando. There’s a talisman for every taste: Joan Didion’s collection of pebbles and seashells (recently sold at auction for seven thousand dollars); Paul Newman’s pocketknife (eight thousand dollars).
Mary Desjardins, a professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth, compared such items to saints’ relics. “Something like Elvis’s gas card—that has little value to someone who’s a historian or a scholar of Elvis,” she said. “It really doesn’t have anything to do with his talent, or his history as a performer. It’s just because Elvis touched it, because it belonged to him. It’s a bit of a fetish object. And the way fetish objects work, they’re sort of magical, in that the proximity to them, the touching of them, gives you some sort of power or sense of self that can’t be acquired otherwise.”
Proximity to a celebrity’s death can lend an object an additional, ghoulish frisson; this seems to be particularly true when the celebrity died under tragic circumstances. In 2020, a seller was shopping around an album that John Lennon had autographed for Mark David Chapman, who later fatally shot him. “Yoko said, ‘Please don’t,’ ” Julien told me; he passed on the consignment. (Another auction house sold the album, for nearly a million dollars.) Two years after Michael Jackson’s fatal overdose, Julien’s put the bed where he died up for sale. After Jackson’s family objected, the house pulled the listing.
On some occasions, the company has shown a more flexible sense of propriety. Julien’s has sold William Shatner’s kidney stone and Truman Capote’s ashes. (“Truman Capote loved the element of shock,” Julien said at the time. “He loved publicity. And I’m sure he’s looking down, laughing, and saying, ‘That’s something I would have done.’ ”) This spring, Julien’s plans to auction off a burial crypt in a West Hollywood mausoleum. The crypt, situated in the Corridor of Memories, is a row above and four spaces to the left of Marilyn Monroe’s, and even closer to Hugh Hefner’s. (Hefner bought the space next to Monroe, whom he had never met, in 2009. “I’m a believer in things symbolic,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up.”) A man had offered to consign the burial space to Julien’s a few years earlier. When Julien went to visit it, he was surprised to see that someone was already interred there. “I told him, ‘I can’t sell a crypt with somebody in it,’ ” Julien told me. “He goes, ‘Oh, that’s my mom. I’m thinking about moving her.’ ” The crypt, newly vacant, has an estimate of at least two hundred thousand dollars.
In November, Laura Woolley, the Julien’s managing director, met me at the company’s main warehouse, in L.A. Woolley started out in the Sotheby’s collectibles department, then did a stint at Julien’s during its early days—her job involved watching every episode of the “Sonny & Cher” show to determine the provenance of clothing for the Cher auction—before opening her own appraisal business specializing in pop-culture memorabilia. Her steady, skeptical gaze struck me as familiar, and I realized that I’d seen her on “Antiques Roadshow,” where she regularly appears as an expert.
She returned to Julien’s last year, when the company went on a hiring spree. (It now has three dozen employees.) Julien’s had a new C.E.O., David Goodman, a former executive at Sotheby’s, with ambitious plans for expansion. “We’re really bullish on collecting behavior,” he told me. “We want a constant drumbeat of sales.” (Julien and Nolan have stayed on, as co-executive directors.)
Like many people who work in memorabilia, Woolley doesn’t own much of it herself. This surprised me, until she led me into the warehouse, where Julien’s stores objects slated for future sales. My overwhelming impression was of stuff, everywhere, any individual mystique diluted by the sheer exhausting quantity of it all. We walked down long aisles, past a rapper’s sneaker collection, an insectoid claw from a “Starship Troopers” alien, a wooden chair owned by an actor from “Gunsmoke,” and a scuffed road case with “Mick Fleetwood” stamped on it. Woolley lifted a protective sheet; underneath was a sleek black Corvette Stingray that once belonged to Slash. A velvet chair with golden fringe looked tacky to me until Woolley explained that it had once belonged to Janet Jackson. The chair shimmered, briefly, with an aura of specialness; then we moved on.
Woolley said that, despite a life spent among famous people’s detritus, she still finds that some objects have an inexplicable resonance. “The hair on the back of your neck stands up,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”
In 1999, Christie’s held an auction of Marilyn Monroe’s things. “That was a watershed moment,” Woolley said. “People were paying, like, thirty-seven thousand dollars for a Polaroid of her dog.” Monroe had left her personal effects and the bulk of her intellectual property to her acting teacher Lee Strasberg. After a decades-long probate process, they were eventually inherited by Strasberg’s third wife, Anna, who licensed the actress’s image liberally and enlisted Christie’s to sell the possessions. (Julien’s has since sold further remnants from Monroe’s life, including her prescription-pill bottles, her tax returns, a letter to her psychiatrist, and a lock of her hair.)
Before the auction, Woolley was alone in the warehouse, cataloguing some of Monroe’s items—“intimate things,” she said. Hairpins, undergarments. The bras were lumpy and misshapen, because they were padded with sawdust. Handling them, Woolley felt a heaviness come over her, “a sense of, This is not what she would have wanted.” She felt an overwhelming urge to apologize. “So I started talking to Marilyn. Like a crazy person. Like, ‘I’m so sorry that this is happening to your stuff. But I’m going to try to do it with as much respect as possible.’ Regardless of how it all turned out for her.” She let out a sharp, short laugh. “Yeah,” she said. “Talking to a ghost in a warehouse by myself. This is the reality of what we do.” ♦
