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A pair of ruby pink slippers worn by actress Judy Garland within the traditional film The Wizard of Oz is about to be auctioned off Saturday.
The iconic sequinned pumps had been as soon as stolen from a Minnesota museum. But now they’re anticipated to fetch as a lot as $3m (£2.35m) at public sale, in accordance with Heritage Auctions.
Online bidding began a month in the past, and as of midday native time on Saturday, the very best bid was $1.55m.
Heritage Auctions has referred to as these slippers the “Holy Grail of Hollywood memorabilia”.
Garland was solely 16 when she performed Dorothy within the traditional 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz. Media outlet Variety ranked it second in its inaugural listing of “100 Greatest Movies of All Time”.
The movie is a musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 kids’s ebook The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. While within the ebook, the magical slippers are silver, the producers for the movie modified them to pink to benefit from the brand new Technicolor know-how.
In the movie, as within the ebook, a pivotal second happens when Dorothy should click on her heels 3 times as she repeats “There’s no place like home” with a view to depart the magical land of Oz and return to Kansas and her Auntie Em.
While a number of pairs of sneakers had been worn by Garland throughout filming, solely 4 are identified to have survived.
One of the pairs is on exhibit on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. But this pair up for public sale has its personal distinctive historical past.
Collector Michael Shaw had loaned the slippers out to the Judy Garland Museum in her hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, once they had been stolen in 2005.
Professional thief Terry Jon Martin used a hammer to smash the glass case and snatch the slippers, believing that their insured worth of $1m have to be as a result of they had been coated in precise gem stones.
But when he took them to a “fence” – and middleman who sells stolen items to discreet patrons – he found they had been simply glass.
So he gave the sneakers to another person. It wasn’t till 2018 that the FBI recovered the sneakers in a sting operation. What occurred to them in these 13 years remains to be not identified.
In 2023, Martin – who was in his 70s and used a wheelchair – pleaded responsible to stealing them, and was sentenced to time served.
“There’s some closure, and we do know definitely that Terry Jon Martin did break into our museum, but I’d like to know what happened to them after he let them go,” John Kelsch, curator of the Judy Garland Museum, told CBS News Minnesota in 2023. “Just to do it because he thought they were real rubies and to turn them over to a jewelry fence. I mean, the value is not rubies. The value is an American treasure, a national treasure. To steal them without knowing that seems ludicrous.”
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