Barry White’s suit patterns? Rhett and Scarlett’s baby cradle? Gene Siskel’s critic’s chair? If Hollywood’s crazy aunt decided to clean out her attic, the pile on her Beverly Hills lawn might look like the 60 or so peculiar lots put up for sale by Screenbid.com on Monday night.
“We have a strange auction here, lots of things come our way,” Screenbid chief executive Jeffrey Dash said during an interview at his Culver City warehouse headquarters a few hours before the action began at 8 p.m. The online movie and television prop-seller, noted Dash, has normally conducted themed auctions, like its occasional Mad Men-oriented blow-outs. But this time, the service is experimenting with what might become an annual event—a kind of high-end yard sale offering some of the more intriguing items from various networks, studios and other owners.
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The Gone With The Wind baby cradle, that Gothic affair with a canopy suspended from a bird’s beak, turned up at the Omega prop house. “We had it authenticated,” assures Dash. For those obsessed with Warner artifacts, there’s also a set of streetcar-shaped seating cards from a Jack Warner dinner party for A Streetcar Named Desire: Laurence Olivier, Danny Kaye and Vivien Leigh were among the guests.
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The Siskel estate is selling the chair and other artifacts. If you’re crazy about chairs, you might want to bid on the beige leather psychiatrist’s chairs from Monk.
But those suit patterns are really something to think about. They come from the Beverly Hills tailor Certo, who dressed the stars, including White, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Johnny Carson (shown above at the 1980 Academy Awards). His suit patterns for all the above, complete with indecipherable Italian scratchings, are now up for grabs. And Jimmy Kimmel, the newly named Oscar host, should take note: Those appear to include blueprints Certo used in dressing Carson for his highly successful stints as the Academy Awards emcee.
