Julian started working for Kruse. He knew he didn't have the confidence to become an auctioneer, so he dreamed of being a ringman who would monitor bidders and relay information to the auctioneer with hand signals.
After graduating from high school, Julian expanded the business he started selling pneumatic tennis ball serving machines with his friend's father as a teenager. The job allowed him to break out of the Midwest – he once competed in the US Open with Andre Agassi, whose father advised him on car design – but his upside was limited. “The tennis ball machine business wasn't getting me anywhere,” he said. In the mid-'90s, Julian returned to Indiana to run Kruse's Labor Day auction. Years later, when he was on Johnny Cash's tour bus to celebrate the success of Johnny Cash's classic car auction, Cash asked him what he planned to do with the rest of his life. . Julian likes auctions, but he hates cars, he confessed.it is thing That appealed to him.
In August 1926, Rudolph Valentino died at the age of 31 from complications of a ruptured ulcer. Three months later, business manager George Ullman publicly put Valentino's property up for sale. Not only his speedboat, onyx pocket watch, and black velvet riding habits, but also his 146 pairs of spats and silk underwear. About his socks. According to newspaper articles, the auction attracted oil millionaires, “fancy girls” and “tourist wives of Midwestern farmers.” Almost everything the actor owned was up for sale, including his pet dog and horse. But Ullman withheld some things, including collar buttons, cufflinks and certain shoes. The items “almost spoke to me,” Ullman told a friend. “I couldn't bear to see them go to strangers.”
Laura Woolley, a longtime pop culture appraiser and managing director of Julien's, said celebrity auctions were typically the result of “the three D's: death, divorce, and debt.” Told. The most iconic sales involved elegant, wealthy, and famous people who are no longer alive. When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' estate was auctioned in 1996, Sotheby's sold more than 100,000 copies of the catalog. In 1987, Wallis Simpson's jewelry collection sold for $55 million to bidders that included Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Collins.
George Newman, a professor of organizational psychology and marketing at the University of Toronto who studies celebrity auctions, says the psychological principle that drives buyers is the idea of contagion: “once in contact, always in contact.” It is sometimes summarized as. We believe that on some level a person's true nature is reflected in the objects they handle. “It's not a physical thing, it's like a magical belief that these objects have acquired . . . something,” Newman told me. “And that belief seems to have a real impact on how much people are willing to pay.” Researchers who interviewed members of Barry Manilow fan clubs in the Mid-Midwest in the '90s found that they believed they were most valued. It was discovered that certain items were “objects from the collection that actually touched Barry.'' In one experiment, when participants were told that a celebrity-owned sweater had been sanitized, they were significantly less willing to pay for it. (The opposite was true for notorious figures; subjects were more likely to say they wouldn't wear a sweater that belonged to Hitler, but disinfecting the hypothetical sweater led them to think of it more favorably.) Ta.)
Julian eventually left Kruse and moved to California, where he made connections with Sotheby's collectibles department. “He was very persistent and very serious,” Sotheby's Dunbar said. In 2003, Julien founded his own auction house. Martin Nolan, a tall, lanky Irishman with a background in finance, later joined the company as chief financial officer and eventually became co-owner.
In 2006, Cher hired Julian's, which had six employees, to run the sale. She was renovating her home – “going from neo-Gothic to Zen-sectarian,” Nolan recalls – and it had lots of candelabras and a heavy oak podium. She also understood that the auction had the potential to promote living celebrities. “She said she would rather stick a needle in her eye than have her damn catalogue,” Nolan said. While Sotheby's experts, who co-sponsored the sale, appraised the obviously expensive items, such as diamond jewelry and a Bob Mackie dress, Ms. Julien valued items of a more personal nature, such as dictionaries and high school biology workbooks. He was on the lookout for items that held. . He takes a table lamp made from a stuffed armadillo out of the trash after Cher tells him it was a gift from Gene Simmons, who she was dating. On the day of the auction, Cher was so nervous that she would be judged for selling her stuff, or worse, that no one would want to buy it, that she made arrangements to fly out of the country. But the lot sold even faster than Julian expected. The armadillo lamp sold for more than $4,000, more than 10 times its estimated price.
These days, the feeling that it's unseemly for a living star to auction off her belongings has disappeared. “Ringo, he was the last person who really cared about that. Now no one cares,” Julian said. “All of these people have storage units. And Live Nation doesn't get a cut of the memorabilia sales.” Sales turned out to be attractive to musicians. When I visited Julien's Auctions' headquarters, housed in a warehouse building on the outskirts of an industrial area in Los Angeles, I saw stacks of glossy catalogs featuring the names of celebrities as diverse as Dolly Parton and Bob Dylan. did. These were the mockups that Julian used to lure potential customers. Auction catalogs are a kind of ghostwriter's autobiography, a life told through objects.
Extracting money from a star's image or goods can be emotionally and ethically dangerous. In 2008, Julien's was hired to clear Neverland Ranch, Michael Jackson's fantasy mansion near Santa Barbara, and prepare its contents for auction. There was an air of hopelessness about her job. Jackson was in dire financial straits. The 2,700-acre property had been vacant for some time, and the on-site amusement park had an eerie, weathered feel to it. Julian hired 30 workers to organize everything. “There's a house, a theater, a zoo, a teepee village, a big train station, a little train station,” Nolan said. “We worked day and night.'' Julian thought the auction would net him at least $15 million, and the company took out a loan to finance it. (Julian typically takes a commission of about 35 percent.) “It was all about this,” Julian said. “I don't know how we agreed to take it on. We were naive.”
In April 2009, a month before the auction, Jackson's production company, MJJ Productions, filed an injunction to stop the auction, claiming that Julien's was trying to sell “rare and irreplaceable” items that Jackson intended to keep. filed a lawsuit asking for it. (“We have complied with every request from Michael Jackson over the last eight months,” Julian told CNN. If so, why did he give it to us?'' (“We are an auction house and that is all we do. We are not a shipping company or a storage facility.'') This lawsuit As the was making its way through the courts, Julien's set up an elaborate auction preview. Former department store in Beverly Hills. Ultimately, Julian and MJJ Productions agreed to a settlement, and the property was 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 to the Hard Rock Cafe, the room was buzzing with anticipation. The big item of the night was Eric Clapton's 1964 electric Gibson, believed to be a gift from George Harrison. “Just picking this up makes you feel like you've traveled back 50 years,” one middle-aged man respectfully told me. Most bidding at Julien's auctions is done remotely online or over the phone, but some potential buyers still prefer to show up in person. A group of chatty and cheerful people were sitting at a table littered with drinks. Across from them, a man in a black suit sits alone, a stack of papers in front of him, the tense posture of someone authorized to spend $1 million of his boss's money. He tightened his shoulders. This was Larry Hall, bidding on Clapton's guitar on behalf of Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts and major collector of pop culture. Mr. Irsay's collection, which he hopes to someday turn into a museum, includes the original scroll of “On the Road,” Muhammad Ali's boxing shoes, John F. Kennedy's rocking chair and John Wilkes Booth's Includes “Wanted” posters.
Various people in the memorabilia industry have suggested to me the idea that items owned by celebrities are an undervalued asset. “Customers look at these pieces as if they were looking at works of art,” said Dunbar, who left Sotheby's to run a pop culture memorabilia business. “You can have a Warhol on your wall, or you can have Michael Jordan's Game One and his 1998 NBA Finals jerseys on display.” Some of Julian's customers buy famous pieces and buy Some people have made huge profits by flipping it after a year. Earlier in the week, Julien was talking to a bidder who was interested in Clapton's guitar. “I said, 'Look, if I got this for two million, it would be a steal,'” he told me. “'Maybe in a few years we'll be able to resell it.'” While waiting for the guitar to go on sale, I asked one of the participants, a Credit Suisse vice president (who declined to be named), about my I asked him if he considered the purchase an investment. He looked at me with pity. “That's what you tell your wife,'' he said. “No, this is purely a passion business.”
The auctioneer straight-facedly declared the Gibson, which had a “custom psychedelic finish,” to be “the best guitar ever made.” Within seconds, Hall bid $1 million. After talking on the phone with another prospective buyer, Julian shook his head in a decidedly negative way. The auctioneer waved his hands like an orchestra conductor, trying to coax more money out of the room. The drunken table fell silent. “With this guitar, Clapton became the man and guitarist he was meant to be, and you can buy it for $1.25 million,” the auctioneer said. No one moved. I felt like I was being fooled by the drama of a bidding war. When the auctioneer slammed the gavel and declared the lot sold, Hall's face twitched with joy. “Okay!” he said to no one in particular. “Okay!” Then I saw him shake the hand of a well-wisher. “I feel like I stole the guitar,” he said.
Chad Cobain ended the auction early. Kurt's guitar was scheduled for sale the next day. “I’ll probably just watch it from my hotel room,” he told me. “It's going to be emotional.” (The Mustang was eventually sold for $1.5 million to a Japanese businessman who planned to display it in a music-themed cafe.)
While the market for seven-figure guitars is limited, auction houses see memorabilia and collectibles more broadly as an area with “significant growth potential,” said FIT's head of art market research. Natasha Degen said. ” COVID” Dunbar said. “People were home, they were nostalgic, they had money, they had access to auctions. And it was kind of a cycle, the more people bid the price, the more people were interested. Celebrity auction houses like Julien take their cues from the world of sports. Sports merchandise giant Fanatics has been particularly creative in capitalizing on the fandom economy. The company sells collectibles featuring small slices of balls, bases, pucks and nets used in NHL and MLB games. For $50, you can buy a Yankees-branded pen sprinkled with “real game-used dirt.”
