Word: auction
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Treasures from Ben Sonnenberg's mansion go on auction...
...southern side of Gramercy Park, that most Jamesian of Manhattan's squares, and last week it was proceeding, slowly and irreversibly, to come apart, as the photographers, appraisers and people from Sotheby Parke Bernet moved through it, checking and cataloguing, preparing the four-day auction that in June will scatter the mansion's contents for good. What had been the background to a life had already acquired a museum glaze; the invidious perfection of the showroom lay, like a cold sheet of plastic, on every tabletop and drawing. Its memory circuits had been...
...author deliberately, and sometimes perversely, provides a fragmentary narrative. Huge pieces of the brothers' lives are left out, and odd bits are included: the agreeable information, for instance, that Peregrine finds an auction house where he purchases a pair of Henry James' pants...
...Jones party, in which the ballroom is filled with trees, grass, live pigs, chickens, llamas and a tame tiger, while guests gnaw on turkey drumsticks and slurp wine out of goatskin bags. One group had an Arabian Nights party for its mostly male membership and held an auction of comely young "slave girls." Just as the successful bidders claimed their prizes, however, hotel employees dressed as commandos leaped from the balconies to rescue the maidens...
Emerald City it wasn't, but the chandeliered ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills held treasures of its own last week. Up for auction were 423 possessions of the late Judy Garland. Among the items on the block: Garland's copy of the musical arrangement of Over the Rainbow, a pair of loaded dice given to her by Humphrey Bogart (purchased by Actress Lily Tomlin for $1,200), Judy's The Wizard of Oz scrapbook, and the beaded silk jacket she wore at Carnegie Hall. The highest sum -$60,000-was shelled...