Word: auction
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with the final session winding down and the supply of Jackie and Camelot memorabilia drying up, the feeding frenzy at Sotheby's reached a climax. Three modest cushions, assessed at $50 to $100, were snapped up for $25,300. When it was all over, the total proceeds from the auction, which the upper ranges of Sotheby's estimates would have placed at about $4 million, came to $34.5 million...
Even before the auction's astronomical proceeds had materialized, there were some nasty returns for the principal beneficiaries, Jackie's children Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and John Jr. "How viscerally cruel it was," wrote New York magazine, "for Caroline and John to auction off their mom as Home Shopping Network fodder." Last week, as the buying orgy intensified, a Kennedy family intimate who would comment only off the record called the auction "the pits." The source denies reports that the children, thanks to the complex terms of Jackie's will, are cash poor. "This auction is going to make them rich...
...other insiders assert that the auction, while its public garishness might have mortified Jackie, was her idea. Nancy Tuckerman, Jackie's White House social secretary and close friend until the former First Lady's death in May 1994, told Time that "Jackie did mention in her will that the children, if they wanted to, should have an auction. She said that would be the practical thing to do." Tuckerman remembers accompanying Jackie on periodic visits ("she was sentimental about possessions") to storage rooms housing her belongings. "She would say to me, 'I keep thinking about my children with all these...
Pierre Salinger, J.F.K.'s press secretary, confirms that Jackie discussed the idea of an auction with her children. "There were a number of things that were not for sale, that were given to the kids," says Salinger. He adds that the children rigorously culled their mother's mountains of things to select important and appropriate items for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston (which will also receive most of the $2.5 million from the catalog sales). In April 1995, Caroline and John donated a huge trove of items to the library, including Jackie's wedding dress, 38,000 pages...
That there was still enough left over to fuel a four-day auction seems an important consideration to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose husband Richard was an insider in J.F.K.'s Administration and who herself is friendly with a number of the Kennedys. "There's a sense that all of the Kennedy family homes are so filled with mementos and pictures from the past that you do feel when you set foot in them as if you're drawn backward in time. While that is very interesting historically for people who visit, I've often wondered what it's like...