Sounds like someone really enjoyed the vocal stylings of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in the new Wicked movie. A Dallas-based auction house that specializes in collectibles just sold a pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in the original Wizard of Oz movie for a total of $32.5 million dollars. For the price of about 500 college educations, one lucky anonymous bidder will now possess a piece of Hollywood history and, I’m sure, become the envy of Old Hollywood foot fetishists worldwide.
The auction house predicted that the shoes would sell for about $10 million, according to the New York Times, but that number was surpassed in the first few seconds of live bidding. According to People, the shoes are now the highest-valued piece of movie memorabilia ever sold at auction.
The sticker shock alone is wild when you consider that the previous record holder, Marilyn Monroe’s white dress from The Seven Year Itch, went for a paltry $5.52 million in 2011. What’s even more wild is how the slippers came up for auction in the first place. Collector Michael Shaw lent them out to various museums and exhibits until, in 2005, they were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, by a local resident with mob ties. According to the Guardian, he used a hammer to smash and grab the shoes from the museum after an “associate” told him they were probably decorated with real rubies. When it turned out they weren’t, he discarded them. They were lost until the FBI recovered them in 2018 and returned them to Shaw, who put them up for auction.
On top of all that, the shoes themselves are mismatched; they and the pair owned by the Smithsonian are each made up of halves of matching pairs labeled No. 1 and No. 6. I can only hope that the anonymous buyer will be down to switch, reuniting the mismatched pairs so that someday, Kim Kardashian can wear them to the Met Gala.