Is it a bid? Superman’s cape goes to auction
ONE SUPERHERO’S CAPE AND FOUR MEN WHO WORE IT
1. DARVIN
the catalogue for the “icons and idols: hollywood” auction, held at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, California, on 16 December 2019, boasted several notable items for sale. Lot 149: a felt hat made by Lock & Co Hatters of London and worn by Charlie Chaplin in his 1947 film, Monsieur Verdoux. Lot 355: a white T-shirt emblazoned with a Nike Swoosh, dirtied with “studio soiling” and worn by Tom Hanks in 1994’s Forrest Gump, visible in a sequence when Gump spends three years running across America. Lot 298: a 1968 Husqvarna Viking 360 motorcycle once purchased by the actor Steve McQueen. Lot 358: a “pipe-weed” pipe, used by Sir Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins in 2001’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of
‘sometimes superman would like to be clark kent, just a normal person with normal responsibilities’ — Christopher Reeve in The Making of Superman the Movie by David Michael Petrou (Warner Books, 1978)
the Ring. But there was one item that was set to be the centrepiece of the event, and to which two double-page spreads of the glossy catalogue were devoted. Lot 385: a blood-red cape, emblazoned on the back with a stylised “S” picked out in blue stitching. It had been worn in Superman: The Movie by Christopher Reeve, a handsome, athletic and relatively unknown actor who had just turned 26 when the film came out in 1978 and would become forever associated with the superhero he played — the “Man of Steel” with his unmatchable strength, speed and moral fibre — and also his alter-ego, the bumbling, bespectacled reporter, Clark Kent.
The cape was a remnant of the outfit created by costume designer Yvonne Blake for the film, adapted from the drawings of Joe Shuster, who invented Superman in the Thirties with his high-school friend Jerry Siegel. Boots, tights, cape and torso-hugging shirt with an “S” on the chest. Also, overshorts: although according to David Michael Petrou’s 1978 book, The Making of Superman the Movie, when Reeve wore them, Blake had to insert a “large swimmer’s cup” as “some obvious protuberances” were creating continuity problems as they were “not always in exactly the same place”.
Because of the cape’s dimensions, it was understood to be a “walking” cape; as opposed to the “flying” capes, which were wider and had slits cut into them through which the harnesses that would make Reeve appear to take to the skies could be attached. It was thought to be one of six, as suggested by a note, handwritten close to the hem, which read: “(was turned up) No 5/6 relined 1/3/78”. The cape appeared to be made from some type of cotton, and was still bright, with little evidence of fraying, unlike costumes made from synthetic fabrics which, while looking more futuristic, often proved quicker to degrade.
But it was not the condition that made the cape such an important item. Included in the lot was a letter, written in 1979 by the editor and publisher of DC Comics, Jack C Harris, to a teenage boy in Utah. “Dear Darvin,” it began. “Congratulations! Your expertise in SUPERMAN lore… has won you first prize in the SECOND SUPERMAN THE MOVIE CONTEST, the actual cape worn by actor Christopher Reeve.”
The letter confirmed the results of a competition promoted in issue #331 of Superman, a copy of which was included in the auction lot. The rules had been deceptively simple: correctly answer 25 trivia questions about the world of Superman and send them, on a postcard, to DC Comics in New York. But, reported Harris in his letter, the questions were so difficult that only 21 contestants managed to get them
INCLUDED IN THE LOT WAS A 1979 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR AND PUBLISHER OF DC COMICS: ‘CONGRATULATIONS! YOUR EXPERTISE IN SUPERMAN LORE… HAS WON YOU FIRST PRIZE IN THE SECOND SUPERMAN THE MOVIE CONTEST, THE ACTUAL CAPE
WORN BY ACTOR CHRISTOPHER REEVE’
all correct, and, as luck would have it, Christopher Reeve was in town when they needed to pick a winner. It was he who had selected Darvin’s card. “We’re proud to have fans such as you,” Harris concluded, “who are so wellversed in the legends of the American myths we’re creating every day. Our very best wishes to you, and again we offer our congratulations! Wear your cape in the best of health!”
darvin metzger grew up in bountiful, utah, a town, like many others in the area, with a predominantly Mormon population (and also the town from which, in 1974, Ted Bundy abducted his twelfth murder victim, 17-year-old Debra Kent). Darvin and his family were not Mormons and he felt somewhat isolated as a child, until he discovered comic books. It gave him a thing of his own and, after he started working in a comic book store as a teenager, several of his customers, other young men who shared his interests, became his friends.
Superman was never his favourite. He leaned more towards Spider-Man or Batman: characters who were more realistic, in relative terms at least. A teenager who acquires powers, and a human who invents incredible things to fight crime. With Superman there was too much power involved — the same thing that put him off Hulk or Thor — the so-called “Man of Tomorrow” didn’t have to use his brains to solve problems, or at least so it seemed to Darvin at the time.
When they saw the announcement of the cape competition in Superman #331, Darvin and his friends decided to give it a shot. Here was something in which they were specialists; they actually stood a chance. They pooled their knowledge and took advantage of the archive of Superman books at Cosmic Aeroplane Bookstore in Salt Lake City, where Darvin, now 17 years old, was working. The questions were undeniably hard: what colour is super-villain Lex Luthor’s hair? But he was bald! Until one boy remembered an early appearance of Superman’s nemesis in which — eureka! — he was depicted with red hair. Despite the rules stipulating against it, the boys entered multiple entries under fake names to increase their chances of winning.
Darvin was working at the comic book store when he received a call from his father telling him to come home right away. Assuming there was an emergency, he jumped in his car and drove the 20 or so miles to Bountiful. When he found no obvious cause for the summons he got upset with his dad, but just then the phone rang. “It’s for you,” his father said. It was a representative of DC Comics, telling Darvin his name had been drawn and he had won first prize: the Superman cape.
It felt great to have won, and Darvin was excited, though a small part of him felt sad that he hadn’t won DC Comic’s first Superman: The Movie competition, for which the prize was a part in the film itself (the two winners appeared as members of Clark Kent’s high-school football team). Also, the strategy that he and his friends had devised had worked: of the successful 21 entries, six others were from Salt Lake City; even Darvin’s dog, Duke, won a third-tier prize, a two-year subscription to a DC title of his choice, though Darvin was too sheepish to claim it. His story appeared in the Davis County Clipper, with a photograph of Darvin outside his house wearing the cape, smiling, arms raised, which the paper transposed over a picture of his street in Bountiful so that he appeared to be flying over the rooftops.
Because Darvin worked in the field, he understood the importance of what he had. He had already amassed a collection of 10,000 comics — often exchanging his wages at Cosmic Aeroplane for store credit — which he kept in his bedroom in Mylar bags. He stored the cape carefully at his parents’ house in Bountiful for the next few years while he worked somewhat aimless jobs, wondering what to do with his life, until, one day, he made a spur-of-themoment decision: he would join the US Navy.
It was a change of heart that surprised not only Darvin but his father, with whom he had fought when the time had come for him, like all 18-year-old American males, to register for Selective Service. When Darvin had received his paperwork he had thrown it in the fire. Now he would be based at Moffett Federal Airfield in Northern California, and specialise in aviation electronics (“Statistically speaking, of course,” as Reeve’s Superman reminds Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane, whom he has just rescued from a helicopter teetering on the roof of a skyscraper, flying is “still the safest way to travel”).
By 1988, Darvin was in his late twenties and married, with a young son and baby daughter. He and his wife liked California, but soon the family’s finances started to feel stretched: Darvin’s wages did not go far enough, and they had never been the best at budgeting. He had sold his comic book collection in 1981, before he’d joined the military, to pay back a friend who’d lent him money for a truck; it was time to part with the cape too.
He gave it to an acquaintance who ran a comic book store, Dick Swan, to display behind the counter — it seemed a shame for him to keep it at home in a box — until Dick mentioned that he knew someone who might be interested in buying it. Darvin had some qualms: he well knew that the value of the cape might go up in years to come. But Christmas was approaching and he needed the money now. When Dick told him the buyer had offered $600, he took it.
the appeal of celebrity memorabilia is both hard to deny and, at times, to fathom. Clothes that musicians and movie stars have worn, gifts they have given and received, letters they have written, tissues they have blown their noses in — a Kleenex used by Scarlett Johansson during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was sold for charity in 2008 and raised £3,600 — are bought and sold like antiques and worshipped like relics. Today, a piece of toast with a bite mark from a pop star can get the attention once afforded to a crucifix touched by an apostle (the toast was bitten by One Direction’s Niall Horan and put on eBay by an Australian TV company in 2012, where it reportedly attracted a top bid of almost $(AU)$100,000, equivalent to £65,000). Such items, it seems, offer a chance to own a piece of collective pop history and be close to a star who seems out of reach, particularly if they have come to the end of their (ordinary, human) lifespan. It is a way to feel their residual energy, perhaps, or at least a few dead skin cells.
Celebrity memorabilia sales also make for easy news stories. In October last year, an acrylic and mohair cardigan worn by Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain during the band’s 1993 MTV Unplugged performance, complete with stains and cigarette burns, sold for $334,000 making it — in a possibly not terribly strong field — the most expensive item of knitwear ever bought at auction. In December 2019, reality star Kim Kardashian West spent $65,625 on a velvet jacket worn by Michael Jackson, and a further $56,250 on a white fedora he wore to perform his song “Smooth Criminal”: both Christmas presents, she announced on Instagram, for her six-year-old daughter, North. Another Instagram user mocked up a fake post purporting to be from Kardashian West, announcing that she had also purchased for North the bloodied white shirt in which President John F Kennedy was assassinated; at least one website reported the purchase as fact, until Kardashian West highlighted the error. (And perhaps it wasn’t even so far-fetched: at the time of writing, the website Moments in Time is selling, for $125,000, a “bullet dented” medallion that rapper Tupac Shakur was apparently wearing when he was shot and wounded in 1994.)
The market in movie memorabilia alone is estimated to have grown from an estimated £27m 10 years ago to between £155m and £310m today, and the overall global celebrity
memorabilia market has been estimated at beyond a billion. There are numerous auction houses specialising in this area: Heritage Auctions in Houston, Profiles in History in Calabasas and Prop Store in the UK, to name just three, as well as Julien’s Auctions in Los Angeles, which sold the Michael Jackson jacket and hat and the Cobain cardigan, and were also overseeing the sale of the cape.
Most of the major international auctioneers — Bonhams, Sotheby’s, Christie’s — have departments dedicated to pop culture, entertainment memorabilia or “private and iconic collections”. Expert analysis and authenticating documentation are of particularly vital importance in this industry: an FBI operation in 2000 posited that over half of the items on the sports and celebrity memorabilia market were likely to be counterfeit.
“There’s so much serious money coming into this world,” says Martin Nolan, co-owner and executive director of Julien’s Auctions. Originally from County Roscommon in Ireland, Nolan worked on Wall Street for 13 years before joining Julien’s in 2005 and has been surprised to find it is an industry that seems to invert economic trends. “We find that in a recession we tend to do better,” he said. “That sounds crazy I know, but the people who have the stuff need money so they’re consigning it to auction, and we’re not selling anything that anybody needs, clearly: we’re selling to people that have sufficient disposable income that they are not impacted.”
Music, Nolan says, is particularly strong right now, and Julien’s has learned to host its rock ’n’ roll auctions in New York, “because the Wall Street guys who are making serious amounts of money and getting huge bonuses, they love their toys, and there’s nothing more cool than to have a John Lennon guitar on the wall, or Ringo’s drum kit in the conference room.”
The clash of corporate capitalism and rock rebellion is not lost on him: “You think about Nirvana, Kurt Cobain was so anti all of this world. He probably bought that cardigan for five bucks in a thrift shop. It sort of goes against everything he was singing about.”
But, says Nolan, the people who buy such things are in fact trying — like Superman reversing the Earth’s rotation in order to prevent an earthquake that will kill Lois Lane — to turn back time. “It’s 26 years since Cobain passed away, and the people that loved Nirvana then have gone on to lead successful lives, they’re professionals now, and 26 years later, they’re buying a memory. They’re buying their youth.”
2. STEFAN
for close to a decade after darvin had sold it, the Superman cape went dark, its whereabouts a mystery. In those same years, Christopher Reeve, who had gone on to star in a further three Superman films, fell from a horse and was left paralysed from the neck down and unable to breathe without a portable ventilator. A year after his accident, in March 1996, he made a surprise appearance at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, greeted with a minute-long standing ovation. “What you probably don’t know is I left New York last September and I just arrived here this morning,” he said from his wheelchair, to both laughter and tears.
In 1997, the Superman cape reappeared in a “Collectors’ Carousel” sale of “Dolls, Toys, Hollywood and Rock ’n’ Roll Memorabilia” at Sotheby’s in Manhattan. How it travelled the breadth of America, from California to New York, and who brought it there, is difficult to determine: two representatives of Sotheby’s told me records from the time were not sufficient to identify and contact the consigner on my behalf; Dick Swan, who sold the cape for Darvin, could not remember who had bought it, only that it was an “irregular customer, not someone I knew well”.
On the morning of 19 December 1997, Stefan Park, then 28, was having breakfast with a friend in the dining room of their Manhattan hotel. They were on the final leg of a monthlong trip that had taken them to Asia, Australia and the United States; New York was to be their last stop before returning home to Sweden. Stefan had grown up in Gothenburg, in a family of modest means and little academic expectation, but his natural abilities in physics, chemistry and mathematics had seen him hurtle into professional life at startling speed: university studies alongside high school at 15, a job in the research department of Volvo at 17, setting up his first company at 24 and becoming one of the first people in Europe to work with artificial intelligence and virtual reality. By his late twenties, he had worked hard, earned well, and was ready for a vacation.
As they ate their breakfast, the friend — a professional footballer whom Stefan prefers not to name — noticed an item on the news.
It was about a jacket that had been worn by William Shatner as Captain Kirk in Star Trek; one of the iconic, maroon ones from the second, superior, movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that came out in 1982. It was for sale in New York that very day. In fact, the auction had already started. As a self-confessed nerdy scientist, Star Trek was Stefan’s ultimate sci-fi passion. They ran outside and hailed a cab.
Stefan’s collecting interests had started small. As a child he was fascinated by space exploration; one day he thought he would love to have an autograph from an astronaut. You could buy one for not much: as little as $15 maybe. Then, he thought he’d like to have one from a cosmonaut too. And what about seeing if he could get an item of some kind from every living astronaut? There were only 270 or so; it couldn’t be too hard. Or what about a signed letter from Neil Armstrong that had actually been carried into space and back? Before long, Stefan had them all, and more.
When they arrived at Sotheby’s they were fast-tracked through the registration process, despite being two young guys in their twenties and perhaps not the most convincing of customers. They entered the sale room just before the jacket came up, and despite a bidding war, Stefan came away victorious. He was ecstatic from the win but there was still one auction lot to go. (He learned later that the item had also been featured on the breakfast news show, but he’d got in the taxi so fast he missed it.) He remembers some kind of a veil coming down, and a spotlight, and the shiny Superman logo, and realising that, for everyone else in the room, this was the reason they had come.
Stålman, as Superman was known in Swedish — a literal translation of “Man of Steel” — had been the comic that Stefan had grown up with. He’d read it since he was six. He’d seen the film at the cinema, sitting in the front row, second seat from the left: he’d always had a good memory for spatial settings and for dates. Reeve, he remembered, really looked like Superman. It was one of the few films where you could believe the actor and the character were one and the same. Still revved up from buying the Captain Kirk jacket, Stefan raised his auction paddle up and didn’t take it down.
Stefan bought the cape for $23,000. Back at the hotel that night, he and his friend had dinner. His friend wore the Captain Kirk jacket, he wore the cape. They ordered room service instead of eating in the hotel’s restaurant because, despite their giddiness, there were some limits to how nerdy they were prepared to be. The next day, he packed the jacket and the cape in his hand luggage and boarded a