For sale: memories from an enduring love story
Shackles from the film “Cool Hand Luke”; a script from the 1963 comedy “A New Kind of Love”; the wedding dress that Joanne Woodward wore the day she married Paul Newman in 1958.
These artifacts, along with some 300others, tell the story of a union between two of Hollywood's most enduring film stars that lasted more than half a century. It began in 1953 and lasted until Newman, a magnetic titan of the screen, died in 2008 at the age of 83. Woodward, 93, a formidable talent, has kept a private life since learning she has Alzheimer's disease in 2007. The objects also will take on another kind of value later this year when they are put up for sale in a series of auctions by Sotheby's. If previous demand for Newman's belongings is any measure, the events are likely to be lucrative: A Rolex he owned sold in 2017 for a record $17.8 million. Three years later, another of Newman's watches sold for more than $5.4 million.
The auctions, which will take place both online and in person in New York, follow the recent release of “The Last Movie Stars,” a six-part HBO Max documentary series directed by Ethan Hawke and based on audio transcripts of interviews with the couple's friends, colleagues and family members. Newman's posthumous memoir, “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man,” also was published last year. “The family really felt that this was the right time to continue telling the story of their parents,” Mari-Claudia Jimenez, the chairman of Sotheby's, said by phone Wednesday. The proceeds from the sales, she added, would go to the family.
The items, most of them from the couple's home in Connecticut, include family photographs and autographed scripts, as well as awards, props and costumes from films including “The Color of Money,” “The Three Faces of Eve” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Sotheby's said. Woodward's wedding ring; autographed letters and photographs from Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; antique furniture and art collected by the couple; as well as racing memorabilia kept by Newman, a keen race car driver, also will go on the block. Sotheby's has estimated that an embroidered suit worn by Newman at a 1971 Ontario Motor Speedway race could sell for up to $25,000; that the “Cool Hand Luke” shackles could sell for up to $5,000; and that Woodward's wedding dress could fetch up to $1,200.
Sales of celebrity memorabilia have historically turned a handsome profit. Steve McQueen's hero car from the legendary chase scene in the film “Bullitt”? $3.74 million. The “Casablanca” piano? $3.4 million. Marilyn Monroe's Golden Globe? $250,000.