Long-lost ‘Oz’ dress to be auctioned

In an indelible scene from “The Wizard of Oz,” the vivid-green Wicked Witch held a frightened Dorothy captive by threatening harm to her dog, Toto, if she did not give up her ruby-red slippers.

The scene was memorable not only for the bright red of Dorothy's shoes, but also for her striking blueand-white gingham pinafore dress — one of several that teenage Judy Garland wore in one of the first major movies filmed in Technicolor, in 1939.

“The dress was a legend, but no one had seen it since the late 1980s,” Jacqueline Leary-warsaw, dean of the school of music, drama and art at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., said Friday. A priest who headed the drama department had been given the dress in 1973, but the university lost track of it.

Now the university hopes to auction it off for at least $1.2 million, with the money going to pay for a new film program. It went on display Saturday at Bonhams New York, where the public can see it through Friday. On May 24, it will be presented at the “Bonhams Classic Hollywood: Film and Television” auction in Los Angeles.

Garland wore several versions of the fragile blue-andwhite dress, but only one other — used elsewhere in the movie — is known to still exist. Julien's Auctions sold it for $480,000 in 2012. Bonhams sold the same dress again for nearly $1.6 million in 2015. The auction house also sold the Cowardly Lion costume worn by actor Bert Lahr for more than $3 million the previous year.

This second dress was found last year, in a shoebox, inside a bag, sitting on top of some faculty mailboxes. It had been “a legend around the drama department,” Leary-warsaw said.