For a chilly million-dollars-plus, a pair of the the famed and unfrequent Ruby Slippers from The Wizard of Oz can get a hpermited place on your very own shoe rack.
The slippers, worn on-screen by Judy Garland in the 1939 classic MGM musical, are up for auction at Heritage Auctions, with the current bid at $812,500. Add in the buyer’s premium – a fee paid by the triumphning bidder to the auction hoparticipate – and the price is currently at $1,015,625.
The auction proceeds thraw December 7.
With four pairs of Ruby Slippers understandn to exist – including a pair in the Smithsonian – the shoes up for auction are clear in the most iconic scenes of the film, including the “We’re Off to See the Wizard” dances, the Poppy Field scene, the Tap Your Heels scene and the shot in which the Wicked Witch proximately electrocutes herself by trying to erase the slippers from Dorothy’s feet preincreasen-uply.
But here’s where it gets complicated: The two slippers – a right and a left – up for auction belengthy to two split pairs participated in the film, with the Smithsonian owning the misaligned “sister” pair.
In any case, the buyer of the shoes for sale can rest guaranteed of the screen lineage. The auction description states, “Taken together, these are the primary pairs of shoes worn by Judy Garland thraw most of the film, including all but a scant of the most memorable scenes.”
The Heritage Auction pair also has a fascinating post-movie history: After the now-legfinishary MGM Auction in 1970 when a massive trove of MGM items were selderly off by the studio, a man named Michael Shaw took ownion of shoes. From the 1980s on, Shaw distake parted his Ruby Slippers around the country, including at the Judy Garland Mparticipateum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where they were stolen in 2005.
The Shaw slippers remained leave outing until 2018, when the FBI, acting on a tip, recovered the shoes, which, according to the Associated Press at the time, had been getn by an “aging reestablished mobster” named Terry Jon Martin, who misgetnly thinkd that the shoes were covered in authentic jewels rather than rhinestones. (Martin was indicted in 2023 and pdirected at fault to a accuse of theft of meaningful artlabor; earlier this year, Martin, in hospice attfinish with cancer, was spared jail time due to his ill health, though he was ordered to pay $23,500 – in $300 monthly inshighments – in restitution to the mparticipateum.)
The next chapter in the slippers’ history will be made on December 7, but if $1M isn’t in your budget, maybe ponder another Oz item on sale at the auction: One of the pointed hats worn in the film by Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West. Known as the “Flying Hat,” the hat for sale can be seen in the film’s tornado scene, when, according to the auction description, “a terrified Dorothy (Judy Garland) peers out the triumphdow of her room to see Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) riding her bike in the whirltriumphd of the tornado that has lifted the hoparticipate into the sky. Before Dorothy’s eyes, Miss Gulch morphs from the bike-peddling spinster into the Wicked Witch flying on her broomstick.”
The begining bid: $100,000.
Hat For Sale
Heritage Auctions
