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2 weeks ago
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For a cool million-dollars-plus, a pair of the the famed and rare Ruby Slippers from The Wizard of Oz can take a hallowed 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 winning bidder to the auction house – and the price is currently at $1,015,625.
The auction continues through December 7.
With four pairs of Ruby Slippers known to exist – including a pair in the Smithsonian – the shoes up for auction are visible 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 nearly electrocutes herself by trying to remove the slippers from Dorothy’s feet prematurely.
But here’s where it gets complicated: The two slippers – a right and a left – up for auction belong to two separate pairs used in the film, with the Smithsonian owning the mismatched “sister” pair.
In any case, the buyer of the shoes for sale can rest assured of the screen lineage. The auction description states, “Taken together, these are the primary pairs of shoes worn by Judy Garland through most of the film, including all but a few of the most memorable scenes.”
The Heritage Auction pair also has a fascinating post-movie history: After the now-legendary MGM Auction in 1970 when a massive trove of MGM items were sold off by the studio, a man named Michael Shaw took possession of shoes. From the 1980s on, Shaw displayed his Ruby Slippers around the country, including at the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where they were stolen in 2005.
The Shaw slippers remained missing until 2018, when the FBI, acting on a tip, recovered the shoes, which, according to the Associated Press at the time, had been taken by an “aging reformed mobster” named Terry Jon Martin, who mistakenly believed that the shoes were covered in real jewels rather than rhinestones. (Martin was indicted in 2023 and pleaded guilty to a charge of theft of major artwork; earlier this year, Martin, in hospice care with cancer, was spared jail time due to his ill health, though he was ordered to pay $23,500 – in $300 monthly installments – in restitution to the museum.)
The next chapter in the slippers’ history will be made on December 7, but if $1M isn’t in your budget, maybe consider 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 window of her room to see Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) riding her bike in the whirlwind of the tornado that has lifted the house into the sky. Before Dorothy’s eyes, Miss Gulch morphs from the bike-peddling spinster into the Wicked Witch flying on her broomstick.”
The starting bid: $100,000.
