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So often in this business, a story goes viral and receives no follow-up. The initial mystery is reported but the resolution never comes to light. So it was with the 2001 tale of Jack Nicholson’s baby teeth. Twenty-three years ago, the British TV station Auctionworld claimed to have acquired The Shining star’s toddler chompers. It planned to auction them off on December 10, just about a month after the channel went live. Nicholson, reportedly, was pissed and wanted his teeth back.
There was a lot of coverage of the auction at the time. It ripped through the British tabloid press before making it to more respectable publications like the BBC and Time. The auction was reported but not the results? Did Nicholson acquire what was once his? How much did some weirdo pay for this grim memorabilia? Answers were impossible to find. But now, thanks to investigative journalist Chris Stanton at Vulture, we have answers to these heavy questions.
Stanton’s full story is one of media frenzy, tabloid reporting, and early internet virality. It’s a reminder that people are less likely to double-check the facts on a salacious story they want to be true. So what happened? Well, it turns out that Auctionworld never had Nicholson’s teeth. A desperate PR flack worried about losing their job made the whole thing up and no one tracked down the truth until Stanton started asking around more than 20 years later.
Back in 2001, Auctionworld was a new channel. It was weird. It worked like other home shopping networks with a twist. The hosts would bring out a jewel-encrusted globe, Matt Damon’s uniform from Saving Private Ryan, or an expensive-looking watch and claim Auctionworld only had them in limited quantities. The channel would display the starting bid and quantity and sell the items to the highest bidder.
According to the Vulture story, which spoke to former employees of the channel, the whole operation was fishy. Auctionworld’s owner would bid on items himself and call the studio from home to randomly change the number of items on offer. The before-mentioned jewel-encrusted globe was, once shattered, full of cardboard. The channel didn’t last long. It kept failing to deliver goods to customers and UK regulators eventually fined it for £450,000. The channel collapsed and its founder fled the country, leaving employees unpaid and orders unshipped.
But what about Jack Nicholson’s baby teeth?
That was the brainchild of then-junior PR executive Ben Keen. Keen told Vulture that he was working his very first PR job when the company he worked for assigned him to the Auctionworld account. It didn’t go well. Keen failed to create buzz and a week before the channel was set to launch he knew his firm’s contract wouldn’t be renewed. So, out of desperation, he made something up. He put together a press release about Nicholson’s teeth and sent it into the wild. Keen even invented the bit about the actor being mad and wanting the teeth back. “And that gave birth to a story about Jack Nicholson’s teeth,” he told Vulture.
The stunt worked and soon everyone was buzzing about Auctionworld and the strange teeth. The channel’s managing director even went on Sky Digital in the U.K. to talk about it. “It’s weird, yes, but we’ve had offers already exceeding £5,000,” he said at the time. “We’re intrigued to see what Mr. Nicholson’s agent offers.”
After reading through the piece I’m struck by only one question: Did nobody check with Jack Nicholson at the time before running the story? It’s possible they did. Nicholson has been press-shy for a long time and in 2001 he was at the end of his storied acting career. It’s possible he or his team didn’t think it was worth commenting on such a silly story.
So the story sat online for 23 years, a weird little bit of tabloid gossip that persisted in the collective unconscious. The journey to the truth is a good reminder in these troubled times that it’s good to be skeptical of the information we see online. It’s good to ask questions. Especially about the provenance of celebrity teeth.
