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- A pair of ruby slippers has become the most expensive piece of entertainment memorabilia sold at auction.
- The shoes, which featured in “The Wizard of Oz,” fetched $28 million at auction.
- The pair — one of several worn by Judy Garland in the 1939 film — were once stolen from a museum.
A pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” sold at an auction on Saturday for $28 million — the highest- price ever paid for a piece of entertainment memorabilia.
Heritage Auctions, the auction house that sold the shoes, which are one of four surviving pairs from the 1939 movie, said in a press release that live bidding opened at $1.55 million, with pre-auction estimates for the slippers starting from $3 million.
“They surpassed that within seconds,” the auction house said.
Including the Dallas-based auction house’s fee, the unknown buyer is set to pay $32.5 million in total.
The iconic slippers, dubbed the “the Holy Grail of Hollywood memorabilia” by the auction house, already had a storied past.
As Rhys Thomas, author of “The Ruby Slippers of Oz,” put it, they have seen “more twists and turns than the Yellow Brick Road.”
They disappeared for more than a decade after being stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in 2005 while on loan.
The FBI recovered the shoes in 2018 during a sting operation.
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The man behind the heist, Terry Jon Martin, 77, pleaded guilty to the theft last year.
An attorney for Martin said that his client had believed that the rubies on the shoes were real, but he got rid of them after being told they were glass.
Martin, who was suffering from poor health, was given no prison time at a hearing in early 2024, the Associated Press reported.
The shoes were returned to their owner, Michael Shaw, earlier this year. He gave them to Heritage Auctions for Saturday’s auction.
The sale of the shoes comes amid renewed interest in the musical following the release of “Wicked,” which tells the backstory of the Wicked Witch of the West.
The movie, which stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, has taken the box office by storm, grossing more than $295 million domestically and over $390 million worldwide.
