Last March, Heritage Auctions announced that a pair of ruby slippers from the movie The Wizard of Oz was coming to auction. Now, they have revealed that the famous shoes will be the stars of their upcoming entertainment auction on December 7, 2024.
This is exciting news on its own (especially with the recently released movie Wicked, inspired by The Wizard of Oz, rekindling interest in the 1939 classic), but with this pair, there’s even more to the story. In a series of dramatic events, these shoes were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn., in 2005 and recovered by the FBI in 2018. Earlier this year, they finally returned to their owner, collector, and former child actor, Michael Shaw. Shaw, who had loaned the slippers to the museum for their annual Judy Garland Festival, consigned them to Heritage Auctions.
The costumers for The Wizard of Oz created multiple pairs of ruby slippers for Garland to wear as Dorothy. Many were made for specific purposes; for example, some were made for dance scenes. Today, four known pairs of ruby slippers survive, one of which is in the Smithsonian collection, a testimony to their significance in not just film history but American history. The pair Shaw owned and has now consigned was, in the words of the Associated Press, “believed to be the highest quality of all of them—they were the ones used in close-ups of Dorothy clicking her heels.”
Already called the “traveling shoes” after frequent traveling exhibitions, the shoes went on a world tour starting in October, with stops in Japan, Dallas, New York, and London.
The Dec. 7 auction will include more Wizard of Oz memorabilia, including a screen-matched hat worn by Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West. Like the ruby slippers, the hat was part of Shaw’s “Hollywood on Tour” traveling exhibits of the 1980s and ’90s, and it was also acquired from costumer and collector Kent Warner. According to Joe Maddalena, Heritage Auctions Executive Vice President (whom the auction house describes as having “handled more Wizard of Oz memorabilia and props than any other auctioneer”), “The ruby slippers and Wicked Witch’s hat stand at the pinnacle of Hollywood history.”
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