People of Letters : Collectibles: Autographed material is being called the “unexploited collectible.” Experts agree the money is in Los Angeles, the market in the East.

It was the first event of its kind since Sotheby’s ceased its full auction schedule in Los Angeles seven years ago. A new independent auction house, Willen’s, was holding an inaugural autograph sale in the sedate chandeliered rooms of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and manuscript aficionados had turned out in overflowing numbers.

Sipping tea, they swapped tales of document acquisitions, examined the scrawled yellowed papers displayed on long cloth-draped tables, then moved on to the serious business of bidding, tipping up their numbered paddles with varying degrees of discretion and bravura.

Claiming the highest offer of $24,000 at the recent event was a copy of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” autographed by the complete speaking cast of the film. An $8,500 bid bought a much-admired Abraham Lincoln letter in which the Civil War President considered pardoning one Joseph Aud for conducting people through federal lines by rowing them across the Potomac.

Hollywood manager Ken Kragen, organizer of Hands Across America, paid $10,000 for an Albert Einstein letter asserting the physicist’s early belief in the theory of relativity.

Burt Lancaster’s daughter, bidding for her father, laughed out loud when she won 10 bars of music by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi for a bargain price of $7,000.

One of eight letters that Marilyn Monroe wrote as Norma Jean Baker was sold for $8,500, an early printing of the Declaration of Independence signed by John Binns brought $6,500, and a letter by Greta Garbo, scratched out on a Western Union telegram form, went for $1,100.

Unexpectedly, it was an angry Humphrey Bogart missive accusing Warner Brothers of “bad faith” that brought fever-pitch bidding, ending at $4,200, more than twice its estimate.

Organized by Sara Willen, formerly of the Beverly Hills firm, Scriptorium, the auction was a signal that, far from being a musty scholar’s pursuit, collecting old documents is becoming a booming Southern California pastime for the chic and famous.

“In the last three or four years everybody’s gone crazy. Everybody’s going wild about everything,” says David Karpeles, a doyen of West Coast collectors whose manuscripts are housed in family museums in Santa Barbara and Montecito.

Among celebrity collectors, Sylvester Stallone seeks out the papers of Edgar Allan Poe, Steven Spielberg collects cult-movie scripts and Donald Duck animation cels, and George Lucas scouts out all things concerning Orson Welles.

“They’re now seeing autographs as a new, unexploited collectible,” says Joseph Maddalena, owner of the Beverly Hills manuscript firm, Profiles in History. “Autographs are still a hobby and because they’re still a hobby they’re tremendously undervalued.”

Maddalena estimates there are a couple of hundred collectors in Southern California who each spend $50,000 a year buying autograph material. In a familiar art-market pattern, experts agree, the money is in Los Angeles, the market in the East.

As Willen explains her auction venture, “Three times a year, 20 people get on a plane and go to Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they all live within 15 minutes of me.”

If her effort succeeds financially, the Huntington Library’s curator of early American manuscripts, John Rhodehamel, predicts “that might lead to something.”

Adds Karpeles, “I’d like to see a big auction house on the West Coast so we could stand up to New York and London.”

Auction Activity

Already auction activity in Los Angeles is on the increase.

The San Francisco auction firm of Butterfield & Butterfield opened business here a year ago and Camden House, specializing in entertainment memorabilia, held its second auction this past weekend.

For the past several years, dealers say, West Coast prices have been rising annually at between 10% and 25%. Although Sotheby’s head of American documents sales, Mary-Jo Kline, calls the national market “sedate” in comparison to volatile art prices, Karpeles, a real estate investor, declares that good pieces have “gone up far faster and higher” than land and housing values.

The reason for the sudden discovery of manuscripts is a matter of differing opinions. Maddalena sees collectors coming from stamp and coin markets plagued by fraud and artificially inflated prices. John McLaughlin, who collects and deals in motion picture material, attributes the influx of money to the 1987 stock market crash, which drove investors to other fields. At Sotheby’s, Kline observes a shift among auction addicts from books and art to less-expensive autographs. “They like to look through catalogues, and they like going to sales.”

Harrumphs Maddalena of this sort of New York crowd, “Instead of going to the movies, they go to a Sotheby’s sale.”

Southern California collectors, he maintains, “take their collecting much more seriously.”

Kline, who counts important clients in the Los Angeles area, sees them as more independent than the usual East Coast buffs. “They like to have control over their collecting,” she says. “They make their own decisions.”

The motivation to collect derives from everything--from hopes of lucrative investment to less easily definable instincts.

Americans, says Kline, have never thrown out scraps of paper. No sooner had the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence than collectors were gathering up signatures of the signers. And, following the Civil War, Gilded Age millionaires took to manuscript collecting as a means of attaining cultural respectability.

Contemporary collectors also begin their habits in typical ways, the experts say.

Kragen recounts how he wandered into an autograph shop and bought a signed Mark Twain photograph as a Christmas gift for a client. When the client announced he was changing managers, Kragen kept the photo, and, finding that friends viewed it “with awe,” went on to such acquisitions as producer David Wolper’s collection of 21 presidential checks.

Building firm president Benjamin Shapell started just as predictably. Ten years ago, he was browsing through an antiques magazine when he noticed a blurb about historical manuscripts. “I was stunned,” he remembers. “I thought people weren’t allowed to own these things. I thought they were all in institutions.”

Once hooked, collectors find the value of their passion in the content of their documents, ideally, written on a pertinent subject by a famous person. Says Karpeles, “You want John Hancock saying, ‘Oh, I just signed the Declaration of Independence yesterday.’ ”

When a document is desirable, there is always a story behind it. The Marilyn Monroe letter auctioned at Willen’s was written when she was 16 and working in a wartime factory in the San Fernando Valley.

“Here’s somebody who had a tortuous childhood and adulthood,” says Willen. “But if you look for a moment between the awful childhood and the hideous adulthood, there’s one moment when she’s Norma Jean and happy.”

“I’m so full of life, pep and vitality,” declares Monroe, who has become the proud owner of a monkey-hair coat.

Historical Link

It is just such visceral links to history that provide collectors with thrills.

“You can collect any hero you like,” says Shapell, whose idol is Abraham Lincoln. “When I hold a letter Lincoln once held, it really does something to me,” he says.

For the cognoscenti, crossed-out texts only add to the intrigue.

“You can look under cross-outs to see what this famous person was thinking,” says Karpeles, who laughs. “Some of the things they thought about were pretty dumb.”

Karpeles, whose treasures include a 1493 letter from Spain’s King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella to the Pope agreeing on their ownership of the New World, sees only about one in 10,000 manuscripts as historically important.

In the high-price class are blue-chip American Presidents, Washington and Lincoln, at around six figures. An early unpublished Einstein article sold two years ago for more than $1 million, while in the top-of-the-line category of composers, the record price was set in 1987 at Sotheby’s in London when nine Mozart symphonies were sold for $3.9 million.

For bargain-hunting collectors there are the neglected areas of black history and women (Susan B. Anthony letters typically bring less than $1,000), says Sotheby’s Kline. Karpeles sees former President Richard Nixon’s letters as important, and McLaughlin recommends modern movie scripts (“they’re not sexy looking”) as good buys in a skyrocketing market. Says Maddalena, “Four years ago if you walked in a major auction house with Orson Welles’ reading copy of H. G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds,’ they’d have laughed you out the door. It sold a year and a half ago for $220,000.”

But passionate collectors are sharp on the subject of speculative buying. Says Kline, “If people want to collect documents for investment, I recommend CDs and treasury notes.”

And, caution the experts, even the biggest collectors sometimes make serious errors of judgment.

Five years ago, Malcolm Forbes and H. Ross Perot did legendary battle over a souvenir copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. Caught in auction fever, the moguls charged ever upward, until the gavel finally whacked down at $270,000.

Sotheby’s estimate for the document had been between $35,000 and $50,000.