Daughter of Child Star to Auction ‘Oz’ Figurines

If all goes well for Lidia Penge of Dana Point, the past could very well be the ticket to a more prosperous future.

Six years ago, Penge, then 24, flew to New York to explore the contents of a warehouse that had been left to her and her sisters by their mother, MGM child actress Jackie Horner. Like a time capsule, the warehouse had been unopened since 1953.

For Penge, the trip was more than a chance to dust off old family photo albums and rustle the pages of quaint diaries. It was a chance to get to know a mother who died when Penge was only 14.

“We knew that there were items that had been in storage for 30 years, but it was just too expensive to take time off, fly back to New York and go through the stuff,” Penge said recently. “I couldn’t afford it until 1983 when my husband (then fiance) loaned me $1,500 to fly back.”

Among the glass records, dusty furniture and old books and China she found in the warehouse, Penge discovered five hand-painted plaster figurines, each about 11 inches tall, of characters from MGM’s 1939 film classic “The Wizard of Oz”: Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow and Professor Marvel.

“My mother had always told my sisters and me about things she had in storage in New York,” says Penge, “but we didn’t know that the Oz statues were there.” Penge shipped them home along with some other items and put them on a closet shelf.

Three months later, the warehouse burned to the ground taking with it all the items that Penge had left behind. “If we had waited three months longer we would have had nothing,” she said. “No statues, no pictures, no records. No link to my past.”

Last September, Penge heard about the pair of original “Oz” ruby slippers that netted $165,000 at a Christie’s auction in June of 1988.

Her interest piqued, she took the statues to the Christie’s office in Beverly Hills where an “Oz” specialist, Rhys Thomas, determined their age and speculated on the role they may have played in the actual production of the film.

According to Thomas, the one-of-a-kind figurines bear a close resemblance to the illustrations in Frank L. Baum’s book and probably were made by MGM artists as prototypes for the film.

Thomas dates them between May and October of 1938-- after the historic change of the slippers’ color from silver to the better-for-Technicolor ruby-red, and before the casting of Judy Garland (the Dorothy figurine has blond hair, rather than Garland’s brunette).

Christie’s researchers believe that producer Louis B. Mayer’s secretary, Ida Koverman, gave the figures to Horner, who starred in MGM films “Smilin’ Through” (1941) and “Panama Hattie” (1942) and who appeared as a regular in the “Our Gang” comedy series before becoming a concert pianist.

Hoping to cash in on a wave of public interest brought on by “The Wizard of Oz’s” 50th anniversary, Penge has put the statues on Christie’s auction block where they will be offered today. Bidding is expected to begin at around $10,000, but Penge is hoping that the statues will bring in a considerably higher sum.

“The thing with the ruby slippers,” she noted, “is that they were old and worn looking. Our statues were carefully stored for 30 years, wrapped in newspapers in a cold, dry, cement room. They’re in almost perfect condition.” However, the years have left their mark on two of the statues: Professor Marvel and, to a lesser degree, Dorothy, suffer from flaking and chipped paint.

Still, Penge hopes that the figures will fetch enough money that, once she’s split the proceeds with her three sisters (and given Christie’s its cut of 10%), she and her husband, a sales representative for Dimension Cable Services, will be able to make a down payment on a house.

“As much as we’d like to keep the statues and hand them down, a house will be a more practical heirloom than the statues,” she said. “Fortunately, we were able to get enough items from the warehouse before it burned that there is still plenty left to pass on.”

The other items include a pair of Franklin D. Roosevelt dolls made during the Depression and presented to Horner by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and a pair of ornate, Chinese throne chairs complete with hand-carved dragons and birds.