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Bidders Can’t Leave Garbo Estate Alone

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From Reuters

Garbo-mania swept through Sotheby’s auction house Thursday as nearly 1,000 people bid furiously for the right to sit in one of the legendary screen star’s chairs, read from her bookcases and light her candlesticks and lamps.

Fans of the late Greta Garbo jammed Sotheby’s salesroom, bidding so fast and so furiously that auctioneer John Marion could not keep up.

The actress’ niece, who inherited her aunt’s estate, ordered Sotheby’s to sell 192 items from Garbo’s Manhattan home. She cleared $2.5 million for the day’s sale and another $18.2 million for art sold earlier in the week at the Impressionist auctions, minus 10% commission for the auction house.

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“The family is really ecstatic. . . . We’re all really tickled,” said Ted Kurz, lawyer for the Garbo estate.

The sale was the ultimate invasion of privacy for the actress, who died last April and was famed for her self-imposed hermit’s life, saying she wanted to be left alone.

The brightly dressed crowd watched as paintings, prints and pieces of furniture sold for sometimes tens of thousands of dollars more than their estimates.

A pair of flowered candlesticks, valued at only $800, sold for a staggering $30,000, and a small porcelain decanter in the shape of a wizard, estimated at $700, brought $18,700 and a smattering of applause.

The top sale of the day was an Albert Andre painting that fetched $187,000, nearly five times its high estimate.

“They (the prices) are insanely high,” art history professor Soffy Arboleda said.

“Look what that dog brought. It is absolutely ridiculous,” she added, referring to a tiny French school portrait of a white terrier that sold for $18,700 against a $600 to $800 estimate.

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Barbara Barondess MacLean, a friend of Garbo’s for the last 57 years who didn’t bid on anything, was not surprised by the sky-high prices.

“Everybody in the world has a fantasy just to be somebody else, to have more money, more fame, more beauty, more everything. These people just want to touch that,” said MacLean, an actress who did a three-minute scene with Garbo in the 1933 film “Queen Christina.”

Melisa Morgan and Don Hamilton, both singers who live in Manhattan, were two New Yorkers who hoped to touch Garbo’s fame.

The couple could only laugh when their $1,500 bid for a painting of a rooster by Christian d’Espic was quickly eclipsed. The piece, estimated at $500, sold for $5,775.

Even Garbo’s late brother, Sven Gustafson, got a taste of the hysteria when his oil work, “Embracing Couple,” sold for $9,350. It had been estimated to bring $400.

“He became an artist overnight,” said Sotheby’s President Diana Brooks.

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