Dietrich Apartment Items Draw $659,023 at Auction

When art collector Lloyd Greif arrived at Sotheby’s auction house in Beverly Hills on Saturday to bid on a century-old oil painting by French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, he hadn’t an inkling that he would end up talking to a reporter from a German television station.

As Greif went to collect the painting, which he bought for $140,000, reporters surrounded him and began firing questions. Not the usual auction behavior--but this was no ordinary auction.

The painting was one of 270 lots of items from film icon Marlene Dietrich’s New York apartment auctioned off to a standing-room-only crowd at Sotheby’s, the largest such event for the West Coast branch of the auction house.

A veteran of more subdued art auctions, Grief didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

“I guess Hollywood is Hollywood,” he said. “They’re selling cocktail tables in there. I don’t follow that.”

He was in the minority.

For collectors from around the world--bids were faxed from Tokyo, Ireland and Australia--Saturday represented a chance to buy a piece of immortality. Buyers spent $659,023, twice what auctioneers had anticipated.

“Marlene Dietrich comes from an era of real movie stars,” said Gloria Ziese, a Newport Beach collector who bought Dietrich’s Mickey Mouse savings bank for $1,035.

“I go back to the ‘30s and ‘40s because that’s where the real talent lies. You can grab a piece of history and have it forever.”

Those pieces ranged from the Mickey Mouse bank to Pucci dresses, notes from Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles and a grand piano, which sold for $10,925.

They came from the Park Avenue apartment that the screen siren--best known for her cabaret acts and femme fatale roles in films like “The Blue Angel”--kept from the late 1950s until her death in 1992.

Sotheby’s shipped the items to its Beverly Hills branch, expecting that Dietrich’s bric-a-brac would generate more interest near Hollywood.

That was a good guess. Even before the gavel banged Saturday morning, 1,000 bids were faxed in.

*

Not all the potential bidders could fit in the auction house. Dozens had to wait outside under a fierce fall sun as a Sotheby’s representative called in their bids through the door.

Though some bidders searched for bargains, most of the crowd came for serious bidding. Collectors said bids were stunningly high.

Actress Jennifer Tilly walked off with a pair of letters from Hemingway costing more than $10,000, plus several dresses and a fur.

“I love Marlene Dietrich. I just love her mystery and sense of style,” she said.

Asked what she would do with the dresses, she replied: “I’m going to wear them. Unless they don’t fit, in which case I’m going to wrap them up in acid-free tissue paper and when I die they can have another great auction.”