Last Reprise

A jazz fan driving along South Robertson Boulevard could be distracted into a rear-end collision by the big black-and-white sign.

An estate sale for Ella Fitzgerald? In a modest antique store on a Los Angeles block well down the road from showbiz central? Besides, didn’t the beloved singer die in June 1996, long enough ago for collectors and museums to snatch up all the memorabilia?

Such questions are perfectly reasonable, agrees Joseph Donnelly, who owns Bumps, the Beverlywood shop selling gowns, shoes, furniture and record albums from Fitzgerald’s home.

Part of the answer is that the First Lady of American Song was a pack rat.

When she died at the age of 78, the closets in her 6,500-square-foot Beverly Hills house were stuffed with clothes and souvenirs dating back to the 1950s. Plenty was left even after her family, Sotheby’s auction house, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress and Harvard University took their shares.

But Donnelly was upset at how hundreds of remaining items were about to be sold off in an everyday-type garage sale at a veterans’ rehabilitation center. So he rescued them, buying in bulk, and Fitzgerald’s estate later added more items to sell at Bumps.

Now Donnelly seems torn between pride and anger that what he calls his “humble setting” is handling, among other things, the mink-trimmed black-and-turquoise gown that designer Don Loper created for Fitzgerald (price tag, $2,500) and her portable 45 rpm record player ($150).

“Had this been Paris or Berlin or New York, they would have paid admission to come to buy things of Ella’s,” he said. “But Los Angeles doesn’t seem to care about what’s important regarding its past.”

In a complicated arrangement, some of the proceeds are going to charities, including the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, which supports programs to aid juvenile diabetics and music students. All the items have been certified as genuine, said Richard Rosman, attorney for her estate and foundation.

Some fans were puzzled at first by the sale’s location. But Valerie Bishop thought it was fitting.

“Ella was a very humble, down home kind of person and this was as if she had come home to the neighborhood, so to speak,” said Bishop, a legal secretary in her 50s from Santa Monica. She purchased a small jewelry pin and a lithograph print at Bumps.

Steven Edelman, a comedy writer from West Hollywood, was also surprised to see the sale sign on Robertson. He wound up spending $60 on a single leather glove and a silk scarf, which he now has placed in a plastic frame in his den. “It won’t change my life,” said Edelman, 52. “It’s just something that represents a small part of my world because of what she has done. A lot of those people I grew up admiring in entertainment, music, athletics are not around anymore.”

Customers often tell Donnelly, he says, how Fitzgerald’s songs “reach into them and touch a romantic chord”--from her first hit, “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” in 1938, to all the ballads, up-tempo jazz, scat singing, bossa nova and the classic songbook albums of Ellington, Porter and Gershwin music.

One elderly shopper recalled that he owed his college love life to Fitzgerald. “He said he’d have a girl over and put Ella on the record player, and that made all the difference in the world,” the shop owner says.

Donnelly, 49, was a late convert to Fitzgerald. His tastes used to veer more to 1960s rock. Now, he predicts that “200 or 300 years from now, this lady is still going to be great no matter what planet you’re on.”

The Smithsonian has Fitzgerald’s awards (including her Presidential Medal of Freedom), her scrapbooks, photographs, some signature outfits and a pair of white eyeglasses she made famous in an American Express advertisement. The Library of Congress was given about 800 musical arrangements and the Schlesinger Library, at Harvard-Radcliffe, got her large collection of cookbooks.

An auction at Sotheby’s in Beverly Hills in May netted her charitable foundation more than $236,000 by selling off such flashy mementos as Fitzgerald’s baby grand piano, her 1978 Rolls-Royce, a gold wristwatch given to her by Frank Sinatra and books inscribed by artist Pablo Picasso and lyricist Ira Gershwin.

Foundation attorney Rosman said he hoped Bumps’ unpretentious setting would attract a wider audience than the mainly affluent bidders at Sotheby’s. “Ella was loved across all races and economic spectrums,” he said.

Located at 1605 S. Robertson Blvd., four blocks south of Pico Boulevard, the 14-month-old Bumps store began the sale in the summer and will continue it for an undetermined period.

On the lower end of the price scale are about 150 pieces of everyday clothes (many in dress size 18) and 40 pairs of shoes (size 9). Belts are selling for $15; blouses for $25; a cotton jacket for $75, a wool suit, $125. Albums from her record collection range from $10 to $25.

Among the more upscale merchandise are a plush bath towel with Fitzgerald’s name embroidered on it, $250; test pressings for the “Fine and Mellow” album, $500; 25 sequined and chiffon gowns that range between $400 and $2,500; and her dining room set, including table, six chairs, buffet and china closet, with a $12,000 asking price.

Music industry executive Elise Kolesky recently paid $950 for a knee-length Persian lamb coat, with “Ella” stitched on its satin lining. “I’m absolutely going to wear it once or twice, and then I’m probably going to mount it,” said Kolesky, 40, who lives in New York.

She described herself as “‘extremely shocked” when a friend told her that Fitzgerald’s estate was being sold in such a relatively unknown store.

Other people have expressed similar sentiments about Fitzgerald’s final resting place. After struggles with heart disease and diabetes that had forced amputation of her legs below the knees, she died June 15, 1996. She was interred in a crypt in a high-rise mausoleum at Inglewood Park Cemetery, her remains marked by a modest plaque.

Rosman, her attorney, insists that she would have wanted it that way. “I think part of her worldwide fame and popularity was that she loved her fans as much as they loved her,” he said. “Everybody was the same as her, nobody was better or worse.”