Auctioning off remnants of Camelot

They’re the kind of tag-sale items left over when families clean out vacation homes: frayed sofas, chipped china cups and mismatched glasses. There are also a few straw baskets, some worn dictionaries, even an old wine bottle that’s been turned into a lamp.

However, the 691 lots being auctioned by Sotheby’s Holdings Inc. in New York this week are not the flotsam of ordinary lives. These are artifacts from houses owned by President Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline.

“The name still has magic,” said Chapin Carson, the Sotheby’s senior vice president who organized the sale. “People look back with nostalgia to the Kennedy years as a time when it seemed like everything was possible.”

Sotheby’s learned about America’s fondness for all things Kennedy eight years ago when siblings Caroline and John Jr. sold items from their mother’s estate after her death in 1994. The 1,301 lots brought in $34.5 million, seven times the presale estimate by Sotheby’s.

Jacqueline’s fake pearls, the object of her son’s attention in a famous White House photograph, went for $211,500 after being valued at $500 to $700 by Sotheby’s. President Kennedy’s golf clubs, split into two lots, sold for a combined $1.2 million, higher than the $1,400 to $1,800 estimate.

Following her brother’s death in 1999, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg is putting more pieces of Camelot on the auction block, after donating historic items to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

“I found myself again with more houses and belongings than I could possibly use or enjoy,” she writes in the preface to the auction catalog. “I hope these objects, books and furniture will bring a new set of memories as they find new homes, and I hope those memories are as happy as my own.”

For the public preview last week, the pieces were arranged to look like rooms in the six Kennedy homes they came from: the family quarters of the White House; Jacqueline’s apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan; her vacation homes in Peapack, N.J., and Middleburg, Va.; the property she bought in 1979 on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard; and the “Summer White House” across Nantucket Sound in Hyannisport.

There are no golf clubs in this auction, though there is a rocking chair. Although there’s no evidence President Kennedy sat in it, Sotheby’s senior vice president Matthew Weigman said, it’s likely he did because it predates his death. This chair, made of oak with a braided wicker back and seat, has an estimated value of $4,000 to $6,000. In the last auction there were two “Kennedy rockers” with estimates of $3,000 to $5,000. One sold for $453,500 and the other for $442,500.

“All these items were valued as if they belonged to an ordinary person, not the Kennedys,” Weigman said. “It’s difficult to put a value on a name.”

The item with the highest estimated sale price isn’t something the public readily connects with the Kennedys: a 2-foot sandstone bust of a goddess from the 11th century, estimated to sell for $40,000 to $60,000.

An oil painting that has a lower estimated price could end up being one of the auction’s highest sellers because of its historic connection, Weigman says.

The painting, attributed to Frederick Mayhew, was in the background of a Time magazine cover photograph of a newly elected Kennedy in November 1960. “Portrait of Captain Platt Out of Portsmouth, With Clipper Ship in the Distance” has an estimated sale price of $7,000 to $9,000.