Ruby Slippers on the Road to Fortune and Fame – WorthPoint

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” —Lao Tzu

When Dorothy and her new friends Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man, took off down the Yellow Brick Road in the iconic film The Wizard of Oz, no one could have guessed that 85 years later, the ruby slippers would set the collectibles world abuzz by fetching $32.5 million at auction. Since the movie premiered in 1939, the slippers have been on a journey through warehouses, museums, and crime scenes, but now, at last, each remaining pair is accounted for and safely secured. It’s been a long, strange trip.

HOW IT STARTED

In any film, there are always extra props and costumes. There is no definite confirmation of how many pairs of ruby slippers initially existed. Still, according to the Smithsonian, in 1970, MGM Studios held a huge auction, selling thousands of props and costumes. The studio had been failing financially when investor Kirk Kerkorian bought it, planning to break up the assets to sell and create a movie-themed hotel company.

MGM hired costumer Kent Warner to curate the items for the auction. MGM had not tried to preserve anything from the decades of movies the studio released, but Warner spotted a few pairs of the ruby slippers. He instantly knew he had to try to preserve them. Warner kept one pair for himself, and David Weisz, the auctioneer hired to manage the sale, instructed him to destroy the rest. It appears that he never did this. The pair sold at the MGM 1970 auction went for $15,000, and MGM believed at the time that this was the only pair in existence. The unidentified buyer of this pair donated them anonymously to the Smithsonian In 1979, reportedly disappointed that there were other surviving pairs.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

While some details are fuzzy and lost to history, the stories surrounding other pairs of the ruby slippers have fascinated movie fans and collectors for decades. Roberta Jeffries Bauman was a high school junior in Memphis, TN, in 1940 when she won an MGM contest. Her prize? A pair of size 6B ruby slippers from the movie. Until the 1970 MGM auction, she believed her pair was the only pair left. Hearing that the auction had sold a pair for $15,000, she notified MGM that she owned another pair but never received a response.

In 1988, she sold her pair for $150,000 to Anthony Landini, who agreed to allow Disney to display the shoes at their attraction “The Great Movie Ride.” In 2000, Landini sold the pair to David Elkouby, a collector and investor. That pair remains in a bank vault. Disney created a replica of the pair that they displayed until 2017.

Bauman and Landini were not the only ones to sell their pairs. In 1981, Kent Warner, who had mounting medical bills, sold the pair he kept from 1970 for $12,000. In 1988, when Bauman’s pair sold for $150,000, the buyer who purchased the Warner pair sold it for a similar price to a buyer from St. Louis, who had been an underbidder in the auction for the pair owned by Roberta Bauman. In 2012, a syndicate led by actor Leonard DiCaprio and director Steven Spielberg purchased this pair privately for $2.2 million and donated them to the Motion Picture Academy for display in the Academy Museum in Los Angeles.

Actress Debbie Reynolds was also a player in the shoe game. She was at the 1970 MGM auction nearly every day, purchasing items for a planned Hollywood history museum. While the museum never opened, she bought close to $600,000 worth of props and costumes from the sale, including an off-screen test pair of slippers with curled toes and an Arabian design. In 2011, Reynolds auctioned off many of her items from the MGM sale, including the Arabian pair, which sold for nearly $690,000.

The remaining known pair of ruby slippers is the one that’s been in the news recently. This pair has been on quite a journey. Owned by an assistant of Kent Warner’s, Michael Shaw, the pair was on loan to the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, MI. In 2005, thieves stole this pair from the museum in a daring smash-and-grab robbery. It wasn’t until 2018 that the shoes turned up in a sting operation conducted by the FBI. The agency kept the shoes as evidence but did not have any suspects until May of 2023, when the FBI charged Terry Jon Martin with the theft. Another man, Jerry Hal Saliterman, was also arrested in connection with the robbery.

The FBI returned the shoes to Shaw in 2024, and it is this pair that sold recently for a record-shattering price of $32 million. Interestingly enough, the FBI enlisted the aid of the Smithsonian in authenticating the recovered pair of slippers. They discovered that the pair owned by Shaw and the pair on display at the National Museum of American History were mismatched. The pairs were rematched with their original mates, and now both pairs are safely secured.

NEXT STEPS

With all of the known surviving pairs of these iconic slippers safely accounted for, what happens next? That’s hard to say. The pair recently sold at auction set a record for the highest price ever paid for a movie prop at auction. For those keeping track, the whereabouts and status of the pairs are as follows:

1. MGM Auction Pair—This pair was part of the giant 1970 MGM Auction and later donated by the buyer to the Smithsonian, where they remain on exhibit. Experts discovered they were a mismatched pair and later rematched them when the FBI recovered a stolen pair.
2. The Roberta Bauman Pair— MGM awarded this pair to contest winner Roberta Bauman in 1940. She sold them in 1988 to Anthony Landini, who allowed Disney to display them. Landini sold them to investor/collector David Elkouby in 2000, who keeps them in a bank vault in an undisclosed location.
3. The Kent Warner Pair—Warner kept at least one pair for himself when he found the shoes in preparation for the 1970 MGM auction. In 1981, he sold this pair for $12,000. That buyer then sold them to Phillip Samuels of St. Louis, an underbidder in the Bauman sale. In 2011, actor Leonardo Dicaprio and director Steven Spielberg raised $2.2 million to purchase them and then donated them to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). They are on display periodically at the Academy Museum.
4. The Michael Shaw Pair—Purchased for $2500 from Kent Warner by his friend and colleague Mike Shaw, this pair spent years on display at the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, MI. They were stolen from there in 2005, recovered in 2018, authenticated and rematched with the pair owned by the Smithsonian, and sold recently for $32 million. The buyer is still unidentified and has not indicated whether the slippers will be publicly displayed.

The Wizard of Oz Museum in Cocoa Beach, Florida, and the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, MI, have several props and costumes from the movie. To collectors and movie buffs today, it’s unfathomable that so many pieces of movie history were essentially tossed out with the trash before the MGM auction started a trend in 1970. Movie props are fast becoming an investment-class collectible.

Martin Nolan, Co-founder and Executive Director of Julien’s Auctions, told WorthPoint, “The Ruby Slippers symbolize so many things to so many people, such as the underdog can win against powerful forces. They are a symbol of a special place where people can escape their troubles. The sale of one of the four pairs of Ruby Slippers known to exist today for over $32 million reinforces the importance of movie memorabilia to people from all walks of life. People can easily relate to movie memorabilia, triggering a memory as we are all nostalgic and are now considered fine art. The Ruby Slippers currently on display at The National Museum of American History are the most visited object at the museum.”

Brenda Kelley Kim lives in the Boston area. She is the author of Sink or Swim: Tales From the Deep End of Everywhere and writes a weekly syndicated column for The Marblehead Weekly News/Essex Media Group. When not writing or walking her snorty pug, Penny, she enjoys yard sales, flea markets, and badminton.

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