How did actress MARILYN MONROE bring two men together to create a world-class museum in Kildare? SARAH MC DONNELL found out …
Newbridge Silverware CEO William Doyle with Martin Nolan, executive director of Julien’s Auctions, the largest entertainment auction house in the world. Image by Padraic Deasy
In 2006, William Doyle, CEO of Newbridge Silverware, was on holiday with his wife Monica, who was reading a magazine article about an upcoming Christie’s auction which was to include the black Givenchy dress Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Monica mentioned it in passing but William fixed on it. “I think I’ll have a go at buying that dress,” he said, though as he puts it, smiling,“I didn’t want it for myself. I was always looking for exceptional ways of putting Newbridge Silverware on the map, and this
was interesting.” Doyle, who describes himself as “an intensely shy person” had never expressed an interest in dresses, auctions, or Audrey Hepburn. This was new, and it set in place a chain events that would lead to the building of the Newbridge Museum of Style Icons.
THE FIRST ACQUISITION
The estimate for the dress was $250,000. With the agreement of the somewhat bemused board of Newbridge Silverware to bid to that level, Doyle went to London and amid a crowd of international bidders, raised his paddle time after time, quickly outstripping the board-approved $250,000. There was a certain amount of adrenaline involved,
he says, with customary understatement. What he didn’t know was that on the telephone from Paris was Hubert de Givenchy’s “person” who was determined to get his hands on the dress. The bidding closed at $650,000, Doyle’s paddle having dropped around the $450,000 mark.
It wasn’t the outcome Doyle had hoped for but it turned out to be a serendipitous one. At the same auction, Doyle bid for a second garment, also designed by Givenchy, which Hepburn had worn in Charade. He also acquired several of Hepburn’s scrapbooks, sketches and letters, including one from Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw to the actress, and correspondence between Hepburn’s eldest son Sean Ferrer, then a child, to his grandfather, Joseph Anthony Ruston, Hepburn’s father, who at the time was living in Dublin’s Merrion Square with his Irish wife.
THE JULIEN’S AUCTIONS STORY
In November 2006, Martin Nolan read about a dress sold in London – the Breakfast at Tiffany’s dress – the underbidder was an Irishman. That’s when he called William Doyle to introduce himself. “We’ve never heard of you,” said Nolan, telephoning Doyle from Julien’s Auctions on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. From Kiltoom, near Athlone, Nolan first went to New York on a Donnelly visa in 1989 and worked as a bellman before training as a stockbroker at JP Morgan. At an office event for Merrill Lynch, he met Darren Julien, then just a year in business, who had left Sotheby’s to set up his own auction house. Nolan tried to inveigle Julien to abandon the auction world; instead Julien persuaded Nolan to join his new venture.
Julien’s Auctions, whose model is to build the interest and anticipation of fans and collectors with travelling exhibitions in advance of the auction itself, is now one of the biggest players in the entertainment memorabilia industry, a multi-billion dollar global business and has become, as Martin Nolan puts it, the “go-to guys for celebrity auctions”, handling sales of items belonging to Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach, Joan Collins, Elvis Presley, Burt Reynolds, Johnny Cash, Barbra Streisand, Cher and countless others. Martin Nolan and his team spent two months at Neverland, Michael Jackson’s California ranch, in 2009, before Jackson pulled out of the sale – the exhibition took place, nonetheless – the five catalogue boxed set alone cost $1,000. Jackson died two months after the exhibition closed. If the frenzied interest in Jackson’s – and other celebrities’ – belongings seems absurd, as Nolan points out, “to some, Cher’s microphone is as valuable as a Picasso”.
When Julien’s Auctions called, William Doyle says, his interest was piqued. Julien’s was planning to tour a Marilyn Monroe exhibition, in advance of an auction. Doyle explained he was not a collector – yet. He had one garment and no exhibition space. “You’ll have to build one,” said Nolan, “if you do, we will bring our exhibition to Newbridge.” A few months passed. As Doyle saw it, if he wanted to put Newbridge Silverware in the public eye, globally, an international exhibition of Marilyn Monroe dresses would certainly do it. When Nolan offered again to install the exhibition in Newbridge, William Doyle and his team started building a museum above the showroom. They had seven weeks.
THE MUSEUM OPENS
On May 31 2007, Martin Nolan was climbing a ladder to the Museum of Style Icons on the first floor of the Newbridge Silverware showroom, hauling up suitcases of Marilyn Monroe’s clothes. The garments were hastily displayed on standard mannequins. The staircase would be installed a couple of hours before the launch. In a torrential summer downpour, The Newbridge Silverware Museum of Style Icons opened. The Tiger was roaring, Charlie McCreevy, VIP guests and a bevy of Irish models attended. At the time, in addition to the Monroe items, the museum housed only the black Givenchy two-piece worn by Audrey Hepburn in the 1963 movie Charade along with her collection of letters. Champagne flowed and Newbridge got the newspaper coverage it wanted. At midnight, the guests sang Happy Birthday to Marilyn – it would have been her 80th.
The bug had bitten. The day before the museum opened, William Doyle had not been able to resist a Christies’s sale of Hollywood vintage garments, and bought the green wool suit Tippi Hedren wore in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. He also bought a number of Judy Garland costumes from the estate of actress Debbie Reynolds who had been collecting since the 1960s. And so it began, over the next ten years, he acquired dresses, owned by stars, many with an Irish connection, such as Rita Hayworth (Hayworth was married to Ali Khan, the son of the Aga Khan) Maureen O’Hara, Jayne Mansfield, Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner, Joan Fontaine and her sister Olivia de Havilland, Joan Collins (who visited in October 2015), Greta Garbo and Liza Minnelli. Many items were bought at Julien’s Auctions sales. Forging a friendship with Martin Nolan had opened up a whole new world.
THE AUCTION
In advance of its unveiling at Newbridge in June 2016 and the eventual auction itself, on November 19-20, the Julien’s Auctions Marilyn Monroe exhibition was staged at London’s Design Centre. In London, Martin Nolan explained to me how he had had a call from the family of the late Lee Strasberg, Monroe’s friend and acting coach, to whom Monroe had left all her personal effects. After almost 50 years of protecting Monroe’s legacy, the Strasbergs wanted to sell. Martin Nolan spent weeks in the Strasberg apartment in New York and in six storage units in New Jersey, sifting through the personal possessions which had lain there since shortly after Monroe was found dead in her California home in 1962.
Included in the auction will be items from the Strasberg estate, the collection of legendary Monroe collector David Gainsborough Roberts which had filled a huge warehouse in New Jersey and a “Déjà Vu” collection, from actress Debbie Reynolds’ original collection of Monroe’s career costumes, including a dress from The Prince and the Showgirl and dresses from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Some Like it Hot and No Business Like Show Business. This auction, in what would have been, had she lived, Monroe’s 90th year, will be the biggest yet.
A LIFE ACCUMULATED
“Marilyn was a hoarder,” says Martin Nolan, “she kept everything, from receipts, to tickets, to used make-up cases.” The Strasberg estate includes furniture from Monroe’s New York and LA homes, personal wardrobe pieces, shoes, including scuffed white shoes purported to be from her wedding to Arthur Miller, make-up robes, handbags, phone books (the page opened on AVEDON, Richard, the last entry on the page the ALL-NIGHT PHARMACY on Lexington Avenue) cheque books (the last cheque she wrote was to her housekeeper in New York on August 3, 1962; she died in LA on August 5), a tiny Blancpain watch, even an 1947 minaudière with her used Revlon lipstick, two dimes for the cloakroom and eight Philip Morris ciggies, as well as Joe DiMaggio’s jewellery case, a red Morocco-bound collection of Arthur Miller plays, monogrammed with the letters MM, and a Gucci address book. There are countless letters thanking her for her generosity. As well as a generous nature, Nolan felt, as he handled her sketches, paintings and writings, that Monroe concealed a creative side. Her sketches are as whimsical as her scraps of poetry, fragile and unfinished. Among her papers he found designs for an art studio at her house on 57th Street in New York.
Monroe kept everything, from the strappy sandals she wore as a 16-year-old model, to her fur storage receipts. Perhaps accumulating possessions helped her construct a past, an identity, a sense of self worth. Her loneliness is reflected in a sad note to Lee Strasberg, written while she was filming The Prince and the Showgirl, with an unsupportive Lawrence Olivier. She writes of her inability to concentrate, of feeling lost, the scrawled letters slanting off the page.
One of the most fascinating lots in the auction is a letter from Jean Kennedy Smith to Marilyn Monroe, thanking her for her kind note to Smith’s father Joe Kennedy, after he had a stroke. “I understand that you and Bobby are now the item”, Smith writes, referring to her brother, Bobby Kennedy, confirming a much-rumoured affair. The original letter has never been seen before.
THE PROVENANCE
Provenance, or the credibility of previous ownership, is key to realising value. Julien’s spent three full months verifying ownership, with five cataloguers and three additional Marilyn Monroe experts. The two-day auction will go online, with international bidders bidding against the room for 800 lots. “When someone dies at 36, very blonde, very beautiful, she is frozen in time and the fascination increases,” says Nolan. The interest in this auction is off the scale, with thousands already registered to bid online, hundreds expected at the auction on the day. The items with the smallest estimates include receipts for “herbs and spices” and delivery dockets for Arthur Miller’s Olympia typewriter. The lot expected to reach the highest price is the dress from Some Like it Hot, with an estimate between $400,00 and $600,00.
For the final leg of the Marilyn Monroe exhibition tour, from New York to Southhampton on Cunard’s Queen Mary, 27 members of Nolan’s family were invited, the guest of honour his 85-year-old mother Kitty Nolan. As most of the items are so valuable as to be uninsurable, the Nolan party set sail carrying by hand Marilyn Monroe’s belongings.
THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY
Now, Newbridge has a world-class museum. “William gets requests to lend his garments to the V&A and to the House of Givenchy,” says Nolan. “In 2017 a Hollywood Museum will open on Wiltshire Boulevard. That’s how long it’s taken the Academy to get around to it. William did it ten years ago.” So what will William Doyle do when the Academy comes calling, requesting to borrow pieces? Doyle might say, generously, “Ask Martin, it’s his museum.” When I tell Nolan this, he laughs. “I suggest things, he is gracious enough to listen.”
THE EXPERTS
1. AUTHORITY ON VINTAGE
Kerry Taylor Auctions is a London-based auction house owned by KERRY TAYLOR, an acknowledged authority on couture and vintage clothing. William Doyle bought Princess Diana’s Emmanuel-designed “India dress”, her last wedding dress toile and her engagement blouse, above, as well as the Balenciaga gown Ava Gardner wore in the film To Kill A Mockingbird, from Taylor. Taylor attributes the high sale prices of garments owned by actors and musicians to a growing global fascination with celebrity, particularly the “super-famous”, whose garments command massive prices. “In the 1990s you might have secured a Marilyn Monroe gown for $10,000 or less, now it’s likely to be $100,000,” says Taylor. “The internet has also opened what was a largely western market into a massive Asian one, which is driving prices.” Exhibitions devoted to clothing – whether “Alexander McQueen” or “100 Years of Hollywood” at the V&A or the Costume Institute of MOMA exhibition in New York – have broken records for attendance. As for the Newbridge MOSI, Taylor is not surprised that museums are calling William Doyle. “These pieces are very important in the history of Hollywood.”
CARING FOR THE MOSI COLLECTION
RACHEL PHELAN is a professional textile conservator, with a primary degree in History of Art from Trinity College and postgraduate training in Textile Conservation from London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. Phelan works for major institutions and private clients all over the world and restores all garments bought by Newbridge.
“You get a huge sense of the person from their garments. Marilyn Monroe was a slim size ten with a double-D bust, not a size 16, as sometimes reported. Basically she had the shape of a glamour model, the role in which she started her career. Audrey Hepburn’s figure is tiny, reflecting her lack of nourishment during the war. The construction of the Givenchy pieces is exquisite: the petticoat hems of the Funny Face floral dress are hand-bound in matching fabric and the heavy beading on the black Charade dress, above, would have rustled as she moved.”
A conservator of vintage garments is also responsible for their storage and preservation. As the museum began to find its feet, Phelan specified climate-controlled display cases
to control temperature and moisture. Where once mannequins were standard, now each is custom-made in London to the dress size of the original wearer. William Doyle recalls how they encouraged a model to wear one of the early acquisitions for the Museum’s launch. Now, the thought fills him with horror.
William Doyle with Princess Charlene of Monaco in Newbridge in 2013
A VISIT FROM A PRINCESS
In the Museum of Style Icons, a long vitrine is dedicated to Princess Grace of Monaco. When actress Grace Kelly, whose grandfather was from Mayo, married Prince Rainier, all her Hollywood garments were purchased for her and she never sold any of them. On the 25th anniversary of her death, the Princess Grace Foundation auctioned just two pieces, one a grey and rose dress designed by Helen Rose for the 1956 film High Society, the other a green Givenchy suit she wore to meet John and Jackie Kennedy at the White House and on her first visit to Ireland in 1961. William Doyle snapped up both.
Princess Charlene of Monaco visited the museum in 2013 with Kelly relatives. Princess Charlene herself descends on her paternal line from the Fagans of Feltrim. In 1592, Richard and Christopher Fagan helped found Trinity College; in the 1660s, another Christopher Fagan, sold his property to the Duke of Ormond to create a royal deer park – now the Phoenix Park.The royalties from Newbridge’s Princess Grace jewellery collection, inspired by the Princess, go to the Foundation.
www.newbridgesilverware.com/mosi
Sarah McDonnell
This article appeared in a previous issue, for more features like this, don’t miss our September issue, out Thursday, October 6.
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