I’ve never been one for soliciting autographs because — when you think about it — once the famous person signs their name and you go your separate ways, how do you get others to believe that the name on the napkin you’re holding actually came from you say it did?
I did have coffee with Mel Gibson once. Well, Mel and I were in the same Starbucks at adjoining tables … but I’m going with the technicality and saying that, yes, we had coffee together. This, I suspect, you believe; since, really, who these days would use Mel Gibson as the subject of an anecdote unless it were true.
I didn’t ask him for an autograph, but when he left another coffee shop customer fetched Mel’s Frappucino cup out of the trash and left the store with it. You do wonder (although not very long or very comfortably) what that person was planning to do with the Frappuresidue.
I bring this up because, lately, odd items once belonging to the rich and famous have fetched quite handsome amounts of money at auction.
Don’t believe me? Well, just this week half a set of dentures belonging to Winston Churchill were worth $22,000 to someone. The uppers. Churchill, it seemed, found these false chompers to be of utmost importance — they hid a natural lisp and allowed The British Bulldog to deliver inspiring speeches with aplomb.
“These are the teeth that saved the world,” said Jane Hughes of London’s Hunterian Museum.
But $22,000 for chompers is a mere pittance compared to the $266,500 that someone out there paid to purchase a horse. Not just any horse, but Trigger — the faithful steed of television and movie singing cowboy Roy Rogers.
Yes, Trigger … the actual horse … who died in 1965 … and was then stuffed.
The auction of items from the estate of Rogers and Dale Evans also yielded $386,500 for Trigger’s saddle, and $35,000 for Bullet, Roy and Dale’s German shepherd … which also has passed on, and been stuffed.
Roy was faithful to a fault to his animal companions, but might have gone a bit far when talking about his own desires for the hereafter:
“When my time comes,” he once said, “just skin me and put me up there on Trigger, just as though nothing had ever changed.”
Thankfully, Roy wasn’t stuffed and mounted atop Trigger … or else who knows how much he would have gone for at auction.
Finally, there’s this cheery note. Tools supposedly used in the autopsy conducted on Elvis Presley were withdrawn last week from a Chicago auction when it was determined that the authenticity of the items could not be verified. (Remember what we said about verifying autographs? This would be harder.)
Valued at a bargain at $14,000, the items included rubber gloves, forceps, a comb, eyeliner and … take a deep breath … a toe tag. Questions about the legitimacy of the materials arose for two reasons. First, conflicting stories were uncovered about what happened in the morgue after the Elvis autopsy and embalming took place.
Also, as we all know, you can’t do an autopsy on someone who’s still among the living.
