Lost for decades, Dorothy’s dress from ‘Oz’ up for sale

NEW YORK (AP) — It’s one of the most recognizable outfits in American film record, the blue-and-white checked gingham dress a young Judy Garland wore as Dorothy in the traditional 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.”

For a long time, a single of the variations of the dress Garland wore in the movie was assumed lost at Catholic College of America, in which it experienced been provided to somebody in the drama division in the early 1970s. But the clearing out of some business clutter very last year led to the obtaining of the costume in an previous shoebox, and now it’s headed for the auction block.

When she very first saw it, “all I could believe about was watching the movie when I was a baby and increasing up with” it, claimed Jacqueline Leary-Warsaw, dean of the faculty of music, drama and art at Catholic College, in Washington, D.C. “In a way it was like I was hunting at my earlier childhood.”

She and some others are hopeful that nostalgia variable will arrive into participate in when the costume goes up for sale at Bonhams “Classic Hollywood: Movie and Television” auction on Could 24 in Los Angeles, in which it has a presale estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. Bonhams has the dress on display screen this 7 days at the auction house’s New York spot just before it is despatched to California for general public look at and then auction.

Helen Hall, director of well known society for Bonhams, explained that the industry for memorabilia, and film costumes in distinct, is sturdy, and that “The Wizard of Oz” is a cultural touchstone.

People “very a lot don’t forget the very first time they saw the movie, the impact it had on their life,” she reported. The movie is renowned for its audio, its dialogue and its visuals, specially when Dorothy goes from drab, sepia-colored Kansas to gloriously multicolored Oz.

There was a lot more than one of the costume manufactured for Garland while filming. Corridor mentioned that four are acknowledged to exist and that only two, which includes the a person found at Catholic University, are with the shirt she wore underneath. Bonhams offered the other one particular with a blouse at an auction in 2015 for more than $1.5 million.

(There are also some surviving pairs of the ruby slippers Garland wore, with one particular pair in the collection at the Smithsonian.)

The rediscovered gown had originally been given to Father Gilbert Hartke, who was then head of the university’s drama section, in 1973 by actress Mercedes McCambridge, Leary-Warsaw claimed, though it is not apparent how McCambridge came to have it.

Somehow, in the many years that adopted, the section missing monitor of the costume till it turned “something that persons experienced assumed was just a fantasy,” she said. Last 12 months, during preparations for a renovation, a bag made up of the shoebox was opened, and there it was — while how it bought to the place it ended up stays a thriller, Leary-Warsaw said.

The dress was in excellent problem, aside from a piece that experienced been lower absent, though the shirt was additional fragile.

In exploring the costume, it was determined that Garland wore it in the motion picture in the scene the place she is confronted in a castle by a threatening Wicked Witch of the West.

The school made the decision to auction it off rather of holding it, and strategies to use the proceeds from the auction sale to build a total-fledged film system in the drama division.