Collecting JACKIE

The urge to own a piece of a pop icon.

By Anastasia Toufexis, Rose Toufexis, published on March 01, 1999 - last reviewed on September 28, 2009

It's been three years since the frantic auction where even worn pillows and old footstools sold for tens of thousands of dollars. How do successful bidders regard their treasures now and how do they live with them day to day?

They went, they saw, they bought. So much so that towards the end of the frenzied auction that quickly became known as "the garage sale of the century," an astounded observer jokingly wondered what would happen if the estate offered up a No. 2 pencil.

What drove so many people to pay fortunes for items which often had little historical significance or even intrinsic value, only that they once belonged to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis?

She was, of course, famous, which these days is its own appeal. "It may have to do with how anonymous we all feel, but we have a hunger for connection with fame," says Richard Gottlieb, M.D., of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and associate professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "And it almost doesn't matter why a celebrity is famous." Nor how humble his or her possession. Like the holy relics of saints, "things that famous others have touched are enlivened by contagious magic," avers Russell Belk, Ph.D., professor of business at the University of Utah.

But listening to successful bidders talk, one quickly recognizes that Jackie was more than a pop icon. During her 64 years, she was cast in a multiplicity of roles that resonate on a deeply personal level with many Americans: Queen of Camelot, noble widow, protective mother, victim, exile, survivor. "She was an amalgam of a very attractive, youthful person who became at the moment of the assassination a madre dolorosa, a mother of pain, for the nation," observes psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger, Ph.D., author of Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Harcourt Brace, 1994). Fate has made Jackie at once human and vulnerable, mythic and mysterious.

No wonder, then, the desire to retain some piece of her. "At heart, collecting has to do with the prevention of loss, which is a universal and painful part of the human condition," Gottlieb observes. "It's an effort to stop time in its tracks, to hold on to things and the people that they symbolically represent, to make us feel less stricken and alone."

Here are some of the stories of buyers at the auction.

E. LAVERNE JOHNSON

Johnson had her heart set on one object--a sketch of a bird in a cage with an open door--and she got it. "That particular item reminded me of Jackie's life," says Johnson, who paid $25,000 for the tiny drawing that now rests in a locked cabinet in her living room (and another $25,000 for 50 of Jackie's books). "Later I learned that Aristotle Onassis had called Jackie `a little bird that needs its freedom and its security.' We watched her through the years saying she did not want to live the life we forced her to live, but yet she could have left and didn't." Johnson wonders about the picture which carries Jackie's name. Where did it come from: did Onassis give it to her, did she paint it of herself?

Johnson, president and CEO of the New York City-based International Institute for Learning, feels a special affinity with Jackie: "She was a single parent raising two children; I was raising two children by myself. She came back to New York City; I moved to New York City. I run my own company now; she wanted to work every day."

"She wanted to find meaning in her life," concludes Johnson, "and you don't find meaning in money. She was an inspiration."

RICHARD GASPARI

Gaspari got a shock when he began examining one of the 40 books he bought, A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, a 24-hour chronicle of Kennedy's activities just a month before the assassination, and came across a handwritten dedication from author Jim Bishop. Says Gaspari: "It's dated February of 1964 to JFK, Jr. It says, `To be read when you're tall and memories are dim.'"

The book is Gaspari's prize from the auction. His other purchases: a Louis XV white-painted bedside table and an oval tray-top table painted bizarre colors. Total spent: $50,000. "I'm sure my dad didn't make in a year what I paid for that oval table alone," says Gaspari, president and CEO of the Richard Michael Group, a Chicago-based temp agency. "But my wife Ellen admired Jackie Onassis, primarily for the way she raised her children; I was more into what the election of a Catholic to President meant."

The family doesn't treat the items as holy relics: "They're part of us now," declares Gaspari. "We don't lock them up." The oval tray table--"one of the ugliest things you've seen in your life," says Gaspari, who even suggested having it refinished--was thrown in the garage for six months and now sits in the family room, where it gets knocked around regularly. "I caught my son one day using it as a bat," he says, laughing. The Bishop book gets more care. Gaspari believes it truly belongs elsewhere. "I think JFK Jr. should have this book. If he wants it, he should call me."

HARRY WILKS

An antiquities collector who frequently attends auctions, Wilks wound up at the sale not because he was a particular fan of Jackie's--"I admired her until she married Onassis. I was very, very disappointed."--but because Sotheby's sent him the tickets.