The Rex Harrison Spectator/Bidding Goodbye
Mallon, Thomas
THE REX HARRISON SPECTATOR BIDDING GOODBYE T he man at the lectern looks out 1 over his half-glasses and asks the audience who will give him $275 for Richard Nixon. Actually, it is a copy of The...
...pretty younger ones no doubt chatting ironically about the romantic impulse that brought them up here...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 41...
...An absence of squeamishness helped a potential bidder in his survey: he could flip through a rack of the departed's suits as if he were on the second floor of Macy's...
...In life, possessions give their owner status...
...A year ago the same gallery sold the possessions of Bette Davis...
...People have also come in search of clever Christmas presents, and a few holiday touches—poinsettias near the lectern, a Christmas tree behind a pegboard screen—further encourage the sentimentalized commerce...
...Actually, it is a copy of The Real War that's being auctioned, and the $600 it eventually fetches has to do not just with the book's author but also with the single copy's owner, the late Sir Rex Harrison (1908-1990), whose effects are being sold off this afternoon, December 13, 1990, at the William Doyle Galleries on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the proceeds to benefit the scholarship 'fund bearing Sir Rex's name at Boston University...
...By 5:00 I am on the bus heading back downtown, having purchased—for $75 plus tax—Rex Harrison's Victorian oak and silver-plated wine bucket...
...rator's afternoon shopping spree...
...People took their seats early, the way they might for a hit play or a prominent man's wake...
...Lot #158, a box of fourteen sweaters, was estimated at $200-400...
...I sit with my all-day-sucker-shaped paddle, #302, recalling how a year ago this week I saw Rex Harrison do Somerset Maugham's The Circle, and was startled, alas, by his seeming in more urgent need of revival than the play...
...These signature items are offered late in the auction, one by one...
...This hairpiece, held up high by one of the green-shirted porters who keep pace with the auctioneer, looked like something pulled up from a drain, but it's been the only thing bid upon by the young man in front of me, who wears a punkish black hat throughout the proceedings: atheatre student (a bald one...
...She later tells me that at her New Year's party it leaked all over the place, turning her dining-room table into a soggy plain...
...Along with his instructions about the state sales tax, the establishment of provenance, and so forth, the auctioneer offered a disclaimer—all items have "been used...
...One or two objects even become instruments of revenge...
...Set out under the flashlight-shaped lamps of the gallery, Rex Harrison's possessions looked as if they had been acquired not in the course of somebody's long life, but during a set decoThomas Mallon's new novel Aurora 7, has just been published by Ticknor & Fields...
...On a wall to the right of the auctioneer hangs a huge photo-portrait of Sir Rex, looking down upon the proceedings, slightly scandalized but rather more amused...
...Is that why they seem uncharacteristic, of doubtful psychological provenance...
...The bidders are an entirely civilized group: well-dressed older women...
...My sister had adored him, and this would be just right for her Christmas present...
...It was spectacularly beside the point because, of course, it is the point...
...It's true that they're pretty awful: in this geriatric realm Harrison was no Winston Churchill...
...The first real bidding war—the auctioneer's pen pointing back and forth, like a metronome, between the potential purchasers—was over a shaving mug, manufactured by Mug Makers of Hollywood and inscribed "Rex...
...Surely Julie Andrews would be pleased to know that the framed stage bill for the London production of My Fair Lady is commanding $125 more by Thomas Mallon than a poster for the movie version with Audrey Hepburn...
...The successful bidder paid $325...
...It will take less than three hours to sell more than two hundred lots, and if you lose track you can find which item is whizzing its way from Harrison's possession to that of someone here by consulting the red digital light attached to a pillar at the front...
...Nixon's boilerplate inscription ("To Rex Harrison with appreciation for his incomparable contribution to excellence in the theatre and motion pictures") tells people something about the very quality that has to one degree or another brought them all here: style...
...W hereas, of course, wool hats and cardigan sweaters were...
...With some pretty but less imposing items—a "Cartier sterling silver bookmark, inscribed `Rex' "—one wants to know more...
...The catalogue suggested $10-15...
...The catalogue shows that the original plan was to offer bunches of them in a few lots (the way the ties and shoes are disposed of), but someone has decided to split them up, a move that proves commercially shrewd...
...Did he actually use it to keep his place in the works of Shaw and Nixon, or was it a Christmas present he once got and promptly put in a drawer...
...Some objects in this auction, beneath that luster, have clear intrinsic worth, too: the "Provincial Louis XVI style fruitwood swivel armchair, used by Rex Harrison in his dressing room at every performance for makeup" combines handsomeness with hallowedness in a way that makes the final bid for it—$3,100, from someone in the audience competing with someone on the telephone—no surprise...
...It's upside down," the auctioneer has to tell the porter holding up Lot #119, "Beach Scene," before musing that it might bring more money that way...
...But, bad as they are, shouldn't their close contact with their owner—their maker—endow these paintings with even higher sentimental value than, say, the shaving mug...
...perhaps...
...The paintings Harrison did late in life—Corsican and West Indian landscapes, mostly—prove to be the biggest disappointment of the day, the only class of items to bring consistently less than the gallery suggested...
...But she knew, too, that that was beside the point...
...In death, it's more like the reverse, the owner's celebrity, if he had it, electrifying the object with a personal history...
...This is, of course, a bit of both, though two days ago, when one could "preview" the items for sale, the feeling was even more theatrical...
...At that auction it was the ashtrays, of course...
...He had aged into something shuffling and simian, and yet, determined to keep his limited energies focused entirely on the props and people right in front of him —the audience was a distant irrelevance—he created a more forceful illusion of actually being his character than he probably did in many other productions, when just being Rex Harrison was more than enough to give the crowd its money's worth...
...In the end, the new lot #158C, a single camel-hair cardigan sweater, sells for $450...
...He fruitlessly offered $75...
...stylish gay men calmly alert to the procedures of bidding...
...Does their failure come from their seeming effortful, things this man of ultimate insouciance had to worry over, rather than just deign to use...
...You either have it or you don't...
...Lot #50, even more intimately tactile, some make-up and a hairpiece, went for $125...
...They aren't him...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
