The JFK Sale

by Lita Solis-Cohen

Before the sale, Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey's, wasn't so sure he was glad he had called Robert White and talked him into selling part of his collection of John F. Kennedy memorabilia.

Minutes before the sale, Robert White told the press corps assembled at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City with a dozen television cameras and microphones that he would not have considered selling if he had thought the Kennedy children, the Kennedy Library, and the National Archives would contest the sale and sully Evelyn Lincoln's memory, suggesting that JFK's longtime secretary had no right to have taken some of the items.

"She had a sense of history. She adored JFK and saved things that would have been lost, drafts and dictations that would have been thrown away," White said of his good friend. Mrs. Lincoln had been White's mentor, and she left him a large portion of her collection of JFK memorabilia when she died in May 1995.

After the March 18th and 19th sale was over, White and Ettinger felt better. The nearly 500 lots offered brought approximately $9 million, with the sale of the yacht Honey Fitz accounting for $5.9 million of the total.

About half the lots in the sale belonged to Robert White, a 49-year-old former janitorial supply salesman from Baltimore, Maryland, who is a passionate JFK collector and deals a little to feed his hobby. The rest was from about 60 other consignors, some of them introduced to Guernsey's by White.

The sale was set in motion in March 1996 after White showed part of his JFK collection at the big Atlantique City show in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He had been a regular exhibitor at the show, and show manager Norman Schaut asked him to do a special JFK exhibit in the wake of the April 1996 Jackie O. sale at Sotheby's. The Franklin Mint had a case next to his display, with Jackie's $211,500 fake pearl necklace under armed guard.

After the Atlantique City show, the Franklin Mint asked White if he would like to put on a JFK exhibition at its museum in Wawa, Pennsylvania. He was delighted. The exhibition lasted for three months and was well received, with lots of publicity.

"Dateline NBC" did a story on White and his collection that aired during the Franklin Mint show. White told interviewer Sara James on camera he would never sell his collection and that he wanted to open his own museum but was having trouble getting funding.

"All I had to hear was `never sell,' and I contacted White," said Ettinger. "I went down to Maryland and convinced White, his wife, Jackie, and his business manager, Allan Burt, to sell part of the collection to raise enough money to build a museum," said Ettinger a few weeks before the sale. "White is not a rich man. He stored his collection in his mother's basement."

White agreed to sell things that did not take away the core of his collection, things difficult to display, and things relating to Jackie Kennedy (his focus is JFK). To sweeten the sale, he was talked into selling a few blockbusters, including JFK's Hermès alligator briefcase. Most of the items came from a large file cabinet of Kennedy memorabilia White inherited from Evelyn Lincoln when she died.

White first wrote to Lincoln when he was 12, asking for JFK's autograph. She sent him a facsimile signature. Their correspondence continued, and White's friendship with Mrs. Lincoln and her husband, Harold "Abe" Lincoln, blossomed. Lincoln began selling White some political buttons that she had purchased, and she gave him things. When she died, she named White in her will.

"She left Kennedy memorabilia to others, including her niece and to the Kennedy Library," said White. "I thought things with an Evelyn Lincoln provenance would do well at auction, not start a controversy."

When the sale was announced before Christmas, the Kennedy children, John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, found in the sale some diaries, letters, and mementos they considered personal and rightfully theirs. They threatened legal action to stop the sale.

The National Archives issued a statement declaring some of the papers possibly were of concern to national security. Among them were Kennedy's notes and dictation from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, notes made during his fatal 1963 trip to Dallas, and a scrap of paper with a line from Kennedy's inauguration speech.

The paper with a line from Kennedy's inauguration speech, sold with a photocopied draft of the speech, was estimated at $4000/6000 and sold for $40,250 (includes buyer's premium). The two lots of Kennedy notes and a lot of teletypes on the Cuban Missile Crisis sold for $9200, $6325, and $5175, well under estimates. The doodles Kennedy did en route from Houston to Dallas on paper from the Rice Hotel sold for $11,500.

White had to hire a lawyer. In the course of negotiation, he decided to turn over to Caroline Schlossberg a love letter Jackie had written to JFK. It was never in the sale. Later he also gave the Kennedys a St. Christopher's medal money clip, also not cataloged for sale.

He donated to the Kennedy Library 21 Dictabelts made by JFK. Then as a settlement with the Department of Justice on behalf of the National Archives and to settle the Kennedy family objections, White withdrew from the sale a banjo clock that had hung in the Oval Office and a Sheraton card table Kennedy used to sign documents.

He gave the Kennedy children their father's 1952 journal. He also agreed to give the National Archives four lots of notes on foreign policy and some telegrams that will be deposited at the Kennedy Library. In return, the Archives and the Kennedys relinquished any claims to the rest of the material.

The Dictabelts and some of the other material may be considered a tax-deductible gift to the Kennedy Library.

When the dust settles, and the buyers pay up, White will probably end up with more than $1.5 million if he gets his commissions on all the consignments (which include the yacht Honey Fitz) he corraled for the sale. After he pays his business manager, his lawyer, and his tax man, he may have enough left to move the remainder of his vast JFK collection out of storage and into a bigger house. It is unlikely he will have enough money to build his Kennedy museum.

White likes things that JFK touched, and he got many of them from Lincoln. The ones he put in the sale brought far more than their estimates. An Ace comb sold for $1265 to Guido Ortenzio, a Manhattan memorabilia dealer who specializes in Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy's tie clip, with a letter of authentication from Lincoln, sold for $7475, and his 14k gold blazer buttons sold with a photograph showing the President wearing the blazer for $18,400.

A collection of President Kennedy's signing pens, used between 1961 and 1963 and authenticated by Dave Powers at the Kennedy Library in a letter to Mary Underwood, Kennedy's special assistant, sold for $48,875.

JFK's cuff links with the Presidential Seal did well too. They were made to match his own cuff links, and JFK often gave them to White House staffers who went beyond the call of duty. One pair sold for $11,500, another pair fetched $5750, and a third pair, offered together with a tie bar in its original box, brought $8625. The last set sold to a collector who traveled from Corrales, New Mexico, for the sale.

Anything relating to smoking brought a premium, especially if it had to do with cigars. Five original black-and-white photographs by Joe Bowler for Redbook magazine showing John F. Kennedy smoking a cigar went at $18,400, more than four times the high estimate.

Four cigars in their plastic wrappers in two manila envelopes stamped "The White House," along with a note in Evelyn Lincoln's handwriting, sold for $1092.50. A crystal ashtray etched with an American eagle sold for $4887.50.

The five cigar boxes in the sale brought a wide range of prices. The highest was $46,000 for a mahogany cigar box with a silver plaque engraved "John F. Kennedy," sold with a dozen original Perfecto Garcia Ensigns, a plastic mouthpiece, and some John F. Kennedy presidential matches.

A silver humidor with enamel emblems of five United States army divisions serving in Europe and NATO flags, engraved to commemorate Kennedy's visit to Europe in June 1963, sold for $25,875. A cigar box with the Presidential Seal, given to a member of the press corps by Robert Kennedy, brought $10,350. These two were not White's.

None of the cigar boxes came close to the $574,500 paid by Marvin Shanken of Cigar Aficionado magazine for a walnut humidor at the Jackie O. sale at Sotheby's in 1996. "That was an unrealistic price," said White. "It will never happen again. The prices in the Guernsey's sale were realistic."

White found it hard to explain the $332,500 paid on Thursday for a presidential rocking chair used by JFK when he stayed at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City. It is believed Kennedy ordered 12 rocking chairs. Another in rough condition, also from the Carlyle, sold on Wednesday for $23,000, and a folding rocker Kennedy kept on Air Force One sold for $19,550.

The folding rocker had belonged to Doyle Whitehead, chief steward on Air Force One during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He kept the chair after National Archives officials removed what they wanted from the plane. Whitehead accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Charles de Gaulle's funeral, and he mentioned to her he had the chair. She told him to keep it. A note from her to Whitehead accompanied the chair: "For S.Sgt. Whitehead - Thank you for the joy you gave the President in Air Force One. Jacqueline Kennedy." White said he wanted to buy the chair because it is really rare.

With the exception of Kennedy's tortoiseshell sunglasses that sold for a whopping $46,000 to a phone bidder, JFK's clothes did not bring as much as expected. The sunglasses and most of the clothes were not from White's collection.

Caryl Traten Fisher, a Washington, D.C., music teacher, consigned some of Jackie Kennedy's clothes. She said her father, an antiques dealer in Bethesda, saw a pile of clothes on the floor during one of his visits and asked what they were. "Jackie told him she was going to give them to the maids, so he asked if he could have them for his two little girls," she recounted. "We used to wear them for Halloween," said Fisher. "I hated to give up the black sequined bolero. It was part of my vampire costume."

She said the $20,000 she expected to clear from her consignment was "found money." The bolero sold for $1725; a silk faille jacket by Jacques Fath of Paris, with a Bergdorf Goodman label, $2300; and a black swing coat, $1035. The jacket and coat sold to Alan Hager, CEO of Who's on First. He said he owns three memorabilia stores in Orlando, Florida, and he was a major buyer.

A man in the salesroom who wanted anonymity bought Jackie's costume jewelry, paying $4025 for a pair of rhinestone drop earrings and $1092.50 for a heart-shaped rhinestone brooch. A pillbox hat that belonged to White went at $8050. (A photograph of Jackie wearing it was offered as a separate lot.)

Political material provoked spirited bidding. One lot consisting of original ballot and tally sheets and a delegate seating plan from the 1960 Democratic National Convention sold for $51,750. Motion-picture footage documenting JFK's senatorial campaign in 1952 sold for $34,500. Autograph material with less serious content brought less money but often more than expected.

The biggest disappointment was the failure of the sailboat Flash II. There was no bidding for the 22' x 8' Star Class sloop that John Kennedy owned with Joe, his older brother, and sailed in the summer of 1936 when he was 19 years old. Apparently, the consignors wanted $1 million for what sailors at the sale said was a $10,000 boat without the Kennedy connection.

A silver toddy warmer awarded to Joe Kennedy for a Labor Day sailing race brought a disappointing $2875 (est. $2000/4000). It had Joe's, not Jack's, name on it.

Artwork brought far less than estimated, and some pieces failed to sell. A bronze cast of the head of John F. Kennedy by Robert Berks, a study for the heroic head at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, did not sell, nor did an unfinished full-length sculpture of Kennedy by Berks.

White says comparing this sale with Sotheby's $34.5 million Jackie O. sale is wrong. "That sale was three times as big and a media frenzy. The people who bought there weren't really Kennedy collectors before that sale. Guernsey's sale gave the average collector a chance to be in the ball game."

White said he thought all the media controversy, including the fact that Ted Sorenson went on the "Today" show the morning of the sale and raised questions of good title, was unfortunate. "When National Public Radio got a letter from the National Archives claiming that some of the material might be classified, it was devastating," he said.

Others thought the adverse publicity may have helped. "Some people felt this may be one of the last times they would get a chance to buy well-documented Kennedy items," said Allan Burt, White's business manager.

Although some said it was a tawdry sale full of family items people had obtained through questionable means, others pointed out that the Kennedy children had profited from the $34.5 million sale of their mother's possessions and that those who consigned to Guernsey's had every right to a profit.

A week after the sale, it was impossible to get a final price list. According to a Guernsey's staff member, this was because "things are still being sold." Calls to a public relations agency were not returned.

White and his business manager were available to verify most prices unofficially. White said he had a lot to do with the production of the handsome catalog, working with three well-educated young women who used his research materials and wrote the descriptions. Arlan Ettinger took the good photographs.

Joanne Grant did an able job as auctioneer, handling phone bidders, order bids, and about 200 bidders in the cavernous Seventh Regiment Armory Drill Room where, during the first session, bidders were outnumbered by members of the press.