CULTURE-USA: The Price of Jackie O’s Knick-Knacks

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Apr 30 1996 (IPS) - Call it capitalism gone mad, or nostalgia run amok.

Whatever it was, it induced otherwise sane people to spend more than 200,000 dollars for a string of fake pearls, more than 700,000 for a set of golf clubs and 1.43 million dollars for a desk.

These are not just anybody’s things, however. The bidding frenzy unleashed last week at Sotheby’s auction in New York was over the possessions, prized or otherwise, of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, former U.S. first lady and icon of 1960s glamour.

Onassis, who died last year, became for many the symbol of the elegance associated with her late husband, President John F. Kennedy. So it should come as no surprise that even her knick- knacks are valuable.

One investor, buying a giltwood mirror for some 16,000 dollars, explained that she was buying her family “a little bit of history”. Others explained that they were buying a piece of “Camelot”, the Arthurian kingdom to which the Kennedy administration compared itself.

Undeniably, some of the artifacts have historical value.

The 1.43-million-dollar desk, for example, is not simply a Louis XVI, which would normally be valued by Sotheby’s no higher than 30,000 dollars. It is in fact, The Desk, on which Kennedy signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in October 1963, just one month before he was shot dead in Dallas, Texas.

Other objects have more celebrity impact: a 40-carat diamond engagement ring given to the former Mrs. Kennedy by her next husband, Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis, which sold for 2.6 million dollars; ear clips that the former Jacqueline Bouvier wore the day she met Kennedy, which netted 32,500 dollars.

Even some of the most canny speculators at Sotheby’s conceded the prices were insane. But for investors it also provided a glimpse into just how much, in dollar terms, the Kennedy glamour is worth.

Sotheby’s, for example, compiled a list of estimates of how much the objects in its Onassis catalogue might net, were they the possessions of an ordinary person.

It found that, by the middle of the sale, it had sold for nearly 21 million dollars items that would normally only have been worth at most 3.5 million dollars — a ‘Kennedy mystique’ effect of 17.5 million dollars.

For some objects, the mystique effect boosts the price by surprisingly huge amounts. Thursday, three strands of fake pearls made immortal in a Kennedy-presidency photograph of the first lady garnered 211,500 dollars. Current market price of such strings of fake pearls is between 45 and 80 dollars. (MORE)

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