A pair of iconic ruby red slippers worn by actress Judy Garland in the classic movie The Wizard of Oz are set to be auctioned off this weekend.
The sequinned pumps, once stolen from a museum in Minnesota, are expected to fetch as much as $3m (£2.35m) at auction, according to Heritage Auctions.
Online bidding for the famous slippers began a month ago, with the current highest bid standing at $1.55m as of noon local time on Saturday. Heritage Auctions has dubbed these slippers the “Holy Grail of Hollywood memorabilia”.
Judy Garland was only 16 years old when she portrayed Dorothy in the beloved 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz. The film, a musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, remains a timeless classic, with Variety ranking it second in its list of “100 Greatest Movies of All Time”.
While the magical slippers in Baum’s book were silver, the producers of the film opted to make them ruby red to showcase the new Technicolor technology of the time.
In a pivotal moment in the film, Dorothy clicks her heels three times while repeating “There’s no place like home” to leave the enchanted land of Oz and return to Kansas.
Of the several pairs of shoes worn by Garland during filming, only four are known to have survived. One pair is currently on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, while the pair up for auction has its own unique history.
Collector Michael Shaw had lent the slippers to the Judy Garland Museum in her hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where they were stolen in 2005 by professional thief Terry Jon Martin. Martin mistakenly believed the shoes were adorned with gemstones and had a value of $1m, only to later discover they were just glass.
After 13 years, the shoes were recovered by the FBI in 2018. In 2023, Martin pleaded guilty to the theft and was sentenced to time served. The curator of the Judy Garland Museum expressed a desire to uncover the full story of what happened to the slippers during those missing years.
