We're pleased to present an interview with the Executive Director and CFO (Chief Financial Officer) of Julien's, Mr. Martin J. Dolan.
Q - Mr. Dolan, what an interesting line of work you've chosen for yourself! How did you find your way to Julien's Auctions? What's your background?
A - (laughs) Well, growing up in rural Ireland it certainly wasn't my goal to be an auctioneer working with celebrities in Hollywood, but here we are. I actually was working in New York City on Wall Street when I got to know Julien's Auctions in 2004, and I joined the company in 2005. It's been a tremendous amount of fun all the way, working with all the greats like Barbra Streisand, Cher and Bette Midler and U2 and Ringo Starr; Hollywood legends like Burt Reynolds. Now, to do this auction that we're working on today for Jean and Casey Kasem, who was so legendary. Casey Kasem was so well known. Top 40. Top 20. This has been a real fun project.
Q - With this Jean and Casey Kasem auction, did the family contact Julien's Auctions? Did you contact the family? How did that work?
A - Last year (2021) we were doing an auction for the great Janet Jackson and we had an amazing exhibition here. We had a VIP reception and Jean Kasem came to the reception. She was invited. She was intrigued by Janet selling all these items she had. Jean said she had items and was selling her house and this could be an interesting project. So, we agreed to work together and here we are at this auction. We have over five hundred items in the auction block. Gary, it's a very diverse auction because there's beautiful household furnishings, fine decorative art and then you have great items from Casey Kasem himself. He was a d.j. who interacted with so many celebrities. So this is an auction where you have so many other celebrities involved. Mohammed Ali, Magic Johnson. So you have sports items. You have Rock 'n' Roll items. You have Hollywood items. Letters from Elizabeth Taylor, a great photograph signed by Betty White, Jerry Lewis. On and on. Just a great trip down Memory Lane. When you go through the catalog, which is amazing, it's sort of like a history book presenting the life of Casey Kasem and his wife Jean, who we know was on Cheers, the beloved TV show.
Q - One of the items being auctioned off is Casey Kasem's microphone. I would think the family would want to keep that.
A - And especially a microphone coming from Casey Kasem. That's what creates him, because his voice was so unique and he was the voice on Scooby Doo and other characters. And so, yes the microphone is something that is highly sought after. I remember back in December (2021) we did an auction for Mel Blanc, of course another famous voice and voice-over artist, and we sold his microphone for a significant amount of money. Would you believe Casey Kasem's microphone pre-auction bidding is at $15,000 and it could go significantly higher when it comes to auction here in Beverly Hills on Thursday (March 17 2022). It's something that people relate to and would love to own his microphone. It's such a personal item representing his amazing voice and his career.
Q - Have you any idea how much this auction is going to bring in?
A - There's over five hundred items. And if you can't be in Beverly Hills you can go to JuliensLive.com and you'll actually be able to see and hear the auctioneer. You can actually click the button and bid in real time, bidding against people here in the gallery and bidding on the phone. The nice thing about this is everything is at No Reserve. It's estimated conservatively at $300,000 to $500,000. It's really diverse.
Q - Who's buying this merchandise? Is it private collectors? Is it businesses like the Hard Rock Cafe?
A - We've had over 100,000 people come to our website to view the auction, which is incredible. We have probably over 1,000 already who are ready to participate in the auction. So, it's museums, it's fans, it's collectors and also you have investors. Investors see these items as cool items. They're tangible assets. You can have great conversations about them and in years to come it's likely that they'll appreciate in value, especially something from Mohammed Ali or Yogi Berra, or you have a Ringo Starr signed check or a John Lennon or George Harrison signed check. All these items appreciate in value, so people are looking to own them. Then you own them and in years to come you turn around and sell them and it's likely you'll sell it for more than you paid for it. And you'll have the years of enjoyment that you've owned this. So again, it's just a beautiful sale (Jean and Casey Kasem), a lifetime sale and nothing that's really expensive. Just real cool memorabilia stuff. You can have them on display in your home, office or place of business.
Q - Have you ever been surprised at some of the items that you've seen come to auction? One item that comes to mind is the Marilyn Monroe dress. To actually see that must have been something else.
A - That was one of the highlights of my career. On my wish list I had Michael Jackson's red jacket from Thriller, which I sold for $1.8 million. I sold his glove from the Moonwalk 1983 Motown Special, the 25th Anniversary for $420,000. Marilyn Monroe's dress was one of the items on my wish list. In 2016 I got to sell that dress. Marilyn had it made by Jean Luc designers. Bob Mackie did the sketch. Elizabeth Courtney and her team at Western Costume Company spent six weeks hand stitching 2,200 crystals onto the dress. Sixty years ago Gary, on May 16th, (1962) Marilyn came onstage and wore that dress for a ninety second performance. We sold it in 2016 for $4.18 million. It was bought by Ripley's Believe It Or Not. They're very proud owners and they were celebrating one hundred years of their museum and this is an item they wanted to have. And, it's part of their collection now. What a story that is. She had matching shoes, which we did not sell. The whole outfit cost her $1,400. She made a deposit on it and paid the balance in July (1962) and sadly passed away in August of that year. It was archived for so many years. That's an incredible historical, political, Hollywood piece of memorabilia and it continues to make history today.
Q - The dress then was in Marilyn's house and whoever inherited the house, inherited the dress and they contacted Julien's? Is that how it worked?
A - Very similar, Gary. What actually happened was, Marilyn of course passed away when she had no family. She had a half-sister in Florida. Her mom was in a psychiatric institution and Marilyn was paying for her mother to be cared for in this particular home. When Marilyn passed away she left everything to a few friends she named. She left money to take care of her mother. She left money to her half-sister and then she left everything else to Lee Strasberg and Paula Strasberg. Lee was of course her friend, but not only her friend, he was her acting coach as well. So, all these items went to Lee Strasberg and he passed away. His wife passed away and then he remarried Anna Strasberg. In 1999 there was a sale and the dress sold for $1.25 million and then a gentleman, Martin Zweig, who was an investor on Wall Street, he bought the dress for a world record at the time 1.25 million dollars. In the meantime he passed away and so the dress came to us in 2016 and, as I said, sold for four times what he paid for it.
Q - And the value of that dress will only go up in time. Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and The Beatles memorabilia seems to only go up in value. I don't know what the market is for Frank Sinatra and Elvis.
A - Well of course it's a supply and demand factor. Elvis had a huge amount of stuff and he was a prolific buyer and collector. He was constantly accumulating stuff. There's a lot of Elvis out there, but Elvis collectability is still very, very strong. Same for Frank Sinatra. We did an auction a couple of years ago for Frank and Nancy Sinatra, his first wife and mother of his children, and that sold really, really well. His piano sold for over $100,000. So, Frank is very, very collectable. John Lennon, very collectable. Anything from The Beatles is highly sought after. One of the greatest bands in the world. But, who are the bands today who are going to have that longevity that in twenty years, thirty years, forty years are still going to be relevant and people are going to want to own something from their lives and career? If you're a contemporary artist today, who has the staying power? Is it Madonna? Is it Britney? Taylor Swift? We don't know. If we buy something from these performers that we actually like, we can enjoy the item. Then in the years to come they'll still be famous and sought after. BTS, the boy band from South Korea, they're highly collectable right now. They have an army of fans all over the world. And so, their prices continue to go up. Maybe they're the new Beatle band.
Q - Martin, it's hard to imagine any band ever surpassing The Beatles. They were just the right guys, with the right stuff at the right time.
A - Absolutely. In the '60s things were changing, emerging from the depression of the '50s, the war in the '40s, and so peoples' mindset were different. The liberation going on all over the world. They were the perfect band to be a part of that and are still riding that wave, if you will.
Q - How much competition does Julien's Auctions have in the world of celebrity memorabilia?
A - Well, most of the auction houses would dabble in this, Sotheby's and Christy's, the big auction houses that have been around for three-hundred years. What makes Julien's different Gary, is that this is our niche. We don't do anything else. We don't do watches today and clocks tomorrow and radios the next day. We're doing one to two auctions a month. We make them speciality events. We have a big reception here on Wednesday night before the auction. On Thursday we'll have all the VIPs in town attend the event, have a glass of champagne and walk around and see the really cool items, reminisce, take a trip down memory lane. This will be the last time this collection (Jean and Casey Kasem) will be together. These items will be dispersed all over the world. They're going to go to new homes, museums, galleries and places of business where people will continue to care for them and they'll have a memory and a meaning for the new owners who in years to come may in turn, turn around and come back to us and sell them again. So, very little competition as regards to who's the true niche in celebrity sports, Rock 'n' Roll, and Hollywood. And we do street and contemporary art like Banksy or Damien Hirst or Hockney or any of these great artists.
Q - You must have people in Julien's who can validate the signatures of some of the autographed material that comes your way, don't you?
A - Exactly. We have a team of twenty-five that makes all this magic happen. But we have outside people that we work with. We have a Beatles expert, not on our staff, but on contract with us. Everything we sell Beatles goes to him to be authenticated before we would include it in our auction. The Beatles had so many fans and so many requests for signatures they couldn't possibly be signing everything. So, they had their manager and secretary that would sign. In fact, the same applied to Marilyn Monroe. We can know if it's an actual, legitimate, real Marilyn Monroe signature of if it's what we call secretarial. Sometimes a secretary would actually sign a photograph and put it in an envelope and send it back to the person who requested it. That's not uncommon. But you want a real John Lennon signature, a real George Harrison signature, as opposed to being signed by a manager or secretary. I talked to Freda Kelly, who was the secretary of The Beatles Fan Club. She's still alive. She did a documentary. An amazing person. She would talk about the requests in the mail they would get. When they started becoming famous, it was like a few letters a week. She would go to Ringo's mother on a Tuesday night, John's aunt on a Wednesday, Paul's father on a Thursday night. She's spend a little bit of time opening fan mail. Then they came to America in '64 and the avalanche of fan mail; it wasn't just fifteen pieces of fan mail a week. It was almost fifty thousand on a monthly basis coming in. They were absolutely overwhelmed. There was no way that the four Beatles could sit down and be signing and the write music as well and travel and tour and go into the studio and record albums. Think about how busy they were. It's four young boys really.
Q - And don't fort get TV shows, three albums a year.
A - Movies. Incredible. So prolific. Their span was less than ten years actually, from start to finish, and yet when you think about it we're sill talking about it more than sixty years on today.
Q - With so many celebrities out there in the world, Julien's is almost guaranteed to be in business for a long, long time, aren't you?
A - Our business continues to grow and we're very, very happy about that. We just moved into a super-sized warehouse to accommodate all the collections and have all the staff working under one roof. And yes, people are more and more fascinated with celebrities.
Q - What about this Kurt Cobain guitar you sold. What's the story behind that?
A - Kurt bought it from Voltage Guitar Shop here in Los Angeles. Lloyd Chiate was the owner. He sold it to Kurt and his heavily pregnant wife Courtney in 1992. Kurt came in looking for a Martin guitar. He was a left handed guitar player, so the Martin guitars are easy to change to. He bought it from Lloyd for $5,000. Lloyd picked it up from a little guitar shop in Mississippi for $3,500, so he made a very nice profit. But then when he came to the auction in 2020, and coincidentally was sitting next to the winning bidder, which was Peter Freedman. He owns Rode Microphones in Australia, a very famous microphone. Good quality microphones. Lloyd could not believe that the guitar sold for six million and ten thousand dollars. Keep in mind he sold it to Kurt for five thousand dollars in 1992. But the value there is Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, MTV Unplugged, fourteen songs all in one take, November 1993. Sadly, Kurt passed away in April, 1994.
Q - You know as much about the music history and dates as I do. I'm impressed!
A - (laughs) Gary, it's my job.
Official Website: www.JuliensAuctions.com
