Celebrity Estate Sales and Auctions: 6 People Share Their Most Memorable Shopping Experiences

Photo: John Parvin

Celebrity estate sale finds range from the totally bizarre (think Truman Capote’s ashes) to the completely mundane (Betty White’s precious pet puzzle collection, for instance). Spending loads of money on used stuff from a celebrity may seem odd to some, but there’s undeniably a market for it. For shoppers, these purchases can be a way to cement an emotional connection with a favorite entertainer or artist, or at the very least, they can serve as conversation starters that create a more meaningful living space.

There is no one definitive experience of the celebrity estate sale or auction. You can end up at a highly curated auction, held by Christie’s, Sotheby’s, or some other auction house, with no way to guarantee you won’t get priced out of the lot you have your eye on. You could attend the estate sale of a beloved celebrity who’s passed away, or to a sale hosted by someone who’s simply trying to clean out their garage. You could go to an in-person estate sale, with a mountain of goods big and small to sort through and the constant fear that you’re missing something in another room or beneath the pile of stuff a fellow shopper is hoarding for their own perusal.

Still, the uncertainty is a major part of what makes the experience worthwhile, and at the end of the day when you end up with something you never thought you’d call your own, whatever your specific anxieties were will have been proven worthwhile. Below, we spoke to real people about their celebrity estate sale and auction finds, and learned more about what compelled them to seek out objects that once belonged to their idols.

Truman Capote’s stuffed animals

In 1999, screenwriter and television producer Stephanie Savage received the catalog for Marilyn Monroe’s estate auction as a gift from her then boyfriend. “Flipping through the catalog, I got to the auction lot that was her makeup case and I just totally burst into tears,” she says. “It just felt like it had so much energy inside of it. It was so intimate that it just really moved me.” In the 25 years since, Savage has remained drawn to the sense of intimacy that estate sales offer. Her home contains a handful of storied finds and her Marilyn Monroe catalog has gained more than a few companions. Over the years, she’s secured a variety of auction catalogs, including those of Elizabeth Taylor, Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, for her collection.

In 2006, Savage had her first experience shopping an estate sale at the Truman Capote auction held by Bonhams. The lot she was immediately drawn to was a collection of five stuffed animals from the ’50s and ’60s. Though she worried they would end up being bid up out of reach, they ended up being “highly affordable” and she’d held onto them for nearly 18 years. “Ever since then I’ve just always felt an understanding of the power of being able to have that connection with someone who you really admire, whose personality you’re fascinated by,” she says. “To be able to bring that energy into your own home and share it with your friends and family and your guests, I think it’s something that’s really special.”

Bidding on the Joan Didion auction was quite a contrast from the experience at the Capote auction. The item she was most drawn to, Didion’s peacock chair, ended up selling for 40 times its estimate. Sitting at her laptop watching the bids tick up, “it quickly became clear that all reason had gone out the window for every bidder. Things were going extremely high and emotion was just taking over,” Savage recalls. Still, she was able to secure a Robert Rauschenberg print, which now sits in her bedroom above her own wicker chair that she previously planned on replacing with Didion’s. “Things owned by other people are something that I’ve always treasured and sought out,” Savage says. “This is just a specific iteration that I’m really lucky to be able to enjoy and share with other people.”

Alex Trebek’s tchotchkes

Duncan Byrnes had been to many estate sales before, but never to a home that belonged to a celebrity he himself was a fan of. When he heard about Alex Trebek’s estate sale, he put aside work and everything else to attend. Byrnes waited in line for half an hour before getting in, but once he was inside, “it was surreal,” as he recalls. Byrnes fondly remembers watching Jeopardy with his family every night growing up, his dad always getting correct answer after correct answer, he doing his best to get some right.

“The game was happening on television, but it was also happening in everyone’s homes, and Alex Trebek was the host of many nights of quality time [for my family],” Byrnes explains. “You get the same bit of him every night and although he hosted the show for 10,000 years, there’s maybe like a minute of him interacting with contestants during every show and very little of that is him sharing something about himself.” Unlike most celebrities in the age of social media, Trebek’s personal life wasn’t a major part of the connection that most viewers had with him, Byrnes included. Going to Trebek’s estate sale provided the opportunity to understand Trebek the man, not just Trebek the host. “It is very humanizing,” Byrnes says.

The sale had a massive amount of stuff to sort through—business cards, books, Jeopardy memorabilia, and unique finds, like a bust of Trebek holding a Jeopardy cue card. His limit was $100, but he only ended up spending $15-$20 on a couple of VHS tapes, a keychain, and a shirt. One of the VHS tapes he bought was Wuthering Heights (1939), which he’d never watched but was drawn to because of his love of Kate Bush’s song “Wuthering Heights.”

After leaving the sale—and sharing his purchases with his Trebek loving parents, naturally—Byrnes and his dad discovered that Trebek was a huge fan of Wuthering Heights, and even wrote about his and his wife’s shared love of the movie in his memoir. (Although Wuthering Heights has been adapted many times, it was the 1939 version that Byrnes picked up that was Trebek’s favorite.) Knowing how much Trebek loved the movie made owning it feel even more lucky. “I left feeling really good about what I had and lucky to have it,” Byrnes adds.

A quilt formerly owned by Joan Didion

On the morning of Joan Didion’s estate auction, Orion Carloto wasn’t playing around. “I kind of made a little altar for myself on my kitchen table. I had my laptop in front of me, and a stack of Joan’s books, and a little prayer candle,” she explains. “I was really calling in all of the positive energies that this would work. Obviously, I’m sure a lot of bidders don’t really have a budget, but a young girl like me definitely does.” Ultimately, her altar paid off—after a bidding war, she was able to secure the quilt she wanted for $8,000. “It definitely makes its mark as the most I’ve ever spent on something in my home,” Carloto says. “I’d do it all over again if I could; there’s a rotten part of my brain that believes Joan nodded her head towards me and all I felt was peace.”

In its former life, the quilt was hung in the New York bedroom of Didion’s late daughter, Quintana Roo, according to the auction notes. Now, the quilt hangs in Carloto’s bedroom, which gets less direct sunlight than other areas in her Los Angeles house, where it could get damaged. Before the sale, she meticulously studied the catalog to figure out what she wanted, then she realized the most important factor was to get something that she’d actually be able to live. “I think the purpose in getting something for me was that I would make use of it. If you get the sunglasses, what do you do with that? You don’t want it to sit in a drawer, but how do you showcase a pair of sunglasses as a piece of art in your home?” In the bedroom, the quilt hangs on the wall, greeting her each morning.

Of course, the sale wouldn’t have had quite the level of import to her had she been motivated strictly by utility. Though she cringes at the parasocial element of it, getting something from the sale felt like a way to feel closer to Didion and feel her presence in her home. “In a sick and twisted way, it feels like honoring this closeness that you have to somebody who has changed your life in ways that they may not understand,” Carloto says.

In 2023, as Carloto planned her first solo gallery exhibition, “A Room of One’s Own,” she realized that the quilt was the perfect centerpiece for a show that evoked the warmth of bedrooms and personal spaces. Up until that point, she’d kept her purchase of the quilt private, but the show offered “this kismet moment; it felt like it then had a purpose other than hanging up in my home. There was a purpose to it.”

Busy Philipps’s wine glasses

When Quinn Ward heard about the Busy Philipps fundraising garage sale, she knew she had to be there. The night that the date of the sale was announced, she booked a ticket from Illinois to New York to make sure of it Ward first became a fan of Philipps through binge-watching Cougar Town, the Courtney Cox-starring ABC sitcom that aired from 2009-2015, but her love of Philipps specifically was cemented when listening to her podcast, Busy Philipps is Doing Her Best. She started listening to iton a whim when Philipps’s Cougar Town co-star Krista Miller did a guest episode, but the vulnerability that Philipps and co-host Caissie St. Onge displayed has kept her listening week after week. “Knowing that there's a new podcast episode on Wednesday is what gets me through the week,” Ward says. “I hold on to that so tightly.”

After waiting in line for half an hour, Ward was determined to tell Philipps how much her work means to her. Before arriving, she had no expectation that the actor would even be open to mingling with shoppers at the sale, but in reality she was perfectly personable which led Ward to purchasing a set of Cougar Town wine glasses in the back. Though she bought some clothes, too, the set of glasses are her favorite find—the perfect memento not only of the show she loves, but of meeting Philipps too. “I can’t even believe I own the Cougar Town wine glasses. That show is like my blood, all of my friends know that,” Ward says.

Philipps sold them to her for only $1 a piece, making them a highly affordable prized possession.

Patrick Swayze’s Arts and Crafts style lamps

Growing up, Matt Carson and Bill Albertini spent every summer together. Their parents knew each other before they were born, but they lived in separate towns. Year after year, during those summers, the one thing they would bond over was a shared love of “terrible movies,” as Albertini describes it. Carson puts it a little more bluntly: “Dumb trash is my genre of choice.”

One movie they both loved was Roadhouse, the Patrick Swayze vehicle that Time Magazine has referred to as “the best bad movie of all time.” Scrolling through Facebook in 2017, Carson stumbled upon the news that a Patrick Swayze auction was to be held in April. It was the first celebrity auction he’d “even pondered buying anything from,” Carson says, but after sending it to Albertini, he was committed to finding a lot that they could go in on together. “Matt was really in charge of this,” Albertini says.

The pair are still long distance friends, so it was important that they find a divisible lot—they weren’t about to go Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants on a pair of Swayze’s sweatpants. A set of two Arts & Crafts style lamps immediately caught Carson’s eye and Albertini agreed that they were “legitimately cool,” beyond the Swayze connection. On the day of the auction, Carson handled bidding—a process he compared to “watching my favorite team in a championship. It was like, ‘Oh gosh, what’s going to happen?’”

Carson ended up having to go above the maximum bid he and Albertini had previously decided upon, but both agree that they were worth the extra money. When the lamps finally arrived at Carson’s house, he waited to unbox them until he and Albertini could open them together. Protecting their ability to share the experience, Carson kept the lamps in the comically oversized box they were sent in and drove up to Pennsylvania, where Albertini spends his summers. When the time finally came to do so, Carson and Albertini played the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme music for a “ceremonial unboxing,” as Albertini describes it. “Opening that up was a night I was really looking forward to and it did not disappoint,” Carson says. “It’s really a fond memory.”a lot that they could go in on together. “Matt was really in charge of this,” Albertini says.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest