Something for Herself
Dame Sophie on Famous Women and Their Famous Belongings
Greetings, Dames Nation!
This week, Dame Sophie is bringing you more thoughts about famous women and our culture’s consumption of their material goods. Specifically: I want to talk about two auctions— both the current auction of (the very much alive) Pattie Boyd’s personal effects and the auction (fictionalized in Feud: Truman Capote vs. The Swans, and decidedly deceased) of Joanne Carson’s belongings.
Pattie Boyd is a writer and photographer, as well as a former model and actress, and even with all of those qualities, she’s most famous (yet perhaps least understood) as the muse of two rock gods, George Harrison and Eric Clapton. She’s the inspiration behind “Something” and “Layla”! That’s extraordinary! And yet, her life, ideas, interests, and abilities are all obscured by those facts. They’re not even new facts – “Something” was released in 1971 and “Layla” in 1970.
In 2008, Boyd published a memoir about her relationships with both men and, in 2022, she followed that up with a visual memoir/scrapbook that showcases her photography, photos others took of her, and her personal written ephemera from the era. Having reclaimed her history for herself, she’s selling off a lot of her stuff, as people do. Because she’s Pattie Boyd, and because her stuff includes items such as the original painting that became the cover art for Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, a handmade and illustrated Christmas card from George to Pattie, and an exquisite enamel and diamond-studded necklace, Christie’s auctioned off 110 items to the tune of about $3.5 million.
The 2016 auction of many of Joanne Carson’s worldly goods (depicted as a live, in-person auction in Feud: Truman Capote vs. The Swans) took place entirely online and combined her items with a collection belonging to Jane Fonda. (Side note: I bet hanging out with and getting to hear even ten minutes of gossip with them would have been a hoot.) Coverage of the auction was dominated by the news that Truman Capote’s ashes sold to an anonymous bidder for $45,000, but my taste leans more toward Fonda’s jackets and Carson’s Lilly Pulitzer dresses.
Both auctions gave me an “Is That All There Is?” feeling, as if these women and the entirety of their selves, were being reduced to the mementos and doodads — polaroids, a lighter, pages of handwritten lyrics — we see described very clinically in the auction listings. And yet that’s not the perspective Pattie Boyd has on the whole thing!
Here’s what Boyd has said herself, plucked from an article at PBS Newshour:
“I look back without emotion,” she told The Associated Press. “I can feel slightly sentimental, but not emotional.
“I’ve lived with all of these photographs and objets for so long — 40, 50 years,” she said. “I want other people to enjoy them.”
She wants others to enjoy items that have played their roles in her life! In my imagination, she’s also doing this as a gift to herself; who needs the agita of finding and paying for a very secure storage facility for such things? This is all very well-adjusted, and includes hints of both Marie Kondo and Swedish Death Cleaning, nice little perks to go along with that $3.5 million.
My heartfelt thanks to Dearest, a wonderful fellow Substack newsletter by Monica McLaughlin: she included the Pattie Boyd auction in this month’s issue, which is what got me thinking about it. Monica’s own description of Dearest is both accurate and can’t be improved upon, so I’ll just quote it here: “History and gossip about cool stuff at auction, with an emphasis on antique jewelry (but also lots of weird).” If that’s not #DamesBait, what in the world is?
XOXO/ Dame Sophie
Addendum:
Given that the news of Kate Middleton’s cancer diagnosis came this afternoon, and we’re not professional royal watchers (if anything, we are giddily unprofessional royal watchers), we don’t have a take on the situation beyond “that’s kind of what we figured, and wow, what a crummy couple of months for the health of the House of Windsor.” We are sending all good wishes for a smooth course of chemotherapy and a full recovery!
This is unrelated to our present topics, it’s just a little extra tidbit I found while gif spelunking – if anyone wants a refresher for their favorite eyeroll, this one is perfect.
On Sunday, our paid subscribers will be receiving their monthly recommen-DAMES-tions issue, wherein each of us will be writing briefly about a piece of culture we cannot stop recommending. If you would like to receive that issue, you know what to do: