Mary Pickford’s Oscars’ Sale Blocked

A Los Angeles jury has decided that the Oscar statuettes that once belonged to silent-screen superstar Mary Pickford (above) — one for best actress for the dreary 1929 melodrama Coquette; the other an Honorary Oscar handed to her in 1976 — cannot be sold.

Heirs to the estate of Pickford's third husband and widower, Charles "Buddy" Rogers (by way of his widow, Beverly Rogers, who died in 2007), wanted to sell the Oscars and donate the proceeds to a charity organization. But charitable sale or not, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was determined to prevent it. Unless, that is, the statuettes were sold back to the Academy for the nominal fee of $1.

Since 1951, the Academy has required Oscar winners to sign an agreement giving the organization the right of first refusal to buy back any statuette up for sale for $10 (later reduced to $1).

According to Bob Pool's Los Angeles Times article, "because Pickford signed the agreement when her honorary Oscar was presented to her and because she was a founder of the academy who remained a member until her death, academy officials contend that the 1930 Oscar was grandfathered into the rule on right of first refusal." That in spite of the fact that the by then visibly ailing Pickford didn't sign the document. Her late secretary, Esther Helm, did it for her.

The case isn't quite closed, however, as the judge will hear more arguments next Monday. As per the attorney for Rogers' heirs, the Academy "spent hundreds of thousands of dollars so the charities specified in Beverly Rogers' will won't receive any money." An attorney for the Academy countered that the organization had offered to donate $50,000 to those charities, an amount that was later raised to $200,000 "only because Mary Pickford was a founder."

Pool adds that the Academy's decision to safeguard its trademarked trophies "has made pre-1951 Oscars a hot commodity. The best picture statuette for 1939's Gone With the Wind was purchased for $1.54 million nine years ago by Michael Jackson. The best picture Oscar for 1941's How Green Was My Valley sold for $95,000 four years ago."