Mad Men aired its series finale on May 17, 2015, which means it has been just over a year since Don Draper lifted his eyelids on that hippie commune to reveal a dollar sign in one eye and a Coke bottle in the other. This doesn’t feel right, in either direction, because that scene somehow seems like something that happened impossibly long ago and also like something that happened last month. Time, like a LearJet containing Pete Campbell or small plane piloted by a non-depressed Ted Chaough, truly flies.
To commemorate this one year anniversary, TV and film auction site Screenbid has put together a huge memorabilia auction filled with tons of Mad Men… stuff. Lots of it. Over 1500 items, according to the press release, which explains the whole thing thusly.
To create lots with maximum style and historic value, ScreenBid engaged Mad Men’s award-winning property master Ellen Freund to curate the sale. Dozens of items in the auction were featured in the “Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men” exhibit at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in 2015, and at Modernism Week 2016 in Palm Springs.
“Every item that appeared on Mad Men was chosen with painstaking care to be both historically accurate for the time period and to help tell the characters’ stories through the objects around them,” said Freund. “With this auction, it’s exciting to give fans a chance to take home a piece of American and television history.”
So far Screenbid has released a preview of 34 “selected items” that will be available once the auction kicks off on June 1. Highlights include: glasses (Don and Roger’s sunglasses, Harry Crane’s regular glasses), office things (Joan’s promotion letter, the box in the banner image that Peggy used to move stuff), and entire cars (Don’s 1964 Chrysler Imperial). So if you need any of that stuff and enjoy giving long explanations about the origin of your belongings, this is a big day for you.
Now, if you’re sitting there reading all this thinking that it sounds really familiar, there’s a good reason for that. Screenbid just did a huge Mad Men auction in August, which you probably remember because it featured the rope Lane Pryce used to commit suicide. And someone bid on it! This will never not be one of the top 100 weirdest things to ever happen. What are you doing with Lane’s suicide rope, you weirdo?! And why spend money on it? It’s not like anyone’s going to question you if you produce any old rope from your garage and say, “This is Lane’s suicide rope.” They’ll be too busy backing away slowly with a mixture of fear and concern in their eyes. Use your head!
But that said, there were a few notable omissions from the first auction, so again, fingers crossed that this new one contains one or all of the following:
Bert Cooper’s octopus sex painting
Truly the gold standard of Mad Men memorabilia. Fun fact: This painting is actually a real thing. It has its own Wikipedia page and everything, filled with lots of interesting little tidbits you can share with people while they’re still trying to get over the fact that you purchased a painting that depicts a nude woman being sexually serviced by two octopi that belonged to a testicle-free advertising magnate from a television show*. Very normal!
*The painting belonged to him, not the octopi. Although, if we’re being really honest here, we can’t rule out Bert owning a pair of real sex octopi. The man loved culture!
Bob Benson’s swim trunks
Mad Men was loaded with famous pieces of wardrobe from the ’60s and ’70s, all of which are perfectly fine and nice, but nothing — not one single stitch of fabric on one single suit or dress, except for maybe everything Stan wore, but that was already up for auction last time — ever touched Bob Benson’s tiny little white bathing suit. If this is available and the UPS man gets to stepping after you win it, you might even be able to wear it to the beach once or twice this summer. If not, you can just crank the heat up and wear it around the house all winter. It’s your life.
Ginsberg’s nipple
Listen, if someone’s out there buying Lane’s suicide rope, you can buy the prosthetic nipple that Ginsberg cut off his chest and presented to Peggy because he thought the new computer was turning him gay. If nothing else, it’s a nice piece of evidence to whip out any time someone complains that “nothing happened” on Mad Men. That’ll teach ’em.
Peggy’s rat-killing, Abe-stabbing knife-on-a-stick
A fun piece of memorabilia, sure. But also a legitimate means of self-defense if you too have just moved into a shady area infested with rodents and criminal-type ne’er-do-wells. That’s good value!
Roger Sterling’s fake mustache
Finding out that the glorious mustache Roger Sterling sported in the final season was fake was a shot many people still have not recovered from, but it turns out there is a tiny potential silver lining: If it was fake, that means it was a prop, and if it was a prop, that means there’s at least some possibility that it will be available in this auction. What do you think the bidding would even start at? $500? $1,000? $80,000? Regardless of the number, one thing’s for certain: It’s a bargain at any price.
