Word: auction
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...hears new aphorisms from his bene factor's mistress ( Nadia Gray). "Life is an auction." she tells him. "Men put up their muscles or their brains, women their bodies. It's all the same." Sellers finally comprehends. Putting up his brains, trimming his beard, he pursues what he can now clearly see is the good life. He overpowers the crook he works for and spirals upward, swiftly becoming an international financier, running stupendous treasuries through his fingers like sand. The camel jumps gracefully through the eye of the needle into the sheer heaven of riches on earth...
...pirates are long since gone from the Spanish Main, and so are the slave traders. Their techniques, though, are well-remembered in Communist Cuba. Last week four members of the Cuban Families Committee for Liberation of Prisoners of War flew to Havana on a sorry mission-to negotiate the auction of 1,179 prisoners captured in last year's abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. A mass trial had found them guilty of treason; now at prices ranging from $25,000 to $500,000, Castro offered them for sale. Otherwise, said he. the prisoners would serve 30 years in prison...
...name of Novelist Somerset Maugham, whose collection of impressionist and postimpressionist paintings was on the block at the great London auction house of Sotheby's, undoubtedly accounted for the record turnout of 2,500. But in a larger sense, the star of the evening was, as always, Sotheby's chairman and chief auctioneer, Peter Cecil Wilson, 49. Wilson has sold 28,000 paintings in his career, and last week he went about his work with the same persuasive urbanity that has made Sotheby's the biggest art auction house in the world. Wilson does not joke...
...humble job," he says, "a hopeless kind of job"-was as a general rewrite man and assistant circulation manager for the art magazine Connoisseur. But after a year of drudgery, Wilson felt he had learned enough about antiques to brazen it out at Sotheby's. For his first auction in 1938, he practiced all weekend by "auctioning" off every stick of their furniture to his young wife and their baby's nurse. Even now he scarcely sleeps the night before a sale. "Selling pictures is not like selling boots," he says...
...announcement-"Lot No. 1. Roderick O'Conor's Still Life with Vegetables"-he presided over the sale without a flicker of nervousness, apart from shooting a cuff now and then. The 35 paintings went for $1,466,864, including $244,000-the highest price ever paid at auction for a living artist-for a Picasso curiosity that showed The Death of Harlequin on one side and Woman Seated in a Garden on the other. In the last five years, Sotheby's has brought in $76.5 million, of which nearly half has come from Wilson's painting...