Janis Joplin’s 1965 Porsche 356 SC Cabriolet, sold for $1,760,000/All photos by Terry Shea
The initial results are in and RM Sotheby’s second New York City auction, dubbed “Driven by Disruption,” yielded some impressive figures yesterday, most notably with a competition Ferrari, an extremely rare—and quick—Aston Martin, a culturally historic Porsche 356 and a highly customized 1963 Pontiac Bonneville convertible with its own cultural significance that went for $308,000.*
What you’ve probably already seen in the news is that Janis Joplin’s 1965 Porsche 356 SC Cabriolet went for $1,760,000, absolutely shattering the record for any previous 356 sold at auction, and very likely any private sale as well. But this price had nothing to do with this being a final-year 356 with disc brakes all around, among a bunch of other SC upgrades. No, it had everything to do with the psychedelic “History of the Universe” mural using the car’s body as canvas, first carried out by her friend (and roadie) when she bought the car in the late Sixties and later recreated under commission by her siblings, who offered the car for the first time in New York.
Overall, the sale netted an estimated $79,519,000 in automobiles and $80,498,800 when including the first 28 lots of automobilia, art, signage and posters, which brought it $979,800 in gross revenue for RM Sotheby’s. For the gearheads not as interested in rock ‘n roll history, the headline-topping car was a 1956 Ferrari 290 MM, historic for being one of the few cars of its era to finish every race it entered, still sporting its original engine and driveline and to have been driven by a veritable who’s-who of renowned piloti.
1956 Ferrari 290 MM by Scaglietti, sold for $28,050,000
At $28,050,000, the 290 MM represented a big chunk of the total sales. Add in the $14,300,000 yielded by the one of just 19 Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato and you can see how important those two sales alone were to RM Sotheby’s. Overall, 23 of 31 automobiles sold and those two juggernauts on the top of the list skew the average to an astounding $3,457, 348. Playing with the numbers a bit more, the median calculates to a more, uh, reasonable, $1,430,000. Of the 23 cars sold, a full dozen cleared the seven figure mark and sold for $1,000,000 or more, with eight clearing the $2,000,000 mark.
Sotheby’s 10th floor gallery space on New York’s Upper East Side usually houses paintings or other collectibles, but instead contained some 30 automobiles for the auction, which took place three floors below.
All in all, it was an impressive sale for RM Sotheby’s, though the “value” of the bids of the unsold eight lots was an equally impressive $11,600,000. One unsold lot that caught our eye was a 1959 BMW 507 Series II Roadster that even $1,900,000 could not convince the owner to separate from it. Just two years ago at RM’s “Art of the Automobile” auction in the very same seventh floor Sotheby’s auction room, a BMW 507 set a world record with what seemed an incredible $1,500,000 hammered bid and a $1,650,000 final price. Though it was below the estimate, we expected that $1.9 million bid to be enough, but it wasn’t.
Purple 1934 Delage D8 S Cabriolet absolutely delighted the many women and children who viewed the gallery before the auction. Later it sold for $1,430,000.
While the feeding frenzy on the chart-topping Ferrari opened at $16,000,000 and had jumped to $20 million within a minute, a no reserve 1991 Ferrari Testarossa with virtual no miles on it stalled out at $150,000 but then auctioneer extraordinaire Max Girardo (a true polyglot, instantly calling out the big numbers in several languages throughout the evening), just before the third and final call, got things moving, the car eventually selling for $319,000, about where we expected it to go.
Roy Rogers customized 1963 Pontiac Bonneville convertible fetched an impressive $308,000.
Oh, and that Bonneville that belonged to Roy Rogers and had been customized by Nudie Cohn, his work attaching pistols and rilfes and silver dollars throughout and without the car. It seemed out of place in a gallery filled largely with high-end European and sporting stock, but, then again, it was about as American as any car could possibly be, with its massive V-8, American hero ownership, impossibly large GM B-body chassis and guns galore. It also got its own private gallery, dressed up like a barn.
For full results from the RM Sotheby’s Driven by Disruption sale, visit RMAuctions.com.
* Unless otherwise noted, all prices include a buyer’s premium of 10 percent over the final hammer price.
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