Year of Ann Dvorak: Day 68

If you haven’t already figured out, I have a massive collection of memorabilia relating to Ann Dvorak. I love every last piece in my collection, even if I sometimes can’t remember buying something or, on the rare occasion, have too much of something. There are a handful of items that standout as favorites, and these photos of Ann during her MGM chorus days are right up there.

I have a lot of photos of Ann in the chorus over at MGM. During her tenure at the studio from 1929-1931, she appeared in over 2o titles and fortunately, stills from these films are not hard to come by. These particular photos are especially amazing to me because they are individual shots of her and there are five of them. What’s even more amazing is that she is not identified by name of the back of the photos, so some film aficionado looked at these decades later and knew who is was, which enabled them to wind up in an Ann Dvorak file at a memorabilia shop and finally into my eager hands.

I bought these at Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store in 2003. I was visiting New York with a bunch of friends and me and Darin, my collecting partner in crime hit this shop our first day in the city. I pulled out these five photos, along with a few others, which were then handed to Mr. Ohlinger himself for pricing. The chorus shots came back with $30 written in pencil on the back. Being a starving grad-school student at the time, I was outraged, but somehow managed to talk him down to $20 each on two of them and left the other three behind.

By our last day in New York, the thought of not going home with all five photos was consuming me. We had a late afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and when Darin knocked on the door of my hotel room in the morning, I answered it with, “I need to go back and get those three photos, don’t I?” “Um…yeah!” was the response, and off we went.

We got to the shop and I pulled the three photos, only to be told that Mr. Ohlinger was not in on Sundays, and that staff was not allowed to sell vintage photos in his absence. After an excessive amount of whining on my part, someone finally called him at home and he gave his blessing to sell them to me – for $30, non-negotiable.  I paid it.

As we left the store, I started having buyer’s remorse at having dropping $90 on three photos. Darin whipped around and exclaimed, “Three chorus girl photos of Ann Dvorak come up on eBay. $90. Buy It Now. Do you do it?”

“Oh heck ya,” I immediately replied.

And I have never regretted buying these since.