Doll world: inside the collections of the rich and famous

For many years, when Candy Spelling couldn’t sleep at night, she would visit her dolls. Spelling, whose voluminous helmet-like blow dries are a fitting signature for the wife of Aaron Spelling, the late American producer who made millions from hirsute TV shows such as Dynasty and Charlie’s Angels, is a “night owl”. While the rest of her family slept, she spent hours in the private doll museum she’d constructed in the basement of her California house.

She’d marvel at the dolls’ ornate outfits, or choreograph them into new tableaux using the stage and backdrops she’d commissioned, refreshing an ice-skating scene with a tea party, a picnic with a cocktail soirée. The stillness, the reliable merriment of the dolls soothed her. And she identified with a quality in their faces, a depth beneath the pleasantness. “There was something very soulful in the eyes,” she told me recently.

Spelling, 78, began collecting dolls in about 1980 when a friend gave her daughter Tori Spelling, an actor known for her role in Beverly Hills, 90210 (also produced by her father), four 8in Madame Alexander dolls from the 1950s. Such models have plastic faces, small pouty mouths and “sleep” eyelids that open and close when jiggled, rewarding the effort with the inference of life. “Those were very rare dolls,” Spelling said. She proposed that Tori start a collection. “I said to her, this would be fun to do together, as a mommy-daughter thing.”

Spelling filled her daughter’s room with precious dolls. But one day, Tori said she was tired of waking up with rows of eyes on her. She turned her attention to other things, but Spelling kept on buying. When she moved into “The Manor”, as she called the 123-room house she built on an estate purchased from Bing Crosby in 1983, she installed her collection in the cellar.

Sometimes she’d stay on the phone all night negotiating purchases from fellow collectors. “They would tell me their whole story and why they had to sell the doll — someone’s marriage didn’t work out, they wanted to get rid of the doll because they needed the money but they wanted to make sure it went to a good home,” she said.

The eventual fate of one’s dolls plays on the mind of any committed collector, Spelling told me. Given her children’s aversion, she gave up on the idea of hers being handed down from generation to generation and came to think of herself as a temporary guardian. “Some people foster dogs and cats,” she said. With the Madame Alexanders, she thought, “I’ve fostered them and one day someone will love them as much as I did. That’s the story that I told myself, it’s the story you have to.”

Spelling took the role of custodian seriously. She stored her collection, which grew into the hundreds, in bespoke Lucite cabinets with a heat control system, which she ordered after calling up the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to ask how they preserved their most precious items.

If you’d traversed the manicured basements of Los Angeles or Miami over the past 50 years, you’d find that such specificity and lavish expense were not so unusual. In underground “doll rooms” with temperatures that never rise above 16 Celsius, you’d find whole line-ups gazing back at you. The most precious are European: antique French “Bébés” from the 1880s with “bisque” heads of unglazed porcelain and wide, shocked eyes, by makers such as Jumeau and Gaultier; Armand Marseilles and Reinhardts from Germany with square heads and bulbous cheeks; English painted wooden dolls from the 18th century with bright cartoon make-up and stern close-set eyes.

You’d also find 1950s contemporary dolls, such as Madame Alexanders and Barbies, decked out not like babies but stylish adolescents in froofy gowns or micro minis. And their precursors, the French fashion dolls from the 1860s and ’70s, which also showed off the cutting-edge clothes of the day.

To collect dolls is to engage with the heart of the general collector’s impulse: one saves objects in order to, in some way, save oneself. Whatever the acquisition — art, wine, furniture, bottle caps, airsickness bags — one creates a self-portrait of sorts, driven not just by aesthetic taste, but also an imagined narrative relating to society, beauty, history and, in turn, value. (Of course, there are a few collectors who would claim to be driven only by money, but it is rare to find someone who proffers no connection at all to their loot.) As a hobby, doll collecting has benefits in common with other areas of collecting — the thrill of the chase, the embrace of a community of like-minded aficionados, the allure of distinction and the promise of something to fill the days, something to research and maintain — but here the aspect of self-reflection is explicit.

Any good doll is decent because of the play on likeness, the twinkle of humanity in its eyes. The quest to see oneself in one’s objects is clearer than ever. It is a rare area of collecting where the vast majority of objects take the form of women or girls, and this is undoubtedly why it is dominated by female collectors, many of whom have, they told me, found their place in the world of art and antiques through dolls.

Barbra Streisand built a fake shop, “Bee’s Doll Shop”, in the basement of her Malibu home to show off her collection, part of a strip of old-timey stores displaying her many antiques. Oprah Winfrey’s doll collection runs into the hundreds and includes a 12lb clay “portrait doll” of herself as a baby.

Demi Moore grew a doll collection so expansive that it began to come between her and her then husband, Ashton Kutcher. “I saw Chucky. These things freak me out, man! And she’s got, like, thousands of them,” he told the TV host Conan O’ Brien in 2009. “I think the dolls have souls. And they’re always looking at you. We have some in the bedroom and that makes things just weird. Some of these things are worth a lot of money apparently, but they frighten me a little bit.” The pair separated in 2011.

The 1970s were the heyday of doll collecting in the UK, the English toy auctioneer Daniel Agnew told me recently (few collections existed at all before the 1920s). But in the years that followed, the mood shifted. Dolls became a relic rather than a rite of passage, wrapped up in changing ideals of gender and girlhood, or simply rendered obsolete by the lure of the screen.

Child’s Play, released in 1988, featuring the murderous doll Chucky, accelerated this process. It was a headache for all areas of the market, Agnew said. For years afterwards, if you showed a young person an antique doll, whatever the provenance or quality, they would recoil. To them, the read was one and the same: creepy. The market floundered as older collectors died off and weren’t replaced. Many dolls now sell for less than they did a few decades ago. The middle and lower ends of the market are the “doldrums”, Agnew told me. “A doll once selling for £200 might struggle to make £50.”

But recent cinema has rehabilitated the doll. Barbie became the highest grossing film of 2023, which The New Yorker dubbed “The Year of the Doll”, thanks not just to what was on at the movies but to a general reclaiming of a candy-hued femininity across culture and fashion. A teaser for the film featured Margot Robbie in a swimsuit, dressed as the very first Barbie from 1959, a nod to doll history. This week, London’s Design Museum opened Barbie: The Exhibition, featuring an array of archive Mattel material. From his office in Berkshire, Agnew wondered what the knock-on effects of all this could be. Things could really only go up, he said, with a good-humoured stoicism.

For many years, Agnew ran Christie’s South Kensington doll and teddy bear operation, but in 2007 they decided to wind down the department. Since then he’s been at Special Auction Services, an auction house known for sales like “Trains Galore” and “Cigarette Cards”, based out of an industrial park in Newbury. When I visited him last year, a sale of Churchill memorabilia and ungainly taxidermy was under way on the ground floor.

Agnew, who has long grey hair, a full beard and a resemblance to Santa Claus that is hard to look past given his line of work, sat upstairs, a giant in a sea of miniatures, preparing for his two annual toy sales. On high shelves were bin bag upon bin bag of teddy bears, their noses squished against clear plastic, their limbs twisted into demeaning forms. It was an unnervingly violent scene that I worried would repeat itself in my dreams. Agnew had warned me by email that his office can feel a little like a “mortuary”.

Toys reveal the values and norms of their times, he told me. One can learn about family and gender roles, attitudes to children and adolescence, style, class and craft. Every country has a traditional doll-making skill, and “often things survive in doll world that wouldn’t have survived in the real world,” he said, such as examples of make-up trends, expressions or postures. Agnew began his own collection when he was a boy, amassing small lead farm animals from his mother, an antiques dealer.

He now has thousands of toys: bears, bunnies, insects and, his particular favourites, candy containers in amusing shapes — a loaf of bread, a sofa — which date back to about 1910. He keeps these in a cabinet in his living room, and in his guest room, which is lined floor to ceiling with plastic boxes. Sometimes he dreams of selling up and buying a villa in Greece, but then he is drawn back in by the charm of a vintage bear, the satisfying accuracy of a well-made model bug.

As an assistant catalogued stock on a computer, Agnew physically examined the dolls, taking off wigs, lifting up skirts. He worked methodically but tenderly, like a vet checking an animal for fleas. Most of the dolls were stored in cardboard crates branded with vegetable names. “Every time I go to Tesco, I grab these,” he said, showing me an iceberg lettuce box that served as a bed for a 19th-century wax doll. “A lot of the dolls I come across are not in their best condition. They’ve come out [of] the loft. They can be really dirty. Cross-eyed. Missing fingers. Messy wig.”

Though the British market for collectible dolls is languishing, in America it is booming. Things sell for double, triple, even quadruple what you would get in the UK, Agnew said. This is partly a question of scale and connectivity. In the US, you have a combination of high-profile collectors — the Streisands, the Spellings — and a host of smaller enthusiasts attached to a network of doll clubs.

Online, the names of certain key collectors are cited with reverence. In Dallas, Texas, there is Gail Cook, who is in her eighties and who has her own private museum of antique French and German dolls. When I telephoned her, she only occasionally dropped her phlegmatic tone to stray into wistfulness. “I don’t play dress up with them, or whatever it is that girls do with dolls,” she said. “They are all behind glass.” The space has no sunlight (in case the clothes “melt away”), no wood (which “contains acid that can destroy the dolls”) and fibre-optic lighting (to “protect the fabrics”).

She loves the details in the dolls, she said, becoming more animated. “They used 18-carat gold on some of the purses. They used ivory handles on their parasols.” She has no interest in modern dolls. “I don’t see any art in them,” she said. (I am told this is common. Barbie collectors may graduate to antique fashion dolls, but few who begin with historical dolls will consider anything plastic.) “In the Victorian era, everyone dressed up so beautifully,” Cook continued. “It’s not like today, where little girls are running around in jeans and that sort of thing. It’s a long-lost period — lost in history.”

Cook’s five children have no interest in her collection, she told me, noting that young people today don’t relate to dolls in the same way. They don’t play with them into their teens, as girls used to. They don’t use them to learn how to run a household, how to make clothes, how to dress and pamper oneself. To learn, as Simone de Beauvoir famously put it, through decorating their dolls, to be decorative themselves.

Fellow collector Lizbeth Krupp expressed modesty when I dared compare her to Cook. “A supreme, she is the top of the top,” she demurred. Krupp’s dolls sit alongside her collection of blue-chip contemporary art — Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, Donald Judd — which she amassed with her husband, a real estate mogul. Most of her dolls are stored at her home in Boston and arranged by the colour of their clothes, mauve melts to lavender, burgundy to rust. “I collect dolls like I collect art. I look at their beauty. I look at their rarity,” she explained. She described the dolls as “little sculptures that are wearing couturier outfits. They look like little people from Renoir paintings.”

This was a common theme among the top collectors I spoke to: dolls are not playthings but artworks. All were female and many, like Krupp, have serious art collections. All admired the dolls’ perfection and all claimed they were driven by a strategic thirst for the “best”. It was not, they said, about any kind of subliminal longing: for a cherished toy from youth, for a subtle resemblance to a favoured child or a fizzing nostalgia for the weight of a baby in one’s arms.

And they were all keen to qualify that they were not mad, or overcome with boundless sentimentality. This was something they asserted multiple times across our conversations, even as they sometimes simultaneously caressed their new acquisitions. I noticed in them a defensiveness about their collecting and a need, in their hopeful assertions of artistic merit and historical importance, to make it fit within more accepted standards. This impulse — to measure oneself against the reactions of others, to perform palatability and to make oneself appear sane at all costs — struck me as a uniquely female tendency, which seemed all the more poignant given that we were usually sat surrounded by tens, or even hundreds, of tiny model women, frozen forever in their most genteel and pleasant guise.

All were keen to qualify that they were not mad, even as they sometimes caressed their new acquisitions

All the collectors I spoke to also expressed concern about what would happen to their dolls as time passed. To sell? To hand down? And to whom? It was the great conundrum.

The richest take estate planning into their own hands. The Virginia-based collector Carolyn Barry — who bought the most expensive doll ever sold at auction, a 19th-century French model, for $333,500 — tried to bequeath her collections of glass art and dolls to a museum but couldn’t find one willing to take both (the hesitancy was always around the dolls), so she founded her own, the Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University, which opened in 2018.

The collector Julie Blewis stores her dolls at home in Naples, Florida. Increasingly she worries about environmental disasters, she told me. “I would not even consider buying a home closer to water,” she said solemnly. “Because there is no way, if a hurricane was coming, I could possibly rescue this size of a collection.”

American women like these, Agnew explained, as he straightened the legs of a Steiner doll expected to fetch between £1,500 and £2,000, have their hands on much of the best European antique stock. “There are very few people in this country who would want to spend £10,000 on a doll, but over there the conventions are huge.”

Buyer expectations are also different, he said. “Americans tend to tart things up before they sell them. Here, we sell as seen.” Sometimes he’ll spot something he sold years before up for sale in the US, paint freshened, outfit upgraded. There, buyers want things immaculate. “This is often how we get things here,” he said, pointing to a tarnished doll with one eye missing. “It’s probably inside the head,” he added, knocking the back of its skull. The upcoming auction would not be a glamorous affair, he said. Most people no longer even turn up in person, preferring to bid online. “At Theriault’s,” he said, referring to the leading American auction house, “they feed them ice-cream sundaes during the auction and that sort of thing. I don’t think we are quite in that league.”

Theriault’s in Annapolis, Maryland, handles 70 per cent of the world’s collectable doll market and is almost single-handedly responsible for sustaining the US boom. It is run by a mother-and-son duo, Florence Theriault and Stuart Holbrook, and it is impossible to precisely define the extent to which they are supporting the value of dolls versus entirely inventing it. This fine line has, at points, brought controversy.

Theriault’s has sold a crystal-embellished Antoine Rochard doll for $194,000 (double its estimate), a “Miss Kantoshu” Friendship Doll from the 1920s for $241,000 (the highest price ever paid for a Japanese doll) and an original 1959 Barbie for $48,000 (quadruple its estimate). Their success is built on the simple knowledge that things are worth precisely what people will pay for them.

When Theriault, a former librarian and antiques dealer, founded the business with her husband in 1970, US doll collectors were relatively rare. Her success was down to her tirelessness — now in her eighties, she still works 12 hours a day — and her branding. She held auctions at swanky hotels, and developed a knack for posing the dolls in theatrical ways, which charmed bidders. She also made a speciality of selling full collections, often of notable figures, including Shirley Temple and the reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark.

For such sales, Theriault’s produces lavish catalogues with titles that sit somewhere between a Jilly Cooper novel and a nursery rhyme: “Purple Skies, Plum Delights”, “One Thing Leads to Another”, “Oh, My Stars and Garters!”. They are seen as encyclopedias by doll collectors, but also do a good job of flattering egos. To sell one’s stash with Theriault’s has become an aspiration, a motivation to buy more and buy better, with the promise of having one’s effort rewarded for posterity.

Theriault told me that if the prices would only go higher, the whole arena would have more legitimacy. “Money. That’s what gets the press,” she said. “Sure, $300,000 is a lot for a doll. But in the big field of art and antiques, it’s nothing.”

She refers to people who do not collect dolls, people who perhaps look at those who do with alarm or barely concealed pity, as “the other people”. They just don’t get it, she told me. Indeed, doll collecting is not something people tend to feel ambivalent about. Those who don’t do it cannot imagine ever doing it, while those who do display a particularly strong emotional investment. Theriault’s husband used to say, “I’ve never seen a stamp or coin collector kiss their collection goodbye when they sell it, but I’ve seen doll collectors kiss every doll.”

Theriault told me she has grown accustomed to older collectors telephoning her, worried about leaving their dolls to their uninterested children, but unable to let go. “You’re not ready,” she’ll often tell them, soothingly. (“An active collector buying is far more important to me than one who sells,” Holbrook said plainly. “One who buys, I have years of work with them ahead.”) Such phone calls, and the emotional toll of acting as an untrained therapist, are part of the reason that Theriault is herself an “other” person and has no dolls of her own.

Holbrook too is an “other”. His hobbies are white-water kayaking and kite surfing. He is the more bombastic of the pair, and after talking to him, I felt confident he would be successful at promoting just about anything: essential oils, yoga wear, online masterclasses. “The last thing I want to do when I go home at night is look at another doll,” he told me. And yet he spends his days touring the globe as self-appointed lead PR for the doll world, lobbying museums to show them and anyone and everyone to buy them. He takes 300 flights a year, he said, and three annual cross-country road trips “so I can target and hit collectors from town to town”.

Sure, $300,000 is a lot for a doll. But in the big field of art and antiques, it’s nothing

Many of the collectors I spoke to referred to Holbrook as a friend. It was he who arranged Lizbeth Krupp’s collection in rainbow shades and suggested the addition of hand-calligraphed cards detailing each doll’s credentials. It is often he who advises collectors on what to add next, or suggests a new category if they become priced out of something they love. This guidance is only complicated by the fact that it is also him setting the reserves, him fishing for bids. It is important, Holbrook said, to give collectors “a roadmap of how to have fun in the hobby”. They can never tire of the charm of dolls, can never feel that what they are doing is fruitless or even slightly irrational.

Yet some are not having fun with Holbrook’s roadmap. In 2011, when downsizing, Candy Spelling sold her collection with Theriault’s in an auction branded “To The Manor Born”. A few months later, she sued, asking for $500,000 in damages and claiming they had not paid her or offered clear accounts on the whereabouts of her inventory (the suit was settled in 2012). I put the accusations to Florence Theriault but she waved them away, saying, “Some people make their life out of suing people.”

But Spelling’s story is not unique. Some five years before, a Chicago doll collector claimed to have been stonewalled about payment by Theriault’s. Then, in 2017, a 94-year-old collector sued, claiming Theriault’s had taken her collection, reportedly valued at more than $100,000, and never paid. Alongside fraud and breach of contract, her suit alleged elder abuse. Theriault’s called the allegations false at the time.

There is a dark side to the doll world, Agnew told me, as we sat together among the vegetable crates. The truth is, he said, “many collectors will never make their money back”. The auctions themselves can be dog-eat-dog. He’s seen collectors falsely claim to fellow buyers that a doll has damage so they can get the piece for themselves. “[Occasionally] people will come along to the auction viewing and steal an original shoe off a doll, and we then have to announce that the doll only has one shoe now,” he said. He shook his head. “The eventual buyer of the doll has that shoe, and ends up getting the doll for less money.”

A few weeks later, I drove to visit what both Agnew and Holbrook told me is probably the finest private doll collection in the UK. Its owner, an infectiously peppy Scot, did not want me to use her name, citing security concerns. It was not so much a fear of theft as the idea of the collection being meddled with in some way. “Just out of sheer badness,” she said, as she made me a cup of tea. When I excused myself to use the bathroom, I returned to find her lint-rolling her already immaculate tablecloth. Her house sat in an area so subdued, with streets so wide, that I spotted seven different learner drivers on the three roads leading to it.

The collector, who I will call Margaret, told me the house has a history of sheltering small things: the previous owner was a bonsai tree expert. Margaret used to keep her dolls in a spare bedroom until visitors complained that they scared them. Now she has two “doll rooms”. She travels to America frequently, she told me, to attend conventions and partake in the doll scene. She’s learnt, over the years, that dolls travel best if you wrap their heads in nappies. You can use the padding to shield the curves, she said, with the cheerful conviction of someone passing on a tip that would improve anyone’s daily life immeasurably.

Agnew had praised Margaret’s collection for being unusually broad (it encompasses ancient dolls from circa 250BC through to contemporary examples). But her real love is wax, she told me as we admired her 18th- and 19th-century pieces. “I’m known amongst my dolly friends as the wax lady,” she said, lifting a doll from a wooden cabinet and placing the back of her hand against its cheek. “It’s the closest you get to human complexion. There’s a certain warmth about it.”

The “collecting gene” runs in her family, Margaret told me. Her grandfather collected stamps, her father was obsessed with anything to do with ships. “I remember as a kid going home and saying to my friends, ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention ships.’ I know my kids have done that, I’ve heard them outside more than once saying, ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention the dolls.’”

Sometimes her husband will ask her what has gone up in value, or what was a real bargain, and she will tell him that’s not the point. The reward, she said, is to have built something unique, to have saved something. “It’s an honour to be able to look after these precious things,” she said. As she spoke, I thought of how much history was contained on the shelves around us: the shifts in fashion and taste, but also the dreams, the expectations, compromises, endurance. Then there were the imagined stories of the dolls themselves, each a queen or bride, dancer or farm girl, and the stories of their owners, likely also women and girls, to whom these dolls had once been both companions and fantasies. All of those stories seemed present as Margaret justified herself, and I saw that by asserting these objects’ importance, she had found a way of asserting her own.

Sometimes she gets despondent, thinking of her collection’s eventual sale (her children have made clear they do not want it). “Having spent 40-something years putting this all together, the idea of it all going its separate way . . . ” She grimaced. I asked if she’d considered Theriault’s for the auction. “Stuart came round and did his sales pitch,” she said. “I’m not sure he’s particularly interested in dolls,” she added, after a pause. “It’s like someone who works in a Mars factory — they never eat chocolate.”

Margaret has started to keep lists, she told me, of which pieces are her dolly friends’ favourites, which they would like for their own collections. That way, at the end, they can go to people who will appreciate them. As she spoke, I spotted a pair of late 19th-century Black wax dolls that I recognised from one of Agnew’s recent auctions.

They’d stood out to me at the time for the colour of their skin and the fact of being twins, and for the way their heads tilted slightly to the right, giving them the air of someone performing polite interest while listening. Both had mouths that turned down slightly at the corners, an expression that seemed to change from a smirk to a look of quiet resignation each time I regarded them. Agnew had referenced wear and tear, and yet here they were good as new, clothes laundered, a broken leg fixed. Margaret followed my gaze. “They’ve come home now,” she said proudly.

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