Classic Bond cars are always golden
It's a big year for James Bond. With his 23rd film and the 50th birthday of Dr No, 007-mania is bigger than ever, particularly in auction houses. But do you have the cash to buy a Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5?
Remember the summer of love in 2010? Pretty much like this year, banks were staring into the abyss, euro zone creaking with debt, austerity snapping at everyone's heels, and then a little sports car appeared at auction. And sold for a staggering £2.92 million (HK$35.5 million).
But it was no ordinary car, it was James Bond's iconic 1964 Aston Martin DB5. Still, the sale symbolised a market that had the villains of economic apocalypse gnashing their metal teeth with frustration. Forget shorting the market, if you wanted to make a fortune sell a piece of iconic film memorabilia, ideally driven by Bond.
The car was sold on behalf of Jerry Lee, a multi-millionaire radio station owner, who bought it from the Aston Martin factory in 1969 "where it was covered in dirt in a corner" for US$12,000. He only drove it once and after shipping it back to the US, parked the car in his "James Bond room" in Pennsylvania for 41 years where it was "great for parties". With rotating number plates, ejector seat, bullet-proof shield, radar navigation and machine guns, this 230km/h piece of automotive art is the ultimate party trick. Today it takes pride of place in the collection of flamboyant American banker Harry Yeaggy who, after the 2010 auction, said: "I thought a European would buy it, but I guess they don't appreciate Bond as much as we do."
One European who would refute that is Peter Nelson who started collecting Bond magazines and cards when he was a boy. By the time he was 21 he had bought the iconic white Bond Lotus from The Spy Who Loved Me.
"I had just qualified as a dentist in Britain, heard the car was for sale and rushed to Manchester to buy it. I must have paid US$20,000 for it at the time," he says. Almost 40 years later, Nelson has amassed one of the biggest Bond collections in the world featuring snowmobiles, boats, helicopters, Aston Martins, a Microjet, a T-55 tank and thousands of props, paraphernalia and costumes.
"I would travel the world to Bond film locations. In the Bahamas I came across the Lotus submarine abandoned in a scrap yard. In Paris I looked up Bond stuntman Rémy Julienne and found him in a little village and asked if he had any old Bond vehicles. In his shed were all these Renaults and Tuk Tuks from Octopussy. I bought the lot."
In 2009 Nelson started a museum in Cumbria, Britain, to showcase his collection. Last year he sold the vehicles for "an undisclosed sum" to Michael Dezer, the owner of Dezer Car Collection in Miami. But he kept a DB5 he'd commissioned from Aston Martin as well as "countless" pieces of memorabilia. What is his collection worth now? "It's worth what a room of Bond enthusiasts at an auction is prepared to pay, they have deep pockets.
"Every time a Bond film is released you see the same enthusiasm in the saleroom," says Katherine Williams, memorabilia specialist at Bonhams, London. "And there is nothing they like more than original Bond items and cars, particularly from Dr No, the crème de la crème of memorabilia."
But these items are becoming increasingly rare. "In the 1960s, props, cars and costumes were not as valued then as now but reused or destroyed. Also impacting on rarity is a change in collector mentality, we are seeing collectors holding rare items longer."