Dead rich

Illustration by Charis Tsevis

10 April 2012

Death is a great leveller, Hamlet said. But for celebrities that isn't really true. Some, like Tupac Shakur, are more successful dead than they ever were alive. Others simply vanish from our minds. The only real measure of legend status is the celebrity death industry: how much money a star can make after they have gone.

Every October, to coincide with Halloween, Forbes magazine - bible of the super-rich - compiles a list of the world's top-earning dead celebrities. This year, the top 15 earned a combined £237 million between October 2010 and October 2011. You can probably guess most of their names: Michael Jackson (£110m); Elvis Presley (£35m); Marilyn Monroe (£17m); John Lennon (£7.5m); Jimi Hendrix (£4.5m); Steve McQueen (£4.5m); Andy Warhol (£4m). 'I think it's the long tail of a celebrity's life, for want of a better phrase,' argues Jamie East, founder of the UK's leading gossip website Holy Moly. 'Whenever any celebrity dies, there's a flurry of memorabilia sales on eBay; their album or film or whatever shoots up the charts; then usually that's all you hear. For some people, though, you know they'll still be, well, financially valuable for years to come, as cynical as that sounds.'

Depending on your age and perspective, there have been about 50 significant celebrity deaths this year, including Sir Jimmy Savile, Jane Russell, Gerry Rafferty, Ken Russell, Heavy D and Pete Postlethwaite, all of whom garnered headline tributes. But if you're looking to see who's set to place on next October's list, there are only three serious new entries: Elizabeth Taylor, Amy Winehouse and Steve Jobs. When you add post-death sales of their albums, perfumes, T-shirts and so on to the value of auctions, book deals and the biopics already under way for each of them, it comes to hundreds of millions of pounds - and the year's not finished yet.

For now, Elizabeth Taylor leads. The movie legend died in March and she's already tying with John Lennon for fifth place on this year's Forbes list. The magazine estimates her posthumous earnings to be £7.5m, largely down to her perfume White Diamonds and the sale of her Hollywood home. But that figure doesn't include last week's auction of her jewels, art, gowns and film memorabilia at Christie's New York. At the time of going to press, her jewels alone are widely predicted to bring in at least £20m.

Much of the auction money will go to the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation, the charity she helped to found in 1993. Gossip sites report a rift between Taylor's family - four children, ten grandchildren and four great-grandchildren - and her manager over how her estate will be handled. This seems unlikely, according to Julie Ann Garber who works for Washington legal firm Becker & Poliakoff. Taylor created a trust into which she placed her $1 billion fortune back in 1998. One of her sons, Christopher Wilding, is a trustee, alongside her lawyer Barbara Berkowitz and her personal assistant Timothy Mendleson. Her eighth husband, the builder Larry Fortensky, recently told journalists that she had left him more than £530,000 but no further details have been made public.

Of course, these days, a little thing like death is no barrier to a thriving film career. Jamie Salter, the Canadian businessman who recently acquired Marilyn Monroe's estate for £32m, says he expects that CGI technology, similar to that which allowed Jeff Bridges to act with his 30-year-younger self in Tron: Legacy, will allow a Monroe avatar to appear in a proposed new feature film within the next five years. 'Dead celebrities don't talk back,' he argues. 'They don't go out on the town. They are ready to film every day.'

Even if the trustees of Taylor's estate shy away from such a big-screen reanimation, 2012 will still see the last of the truly glamorous movie stars grace the silver screen: Paramount is currently in discussions with Martin Scorsese about making a biopic based on the book Furious Love by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, the story of the tempestuous on/off romance between Taylor and Richard Burton. Although the book - which included their love letters - sold well on its release in 2010, studio interest was almost nonexistent. But according to Mike Fleming at online Hollywood tip sheet Deadline, Taylor's death in March led to a frantic bidding war between Paramount, which has optioned the book for Scorsese to direct, Black Swan star Natalie Portman and The King's Speech screenwriter David Seidler.

'It's a great love story,' Schoenberger explains. 'Elizabeth Taylor will always be contemporary, whether through her movies or her courageous HIV/AIDS advocacy in the last two decades of her life. She was always a game gal, a champion of the underdog. She never retired from life. And Burton remains an impossibly gifted and romantic figure whose life ended too soon. He would probably have been more at home walking on Hampstead Heath with Keats than walking the red carpet in Hollywood. He seemed like a man out of time, thus he belongs to all time - to anyone who remembers. And their love story, because they suffered so much for it, made them human.'

The death of Amy Winehouse was nothing if not tragic: 27 years old, two great albums, public battles with personal demons, paparazzi and boyfriends The shock of her loss meant the official video of her hit song 'Rehab' was watched about 6.5 million times on YouTube over the weekend of her death alone, while 'Back to Black' and 'You Know I'm No Good' were watched more than four million times each. The Back to Black album hit the top spot on iTunes on both sides of the Atlantic and sold more than 175,000 copies in the first month after her passing. Her posthumous album Lioness hit number one on iTunes within hours of its release on 5 December - and that in spite of a critical mauling and a general sense that her unreleased back catalogue is not in the Michael Jackson/Tupac league.

But record sales are just the beginning. Her estate has also done well, Liz Taylor-style, through auctions. At the beginning of December, the Tusk Modern Art auction sold graffiti artist Bambi's spray-painted image of Amy, while the polka-dot chiffon dress she wore on the cover of Back to Black sold for £43,200 at Kerry Taylor Auctions at the end of November, snapped up by a museum in Chile. 'Disaya, the dress designer, brought it to me and said she wanted to sell it and give some money to the Amy Winehouse Foundation,' explains Kerry Taylor, who ran the auction. 'When they were trying to shoot the cover, the stylist Louise Winwood asked every designer going if she could borrow a dress but only Disaya said yes. It was a very moving day; Amy's family and Disaya's family were all in the front row.'

At the same auction, dresses worn by Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor sold in a similar price range. Kerry Taylor thinks there's something about a star's tragic life that makes people want to own their clothes. The biggest deal so far came in June this year, when the iconic pleated white dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in the legendary subway scene from the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch sold for a whopping £3 million in Los Angeles.

But it's not just clothes worn by stars that flourish. December also saw Fred Perry launch the final collection from its collaboration with Winehouse, including an Argyle sweater dress, a classic pencil skirt and shirts in a pastel pink and blue print scattered with Cadillacs, jukeboxes and cat's-eye sunglasses.

And if dressing like Amy isn't enough, next summer sees the launch of her official biography, Amy, My Daughter, by Mitch Winehouse. Inevitably a biopic will follow. Her ex-boyfriend, the film producer Reg Traviss, has already been approached to helm the project, but turned it down, saying, 'I honestly don't think I could do it. I'd be too close to it.' Mitch, on the other hand, says writing the book has helped with his personal recovery. He's also performed at a benefit in Amy's name at the Royal Albert Hall.

The proceeds of most of these deals go to the Amy Winehouse Foundation, an addiction charity set up since her death by her family, which expects to raise and donate about £500,000 this year. This will soar if negotiations between the Winehouse estate and Cirque du Soleil come off. The Vegas troupe has already built shows around songs by Michael Jackson, The Beatles and Elvis. The Jackson Immortal tour started in October and will travel the world over the next two years - effectively the tour to support the dead pop star's eponymous album, released last month. Immortal grosses $2.5m per night, according to concert data company Pollstar, which is $1m more per show than Jay-Z, Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga. With Jackson's touring costs, estimated at about $200,000 per day, out of the equation, Immortal clears $750,000 in profits per night, split 50/50 between Jackson's estate and Cirque. If Winehouse had a Cirque troupe gigging Lioness, the Foundation would be rich indeed.

When it comes to Steve Jobs, however, there's no obvious way in which his post-death earnings will go to charity. The Apple founder started a Steve Jobs Foundation in 1986 but closed it a year later. In his biography by Walter Isaacson, written in the last months of his life and published just weeks after his death in October, Isaacson writes that Jobs was 'contemptuous of people who made a display of philanthropy'. The book, therefore, comes with no charity attached but still sold 37,000 copies in its first five days on sale in the UK.

Then, of course, there's a biopic in development. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the Facebook movie The Social Network, is on the verge of signing with Sony Pictures to create a script based on Isaacson's book, although the technophobe has confessed that Jobs 'probably inspired my 11-year-old daughter Roxy more than he's inspired me'. Rumours have George Clooney in the running to play the Apple founder.

The value of the rest of Jobs' legacy is harder to estimate. He is reputed to have patents lasting for years, but it is not clear if the value of those products will change post-death. 'We won't know if Apple's sales were affected one way or the other by Jobs' death until early next year when they report their third-quarter earnings,' explains Greg Williams, executive editor at Wired magazine.

'In some ways, the company will be hoping its fortunes remain entirely independent from the story of its founder. His life was a perfect epic: given up for adoption by parents who didn't want him, college drop-out, fired from the company he started only to return in glory to rescue it a few years later. But Apple is one of the world's largest corporations and it's not in its interests to have people believe that Jobs singlehandedly created the iPhone, the iPod and the iPad.'

Try telling that to the thousands of people flocking to sites such as Zazzle to buy tribute
T-shirts with slogans including 'iThank u Steve', 'iSad', and his motto, 'Stay hungry, stay foolish'. They join some odd memorabilia in the Jobs long tail: sales of black turtlenecks peaked, while the German Lunor Classic Rund PP glasses he always wore, designed by Robert Marc and retailing at around £300, have sold out worldwide.

Of course, the internet responded to his passing. Within hours of his death, the web was flooded with tat and in some cases outright scams. Copies of old interviews in Time magazine and Playboy traded at £60, while a signed photo went for £3,000 on eBay. Fortunately for human sanity, one of his 1979 business cards, priced at $2,000, failed to sell.

Isn't there something odd about wanting old interviews, or even wearing the old clothes, of somebody who's passed on? Not at all, says psychologist Dr Helen Nightingale. 'Buying any of these things, from people's albums to their films, books and old clothes, is a kind of vicarious mourning,' she explains. 'Idolising heroes is part of being human, and wanting to touch or feel objects that remind us of them links to the oldest part of the brain, the limbic system. It's like keeping your father's shirt after he dies to remind you of him when you hold it close. You're not accessing the rational, you're accessing your needs and wants.' ES

MORE ABOUT

Auctions

Dead rich

Read More