In 2001, an auction channel claimed it was going to sell them.
Then the story disappeared until now.
Toothday
Bite down into a perfect set of stories all about teeth.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Nicholson, reportedly, was pissed about it enough so that he was considering bidding on the teeth himself.
Were intrigued to see what Mr. Nicholsons agent offers.
(The revelation was left out of the final article, appropriately titledThe Star With the Killer Smile.)
Who in Nicholsons life was going around hawking literal pieces of him?
And who would bid 5,000 on such a thing?
And then, the story all but disappeared.
(One such list, fromTime, features the subhead You Cant Handle the Tooth!)
In the subsequent 23 years, the world of celebrity auction items has only grown stranger.
Celebrity-teeth auctions remain rare, but they do happen.
(She didnt get the job.
Theyve since separated, unrelatedly.)
Pretty quickly, though, he began to suspect something was off.
One best seller was a globe, supposedly made from lapis lazuli and other gemstones.
(Ireland, according to Auctionworlds sales pitch, was represented with a bit of emerald.)
Somecomplained to journalistsas well as regulators, and the scandal snowballed into a full-blown government inquiry.
Even now, former employees dont know where Spitaliotis went.
and I will sue you!
I went out to the tree in my yard and I sat under it and I read a book.
And when I was done, I went back inside.
A few weeks later,Bresler diedat the age of 87.
Meanwhile, Vasta suggested that Spitaliotis likely had one supplier for all of Auctionworlds celebrity goods.
Find the supplier, find the teeth.
Happy to provide more details.
I wrote back asking to do a phone interview, and Keen promptly ghosted me.
I followed up a couple more times to no avail.
When I had all but given up on the whole investigation, Keen finally wrote back.
It took Keen three days to answer my handful of questions, but his response proved worth the wait.
Keen saw an opportunity to get creative.
(We are proposing a guerrilla approach to the promotion of this channel, he toldPRWeekin 2001.)
After touring Auctionworlds absolute dump of a studio, Keen says he advised them to get a better one.
He fed the story to the tabloids, and theyran with it.
(The studio has since been demolished.)
And that, Keen wrote to me, gave birth to a story about Jack Nicholsons teeth.
When Keen arrived at the office the next morning, the whole place was allegedly buzzing.
Morning-TV shows had picked up the story, as had various print and online outlets.
Overnight, Keen had delivered more press for Auctionworld than all of his previous press releases combined.
My desperate stunt had struck a chord with the media, he wrote in a message to me.
Now I needed to find some teeth.
Im not proud of making it up, Keen wrote to me.
But I did my job, which was to get coverage.
Which it did and still does despite the awful channel it supported.
I still get a kick out of Googling Jack Nicholsons tooth auction every now and again.
