‘We were first auction house to sell a guitar for more than $1m'
When Kim Kardashian wanted to wear Marilyn Monroe's provocative 'Happy Birthday' dress to the Met Gala in 2022, Martin Nolan, a man from Kiltoom in Co Roscommon, arrived at her Californian mansion with a plan B gown.
Nolan co-owns Julien's Auctions, which connected Kardashian with Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum to secure the Monroe gown. Julien's had sold the dress to the American franchise for $4.8 million in 2016.
At Kardashian's initial fitting of the 'skin and sequins' number — which Monroe wore when she famously serenaded John F Kennedy for his birthday in 1962 — the dress did not fit.
There was no need for plan B in the end because the reality TV star and businesswoman shed 16lb in three weeks. She arrived at the Met Gala wearing the frock long enough to pose for photos at the steps of the Metropolitan Museum before promptly changing.
The stunt caused ructions among some Monroe fans and fashion historians, and generated headlines across the world.
'There was absolutely no damage done to the dress. The whole world talked about it and it doubled its value,' Nolan says. 'If that dress came to us today we'd sell it for $10 million because Kim made it so much more famous and introduced Marilyn Monroe to a new, younger audience.'
The 62-year-old should know. He has been a partner at Julien's Auctions, one of the world's leading music, entertainment and Hollywood auction houses, for the past 20 years.
The Beverly Hills company, which was set up by Darren Julien in 2003, is regarded as the 'auction house of the stars', putting it up to bigger rivals such as Sotheby's and Christie's when it comes to selling celebrity ephemera and pop culture pieces of art such as Banksy murals or Birkin bags.
Julien's has worked with a long list of stars including Cher, Ringo Starr, Barbra Streisand, Janet Jackson and U2.
It sold Michael Jackson's Thriller jacket for $1.8 million in 2011. It auctioned the original cape worn by Christopher Reeve in the 1978 film Superman for more than $190,000 in 2019. It was also tasked with clearing out and selling the contents of Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion.
The most expensive guitar so far flogged at auction was sold by Julien's when, in 2020, the guitar Kurt Cobain played on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York album fetched $6 million, after fees.
'We were the first auction house to sell a guitar for more than a million dollars,' Nolan says.
On June 26 the company may break more records when a large collection of clothing owned by Diana, Princess of Wales, goes under the hammer at the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills.
Nolan splits his time between California, London and New York. Last week he was catching his breath at Dublin airport, having been touring the items from the Diana collection in the UK and Ireland for the past couple of weeks to drum up publicity and squeeze in a visit to his 94-year-old mother, Kitty, and his large family.
In 2023 Nolan and Julien sold a majority stake in their company to Martin Geller, an investor and financial adviser best known for being Michael Bloomberg's accountant.
Julien and Nolan took some money off the table — Nolan declines to say how much — and stepped down from their respective roles of chief executive and chief financial officer. Both stayed on as executive directors.
In the past two years the company expanded its auction calendar — going from up to 40 auctions a year to about 80 and near-doubling its staff headcount from 25.
'As chief financial officer, I was bogged down in HR and payroll and bills,' Nolan e says. 'Now, I just get to do the part of the job I love, which is meeting clients, bringing in the property, travelling the world, showcasing, exhibiting and selling.'
The middle child of seven, Nolan was raised in Kiltoom in Co Roscommon, just outside Athlone.
His father, Martin Sr, worked in the ESB and Kitty had a fashion boutique in Athlone, which she closed after Nolan was born.
In 1978 Nolan's father died when Martin Jr was 15 years old. 'My mother was widowed at 47 and had seven children all at school. She did a great job and did it all unselfishly,' he says.
After school, Nolan moved to Dublin to work at An Foras Taluntais, the forerunner of Teagasc, and studied accountancy at night.
• The craziest items ever sold at auction
However, in 1987 he took a career break and moved to Australia. At Kitty's urging he applied for the US's Donnelly visa scheme in 1988, which in its inaugural year made 10,000 visas available to people from 36 countries. Nolan was selected from 1.5 million applicants.
When he arrived in New York he walked into the Hilton hotel on Sixth Avenue and was 'hired on the spot' as a bellman, before being promoted to doorman.
Two years in he started to 'get serious' about his career and trained as a stockbroker at JP Morgan Chase.
'I worked from 8am until 8pm Monday to Friday at JP Morgan and wasn't making enough to pay my rent so I continued to work at the Hilton at weekends,' he says. 'It robbed me of my youth but we do what we do.'
On September 11, 2001, Nolan was working in a JP Morgan branch on 79th Street near Central Park when the planes hit the Twin Towers. Colleagues and neighbours lost people in the terrorist attack.
'It made me reassess,' he says. 'I thought if I had perished like so many, what mark would I have made? I went in search of something more rewarding.'
It took a couple of years but in 2003, while working at Merrill Lynch, Nolan met Darren Julien, who was in New York to auction Johnny Cash items for Sotheby's.
'He was just starting Julien's Auctions, so I brought him on as a client to Merrill Lynch and then he hired me [in 2005] to work on the philanthropic side of the business, holding auctions to raise money for charity.'
Most auctions in which Julien's is involved will have some sort of charitable element. 'We always encourage our sellers to put a proportion of the proceeds towards charity. We also do a lot of work with MusiCares, the charitable component of the Grammys,' Nolan says.
The company does not publish its accounts but Nolan says it charges anywhere from zero to 20 per cent commission.
• 'Memorabilia is the new fine art': inside Hollywood's top auction house
The first auction Nolan worked on involved the sale of Marilyn Monroe's personal belongings, which were being sold by her estate in 2005.
They included Monroe's phone book, which had the phone numbers of stars such as Frank Sinatra and Jack Lemmon, and a watercolour she painted for JFK. In total, the auction fetched $1 million.
'That was my first introduction to this world of collecting. I was from rural Ireland, so far away from people having an attachment to anything of that sort,' Nolan says.
It was also his first exposure to celebrity memorabilia as an alternative investment. He cites the Monroe dress as an example. In 1999 it was bought at a Christie's auction by the Wall Street investor Martin Zweig for $1.27 million — then the most money paid for a single item of clothing.
Zweig saw it as an investment. Three years after his death in 2013, his widow Barbara achieved a 278 per cent return when she sold the dress.
Nolan isn't a huge collector but he has bought some watches, including one from the former boxer Evander Holyfield. He also put in an online bid for a coffee pot that is part of a collection being sold by the estate of the American film-maker David Lynch at auction this Wednesday.
'I was outbid right away. We are seeing huge interest in that auction,' he says.
Nolan insists that you don't have to be rich to buy celebrity memorabilia, but you do have to be selective if you are buying it with an expectation of a return. Blue-chip celebrities do well — Michael Jackson, Elvis, Monroe, the Beatles, Dolly Parton and Kurt Cobain. However, Nolan says it can be difficult to identify 'blue-chip celebrities of the future'.
'Entertainers such as South Korean band BTS, Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan are hugely popular now with their fan base but will they have the longevity of Cher or Barbra [Streisand]?'
A few years into working at Julien's, Nolan became a co-owner and business partner. The company has 'gone gangbusters' since then, he says.
In the world of celebrity, it seems nothing is off limits. Julien's auctioned William Shatner's kidney stone, which fetched $25,000 in 2006 for charity, and the writer Truman Capote's ashes, which went for $44,000.
In 2014 Julien and Nolan starred in Celebrity Home Raiders, the Lifetime reality television show, where they went into the homes of celebs such as David Hasselhoff to source items to sell.
The company set up the Hollywood Legends auction in partnership with Turner Classic Movies, which gives buyers another option to pick up movie memorabilia.
'That has been phenomenal because they advertise us on their channel,' Nolan says. 'It brings a whole new audience to us.'
It has not been without its challenges. In 2009 Julien's was involved in a high-profile legal dispute with Michael Jackson after the pop star tried to stop the company from going ahead with an auction of the contents of his sprawling Neverland ranch.
Julien's had been invited to prepare the contents of the ranch for sale by Jackson's manager and had spoken to the singer about what he wanted to keep. It took 30 staff about 90 days to move and label the 2,000 items. They filled nine trucks with contents that included bumper cars, a Rolls-Royce, the Neverland ranch gates and Jackson's crystal glove.
'The case was traumatic and upsetting because we were a very small company at the time and we had zero money,' Nolan says.
The judge ruled in favour of Julien's but the auction house returned the whole exhibition to the singer in return for its costs being covered. Two months later, in June 2009, Jackson was dead. The items are still owned by his estate and in storage.
'Thank God he died knowing he had all his stuff,' Nolan says. 'Now, we have a very good relationship with his fans and are very good friends with his son Prince, who runs a charity called Heal Los Angeles, which wants to end hunger, and we have big projects planned.'
Investor appetite for memorabilia shows little sign of abating. Last year Julien's sold George Harrison's 1968 Resonet Futurama guitar for $1.2 million, well above its $600,000 to $800,000 estimate. Olivia Newton-John's black motorcycle jacket from the 1978 film Grease sold for nearly $500,000, after guiding $80,000 to $100,000. A Fender bass guitar that U2's Adam Clayton played at the Sphere in Las Vegas sold for $260,000, smashing its estimate of $50,000 to $70,000.
Touring exhibitions are used to market forthcoming auctions. Since 2006 it has regularly brought its collections to William Doyle's Newbridge Silverware Museum of Style Icons.
Nolan was in Newbridge last week to show off pieces from the Diana auction, assembled from a wide range of owners from across the world.
About 340 items will go for sale — the largest collection of Diana's clothing to go under the hammer — including a red ski jumpsuit guiding $30,000-$50,000. A Bellville Sassoon floral frock, which Diana wore on many occasions, has an estimate of $200,000-$300,000, while a Catherine Walker-designed Falcon gown, which the princess wore on a 1986 trip to Saudi Arabia, designed as a nod to the country's national bird, is guiding at $200,000-$300,000.
Nolan expects this collection to do very well. At a Hollywood Legends auction in 2023, the hammer went down at $1.1 million for a Jacques Azagury-designed gown worn by the late princess in 1985.
Nolan remembers being in Australia in 1988 when Diana and Charles, then Prince of Wales, visited. 'If you told me then that I would be selling a dress Diana wore on that visit at auction in 2025, I would never have believed you,' he says.
Age: 62Lives: Santa Monica, Los AngelesFamily: singleEducation: graduate of the Reppert School of AuctioneeringFavourite film: The Shawshank RedemptionFavourite book: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Working day: Each day is very different, which is why I love my job. I am usually in a different city at least once a week either to meet a potential buyer or a consignor that may have some incredible items they wish to auction. As an auctioneer I work for the seller but of course I am always searching for the buyers of these iconic pieces that I am lucky to work with every day and I don't take this for granted. My job takes me all over the world but I am always happy for any excuse to return home to Ireland to visit my mum and family and friends at home.
Downtime: Running and swimming really help me to unwind. I've run six marathons but with my hectic travel schedule these days I run about two to four miles a few days a week.
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