Rosebud, the iconic red sled whose name Charles Foster Kane uttered with his last breath triggering the plot of Orson Welles’ 1941 cinematic masterpiece Citizen Kane, has sold at auction for $14.75 million. It is the second most expensive object of movie memorabilia ever sold, after the pair of Ruby Slippers from The Wizard of Oz that sold last year for $32.5 million.
According to Orson Welles, only three balsa wood Rosebuds were made for the final scene of the film when the symbol of Kane’s lost innocence and joy is tossed into a furnace. Balsa was picked for the incineration scene because it’s lightweight and burns fast, which makes it fragile for long-term preservation. Of the three made, only one is known to have survived. Steven Spielberg bought it at Sotheby’s in 1982 for $60,500.
A second Rosebud appeared at auction 14 years later, but it was a heavier pine example made for the early scenes of Charles Foster Kane as a little boy playing with his sled in the snow just before the banker Walter Thatcher tears him away from his happy poverty with his beloved mother to a life of great wealth and even greater loneliness. That Rosebud ended up being given away as a contest prize by RKO Pictures in 1942. The winner was 12-year-old movie buff Arthur Bauer. He kept it for 50 years before putting it up for auction at Christie’s in 1996. It sold to an anonymous buyer for $233,500.
Spielberg’s balsa Rosebud and the Bauer pine Rosebud are the only two other confirmed authentic props from the film. The one that just blew their prices out of the water has a movie-like history of its own. It was rediscovered in 1984 by Gremlins director Joe Dante while he was shooting Explorers on the Paramount lot. A crew member cleaning out an old storage room found it and offered it to the director without realizing what a treasure it was. Joe Dante had it conserved, analyzed and radiocarbon dated to authenticate it. The scientific reports confirmed that it was made of pine matching the Bauer sled, and that the paint matched both the Spielberg and the Bauer sleds. Dante’s Rosebud has one feature the other two lack: a rope threaded through its runners that may have been used to hang it in storage.
Dante, the acclaimed director of Gremlins and The Howling, was no avid collector, but he of course recognized the sled’s importance, and he preserved it quietly for decades, even planting it as an Easter egg in four of his own films. Scientific testing confirmed the sled’s period authenticity, and like the others, it bears signs of production use, including original paint, wear, and removed rails likely sacrificed to wartime scrap drives. Rosebud is not just a prop — it’s a piece of cinematic legend, rescued by a beloved filmmaker and now returned to the spotlight.
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