Celebrity Autographs And Celebrity Addresses

NEW YORK - David Laurell's obsession for the past six years has been to complete his collection of autographs from the cast of the 1965 film The Sound of Music, a collection he began at the age of 9.

Laurell, 48, a former Burbank, Calif., mayor and associate editor of Autograph Collector magazine, has autographs from Peter Jennings, Bill Clinton and Katharine Hepburn, among 800 others. But what he's really obsessing about is Julie Andrews.

Laurell could tap into ebay.com and for less than $50, he'd have the autograph. But that is not his way.


Laurell is a sentimental holdout from the days when autograph hounds approached heroes in person. But eBay, the world's largest online retailer, has struck a thunderbolt into the world of autograph collectors, turning fandom into a fast-track business. However, with the origin of many of the autographs traded on eBay being considered dubious by autograph hounds, the best way to get the authentic number is to collect it in person.

Ten years ago, collecting autographs was mostly limited to young baseball fans obsessing about how to get the attention of their favorite star and men with leather patches on their elbows dreaming of a coveted Shakespeare signature.

"EBay changed all that," said Michael Hecht, president of the Universal Autograph Collectors Club, the largest non-profit organization for autograph collectors. With eBay, anyone with a credit card can buy or sell an autograph at mouse-click speed.

Items merely touched by celebrities sell like hotcakes. Autographs by Angelina Jolie, who will sign most anything, are auctioned off by the dozens. But as business has soared, so has the number of fraudulent items sold. The Federal Trade Commission logged 10,700 complaints last year about alleged Internet auction fraud. EBay maintains that it is only a venue for sales and is not responsible for verifying the products sold on its site.

Expert autograph hunters such as Hecht and Laurell say they believe as many as eight in 10 autographs sold on eBay are phonies.

Many of the listed items probably aren't intentional forgeries but are "secretarials" - signed by an underling - or were produced by a mechanical imprint.

Then there is that pesky autopen, a computer-based signature machine that takes a template of a signature and repeats it over and over.

An entire industry that exists to verify autographs is staffed by seasoned collectors who keep an eye peeled for unusual markings, including the identical signatures produced by an autopen. Every swirl, every curve made by the autograph pen is the same. This is a no-can-do in real life.



When Laurell looks around his office, he can map out his life story in autographs. But his collection still feels incomplete without the main cast signatures on The Sound of Music LP, a gift from his grandmother.

He has four cast members left and is focusing on Julie Andrews. She pops up at book signings, a common target for autograph collectors, but she refuses to sign Sound of Music products at the events. So he is asking everyone he knows if they know her. Or know of anyone who knows of anyone who knows her.