“Just like in the movie ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ we have encountered some obstacles to reach this destination, but in the end it will be worth it,” Jacqueline J. Leary-Warsaw, dean of Catholic’s drama, music and art school, said in a statement.
The story begins in 1973, when the actress Mercedes McCambridge donated the dress to the Rev. Gilbert Hartke, who at the time led Catholic’s drama department. McCambridge, who famously voiced the demon in “The Exorcist,” had been a friend of Garland’s and was an artist-in-residence at Catholic at the time she bestowed the gift.
Garland had died of a drug overdose four years earlier, at age 47. McCambridge, a recovering alcoholic herself, had been raised as a Catholic and was taught drama by nuns. She said she hoped the dress would help students “travelling this road of life” to “trust the[ir] unique greatness,” the school newspaper reported at the time.
The dress she gave to Hartke — one of several identical costumes used in the film — had been worn by Garland in the scene where her character, Dorothy Gale, faces off against the Wicked Witch of the West at the witch’s castle, according to the school.
After Hartke retired the following year, the dress traveled somewhere over the cubicles of the drama department building on Catholic’s Northeast Washington campus, until no one could remember what became of it. While preparing for a building renovation in 2021, lecturer Matt Ripa found the dress in a box up atop the faculty mail slots.
A near-identical Dorothy dress had sold at auction in 2015 for more than $1.5 million (buyer unknown). Catholic decided to sell the delicate costume to fund a faculty chair in fine arts and a new film acting program.
Then a complication emerged. The Rev. Hartke’s niece Barbara sued the school and the auction house, saying the dress was a personal gift from McCambridge to Hartke for his counseling during her struggle with alcohol abuse — not a donation to the university where he worked. As her uncle’s “closest living heir,” she said in lawsuit, “the dress has great and substantial sentimental value” to her.
Catholic countered that Hartke could not have owned the dress because as a Dominican priest he forswore ownership of anything. The vow he took in 1933: “I do render myself incapable of possessing temporal goods as my own or of using them with a private right, so any contrary act, i.e., any act of receiving, retaining, selling, giving, exchanging, profiting, etc. on my own authority is an act that is null and void.” A fellow priest handled his estate.
Meanwhile, other relatives of Hartke — who died in 1986 — disputed Barbara Hartke’s claim to be his closest living relative.
Her 96-year-old cousin, described by Barbara Hartke as “possibly deceased,” told the court she was “in good health and is of sound mind and memory.” She and other family members said “Father Gib,” as they knew him, “was a prolific fundraiser” who would have supported the auction: “Funding to allow Catholic University’s Drama Department to evolve and compete in the future … was Father Hartke’s dream and legacy.”
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Paul G. Gardephe sided with the school, saying Barbara Hartke had never been appointed to represent her uncle’s estate and “there are no ‘extraordinary circumstances’ here” that would justify allowing her to do so now.
An attorney for Barbara…
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