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Growing up in the early 1950s, Joan Moore collected autographed photographs of movie stars.

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Every Sunday, she would sit down with her friends, Bruceen McKay, Joyce Pradinuk and Kay Hassard, and send off letters to the Hollywood studios.

“My mom supplied the envelopes, the paper and the stamps, and we wrote to the movie stars at Universal Studios, MGM and Warner Brothers,” she recounts. “We all wrote the same letter: ‘Dear Elizabeth Taylor, since I have always been a fan of yours, I would appreciate it if you would send me an autographed photo of yourself. Sincerely,’ and we’d sign our name. Then we would wait and the pictures came.”

She still has 128 movie star photos and 48 old movie stills in two binders. Flipping through them is like time-travelling to the 1950s, when stars like Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh were in their heyday.

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Most are autographed, and some are even personalized.

“To Joan, Warmest Regards, Marilyn Monroe,” reads her most glamorous photo.

Moore said an appraiser on the PBS TV show Antiques Roadshow valued “the exact same picture” and autograph of Monroe at US$4,000 to US$6,000 several years ago. So she contacted The Vancouver Sun to see if it was the real deal.

We emailed one of Antiques Roadshow’s top appraisers, Laura Woolley, to ask her what she thought. She phoned back within minutes.

“I’m calling because this is actually one of my biggest pet peeves,” she said over the phone from Los Angeles, where she has a company called The Collector’s Lab.

“It’s always been a bone of contention of mine, (because) they said exactly the opposite of what’s the reality with those signed photos in that segment. They said the red ones are usually by her, and it’s actually green ink that’s more often signed by Marilyn. The red is almost always secretarial.”

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Basically the studios would have people sign photos, rather than have stars themselves do it.

“If you’re writing into the studios, 99 per cent of the time those are secretarial or built-into-the-image signatures,” said Woolley.

This means the 8x10s and postcards Moore has of Burt Lancaster, Betty Grable, Ava Gardner, Farley Granger, Piper Laurie, Cyd Charisse, Jane Russell, Jane Wyman and Spencer Tracy, among others, have a collectible value as vintage photos, but not as autographed ones.

Woolley said you could split them up and sell them on eBay, but probably the easiest thing to do would be to put them into an auction as a group.

“You’ll see lots like that come up at auction and oftentimes they’ll put them in as one big group lot and it’ll have an estimate of US$200 to US$300 to US$500,” she said.

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In any event, looking through the photos is a gas. Tough guy Jack Palance (or his secretary) signed his photo “Lots of Luck” in white ink. Taylor was photographed in a one-piece bathing suit at the beach, with the message “Best wishes always.”

Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan’s signature (or facsimile) is hard to make out, because it blends in with his dark sweater. A Laurie signature is also fading, but the photo of the star with a dog is still crisp.

Moore was born in Edmonton and moved to Vancouver in 1951, where her parents and grandparents ran a rooming house at 1562 Barclay St. in the West End.

“The West End was all rooming houses,” she said. “There was a few three-storey walk up apartment buildings here and there, but mostly it was rooming houses. It was wonderful.”

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Every Saturday she would go to movie row on Granville or the Bay theatre on Denman to see the latest films. Her favourite actor was Betty Grable; she loved the musicals of the 1940s and ‘50s.

In her retirement she moved back to an apartment in the West End, but her movie-watching has changed: these days she’s into science fiction.

“The other night I watched Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, and the week before that watched Tarantula,” she said. “The tarantula escaped from a lab where they were experimenting to make things bigger, and they injected something into this tarantula. Of course he grew bigger, he was as big as my apartment. Before that I watched The Creature From the Black Lagoon.”

Asked if she ever had the Creature’s autograph, she laughed.

“No I didn’t,” she said. “Unfortunately.”

jmackie@postmedia.com

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