Ann Norton remembers the dress in vivid detail.
The blue-and-white gingham frock in the Rev. Gilbert V. Hartke’s office was tiny. “You could tell that it was in a movie and had a lot of wear and tear on it. It still had makeup around the collar,” said Norton, who’d been a student and worked for Hartke at Catholic University in the early 1970s. “It was quite an amazing thing.”
Judy Garland had worn the dress in her legendary role as Dorothy in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, and it had been given to Hartke, a drama professor at the university, by the actress Mercedes McCambridge when she served there as an actress in residence. Hartke relished showing it off, Norton remembers.
“You couldn’t walk by Father’s office without him dragging you into it to show you the damn dress,” Norton said.
After 2006, though, with the office shuffled from a move and Hartke long retired and deceased, no one saw the dress for 15 years. That is, until Catholic University “rediscovered” it in 2021, and planned to auction it at Bonhams auction house to raise money for a new film-acting program. In 2015 Bonhams sold a different Judy Garland Wizard of Oz dress, one of the six thought to exist, for over $1.5 million.
But in May, Barbara Ann Hartke, claiming to be the oldest living heir of the priest, who died in 1986, filed a lawsuit to stop the auction and claim ownership of the dress. Catholic filed a memorandum in opposition, saying the dress had been a donation to the drama department. Several other relatives of Father Hartke filed a letter June 30 supporting the university’s ownership and planned sale of the dress.
“We find it appalling that Barbara Hartke would try to use Father Hartke, and his estate, as a tool for her own financial gain,” the letter says. By putting personal gain above support for Catholic’s drama students, Barbara Hartke’s actions “run counter to everything Father Hartke worked for and stood for his entire life,” the family members wrote.
The court nonetheless issued an injunction that halted the auction on May 23, the day before the sale was supposed to happen. But the legal battle over ownership continues. And the tale of the dress is as twisty as the yellow brick road itself.
The story begins with Hartke: a devout Roman Catholic priest of the Dominican order, a beloved drama professor, the founder and first chair of the department, the lead fund raiser for what would later be named Hartke Theater — and, one rare thing on which Barbara Hartke, the university, and Father Hartke’s other relatives agree — a well-known and influential man.
Hartke’s obituary in The Washington Post described him as “the man about town who seemed to turn up everywhere and know everyone.”
“One of our running jokes in the department was that Father Hartke would die by dropping a name on himself,” Norton said, “because he was among this group of people.” She said Hartke took students to the White House regularly, and often met up with President Gerald Ford and his wife.
Hartke wrote five full-length plays, directed more than 70, and sent nine to Broadway. He served as a presidential envoy to multiple countries, fought racial discrimination in the theaters of Washington, D.C., and “shaped dozens of Oscar, Tony, and Pulitzer prize-winning actors, directors, and playwrights,” a description of his biography says.
Norton worked as Hartke’s driver the summer after he received the dress. She remembers driving him twice a week to a local Washington, D.C., restaurant, a place where “the movers and shakers used to go.”
“He would say, ‘Come with me, my child,’ because that’s how he talked to all of us,” Norton said. “And all the businessmen who were the movers and shakers, they wanted their seats in the front of the restaurant so they could all be seen. He wanted his in the back because he would walk through all of them, and if he saw one that he hadn’t touched up for a while, he’d walk up to them and say, ‘This is one of my children. She needs money for a scholarship,’ and these guys would open their wallet and hand out 500 bucks.”
That commitment is “what’s lost in all this,” Norton said. “This was one tiny thing in this whole mosaic of what Father Hartke did for the department. There’s much more to him than this simple little dress.”
It’s unclear how McCambridge, the actress, came by Dorothy’s dress. But in March 1973, she gave it to Hartke, who was the chair of the drama department at the time. What happened to it after that depends on whom you ask.
In June 2021, Matt Ripa, a drama lecturer at Catholic, found the dress in a shoebox, which was inside a white trash bag on top of faculty mailboxes in the Hartke theater. He had heard “rumors” of it before, and even looked for it in archives and storage closets. But while preparing for renovations to the building, he stumbled upon the dress, packed away with a note from a former professor that simply read, “I found this.” Ripa did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
For the first time, the dress was put in the university’s Special Collections so it could “be preserved in proper storage in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment.”
Barbara Hartke’s initial letter claims that the dress was “missing for decades,” and she assumed it was “lost forever” until news coverage about its auction appeared.
But Catholic’s lawyers wrote that the university has always had possession of the dress, since its donation in 1973. Gail Stewart Beach, a current faculty member in drama, said in an affidavit that she “regularly saw” the dress from 1987 to 2006 in a cabinet in the department chair’s office. The university “lost track internally” of the dress between 2006 and 2021 because of an office move, Catholic’s lawyers said in their letter. Beach, who became the department chair in 2007, said the dress was “misplaced” after the move — and was no longer in the chair’s office.
How could such a valuable item have been misplaced? According to Ryan Lintelman, the entertainment curator at the National Museum of American History who consulted with Catholic University about the dress, film memorabilia was not considered valuable at the time of the dress’s donation. Prior to the 1970s, costumes and props were mostly kept by studios in hopes of reusing them for a different film.
In recent years, the value of film memorabilia has “escalated like crazy” as auctions have “made it possible for everybody to feel like they can own a part of this history” and museums started to collect such materials as a tool to understand American culture and history, Lintelman said. Even so, by the time the dress went missing in 2006, its value would have been obvious. In 2005, a pair of ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz — deemed by an FBI agent to be “one of the most significant and cherished pieces of movie memorabilia in American history” — were stolen from a museum in Minnesota. A different pair of ruby slippers from the film had sold at an auction in 2000 for $666,000.
A spokesperson for Bonhams said the auction house has no comment at this time. But Lintelman said if he had been consulted about bringing the dress to auction — he and his colleagues were not — he would have advised against it because of the “very tricky and undocumented history of its ownership.”
“It warrants further study and research,” Lintelman said.
Barbara Hartke and the university have very different views of that history. In her initial letter to the court, Hartke insists that “McCambridge had a long-term personal relationship with [Father] Hartke that was only tangentially related to his position at Catholic University.”
McCambridge was a “close friend” of Judy Garland, Catholic’s student newspaper reported in 1973, and was “lured” to the university by Hartke. But few details on the relationship between the actress and Hartke can be found.
Barbara Hartke claims McCambridge gave the priest the dress to thank him for his “counseling and support” through her battles with alcohol and substance abuse. “She considered him her personal priest,” Barbara Hartke wrote in a second affidavit. “She credited Uncle Gib with helping her overcome alcoholism and helped improve her relationship with her son.”
So, the dress was Hartke’s personal estate — and therefore should belong to Barbara Hartke as his oldest living descendant, she argues.
Barbara Hartke is a retired Chicago public schoolteacher currently living in Wisconsin. She asserts in court papers that she is the priest’s only living niece (though other family members dispute that claim). She grew up in Chicago with most of the immediate Hartke family — including Father Hartke himself, until he left in 1929 to become a priest, she wrote in the second affidavit.
She states that she met often with McCambridge in downtown Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s — they were both alumni of the same university in Illinois. But while they spoke many times after the priest’s death, she states in the court documents, they never spoke of the dress explicitly.
The Chronicle could not reach Barbara Hartke. Her lawyer, Anthony Scordo, did not respond for comment.
According to Rachel D. Burke, a lawyer who specializes in estate planning, when someone dies without leaving a will, state and local laws determine who has rights to their property.
Hartke died without a spouse, children, or living parents — so under the District of Columbia’s laws, his property would normally go to his siblings or the children of his deceased siblings, Burke said. That’s why his niece is claiming that the dress belonged to him, Burke said.
But Barbara Hartke’s claim applies only if the dress was the priest’s individual property. Lawyers for Catholic University said in their memorandum that as a priest, Hartke signed a vow of poverty in 1933 that left him “incapable of possessing temporal goods as my own or of using them with a private right.”
And according to the probate of his estate after his death in 1986, Hartke had no personal possessions (Barbara Hartke’s lawyer said she never received notice of this). As reported in a 1979 feature about Hartke in The Washington Star, which the university’s lawyers also submitted as evidence, any gift he received became “the monastery’s, the community’s or the drama school’s” property. The Dominican order submitted an affidavit seeking no claim to the dress.
But according to Burke, “whenever you have a gift situation, the critical thing is, What did the donor intend? And so what would have been best is if [McCambridge] had signed something at the time or there had been a statement made by her that was very clearly saying one way or the other whether it was going to the university or whether it was going to him individually.”
There is “absolutely no legal documentation of such a gift to the university” in any of the university’s filings, Barbara Hartke’s lawyer said in a statement in May.
A spokesperson for Catholic University declined to comment. But Catholic’s lawyers wrote in their letter that “Overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence, including contemporaneous accounts, establish that the Dress was given to Father Hartke for the benefit of the students in the drama department.” They cite an article written in The Tower, Catholic’s student newspaper, in March 1973 which states that “Mercedes recently presented Father Gilbert Hartke with Dorothy’s dress from The Wizard of Oz in hopes that the precious gift will be a source of hope, strength, and courage to the students.”
Catholic’s lawyers also cite two key affidavits: one from a former student who, like Norton, remembers Hartke showing the dress to multiple students while saying it belonged to the department — and the other from Hartke’s grandnephew, who remembers asking if he could have the dress while visiting Hartke in the early 1970s.
“I remember my grand-uncle Father Hartke said to me that I could not have it as the dress belonged to Catholic University,” the affidavit says.
Norton said Hartke’s intention to leave the dress with the department is obvious.
“What would Father Hartke do with it, for God’s sakes, personally?” Norton said. “I mean, it’s absurd. Of course he gave it to the department.”
Even if Barbara Hartke did have claim to the dress, as Catholic’s lawyers point out, “her claim to the estate can only be (at most) one-fifth, so to satisfy her interests, the dress would need to be sold.” Hartke had six siblings, five with living descendants.
Of those five remaining family lines, 27 descendants called for Barbara Hartke to drop her lawsuit and allow Catholic to sell the dress to benefit the drama department.
In their filing, they not only say that’s what Gilbert Hartke would have wanted but that Barbara Hartke “had little direct involvement” with him throughout his life.
Margo Carper, one of the family members who signed the letter, responded via email on behalf of the other descendants. “At this time we will let our letter speak for our position,” she wrote.
