Heritage Auctions

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Artifacts of influential Golden Age TV couple on the block, Feb. 21-22 in Dallas

Dallas, TX - A wide array of personal artifacts, awards and show-used memorabilia from the Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams Estate Archive will highlight Heritage Auction Galleries' Feb. 21-22 Signature® Music and Entertainment Auction. This marks a rare opportunity for fans of the legendary duo to own a piece of entertainment history as most of the lots have been locked away for decades, never seeing the light of day, let alone the auction block.

Kovacs and Adams were a stunningly, almost frighteningly talented show business couple. Ernie Kovacs was the handsome, mustached, cigar-smoking satirist, once described by Time as "a sort of Clark Gable with fangs," his brilliance savagely revolutionizing TV comedy in the I-Like-Ike 1950s, a crazy prophet of the comedy that later ran rampant on Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live. His wife was Edie Adams, Miss U.S. Television of 1950, a vivacious, Julliard-trained Broadway blonde, who mixed her Monroe-like sex appeal with dazzling singing/dancing/acting virtuosity.

He won an Emmy for his pioneering, subversively slapstick TV show, showcasing such alter egos as Percy Dovetonsils, the prissy drunken poet, or the banana-waving, cigar-smoking simian of the Nairobi Trio; he also sparked such films as Our Man in Havana. She won a Tony as Daisy Mae in the musical comedy Lil Abner, epically sashayed on her husband's TV show, and was herself a Nairobi Trio member; she also scored in such movies as The Apartment. Kovacs celebrated success spectacularly - hence their Coldwater Canyon showplace home's rotating driveway, upon which Ernie parked his white Bentley.

Then, after midnight on Jan. 14, 1962, Kovacs died in a car accident after attending an after party for Milton Berle. He was 42 years old and his grave marker at Forest Lawn Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills bears the epitaph: "Nothing in Moderation"

His widow, left to raise their children, also inherited Kovacs' $600,000 worth of gambling debts. In five years - perhaps most memorably as the leggy chanteuse of the Muriel Cigars commercial ("Why don't you pick one up and smoke it sometime?") - Edie Adams courageously paid off the debt. She carried on as a beloved star until her death in 2008.

Now Heritage Auction Galleries proudly offers the Ernie Kovacs/Edie Adams Estate Archive - including such items as Percy Dovetonsils' glasses, three masks of the "Nairobi Trio" and their drumstick head beaters, documents, letters, Ernie's Emmy nomination plaque for Best TV writing, and even his TV Hall of Fame Award.

There's "Nothing in Moderation" indeed as Heritage's Ernie Kovacs/Edie Adams Estate Archive celebrates the legacies of two unforgettably brilliant performers.

To view the catalog for this auction, along with detailed photos and descriptions, go online to www.ha.com/7004.

Heritage is the world's third largest auction house, and by far the largest auctioneer of rare collectibles, with annual sales more than $700 million, and 425,000+ registered online bidder-members.

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