12,500 celebrity photos find a permanent home
Christina Rice, left, and Wendy Horowitz of the Los Angeles Central Library with some of John Verzi's slides. The library bought the photo collection at auction for $144,000. Credit: Los Angeles Times / TNS/Mel Melcon
Two friends walked into a Los Angeles diner to speak about the magic of a dead man.
"Amazing what he left behind," said Garry Parmett, an autograph collector, halfway through an omelet. "He had the golden era of Hollywood in those shoeboxes."
"Everyone who was anybody," added David Kaye, a bookseller. "He had the whole cast of 'The Godfather.' "
"He knew where to go," said Parmett.
"Dedication," said Kaye, who finished his eggs and nodded for the bill.
"You couldn't do that today," Parmett said.
"No way," said Kaye. "Impossible."
Photographer John Verzi, who died in 2018, left behind roughly 12,500 slides of celebrities he photographed over the years. The L.A. Central Library is now in possession of his collection. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times/TNS) Credit: TNS/Mel Melcon
The man in question was John Verzi, who for six decades collected about 25,000 autographs and took more than 12,000 pictures of everyone from Audrey Hepburn to Brigitte Bardot to Jimi Hendrix and Alice Cooper. Then he disappeared. He ended up in a trailer park in Las Vegas, watching soap operas in the afternoon, playing casino slots at night, losing and winning in stretches, driving home in the ghost hours in a three-cylinder car his neighbor fixed from time to time.
When he died in 2018, Verzi was 83, alone and, according to friends, nearly broke. His nephew took his ashes to Malibu and scattered them along the ocean in a cove beyond Cher's house.
It was a fitting send-off. Verzi had yearned to be close to the stars since he was a boy watching horror flicks with his older brother. He sought entrance into their realm, not as an interloper or opportunist, but as a man with an ingratiating air who could recite the credit lines of every working actor. He was at home along the celebrity rope line at movie premieres, knew his way around the old Ambassador Hotel, kept a careful eye on the stage door at Merv Griffin studios and took his best photographs of people like Charles Bronson and Tab Hunter at the unemployment office at 6725 Santa Monica Blvd.
He didn't do it for money or recognition. He rarely sold a photo or a signature in what Bonhams auction house called "arguably the greatest autograph collection ever seen." Verzi kept what he gathered in the dim sanctuary of the trailer he bequeathed in a handwritten will to Cherry Tolbert, his best friend at the Venice, California, Post Office, where he had worked for 20 years, sorting letters, correcting ZIP codes and rising to finance clerk.
Bequeathed to a friend
Tolbert stood in that narrow home days after Verzi's death, staring into rows of meticulously curated archives, the legacy of an eccentric who kept a prayer book and listened to Ben E. King and The Shirelles. She contacted Kaye, a memorabilia dealer, who sold the autographs for about $80,000 in a blind auction won by collectors David Wentink and Tom Kramer. The Los Angeles Public Library acquired the 12,500 photographs for $144,000 through a public auction last year at Bonhams.
"I've become obsessed with [Verzi]," said Wendy Horowitz, an archivist cataloging the pictures for the library's photo collection. "This was his escape, and you can see on the faces of the people that a lot of them loved him. He got everyone. Movie stars. TV actors. Rock musicians. French actors. Joe Louis. Robert F. Kennedy. It's amazing. But the historical value of this collection is the people he got who weren't A-listers. Child actors. Obscure character actors."
It was a life of getting to places fast, of tips, winks and confidences. Verzi drove a VW Beetle and traveled with cameras and colored index cards for autographs. He'd get a nod that Frank Sinatra might be in Beverly Hills having a drink or Lucille Ball was playing backgammon at Pips or Jim Morrison of the Doors had arrived at a West Hollywood theater to see "The Beard," a play that was raided by police for a sex scene. Verzi kept tabs and followed whispers.
Beautiful people
Verzi seemed to know everybody. Through the post office, he had access to addresses. Over 11 months in 1960 and 1961, Verzi, who often traveled to New York and Europe and showed up at Hollywood awards shows in a tuxedo, photographed nearly 300 celebrities including Cyd Charisse, Paul Newman, Ronald Reagan, Warren Beatty and Judy Garland.
"He loved photographing beautiful men," said Horowitz, pointing to a slide in her office in the Central Library downtown. "Here's a matador. He shot valets. Bodybuilders. He loved Matt Dillon. He has a lot of shirtless pictures of John Schneider (Dukes of Hazzard)."
Verzi received a large sum of money and quit the post office in 1989. The amount, according to relatives and friends, was between $300,000 and $400,000. The source is unclear. Verzi's stepbrother, Melvin, said Verzi inherited nontaxable securities from a rich man he had befriended.
"That's when he bought his place in Vegas," said John Paschal, a photographer who as a teenager befriended Verzi.
"I think he had a tough life," said Tolbert's daughter, Tina. "But he never sold any of his photographs or autographs. They were precious to him."
The autographs were sold in bulk to Wentink and Kramer; many are now for sale on eBay for $15 to $25, including some by a dealer who goes by "brucelovestheocean."
The photographs will become part of the library's permanent collection. Before Tolbert died in January, Tina said her mother donated money to Shriners in the name of Verzi and his mother. The amount was not known.
