Charlton Heston Secretarial Signature Study

Hi:

At Steve Cyrkin's invitation, I'd like to call your attention to a signature study I've posted on my blog, Charlton Heston signature study by Steve Zarelli.

I believe I have identified the "tell" in Charlton Heston secretarial signatures, and if I am correct, the news is not good for most collectors. It appears that most Heston signed photos are secretarially signed.

Here is a synopsis:

The Theory
Photographs and other memorabilia sent to Mr. Heston's office were signed by a secretary. However, Mr. Heston did authentically sign books through-the-mail.

Real vs. Secretary
In authentic signatures, the R in "Charlton" is distinctly a lowercase "r" and less than half the height of the L. The first four letters are clearly "Char."

In secretarial signatures, the R looks much more like a lowercase "l" and is about the same height as the L. So, the first four letters appear to be "Chall."

I have attached two images to give you a small sampling.

For more details and images, please visit my blog at the link below.

I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts on this. I fully anticipate some resistance to the theory, because denial is always the first step. In fact, I would love to be proved wrong, because that would mean I wasn't sitting on a bunch of secretary signed photos!

By way of introduction, I have been collecting since the early 90s and I am the UACC Ethics Director.

I look forward to the discussion.

The Collecting Obsession

Regards,

Steve Zarelli

Tags: Charlton, Forgery, Heston, Secretary, authenticating, autograph, secretarial

2 members like this

Attachments: No photo uploads here

Figure 1.jpg, 60 KB
Secretary 1.jpg, 37 KB

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Brick Hunter on November 29, 2011 at 1:37pm

I think I see some good investigative work, DB. I've got to say it's kind of hard to follow what exactly happened though.

I suppose a problem is that even relying on cuts authenticated by PSA or JSA, you still get "Challs" for as long as possible. I've seen a lot of crud get through Leaf and Razor. There are at least two or three of those aforementioned crud pieces of Tony Curtis currently on eBay.

Is it strange that the images we seem to post here from eBay listings end up disappearing within a few days fairly frequently. The same thing happened with those autopen James Stewart autographs.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Steve Zarelli on November 29, 2011 at 1:46pm

The same thing happened with those autopen James Stewart autographs.

Really? I didn't realize this. Email me and I can send you a jpg for your files.

No offense to Steve because I do appreciate the work he has done here, but the structure of these forums is very confusing to me and I rarely go back to read things through. The jumping around is just too much.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Brick Hunter on November 29, 2011 at 3:53pm

Luckily I caught wind of this disappearing act on eBay a while ago and began posting the URL in the thread as well as an image of it. That's proven very important as nearly everything talked about suddenly disappears. Posters here do seem to have a far reach. So this site is great for cataloging those images. We have a lot of great images here like CEE GEE's forgeries files.

I also second the appreciation for this site and share the frustration in not being able to follow threads in a more linear way.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Steve Cyrkin, Admin on November 29, 2011 at 4:58pm

My concern is that other sites on the same platform that removed nesting found that members overwhelmingly didn't like it.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Steve Cyrkin, Admin on November 29, 2011 at 5:06pm

And when all the old ones change over to chronological instead of threaded, they'll lose their context, too. We need to do some cleanup and put some rules in place tho.

Permalink Reply by Steve Zarelli on November 29, 2011 at 5:10pm

Yup, I suppose the old ones would lose some context and it would become impossible to tell who is replying to whom.

However, I'm not so sure there would be mass confusion with a linear format in general. As long as you can quote people, it's pretty obvious who the reply is to. Most other sites I go to have the linear format and it seems to work with no issues. (Net54, Game Used Universe, CBCA, etc.)

Permalink Reply by DB on November 29, 2011 at 2:38pm

Look at the picture you posted. It was a Razor Cut authenticated secretarial that Beckett merely slabbed. The seller indicated it was 100% authentic thinking (presuming or mistaken or just BS the buyers) because Beckett slabbed it then it must be authentic 'cause Beckett "said so". Of course they didn't they just slabbed it.. thus Leaf must be at fault as they "acquired" Razor Entertainment! Not necessarily as Razor Entertainment used PSA/DNA or JSA during the time frame referenced before Leaf Involvement.

As u said there are other suspect ones as well in "razor cut ones". THere are other also in the Fraud community that share that opinion. Since there is no information in terms of volume nor distribution it is difficult to assess.

However, we can conclude that during this timetable that ANY Hestons within the Razor Offerings would be highly suspect based on the unreliability of the authenticators.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Brick Hunter on November 29, 2011 at 1:41pm

The course of this thread got exponentially harder to read with the deletion of Greg's posts. A lot of posts are incomprehensible now. I think a couple others were deleted since then. This thread must have made more sense to average collectors learning about Heston's secretarial some months ago. Sad side-effect I guess.

Something else I wanted to re-post which was originally posted by Bob Shinn on page 6.

Some Dealers in our hobby are very reluctant to admit that they are in possesion of Secretarial material, even when presented with genuine examples of somones autograph.

This happened to me with RR Auctions.

Last year I had noticed they had for auction a Heston signed 8x10, that I believed was a Secretarial signature,

and sent an e-mail to Tricia Eaton to let her know about my concerns.

She replied that they believed it was genuine, so I offered to forward her Rolf's Signature Study to help with their investigation.

Trisha said she would welcome the info , so I forwarded it to her.

After about a week I sent Trisha a e-mail and asked what they thought after reviewing my info.

She said they were sticking with their opinion that the autograph was genuine, because their authenticators said it was and that the Signature Study I sent her from Rolf was in German and they could not understand it.

Well that answer made me crazy!!!

You did not have to understand German to see in the many examples that Rolf had pictured in his study what was an original signature and what was Secretarial.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Steve Zarelli on November 29, 2011 at 1:51pm

One of the fatal flaws of the Rolf study is that they used too many vintage examples and were comparing them to contemporary TTM examples. While they were correct, it was not convincing enough, in my opinion.

I will credit that study for being my inspiration for creating my study. I sensed they were onto something and I just couldn't shake my suspicion that Heston TTM (in massive volumes) was too good to be true.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Brick Hunter on November 29, 2011 at 3:49pm

It sounds like willful ignorance to me. I can assume that's true when it comes to a lot of dealers/auctions when secretarials are involved. Everyone wants to believe they're authentic. Between the Chall I posted a week or so ago which had sold through RR and was described by them as an in-person (Yeah - signed in-person by Carol Lanning) autograph and Bob Shinn's notice to them, it makes me wonder whether a lot of these places deep down knew the truth beforehand and were only forced to do the right thing once Mr Zipper tipped the scales with his study.

Some of the incoherent pages on this thread must also be attributed to the deletion of Travis' posts. I did follow this site before I ever started posting and remember what a great read this thread was. I wish it weren't so confusing to anyone looking at it for the first time. The important thing is that the explanation of secretarial vs. authentic is still intact. I like to think keeping this thread alive/around is helpful for newcomers. I'm sure its knowledge dawns on many collectors who never take the time to post about it - that's thanks to Mr Zipper beginning it and making the cogent assertion of what's real and what's not, once and for all.