The Case of Jack Nicholson’s Missing Baby Teeth

In November 2001, Jack Nicholson had a problem: The producers of a shopping channel in the United Kingdom claimed to have possession of his baby teeth and planned to auction them off on live TV. The channel, Auctionworld, had launched earlier that month to little fanfare, operating out of a shabby studio in outer London. Its business model was simple: Presenters would stand next to a product and try to entice anyone watching at home to pick up the phone and place a bid. It appeared to be similar to other shopping channels in the U.K. or Stateside — a modest spectacle that might grab your attention for a moment as you flip channels before possibly provoking the thought, Who buys diamonds this way? But within weeks of its launch, Auctionworld distinguished itself as something more eccentric by releasing an eye-catching press statement: Through undisclosed means, the channel had acquired some of Jack Nicholson’s baby teeth and adult molars, and planned to auction them off the following month. Nicholson, reportedly, was pissed about it — enough so that he was considering bidding on the teeth himself. “It’s weird, yes, but we’ve had offers already exceeding £5,000,” Peter Newby, the channel’s managing director, said at the time. “We’re intrigued to see what Mr. Nicholson’s agent offers.”

The announcement set off a small media storm in the U.K., starting in the outlandish realm of British tabloids before filtering up to more reputable outlets like the Irish Independent and the BBC. Auctioning off uncomfortably intimate celebrity items wasn’t exactly a novel concept — strands of hair from the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, for instance, had changed hands at auction houses over the years, often with some backstory about how the celebrity’s hairstylist held onto it for decades. But teeth auctions had fewer precedents, and Nicholson’s alleged fury over the situation injected it with a dose of scandal. By 2001, the actor had been a star for over three decades and the subject of every conceivable kind of press coverage. In one notorious incident, a Time reporter phoned him in his trailer on the set of 1975’s The Fortune to drop a bomb: The woman Nicholson grew up thinking was his older sister was actually his mother; his supposed “mother” was his grandmother. (The revelation was left out of the final article, appropriately titled “The Star With the Killer Smile.”) While a brand-new British auction channel somehow acquiring Nicholson’s baby teeth was decidedly less high-stakes, it still raised some questions: How did Auctionworld get the teeth? Who in Nicholson’s life was going around hawking literal pieces of him? And who would bid £5,000 on such a thing?

And then, the story all but disappeared. The outlets that reported on it never published any follow-ups on the actual auction, and the open question of what happened to Nicholson’s baby teeth drifted off into the ether, enduring only in the realm of half-broken web links and the occasional list of crazy celebrity auctions. (One such list, from Time, features the subhead “You Can’t Handle the Tooth!”) The trail went cold, and Nicholson himself has never spoken about it publicly, leaving anyone interested in the story to wonder, What ever happened with that whole baby-teeth thing?

In the subsequent 23 years, the world of celebrity auction items has only grown stranger. Hair auctions have gotten even more popular, with individual sales sometimes hitting close to six figures, while one auction house sold off Truman Capote’s ashes for $70,000 in 2016. (The less said about William Shatner’s $25,000 kidney-stone auction, the better, but at least he actually consented to that one.) Celebrity-teeth auctions remain rare, but they do happen. Earlier this year, Winston Churchill’s wartime veneers fetched £18,000 in the U.K., and back in 2011, a Canadian dentist bought John Lennon’s rotten molar for $31,000. That same dentist, Michael Zuk, tells me he also owns a crown that belonged to Elvis and what he believes to be Shaq’s tooth, suggesting that more of these transactions occur than the ones that make headlines.

For Auctionworld, making headlines was par for the course, and the ten or so former employees I spoke with depicted the channel as a chaotic operation in the early 2000s. Alan Ennis, an affable Irishman and veteran shopping-channel presenter who sometimes performs as an Elvis impersonator, accidentally got hired as an Auctionworld presenter in 2002 when he drove his then-fiancée to her audition. (She didn’t get the job. They’ve since separated, unrelatedly.) In some ways, it was a good gig, Ennis says — it paid well, and he only had to work six shifts a week, each consisting of about three hours of airtime.

Pretty quickly, though, he began to suspect something was off. Barring the occasional celebrity item, the channel typically auctioned off goods like watches and jewelry, which it could sell multiples of at the same time, with presenters banging the gavel when bidding reached a price predetermined by management. One best seller was a globe, supposedly made from lapis lazuli and other gemstones. (Ireland, according to Auctionworld’s sales pitch, was represented with a bit of emerald.) The first day he and his fellow presenters sold the globes, Ennis claims, the channel raked in around £1 million. After that, Auctionworld’s Range Rover–driving head honcho, George Spitaliotis, would frequently demand a “globe show” even when they were out of stock. (Keri Vasta, a former head of auction management for Auctionworld, says Spitaliotis would watch the channel at home from his bathtub and call in to tell them to up the quantities of whatever item was being sold, regardless of how many were in stock.) When an unhappy customer returned one of the globes, Ennis says he and an unnamed co-worker — already suspicious of the whole operation — snuck out behind the studio and cracked it open with a hammer, only to find it was made mostly from what he describes as cheap materials like cardboard.

While Spitaliotis allegedly kept employees in the dark, many eventually suspected that Auctionworld itself was exactly like that globe: a shiny façade disguising something cheaper. In one scheme (investigated at the time by Shari Vahl at BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours program, who provided various details for this story), Auctionworld inflated the advertised value of watches from a little-known Swiss brand called Aston Gerard. To distort the watches’ guide prices and convince Auctionworld customers they were getting a good deal by comparison, Aston Gerard rented cases in hotel foyers and displayed the watches next to bogus price tags that sometimes exceeded £16,000. The watches themselves, Ennis says, were “shit,” and were actually manufactured in North London by Auctionworld itself, which owned Aston Gerard. (Credit where it’s due: The Aston Gerard plan was more complex than Spitaliotis’s “shill bidding” strategy of calling in to the show to bid on items himself to drive prices up.)

Another time, Spitaliotis allegedly instructed presenters to auction off digital cameras, then when customers complained that said cameras hadn’t been delivered, Auctionworld claimed there had been a lorry accident on the M4. Failing to deliver goods that customers had already been charged for became a common practice for the channel and, Vasta says, “desperate” people looking for answers began showing up to the studio. Some complained to journalists as well as regulators, and the scandal snowballed into a full-blown government inquiry. In 2004, the broadcasting regulator Ofcom fined Auctionworld a then-record sum of £450,000 for crimes including the artificial inflation of guide prices and failure to deliver goods to customers. With over £19 million in outstanding debts, Auctionworld shut down, and Spitaliotis — who was also charged individually for neglecting his duties — left the country, leaving employees unpaid and as many as 40,000 customers out to dry. Even now, former employees don’t know where Spitaliotis went. In 2005, the BBC investigative show Watchdog tried to track him down to his parents’ house in Cyprus, where the news crew camped out for several days, only to be met with a closed door and shouts of “Get lost!” and “I will sue you!” from Spitaliotis’s father.

With Spitaliotis in the wind and Auctionworld upended, the question of what happened to Nicholson’s baby teeth faded into obscurity, to the extent that several former Auctionworld employees I spoke with don’t even remember the incident. For his part, Nicholson — who’s now 87 — hasn’t acted in a film since 2010’s How Do You Know and has made only sporadic public appearances in recent years, including the occasional courtside showing at a Lakers game. In 2016, Louis C.K. claimed on Marc Maron’s podcast that he tried to get Nicholson for the Alan Alda role in his show Horace and Pete, but Nicholson declined, allegedly saying, “You know what I did today? I went out to the tree in my yard and I sat under it and I read a book. And when I was done, I went back inside.” I tried and failed a few times to contact Nicholson’s longtime agent, Sandy Bresler, figuring that if anyone in the actor’s life was in charge of making unwelcome baby-teeth auctions quietly go away, it was probably him. A few weeks later, Bresler died at the age of 87. Meanwhile, Vasta suggested that Spitaliotis likely had one supplier for all of Auctionworld’s celebrity goods. Find the supplier, find the teeth.

Before I could track down the shadowy celeb-goods dealer to some corner of the world, I received an unexpected response from Ben Keen, a former PR guy for Auctionworld. A month earlier, I had reached out to about 20 Auctionworld alumni, and Keen had responded to my LinkedIn message, writing, “I do remember working on that PR, and I released that story/release,” referring to Auctionworld’s press statement announcing the baby-teeth auction. “Happy to provide more details.” I wrote back asking to do a phone interview, and Keen promptly ghosted me. I followed up a couple more times to no avail. When I had all but given up on the whole investigation, Keen finally wrote back.

It took Keen three days to answer my handful of questions, but his response proved worth the wait. Over 20 years ago, Keen says he was a “very junior” employee hoping to perform well in his first PR job, only to be assigned to a shopping channel run by “proper cowboys” that would eventually sink under the weight of its own scammy business practices. In the months leading up to the channel’s launch, Auctionworld execs hired Keen’s firm to help them get media attention but quickly grew frustrated with how little coverage the initial press releases generated. Keen saw an opportunity to get creative. (“We are proposing a guerrilla approach to the promotion of this channel,” he told PRWeek in 2001.) After touring Auctionworld’s “absolute dump” of a studio, Keen says he advised them to get a better one. That didn’t happen, but the tour proved fruitful in another sense: A crewmember had mentioned the studio was haunted, and Keen had an idea. He fed the story to the tabloids, and they ran with it. (The studio has since been demolished.)

Still unimpressed, the Auctionworld team wound down its contract with Keen’s firm in the weeks following the channel’s launch. With only “a week or two left” and nothing to lose, Keen claims his boss told him to do whatever he wanted. In “the last gasp for coverage,” Keen says he put together a press release announcing that the channel had acquired Jack Nicholson’s baby teeth and intended to auction them off on December 10. To give the story some extra juice, he says he mentioned in the press release that Nicholson was desperate to get them back. “And that,” Keen wrote to me, “gave birth to a story about Jack Nicholson’s teeth.”

When Keen arrived at the office the next morning, the whole place was allegedly “buzzing.” Morning-TV shows had picked up the story, as had various print and online outlets. Overnight, Keen had delivered more press for Auctionworld than all of his previous press releases combined. “My desperate stunt had struck a chord with the media,” he wrote in a message to me. “Now I needed to find some teeth.” Keen sought “high and low” for celebrity teeth to try to make at least some part of the press release retroactively true, but Auctionworld parted ways with his PR firm anyway and simply never addressed the whole baby-teeth issue again. “I’m not proud of making it up,” Keen wrote to me. “But I did my job, which was to get coverage. Which it did and still does despite the awful channel it supported. I still get a kick out of Googling ‘Jack Nicholson’s tooth auction’ every now and again.”

I read Keen’s confession in a bit of a daze, dumbfounded that I had stumbled my way into solving the Case of the Movie Star’s Missing Baby Teeth. That mild shock soon gave way to a sense of relief — a feeling that my detective work had closed an open loop somewhere out there in the universe, even if it was one that no one cared about. At the very least, this investigation should give Keen something new to laugh about the next time he gets the urge to Google “Jack Nicholson’s tooth auction” and reflect on the chaos wrought by a single press release he wrote 23 years ago.