He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven

One superhero’s cape and four men who wore it.

- Miranda Collinge

“SOMETIMES SUPERMAN WOULD LIKE TO BE CLARK KENT, JUST A NORMAL PERSON WITH NORMAL RESPONSIBILITIES.” — Christopher Reeve in The Making of Superman the Movie by David Michael Petrou (Warner Books, 1978)

1. DARVIN

THE CATALOGUE FOR THE ICONS AND IDOLS: HOLLYWOOD AUCTION, HELD AT JULIEN’S AUCTIONS in Beverly Hills, California, on 16 December 2019, boasted several notable items for sale. Lot 149: a felt hat made by Lock & Co Hatters of London and worn by Charlie Chaplin in his 1947 film, Monsieur Verdoux. Lot 355: a white T-shirt emblazoned with a Nike Swoosh, dirtied with ‘studio soiling’ and worn by Tom Hanks in 1994’s Forrest Gump, visible in a sequence when Gump spends three years running across America. Lot 298: a 1968 Husqvarna Viking 360 motorcycle once purchased by the actor Steve McQueen. Lot 358: a ‘pipeweed’ pipe, used by Sir Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins in 2001’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. But there was one item that was set to be the centrepiece of the event, and to which two double-page spreads of the glossy catalogue were devoted. Lot 385: a blood-red cape, emblazoned on the back with a stylised S picked out in blue stitching. It had been worn in Superman: The Movie by Christopher Reeve, a handsome, athletic and relatively unknown actor who had just turned 26 when the film came out in 1978 and would become forever associated with the superhero he played—the Man of Steel with his unmatchable strength, speed and moral fibre—and also his alter-ego, the bumbling, bespectacled reporter, Clark Kent.