New Auctioneers Take Over for Tepper As soon as a rich New Yorker dies, the major auction houses typically send condolence letters. Then their experts go to the apartment or town house, offering to handle antiques and artworks worth more than a few thousand dollars each. Once the estate has been settled and the best stuff taken away, the secondary auction houses help clean out anything else old. New York City long had one secondary house handling the clearing-out processes for estate sales every few weeks: Tepper Galleries on East 25th Street in Manhattan, which closed without warning two years ago. Half a dozen companies have since stepped in to fill the void. The catalogs are terse, and the showrooms tend to look shabby, suggesting that bargains and scholarly discoveries lurk in the dusty corners. The addresses are mostly off the beaten path. "People like seeing out-of-the-way, hidden places in New York," said Adam Hutter, whose family helped run Tepper until burdensome rent helped put it out of business. He has set up Hutter Auction Galleries in a windowless storage building on West 55th Street. His fare for a sale on Saturday varies from an Art Nouveau bronze desk set (estimated at $800 to $1,200) and an early 1900s painting of a damsel and fawn by Frederick S. Church ($3,000 to $4,000) to mid-20th-century Widdicomb chests ($800 to $1,200 for a pair). "It's the old mish-mosh, same as Tepper used to do," he said recently while giving a tour of his warren of showrooms. The new secondary houses have already attracted celebrity material. Mr. Hutter has handled possessions from the estates of the editor Clay Felker and the actress Rue McClanahan. In October he devoted a sale to memorabilia from the euthanasia advocate Jack Kevorkian, including rejection letters from medical journals ($10 each), a stethoscope ($400) and pill bottles for blood pressure medication (about $25 each). Hutter's Queens competitor, Capo Auction, has sold ruby and emerald jewelry from the Maharajah of Jaipur and Victorian statues and massive furniture from the 1850s Steinway Mansion in Astoria. On Jan. 28 Capo will offer hundreds of objects that belonged to Martha Graham at her death in 1991. Ron Protas, Graham's friend and heir, is consigning her awards, portraits, Halston costume sketches, chunky beaded necklaces and rhinestone buckles. Tchotchkes from her apartment include bronze statuettes and carved jade teacups. A pair of metal scallop dishes for sale are engraved "Ron" and "Martha." At a recent Capo preview Christie's and Tepper tags still hung from many lots, left over from previous planned sales by Mr. Protas that fell through. The staff was still unpacking worn trunks stamped with Graham's name, and much of the contents needed restoration. At the bottom of one trunk a blue ceramic bowl lay in shards. "This is a very early blue vessel," said the company owner, Michael Capo, as he disconsolately stacked the fragments. I think it could be Persian. Mr. Capo, a third-generation antiques dealer, collaborated with Tepper over the years. Soon after it closed, he founded his own company at the gritty base of the elevated 7 train in Long Island City. Store owners quickly approached him to unload their more sluggish antiques. "The dealers came to me like I was building a spaceship to leave a dying planet," Mr. Capo said. Sometimes his consignors ask not to be identified, but the information can leak out in strange ways. When customers browse books on his shelves, he said, the bookplates sometimes bear the names of their famous owners, now deceased. Around 1880 actresses realized they could claw their way to respectability by wearing haute couture onstage and off. Any actress not costumed in the latest fashions, a French columnist warned in 1881, "runs the risk of remaining disdained and ignored among the cheap chorus girls." The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture in Manhattan has brought out 166 objects documenting European and American actresses taking control of their public image and reputation for an exhibition, "Staging Fashion, 1880-1920: Jane Hading, Lily Elsie, Billie Burke," through April 8. Jane Hading (pronounced ah-DEENG) was a steely-eyed French competitor of Sarah Bernhardt. Lily Elsie was an unhappy British waif, most famous for playing the heroine in the operetta "The Merry Widow." The American star Billie Burke is best remembered as the cooing good witch Glinda in "The Wizard of Oz." They all heavily promoted products. Their recognizable faces and svelte forms "were used to sell dress silks, knitwear, skin-care creams, soap, biscuits, chocolate and cigarettes," Michele Majer, the exhibition's main curator, writes in the catalog, from Yale University Press. The brand names are as obscure now as Klosfit petticoats and Phosferine, an alcohol and quinine tonic said to cure "brain fog" and "nervous exhaustion." The three women were photographed relaxing at home, in staged tableaus. To defy the popular misconception that actresses spent their free time receiving lovers, publicity campaigns showed Hading, Elsie and Burke playing with children, gardening and hosting parties. Real life backstage was less pretty. Hading was briefly married once, to a theater director who tried to pocket all her earnings. Burke's husband, none other than the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, was a notorious womanizer, and his death in 1932 left her broke. Elsie quit acting to marry an adulterous Scottish aristocrat. She ended up cripplingly depressed and "underwent a frontal lobotomy, which radically altered her personality and all but destroyed her memory," Rebecca Perry, a Bard Graduate Center historian, writes in the catalog. The Bard Center has borrowed clothing that 1910s couturiers made in imitation of the actresses" outfits. From the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bard has American versions of Elsie's preposterously broad-brimmed feathered hats from "The Merry Widow." The Museum of the City of New York has provided a nearly exact copy of the beaded silk sheath that the fashion designer Lucile made for Elsie's 1911 wedding. The gown on loan was commissioned by Alva Bernheimer for her 1912 wedding in Manhattan to the department store magnate Bernard F. Gimbel. Fans who could not afford custom clothing would send one another postcards of the actresses. The Bard Center has framed the cards to reveal the messages on the backs. "Billie Burke looks sweet here," one correspondent wrote to a friend about a photo of the star wearing a floppy lace hat in 1905, just as her stage career was taking off.