As Hollywood legend has it, Joan Crawford feigned illness before the 1946 Academy Award ceremony. Nominated for her starring role in Mildred Pierce—which many people considered her comeback vehicle after a two-year absence from the screen—Crawford believed that Ingrid Bergman would win the Oscar for The Bells of St. Mary’s and did not want to be present for the loss. After discovering that she had won, however, she reportedly applied her makeup and invited members of the press into her bedroom as she accepted her statuette in bed. Can you guess how much the legendary Oscar—the only Academy Award that Crawford won in her nearly five-decade career—sold for on the auction block on Tuesday?

The answer: $426,732. To put this figure in perspective, in 2001 Steven Spielberg paid $578,000 for the Academy Award that belonged to Crawford’s arch rival, Bette Davis, for her role inJezebel. Spielberg paid even more—$607,500—for Clark Gable’s It Happened One Night trophy. In December 2011, Orson Welles’s Academy Award for co-writing the screenplay to Citizen Kane sold for approximately $862,000 at the L.A. auction house Nate D. Sanders, which also facilitated the Crawford-award sale. After paying that much, it’s likely that these deep-pocketed buyers transported their new hardware in something more substantial than a paper bag.

FREE ESTIMATE. To auction, buy, consign or sell Pulp Fiction screen used memorabilia for over $50,000 each, please email [email protected] or phone the Nate D. Sanders Auction House (http://www.NateDSanders.com) in Los Angeles at (310) 440-2982.