What’s a scribbled signature worth?

In 2002 I was living in Berlin. One day my upstairs neighbour Peter told me he had just returned from outside the Hotel Adlon, having seen the self-proclaimed ‘King of Pop’ casually dangling a baby from a third-floor window. Peter was not there among the onlookers as a Michael Jackson fan but rather as a committed autograph collector and dealer, accustomed to haunting stage doors and hotel entrances when celebrities visited the city, tipped off by specialist monthly news-sheets giving the names, dates and locations of likely suspects. He failed to secure a signature that day, but at least witnessed one of the more notorious examples of hands-on parenting of recent decades.

The world of the autograph dealer can seem like a secret fraternity, with its own terminology and numerous pitfalls for the unwary novice. Some stars flatly refuse to give autographs, and because of the money to be made, the market is plagued by forgeries. A seasoned professional once told me that James Dean fakes were rife because the actor enjoyed just a very brief window of stardom; so the only example he would trust would be on a studio contract or other legal document with impeccable provenance.

Two Hitlers and a Marilyn is Adam Andrusier’s memoir of his gradual entry into this esoteric field, tracing his semi-accidental path from knocking on the door of Ronnie Barker’s home in the 1980s as an autograph-hunting ten-year-old, to setting up in business in his twenties as a dealer in rare signatures and documents, encountering, however briefly, the likes of Liz Taylor, Miles Davis and Monica Lewinsky.

This comic coming-of-age story is played out against the nicely described background of Andrusier’s family life in the north London Jewish community, his parents’ slowly unravelling marriage and his complex relationship with his father — a man who is not particularly religious but collects vintage postcards of European synagogues destroyed by the Nazis and does comic turns at social events dressed up as a rabbi or an SS officer.