The Ultimate Collection : Toys were Toby Halicki’s obsession, a way to re-create a lost childhood. Now, they’re going to be sold.

A stunt that went south ended movie producer Toby Halicki’s life in 1989.

But his world survived.

It has lingered for three years behind locks and silent alarms at a Gardena warehouse. His thousands of classic toys. His dozens of elderly cars. His one-acre fantasy of model trains, cap pistols, Little Big Books, piggy banks and pedal cars that Halicki collected to escape the real world and create a ‘50s childhood that never was.

During these posthumous years, at his widow’s behest, little but dust has stirred behind the blind doors of the Halicki complex on industrial Vermont Avenue. Friends have smiled and said that as long as the rooms and their treasures stay undisturbed, Halicki, 38, the writer-producer-director-star of a pair of awful car-crash movies that became European cult classics, just might return.

So his exotic sports car--a white Aston-Martin Lagonda imported from England--remains inside the office alongside Halicki’s broad oak desk and monogrammed chair. Just where the boss parked it.

A remote control for raising an entire office wall to admit the car is on the front seat of the Lagonda. There’s chewing gum in the glove box and the sound track from “Christine” in the tape deck. Keys are in the ignition.

A Mickey Mouse telephone grins from Halicki’s desk. A card lists an unkept appointment at UCLA Medical Center. Notes of things still to do; messages awaiting answers.

But now time has run out for King Tut’s toy box.

The real world and lawyers that constantly irritated Halicki insist there is a will to honor, taxes to pay and a $4-million estate to be distributed among creditors, relatives and employees.

A lengthy squabble between co-executors seemed resolved in February when Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Edward Ross ordered the collection liquidated and the estate settled.

Barring appeals, the trove that took Halicki 15 years to gather will be auctioned over one summer weekend at the Pasadena Convention Center, July 24-26.

“There is enough stuff here to fill all the W.T. Grant stores, all the Woolworths . . . and five or six Sears stores of the ‘50s,” says Rich Rothermel, one of several experts and appraisers prowling the warehouse and separating 100,000 items into 1,500 lots for Rick Cole Auctions. “I’ve seen between 200 and 300 toy collections and most fit inside a tract house.

“This wouldn’t fit into a tract neighborhood.”

Rothermel believes 20% of the collection is “valuable . . . like a (model) Paul Wilson Corvette Indy car in resin plastic that could be worth up to $700.”

Another 50% is “neat stuff that hasn’t skyrocketed, will be fun to have and will one day fetch good prices.” Even the balance is “probably still worth what it cost new.”

And by virtue of its volume, duplication, quality and diversity, Rothermel adds, the Halicki collection is “what we (collectors) would all do if we had way too much money and way too much time to spend it. . . . It certainly is one of the world’s largest.”

Granted, nothing in the collection matches the 1870 firefighting carriage made by a Connecticut toy maker that recently sold for $231,000 at Christie’s. Nor will the auction inflate an antique toy market that already claims an annual growth rate better than bank stocks.

But George Barris, a Southern California legend for his customized hot rods and movie vehicles, says friend Halicki’s collection should be worth “a couple of million, plus.”

Barris, a 40-year collector of full-size and model cars relating to the movie industry, will help out the auction and has identified several gems in the collection.

Such as the tin-plated, mechanical dioramas of the ‘30s and ‘40s. One has cars moving through the Lincoln Tunnel. Another is the Dick Tracy Police Station. Each of the dozen or so, Barris says, are worth “a couple of thousand . . . on up.”

The collection is rich with cast-iron pedal cars built before World War II and stamped steel airplanes of the Lindbergh era. Also dealer promotional models of cars of the ‘50s and ‘60s still in their mailing boxes.

One box holds a pristine 1960 Ford station wagon. It is wrapped in a letter signed by a senior Ford executive at the time: Lee Iacocca.

But toys aren’t all of them.

Halicki never met a hotel key he didn’t like, accumulating more than a thousand--from the Savoy in London to the Admiral Bembow Inn in Atlanta. Hidden in the warehouse basement is an armory of rifles, submachine guns, and limited-edition six-guns commemorating the quests and victims of Wild Bill Hickok, Pat Garrett and Wyatt Earp.

An enameled Havoline Oil sign hovers over an antique motorcycle alongside a ’49 Mercury street rod that is an original Barris Kustom Kar. One room contains lights, cameras and Eleanor, the action car crunched during a hundred stunts in “Gone in 60 Seconds,” Halicki’s first movie.

Some say the private museum is a shard of Americana.

Others look at a child’s sleigh in one corner of the warehouse and see the whole as a dozen flea markets crammed into the final reel of Citizen Kane.

Insiders know it is a memorial built by a man born the prototype of anyone who never threw anything away because you never know when you might need it.

It was in Halicki’s genes. His father owned a junkyard in Dunkirk, N. Y. His childhood lost among 12 siblings, Halicki spent much of it in the yard--driving, dismantling, cutting and cannibalizing cars.

At age 14, he left home with $40 and headed for Gardena.

He pumped gas, opened an auto body shop while in high school and merged happily with Southern California’s passion for chopped and channeled, tucked and rolled, flame-painted street rods cruising Main.

Halicki turned his car profits into real estate that he then rolled over into the movie business.

In 1974, at age 23, he wrote, produced, directed and starred in “Gone in 60 Seconds,” which left only a minor scratch on the memory of Hollywood. Although post-Bullitt, it was among the first of the mass crash movies--93 cars were destroyed during one 40-minute chase sequence.

Video Movie Guide has since sentenced the movie as: “Bone dull except for the 40-minute car chase finale, which is 20 minutes too long.”

But it played big in Europe.

In 1982, Halicki again did everything, including his own stunts, in “The Junkman.” More than 140 cars were wrecked in his second movie, which sank to a one-turkey rating.

Three years ago--and just three months after his marriage to actress-model Denice Shakarian--Halicki began shooting “Gone in 60 Seconds II.” This time, he told reporters, he was pulling back from doing his own stunts: “I still enjoy getting in the car and racing it out or doing the crashes in it. But I’ve limited it down.

“You can always have chase sequences where things go wrong. You have to be careful.”

Halicki wasn’t careful enough.

Halfway through shooting his movie, the script called for a tractor-trailer to crash through a series of parked cars before ramming and toppling a 100-foot water tower. Just before the take, workers cut through a tower support. The structure began to creak and lean.

A cable snapped. It lashed around a telephone pole, which fell and crushed Halicki.

Denice Halicki remembers her husband as a driven, hard-living, sensitive man with “a lot of fears about dying before his time. He was fearful. He was preoccupied.”

Which may explain certain items in the collection.

Halicki kept special copies of the New York Daily News and the Los Angeles Times--issues in which the violent deaths of singer Ricky Nelson and millionaire race driver Peter Revson made front-page news.

Two tickets were displayed near his desk--one to a 1980 tribute near the spot where James Dean died, the other to the estate auction of the late Steve McQueen.

But Denice Halicki also knew a happier man, one who courted her for six years, taking her cross-country and across Europe to buy toys by the load, sometimes by the collection. This tough guy, she says, drove a Rolls-Royce with a Teddy bear buckled-up alongside and celebrated Christmas as a warm, monthlong spectacle. With Toby Halicki as a recurring Santa Claus.

The preoccupation with toys, she continues, was no mystery.

“That was the little boy in him,” she believes. “He was overcompensating for his childhood . . . most of which he blocked out and what he remembered was working for the family.”

The excess of toys, the duplication of items (sometimes by the dozens), is just as easy to understand.

“Toby wanted to be the biggest, the best,” she says. “He had something to prove.”

What Halicki may have proved is that old T-shirt and bumper slogan: He who dies with the most toys wins.

“Toby not only won, he retired the trophy,” says expert Rothermel, still up to his armpits in Hornby trains and Dinky toys. “In fact, it’s probably around here somewhere.”

The victory, however, may ring hollow.

Halicki’s last will and testament, one page scribbled on a Wolcott’s form, leaves a home on eight acres, a Rolls-Royce and $1.5 million in “cash, cars or property” to his widow. His brother and a sister will divide $550,000, with lesser amounts to several employees.

Despite its erasures, initialed alterations, underlining and overwriting, Halicki wrote emphatically:

“Split (the estate) fast and dirty and have a good time. Anyone who screws with or contests this will gets $1 only. I expect the above parties will work together to share this wealth quietly and not blow it . . . on attorneys.

Halicki made one last demand: “No probate.”

But co-executors Denice Halicki and brother Felix Halicki fell out and the will entered probate. An administrator has been appointed by the court. The clarification hearings, motions and orders have dragged on.

Now Denice Halicki, through Beverly Hills attorney Kirk Hallam, has appealed the auction order. The appeal seeks to allow her to specify items she would like to receive from the warehouse as part of her $1.5-million inheritance.

Attorney Valerie Merritt represents the court-appointed administrator. She says the estate’s gross value is about $4 million. On the other hand, there are “significant liabilities,” including creditors claiming $3 million. And there are court costs and attorneys’ fees.

“We have said that there is a distinct possibility that this estate is insolvent,” Merritt says. “In that case, Denice Halicki, Felix Halicki and others will get nothing.”

So he who died with the most toys may have left only Whoopee cushions.