All Dolled Up and Nowhere to Go

Imagine this plot for a horror movie: a massive collection of staring, glass-eyed antique dolls owned by a famous paranormal author gets locked away in storage for years. Curious about noises coming out of the unit, the unsuspecting manager rolls up the door, and so it starts… 

But it’s not a movie plot. Close to five hundred dolls, originally owned and collected by paranormal author and New Orleans native Anne Rice, are cooling their porcelain heels in a storage unit in Denham Springs. Rice, the goth fiction writer best known for the mega-selling Vampire Chronicles, along with an additional slew of other-worldly fiction, kept the dolls with her the last time she lived in New Orleans, between 1988 and 2005. 

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In a statement published in Dolls Magazine back in 2010, Rice reveals more than a passing attachment to her dolls. “I never purchased a doll simply because it was an antique, or the handiwork of a famous doll artist. I purchased only dolls which I loved and found to be beautiful and interesting … dolls I loved to look at,” said Rice. “I must dream that they will go to loving homes, and loving contexts in which they will continue to have vitality and charm for new people. I’m sure that they will find devoted new owners. They’re too beautiful to go wandering alone, without history, in the world. A doll is reborn every time a new person sees that doll. Dolls are immortal. They can live forever if they are passed on down the generations with love and care.”

To some of us, Rice’s dream of dolls living forever is a notion that can bring on a case of full-on pediophobia, a doll phobia not to be confused with pupaphobia, a fear of puppets.  It just takes one viewing of a 2008 YouTube video of the collection in one of Rice’s homes, the renovated St. Elizabeth’s home for girls—a Victorian mansion at 1314 Napoleon (now turned condo) where Rice had childhood friends—to feel a little squeamish: the camera panning antique dolls with cracked porcelain faces and menacing glass eyes, lips pursed into cruel little bows, Maria Callas singing “Printemps Qui Commence” from Samson et Dalila in the background. 

From fan to curator

Fans of Rice’s writing know that dolls have played both minor and major roles in her novels. In Interview with the Vampire, perhaps her most famous book, it’s a kind, caring doll-shop owner who becomes the doomed protector of Claudia, the forever-young child vampire. And in Taltos, the final volume of the Mayfair Witch chronicles, it takes a paranormally gifted doll maker and member of the Taltos race to bring the plot to its melodramatic finale. 

Sue Quiroz never imagined working for Rice for fifteen years, let alone curating a doll collection.  Born in a small town in Ohio, she moved with her family to her mother’s hometown of New Orleans when she was 13.  Now a youthful 71, Quiroz has long, flowing lavender hair and a free-spirited style.  An Anne Rice fan, she devoured each of the Vampire Chronicles with the hunger of the undead and founded the Anne Rice Vampire Lestat fan club, of which she was president. 

“The books flow with passion and history and just pull you into their world,” she said. After meeting Rice at a Queen of the Damned book signing, she was offered a position as her personal assistant. Quiroz was her right hand for fifteen years, a position that eventually included putting on the infamous Anne Rice Vampire Ball every year, a task she just stepped away from last year. She was also charged with overseeing the doll museum in Rice’s home at St. Elizabeth’s.   

“I actually contacted someone who was a doll curator because I had no idea what was involved,” she recalled. “Anne wanted them all placed just so, in little conversational groupings, and we’d move them around to keep things interesting.” Glass shelving and cases were installed upstairs and down in St. Elizabeth’s, with like dolls kept together, including eighty-eight nun dolls Rice especially adored.  

Some of the dolls are related to Rice’s books, including Lestat, Claudia, and Louis dolls from the Vampire Chronicles she’d had commissioned and which Quiroz still has. A large number of Annette Himstedt dolls, so lifelike they seem about to get up and walk towards you, kept company with antique dolls crafted in England and Germany. A six-foot tall Nosferatu doll by artist Thomas Keubler remains one of Quiroz’s favorites.  She has shown the collection to celebrities and fans, including Clive Barker (he loved it), Kirsten Dunst (who played Claudia in the 1994 film), Linda Hamilton, and director James Cameron. 

In 2004, widowed and suffering with health issues, Rice decided to leave New Orleans. She took about half of the 1,000-plus collection with her to California in 2005 and gave the rest to Quiroz, to donate, sell, or do with what she may. Quiroz opted to stay in New Orleans close to family rather than follow Rice to the West Coast.

"They’ve been in boxes for years. I know they aren’t happy.”

In the ensuing thirteen years, Quiroz has donated some of the dolls and would love to see them together again in a museum.  At the very least, she hopes to gift them to charitable silent auctions to raise money for causes close to her heart, including the health needs of women and children.  What she’d really like to do is not keep spending $200 a month to keep the dolls wrapped up in their labeled boxes, which stretch from floor to ceiling in her storage unit. “I’m sure they’re not happy in there, but because they are valuable, I don’t want anything to happen to them.”

Quiroz is very clear that she’s ready for a new chapter in her life. The dolls are haunting her, taking up a lot of emotional, physical and financial space in her world.  “I’ve worked on the Ball for fifteen years, now I’ve moved on and I’m ready to reinvent, to find another niche, to leave this part of my life behind.  But I really want to give these dolls away to a good cause. They’ve been in boxes for years. I know they aren’t happy.”

If your non-profit could benefit from the Anne Rice dolls, or you have a doll museum interested in showcasing the collection, get in touch with Quiroz by email, suequiroz@gmail.com. And please hurry. The dolls are getting restless.  

View Rice’s doll collection here.