NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Peregrine Pollen, who brought a sense of showmanship to the sedate New York auction scene of the 1960s and early ’70s while helping to implement a startling consolidation of two auction-house giants, died Feb. 18. He was 89.

The Times of London reported that he died after being struck by a truck. It did not say where the accident occurred.

In 1960, Pollen was put in charge of the New York operation of the British auction house Sotheby’s as it began to take more interest in art and other collections held by Americans. He scored several coups for the house, striking agreements to auction important American-owned works in England, including, in June 1964, Vasily Kandinsky paintings offered by the Guggenheim Foundation and sold for $1.5 million.

Such successes were particularly nettlesome for the Parke-Bernet Galleries, the dominant New York auction house at the time; it and Sotheby’s were bitter rivals. But the friction ended in July 1964, when Sotheby’s acquired a controlling interest in Parke-Bernet and made Pollen its president. That’s when the fun began.

Pollen, a man with a colorful résumé, set about imparting flair to auctions. Perhaps the most notable one, in February 1967, was “Treasure of the Spanish Main” (as the brochure called it), an auction of items from a fleet of Spanish ships wrecked off Florida during a storm in 1715.

Before the auction began, the lights were dimmed and silhouettes of ships being flung about on stormy seas were projected on a screen. Bella Pollen, Pollen’s daughter, recalled the sale in her memoir, “Meet Me in the In-Between” (2017).

“Among the haul was a trunk of gold coins,” she wrote. “These were offered for sale to children only, the auctioneer scrupulously addressing each peewee collector as ‘sir’ or ‘madam,’ while behind him a large scarlet macaw named Julius, purchased by Dad especially for the occasion, screeched: ‘Pieces of eight! Get your pieces of eight!’”

Under Pollen, the Parke-Bernet Galleries, on Madison Avenue, were not just for auctions anymore. In March 1966, for instance, he repurposed them for a concert by the pianist Philippe Entremont. (“Here we had this beautiful concert hall, although it wasn’t built as one, with no concerts,” Pollen told The New York Times. “It seemed a waste.”)

Two years later he turned the same space over to the boutique Paraphernalia for an anything-but-staid fashion show.

“In the usually hushed auditorium where a nod of the head sometimes means a bid of tens of thousands of dollars for a painting,” The Times wrote of the occasion, “a rock ’n’ roll combo played something described as ‘baroque rock,’” while Pollen stood beaming at the back of the room.

The youth-movement fashions on display dispersed any auction-house stuffiness lingering on the premises.

“What wasn’t clinging to a curvaceous rump,” The Times wrote, “was tantalizing peekaboo. Some of the models had dispensed with the usual body stocking and sent male front-row sitters into polishing up their glasses.”

While injecting pizazz into the auction world, Pollen also expanded it quite a bit. In the 1965-66 auction season, Parke-Bernet’s sales totaled $23.5 million, more than twice what they had been in the year before the acquisition. By 1969-70, the figure was $38.5 million.

Peregrine Michael Hungerford Pollen was born Jan. 24, 1931, in Oxford, England, to Walter Michael Hungerford Pollen, an industrialist, and Rosalind Frances (Benson) Pollen.

“Peregrine Pollen had a name out of Evelyn Waugh,” Robert Lacey wrote in his book “Sotheby’s: Living for Class” (1998), “and he spent his life living up to that.”

He was educated at Eton and at the University of Oxford. Among his early jobs, he would often recount, were attendant at a psychiatric hospital and organist at a nightclub. More conventionally, he taught Latin. He also served as aide-de-camp to the British governor of Kenya.

He went to work at Sotheby’s in 1957, becoming an aide to Peter Wilson, its chairman, who in 1960 made him the company’s first full-time representative in New York. He set up offices in the Corning Glass building, a new tower on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street.

The acquisition of Parke-Bernet gave the company (which retained the Parke-Bernet name) a New York salesroom. From there Pollen expanded the business, opening a display gallery in Houston, an office in Denver and, in 1968, a down-market New York salesroom called PB 84, which, as The Times reported, “will sell the highest bidder just about anything, from refrigerators to television sets.”

Pollen left the New York job in 1972 and returned to England to become Sotheby’s vice chairman. He retired in 1982.

He married Patricia Helen Barry in 1958. The couple had three children, Bella, Susannah and Marcus, before divorcing in 1972. Before they remarried six years later, Pollen had two children with Amanda Willis, Josh and Lally. His wife died in 2016. In addition to his five children, his survivors include 11 grandchildren.

As for that macaw from the “Treasure of the Spanish Main” sale, afterward Pollen took it home. It was unloved by his wife, however, and one time when he was away she sold the bird to a pet dealer in Queens. As Bella Pollen related in her book, her father retaliated by bringing another bird, a caique named Papagoya, back from a subsequent trip to South America.

“My father had successfully smuggled him back on the plane,” Pollen wrote, “or so he claimed, by sedating him with vodka and hiding him inside his shirt. When at first light Papagoya woke up and began emitting hung-over bird noises, the passenger in 10C said nothing, possibly assuming that Dad was suffering from a debilitating stomach ulcer. A couple of generous Bloody Marys saw all three of them through customs and immigration.”

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