Marilyn Monroe’s Private Letters and Personal Effects Head to Auction in Centennial Year
Marilyn Monroe’s most intimate traces are moving from private hands to the auction block. In the year marking 100 years since her birth, Heritage Auctions and Julien’s Auctions are presenting a wide range of letters, clothing, documents, and personal effects that offer a rare view of the Hollywood star beyond the image that made her immortal.
Heritage Auctions will lead the season on June 1 with more than 80 items from the collection of Norman and Hedda Rosten, close friends of Monroe who met her in 1955 and remained part of her life for seven years. The sale centers on correspondence, notes, drawings, and other papers that reveal a more searching and vulnerable Monroe. Among the most significant is a previously unseen eight-page letter from Arthur Miller, her third husband, beginning at $50,000. In it, Miller reflects on the collapse of their marriage in language that is unusually direct and painful.
The Heritage sale also includes Monroe’s handwritten notes from 1955, made while she was studying with Lee and Paula Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York. One note, beginning at $30,000, quotes the Strasbergs on the discipline of acting; another, beginning at $10,000, is filled with daily reflections and private reminders. A personal telephone book from the early 1960s, also in the sale, lists names such as George Cukor, John Huston, Gene Kelly, Jack Lemmon, and Frank Sinatra.
Other highlights point to the way Monroe’s life was preserved through objects as much as through photographs. A pearl-set Fabergé table clock, thought to have been a wedding gift from Joe DiMaggio, begins at $80,000. A Christian Dior two-piece skirt suit she wore in 1954, as she and DiMaggio departed for their honeymoon in Japan, begins at $20,000.
Julien’s Auctions will follow on June 4 with nearly 200 Monroe lots in partnership with Turner Classic Movies. Its offerings include a gold-tone evening bag estimated at $100,000–$200,000 that still contains some of Monroe’s possessions, a silk Jeanne Lanvin evening gown estimated at $20,000–$30,000, the olive-green gate from her Brentwood home estimated at $30,000–$50,000, four x-rays from the early 1950s each estimated at $1,000–$2,000, and a legal document from February 1956 related to her name change from Norma Jeane Mortenson.
The market for Monroe memorabilia has long been shaped by a handful of landmark sales. The white dress from The Seven Year Itch sold for $4.6 million in 2011, and the dress she wore to sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy brought $4.8 million in 2016. This year’s centennial auctions suggest that the appetite for Monroe’s material legacy remains as strong as ever, especially when the objects carry the texture of her private life.
