Monroe’s memorabilia makes trip to Beijing
Shoes, purses, makeup to hit auction block in Los Angeles in November
BEIJING Marilyn Monroe’s dress from Some Like It Hot. Handwritten notes and letters expressing the Hollywood icon’s inner thoughts and, at times, despair.
These and dozens of other personal items the actress left to a friend and mentor were in Beijing on Tuesday for a private viewing by Chinese collectors. More than 1,200 items, including Monroe’s shoes, purses, makeup and jewelry, will then be auctioned in Los Angeles come November.
The 1950s actress who achieved fame as a sex symbol led a troubled life and died at age 36. The image and recollections of her have endured and made her into a pop culture icon. Now the personal items up for auction may invite new readings of the screen legend in the world, as well as in China, a country she never visited.
“Last night I was awake all night again,” she writes to her therapist in March 1961. “Sometimes I wonder what the night time is for. It almost doesn’t exist for me — it all seems like one long, long horrible day.” She goes on to describe her recent time in a mental institution, which she likens to a being sent to a prison “for a crime I hadn’t committed.”
“Oh, well, men are climbing to the moon but they don’t seem interested in the beating human heart,” she writes.
Around 800 items to be auctioned come from the estate of Lee Strasberg, the famed American acting coach who became a father figure to Monroe. The money will go to his widow, Anna. Other items come from the collection of David Gainsborough-Roberts, a major collector of Monroe’s costumes.
The hundreds of items include dresses and outfits, the negligee she wore in the movie Niagara and the green and black-sequined leotard she picked out herself from a studio wardrobe to wear in Bus Stop. There is a tube of her “non-smear” Revlon lipstick in Bachelor’s Carnation shade, the shoes she wore to marry playwright Arthur Miller, and the pair of costume earrings that she wore to the premiere of The Seven Year Itch.
Then there are the personal notes, crayon drawings and watercolours.
Lee Strasberg’s son, David, said that he, his mother and brother found many of the items in suitcases and closets about six years ago during a cleanout, including one trunk he’d been throwing his football cleats on for years that turned out to contain some of Monroe’s personal writings.
“She writes a note to my dad talking about something she heard in class, and she says, ‘It helped me feel freer — you said two plus two does not necessary equal four in acting,’ ” said Strasberg, 45. “There’s logic and then there’s imagination, there’s something more. And for Marilyn, I think she was always after that ‘something more.’ ”
Monroe, who would have turned 90 this year, spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage and became one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, trading off her sex appeal and an image as a vacuous blond. Off camera, she struggled with drug addiction and depression. She died from an overdose of barbiturates.