Sold! A cupboard for eternity – with Marilyn and Hugh

THE oddest things sell at auction. In April 2011, a prosthetic pointed ear worn by Leonard Nimoy in his role as Mr Spock on Star Trek sold for £700 at auction in Los Angeles.

A 44-year-old slice of wedding cake from Princess Anne’s 1973 marriage to Captain Mark Phillips sold at auction in Colchester for £40 in 2017. At the end of last year, Sotheby’s sold Freddie Mercury’s moustache comb for £152,000.

Many celebrity items are a little creepy. In 2009, nine bottles of pills issued to elvis Presley y the day before his death sold for $ 46,327. In 2020, the album cover

John Lennon signed for Mark Chapman a few w hours before Chapman shot him dead went for $900,000.

Buyers will pay y over the odds for r clothes bearing g bodily traces of f their late celebrity y owners. The late e

Kurt Cobain’s cardigan went up for auction in 2019.

A pocket contained what was described as ‘a small amount of something brown and crusty, possibly dried vomit’.

In a normal sale, this would have been grounds for a refund, but in the celebrity auction it served only to increase its value. After fierce bidding, the crusty cardigan sold for $334,000.

This past weekend, Julien’s Auctions of Los Angeles staged a sale under the heading Icons: Playboy, hugh hefner (above) and Marilyn Monroe.

even the title was perverse. hefner never met Marilyn Monroe, but used to collect items associated with her, some of which turned up in the auction of his effects.

Far from being an icon, hefner is nowadays regarded as a seedy relic of an earlier age.

The founder and editor of the soft-porn Playboy magazine, he thought it made him look suave to be photographed in silk pyjamas surrounded by the ‘Bunny Girls’ who populated his manky Playboy ‘mansion’, with its whirlpool baths and circular beds.

hefner saw himself as a smoothie-chops, but was what used to be known as a dirty old man, a cross between Sid James and Dr Crippen.

Since his death at the age of 91 in 2017, he has been accused of blackmail, rape, and illegal sex with minors. Yet there are clearly hefner wannabes still creaking around.

Austin Powers-style items from hefner’s own wardrobe — purple silk pyjamas, a suede suit, a brown, orange and red acrylic velour top, a ‘ Dracula cape’ — went for roughly ten times their estimates. A job-lot of his burgundy smoking jacket, silk pyjamas and slippers fetched $35,750. A circular bed from the Playboy mansion went for $13,000.

A truly terrible bust of Jimi hendrix that bore a much closer resemblance to Dusty Springfield, sold for around $910. even a pencil sharpener fetched $585. One of the mos most pitiful items in th the sale was a black lace and satin bra once worn w by Marilyn Monroe. hefner had bought it at a sale back in 2005, and placed in a frame, just l like an exhibit in a museum.

In last weekend’s sale, the bra was estimated at $2,000-$3,000, 2 but finally went for $11,700.

Other Marilyn Monroe items were more pedestrian: a letter informing her of a cancellation to her insurance ($8,950), an invoice for some pills ($2,275). Twenty two people bid for her demure pink long-sleeved dress; it finally went for $325,000.

The most macabre lot of all was described in the catalogue as ‘ a one- space mausoleum crypt . . . one row above and four spaces to the left of Marilyn Monroe’s’. This is, essentially, a tiny cupboard — 34in by 28in — with just enough room for an urn-ful of ashes.

After Monroe’s death in 1962 at the age of 36, her second husband, the baseball player Joe DiMaggio, arranged for her remains to be placed alongside those of two women who had cared for her when she was a little girl. This loving gesture was corrupted in 1992, when hugh hefner purchased the crypt next to hers, saying, lasciviously, ‘ Spending eternity next to Marilyn is an opportunity too sweet to pass up.’

Last weekend’s winning bid came in at $195,000. Presumably, those with relations’ ashes in slots closer to Marilyn’s will now be thinking of moving them elsewhere, and cashing in.

It all serves to make that £ 40 slice of Princess Anne’s wedding cake seem surprisingly wholesome.