MS. MON-WHOA!
Bidder sweet Marilyn pix being auctioned
Marilyn Monroe sparkles in these enchanting photos from a set of 12 snaps to be auctioned in New York next week.
“Everybody still loves Marilyn,” said Nigel Russell, director of photographs for Heritage Auctions. He estimates the lot will bring $35,000.
“It’s something that I find amazing,” Russell said. “How every time we put up Marilyn photographs, they always do well.”
The photos are by noted lensman and author Lawrence Schil- ler, who snapped Marilyn flirting and frolicking in a cerulean pool in 1962, the year she died. “She only had one condition,” the now-80-year-old photographer told The Post about the shoot, which occurred in the pool at the Twentieth Century Fox studio in Los Angeles. “She said any magazine you publish this in, I don’t want to see Liz Taylor in the same magazine. “She told me, ‘Fox is giving Taylor $1 million and I’m only getting $125,000 a movie,’ ” Schiller recalled.
“She said, ‘I want to show the studio that I could get as many magazine covers as Elizabeth Taylor.’
“Marilyn wanted to generate all the publicity she could to fight Fox to get more money.”
In another image, sparklers are ablaze on her last birthday cake two months before her deathh at age 36.
The photo was taken onn June 1, 1962, Monroe’s last dayy on the set of the never-completed “Something’s Got to Give” — Fox would fired her for repeated lateness — when the crew bought her a huge sheet cake topped with the sparklers
The New York-based Schiller would go on to a celebrated career as a photographer, author, producer and director.
Russell, meanwhile, said he sees the same collector fascination with photos of James Dean and John F. Kennedy.
“There’s something about when someone dies young that you keep them in your memory from that time,” he said.