A single white dress, so sheer it barely exists, is expected to fetch £2 million at auction this week. It is the dress Marilyn Monroe wore to sing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President’ – a moment of such potent, manufactured intimacy that it has haunted American culture ever since.
Now, as the world marks what would have been her 100th birthday, British auction houses are presiding over a curious ritual: the selling of a ghost. Monroe, who died in 1962 at the age of 36, has become a perpetual revenue stream. Her image is licensed, her name is trademarked, and now, her possessions are being parcelled out to the highest bidder.
Julien’s Auctions, based in Beverly Hills but with a strong London presence, is handling the sale of hundreds of items: script notes, a pair of stilettos, a lipstick-stained handkerchief. The prices are staggering, but the psychology is familiar. We are not buying objects.
We are buying proximity to a tragedy. The ‘human cost’ of Monroe’s life – the loneliness, the exploitation, the brinksmanship with fame – has been monetised so thoroughly that her belongings now function as relics. The buyer of a dressing gown is not acquiring a garment; they are acquiring a fragment of a life that never quite belonged to its owner.
British auction houses, ever adept at trading on nostalgia and class, have cornered this market. They understand that luxury sales are not about objects but about stories. A pair of Monroe’s gloves is merely leather and lace.
But the story – a whispered line on set, a hand waved at a frantic press conference – that makes it priceless. The cultural shift is subtle but real. We have moved from worshipping celebrity to collecting it.
The fan who once longed for an autograph now wants a wardrobe. The admiration that once filled stadiums now fills storage units. And the auction house, with its polished catalogues and white-gloved attendants, has become the new temple of fame.
As one bidder told me: ‘I’m not buying her things. I’m buying her time.’ But time is not for sale.
What we are really buying is a sense of control over a narrative that was always beyond control. Monroe herself would have understood this. She once said: ‘Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.
’ At this auction, the soul is on the block, and the price is rising. For the rest of us, those who cannot bid, we watch from the sidelines. We are the crowd at a car crash, unable to look away.
We read the auction catalogues online, we note the estimates, we imagine the weight of the scarf, the smell of the perfume. And we wonder: what will be left of us when we are gone? A century from now, will some auctioneer in a Savile Row suit sell our letters, our furniture, our stray secrets?
Monroe’s legacy is a mirror. What we see in it is not her, but ourselves: our hunger for meaning, our lust for proximity, our refusal to let the dead rest in peace. The auction closes at 8pm.
The bidding war is silent, clinical, and utterly human.
