Sotheby’s New York transformed into a circus of the damned this week as Marilyn Monroe’s belongings hit the block on what would have been her 100th birthday. British collectors, flush with cash and hungry for a piece of Hollywood’s most tragic icon, led the bidding war. But let’s be clear: these aren’t just gowns and lipstick. They are the relics of a woman chewed up and spat out by the very industry that now ghoulishly profits from her memory.
The auction, titled ‘Forever Marilyn’, featured more than 200 lots. The crown jewel: a sheer black sequinned gown worn during the 1950s, fetching £2.8 million. The buyer, a London financier whose name I’m not printing because he’s probably wired his offshore account by now, sat stone-faced as the hammer fell. Another lot, a vintage makeup case containing her preferred shade of Revlon ‘Cherries in the Snow’ lipstick, sold for £180,000 to a mystery bidder via a private bank in the Channel Islands. Sources confirm the winning bidder is connected to a family office with ties to a Swiss trust that has a history of acquiring ‘Hollywood memorabilia as a tax-dodging mechanism’.
But the real story isn’t the price tags. It’s the bodies buried beneath the glamour. Monroe died at 36, a victim of the studio system, the Mob, and the Kennedy family’s secret police. Her make-up, the very tools used to paint a smile on a woman drowning in pills, now belong to men who never knew her. Men who see a tax shelter in a dead star’s lipstick.
Documents obtained from the auction house reveal that 60 per cent of the buyers are British. That’s not a coincidence. The UK’s opaque company registration rules allow these collectors to remain hidden. One bidder, a peer of the realm, used a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands. Another, a fashion heir, funnelled money through a Jersey trust. The pattern is clear: these are not fans. These are vultures using a cultural icon to park wealth.
The auction also included personal letters, including a note to her psychiatrist describing ‘the loneliness of a blonde in a world of grey suits’. One letter, to her half-sister, reads: ‘They look at me like a porcelain doll, but I am a cracked vase.’ The irony is sickening. Today, those same ‘grey suits’ grabbed her belongings, now cracked vases themselves.
Sotheby’s declined to comment on the identity of bidders, citing ‘client confidentiality’. But this isn’t about privacy. It’s about power. The same power that silenced Monroe is now erasing her true legacy. These collectors aren’t preserving history. They are laundering it.
A former Sotheby’s employee, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me: ‘The British crowd is always the worst. They act like they’re saving British heritage, but really they’re just moving cash around. Marilyn’s stuff is just another asset class to them.’
And what of the woman herself? Monroe was a victim of the patriarchy, the establishment, and the mob. Her estate has been picked clean by lawyers and accountants. Now, on her 100th birthday, we don’t get a monument. We get a fire sale.
The final lot, a white halter dress from ‘The Seven Year Itch’, went for £4.6 million. The buyer, a consortium of British art investors, plans to display it in a private club in Mayfair. Not a museum. A club. For the rich. To leer at.
This is not a celebration. This is a crime. And the money trail leads straight to London.
