Marilyn Monroe would have turned 100 this year. Instead, she is being turned into a stack of auction lots. Her lipstick, her dress, her half-read copy of Ulysses: all are now being pored over by British collectors who imagine that by owning a piece of the celluloid dream, they might purchase a slice of lost glamour. They are wrong. They are buying mothballs.
Consider the scene at the auction house. A gentleman in a Savile Row suit inspects a pair of Monroe's stockings. He does not stare at the silk; he stares at the catalogue, computing the price per thread. This is not reverence. It is necrophilia with a credit line. We have done this before. In the 1890s, London society collected the teeth of dead poets. They called it 'relic worship'. Today, we call it 'investment diversification'. The only difference is the interest rate.
Monroe herself would have laughed at this absurdity. She spent her life desperate to be taken seriously as an actress, to be seen as more than a body. Now her body is reduced to a series of objects, each with a reserve price. The highest bid will not bring her back. It will merely fill a glass case in a Belgravia drawing room, where the owner will boast of its provenance while sipping claret. The Fall of Rome was preceded by such decadence: collecting the bones of martyrs while the barbarians sharpened their axes.
Yet there is a deeper malaise here. British collectors are not merely buying a dead star's belongings. They are buying a fantasy of America. A fantasy of a country that once made things: films, dreams, icons. Today, America makes TikToks and trade wars. Monroe belongs to a time when Hollywood exported a coherent image of desirability, however fraudulent. Now we have TikTok influencers who sell lip gloss to nine-year-olds. Which would you rather collect?
The British have always been excellent at hoarding the past. Our museums are full of other people's histories. But this auction is different. It is not about history. It is about panic. Panic at the death of the American century. Panic that our own cultural output is so thin that we must cling to the hem of a dead starlet. We are like the Byzantine Greeks, selling the bones of saints while the Turks knocked on the gates.
And what of Monroe's legacy? She was a woman who embodied the tragedy of being desired for the wrong things. She wanted to be respected. She wanted to be an artist. Instead, she is now a line item on an auctioneer's spreadsheet. The bidders do not know her. They know a photograph, a clip, a rumour. They are in love with a ghost. And the ghost will not go gently. It will haunt every drawing room where a pair of stockings is displayed, whispering: 'Is this all you wanted?'
But perhaps I am being too harsh. Perhaps the collectors are merely connoisseurs, preserving beauty for future generations. Perhaps. But connoisseurs do not pay £100,000 for a lipstick tube. They pay that for Rembrandt's etchings or a first folio of Shakespeare. They do not pay for the residue of a woman's mouth. That is not connoisseurship. That is fetishism. And fetishism always ends badly, as the Victorians knew. They collected hair, teeth, and folded love letters. They ended with a century of sexual repression and Freudian guilt.
So what are we to make of this auction? It is a mirror, and the reflection is not flattering. It shows a culture that has run out of ideas, that cannibalises its own past because it cannot imagine a future. Monroe herself would have hated it. She who spent years trying to escape the shadow of her own image. Now her image is all that remains. And we, the British, are paying for the privilege of burying her again.
Let the auctions proceed. Let the collectors fill their cabinets. But do not call it love. Call it what it is: a last desperate attempt to buy a ticket to a party that ended sixty years ago. The music has stopped. The lights are up. And all that is left is the smell of stale champagne and a half-eaten canapé. Happy birthday, Marilyn. I hope you are not watching.
