Secret trove of Marilyn Monroe personal effects reveal deepest secrets

A secret stash of Marilyn Monroe’s personal effects and some unseen footage has been unearthed, yielding a fascinating glimpse into her deepest secrets.

After Monroe’s death in 1962, a hidden trove of documents kept in two file cabinets wound up with the family of her business manager, largely untouched until a photographer, Mark Anderson, began archiving it in 2005 and gave Vanity Fair a look.

While some of the papers are mundane – fan mail, telegrams from well-wishers and entertainment contracts, others are intensely personal. The Marilyn that leaps from the pages is charming, clever and flirtatious.

Like sweet letters she wrote to husband Arthur Miller’s children at camp, adopting the voice of the family dog.

Or responding to a dig from Tony Curtis after they made “Some Like It Hot,” Monroe wrote to a friend: “There is only one way he could comment on my sexuality and I’m afraid he’s never had the opportunity.”

“Guess what,” she wrote to Bobby Miller in one reference to the Kennedy family.

“I had dinner with the Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, and I asked him what his department was going to do about Civil Rights….I sat next to him, and he isn’t a bad dancer either.”

Other keepsakes hint at her turbulent personal life.

Two ledger entries from 1953 note $1,151.04 in payments to Marilyn’s legal guardian for something “medical.” They coincide with Monroe being hospitalized for a gynecological procedure; Vanity Fair suggests she may have had an abortion.

In 1961, when she was in a psychiatric hospital, a man who may have been gossip columnist Walter Winchell wrote: “Turkey foot. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Let’s go hiking and driving through the Redwoods incognito.”

When she and Miller were married, she financially supported the writer, the documents suggest. By contrast, Joe DiMaggio showered her with money.

A note Monroe never sent speaks to the bond between the bombshell and Joltin’ Joe:
“If I can only succeed in making you happy – I will have succeeded in the biggest and most difficult thing there is – that is to make one person completely happy.”

Speaking of the movie SOME LIKE IT HOT, mentioned above, unseen footage of Marilyn, recorded during the shooting has been discovered. The amateur video, featuring Monroe and her co-stars Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, was taken in 1959 by a U.S. navy officer after Monroe invited him to the set at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, California. The two-and-a-half minute film was found in its original box with the sailor’s possessions in Australia, where he had emigrated to. The video is expected to fetch up to $25,000 when it is auctioned off in Melbourne, Australia later this month. Charles Leski, of Leski Auctions, says, “Marilyn Monroe memorabilia is always in demand, but rarely do we get one-off material like this.”

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