Marilyn Monroe's acclaimed dress sells for $1.26 million



Arizona Daily Wildcat Christie's Director Meredith Etherington-Smith stands next to Marilyn Monroe's "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" dress, on display at Christie's in New York on Friday. The full-length, flesh-colored dress, hand-sewn with more than 6,000 beads, is among 1,000 lots of Monroe's personal property, for which Etherington-Smith is curator, that Christie's is auctioning today and sold yesterday.

By The Associated Press Arizona Daily Wildcat,

October 28, 1999 Talk about this story Associated Press NEW YORK - Marilyn Monroe's form-fitting, flesh-colored dress - a sequined stunner she wore to serenade President Kennedy that still left jaws dropping nearly 40 years later - sold yesterday for a record $1.26 million. The dress, worn by Monroe during her breathless ''Happy Birthday, Mr. President'' to JFK in 1962, was the highest-priced item at the first session of a two-day Manhattan auction. The crowd cheered loudly when the winning bid, from the Manhattan-based Gotta Have It! Collectibles, was announced. It set a new record for an auctioned dress, obliterating the $222,500 paid for an ink blue Princess Diana gown sold in 1997. Asked why he spent a small fortune on the dress, company co-owner Robert Schargin told reporters, ''Because it wasn't $3 million, which we thought it was worth...We stole it.'' He bid $1.5 million; with the house commission, he paid $1,267,500. Buyers snapped up everything from her blue jeans and boots to screenplays, most at prices far beyond the predictions of auction house Christie's. Bikini bottoms were to be sold today. The total take for some 50 items auctioned was $5,630,500. estimate was $30,000 to $50,000. Bidding far outpaced what experts at Christie's had predicted. A baby grand piano, once owned by Monroe's mother and reacquired by the actress years later, sold for $632,500; its pre-sale estimate was $10,000 to $15,000. Even a plaster floor lamp, estimated to sell between $2,000 and $4,000, sold for $21,850. The auction aired live on the American Movie Classics channel, and 1,200 people registered to bid. More than 100 telephone lines accommodated bidders who couldn't joined a standing-room-only crowd of 1,500 inside the Rockefeller Center auction house. The auction house sold 28,000 catalogues at $85 a pop for a cool $2.38 million; 75,000 visitors attended previews in six cities across three continents. The auctioned items, most of them in storage for nearly four decades, included 400 hundred books from her private library, and mementos from her marriages to the New York Yankees superstar and playwright Arthur Miller. Monroe left all her belongings to her acting coach, method acting guru Lee Strasberg. His widow, Anna, was selling them off, with some proceeds going to charity. Sales of Monroe's books will benefit the Literacy Partners, a New York-based adult and family literacy project, while her fur collection will benefit the World Wildlife Foundation.

