When a little-known and out-of-work Marilyn Monroe needed cash, she agreed to a then-scandalous nude photo shoot and was paid a paltry $50.
Now, the photos – which threatened to derail Monroe’s career early on but instead made her an icon and launched the Playboy publishing empire – are up for sale and could fetch upwards of $4 million.
Vintage poster and art retailer Limited Runs in Hollywood is handling the sale of the original star-making shot and other images from what came to be known as the “Red Velvet” photo session.
“There’s huge interest in these historical artifacts, largely because Marilyn is still Hollywood’s most popular actress, alive or dead,” said company owner Pierre Vudrag, an entertainment lawyer-turned-memorabilia dealer.
Indeed, Monroe’s estate, which is not involved with this sale, made $27 million last year in licensing deals and other earnings, ranking the blond bombshell third on the Forbes list of top-earning dead celebrities, behind only Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley.
The pictures, which will be exhibited at Strauss Studio in Hollywood starting July 29 before going on a nationwide two-month tour of galleries while Vudrag seeks a buyer, have a fascinating history.
When a 22-year-old Monroe showed up at photographer Tom Kelley’s Hollywood studio on May 27, 1949, to pose for the “Golden Dreams” calendar, she was out of work and broke.
Signing the model release form as “Mona Monroe,” she agreed to strip for the camera on two conditions: that Kelley’s wife, Natalie, be present during the shoot and that her fee should be $50 – reportedly the amount of cash she needed to get back her impounded car.
By the time the calendar was hanging on the walls of gas stations and barbershops in 1952, Monroe was a fast-rising star under contract at 20th Century Fox and the studio faced a huge scandal when the press started to ask if the pinup girl reclining on rumpled red velvet was really its new starlet.
Instead of denying it, Monroe admitted it was her in the picture and the resulting controversy made her a much bigger star. The calendar, meanwhile, went on to sell 8 million copies worldwide.
The admission was typical of her honesty, recalled Monroe’s former publicist, Michael Selsman, now 77 and living in Beverly Hills.
“Marilyn never denied it was her in these nude pictures taken when she was trying to make a name for herself,” he said. “She said she wasn’t ashamed.”
In 1953, astute publisher Hugh Hefner bought the copyright to the main “Red Velvet” image for the now historic first issue of Playboy, which sold more than 50,000 copies on first printing, allowing him to continue production of the magazine and ultimately grow his brand into Playboy Enterprises Inc., now headquartered in Beverly Hills.
Private buyer
After Monroe posed nude for Kelley, a Chicago printing firm acquired the original “Red Velvet” photograph and other images from the shoot, and then created 21 large-format color separations – negatives capturing different colored light – as part of a painstaking printing process to make the final full-color image for the “Golden Dreams” calendar.
The photograph and mounted separations eventually found their way into a corporate collection acquired in 2010 by Las Vegas art collector Al Babbitt, owner of Messenger Art Collection, which consists of more than 5,000 pieces.
Messenger hired Vudrag and Limited Runs to sell the Monroe items, which Vudrag said have been appraised at $4.2 million.
“It’s costly to keep such a large collection going and this Marilyn sale will help us monetize the collection,” said Sue Roderick, Messenger’s vice president of marketing. “We are hoping a private buyer will come forward. And if not, we will go to auction in New York when the tour ends there in September.”
She added that the company decided to bring in Vudrag and Limited Runs to handle the sale after being impressed with how well dozens of rare Monroe photographs sold on the firm’s website.
Vudrag said Limited Runs previously acquired 60 unpublished photos of Monroe at an estate sale, restored them and took them on a cross-country tour before selling them online.
“That’s exactly the model we’ll be using in this sale, too,” he said.
The purpose of the tour is twofold: to bring this iconic photo art to the public while at the same time identifying a museum or private collection keen to purchase the items.
As for who the buyer will be, look no further than the current Chinese obsession with all things Hollywood, Selsman suggested.
“The Chinese know nothing about classic Hollywood but they know her,” he said. “They’re buying up as much of America as they can – real estate, collectibles, anything that has value in the event the Chinese miracle collapses.”
Another factor making it likely the collection will go to a Chinese buyer is the collection’s connection to Playboy. Though Playboy magazine has never been sold there, Scott Flanders, chief executive of Playboy Enterprises, said Chinese consumers bought more than $500 million worth of Playboy-branded products last year, making it one of the firm’s biggest licensing markets.
Roderick agreed it’s likely the photos will go to a Chinese buyer, but she also said hopes the photos stay stateside.
“It would be nice if this special piece of Americana stayed in our country,” she said.
