Up for Auction: Marilyn Monroe's Love Letters

Including notes from Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Nov 12, 2014 10:58 AM CST
Up for Auction: Marilyn Monroe's Love Letters
This Nov. 7, 2014, photo shows part of a three-page handwritten letter from Joe DiMaggio to Marilyn Monroe that was postmarked Oct. 9, 1954, on display at Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills, Calif.   (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

It's no secret Joe DiMaggio loved Marilyn Monroe. The baseball great cried at her funeral and for 20 years had flowers placed at her crypt several times a week. The public displays were unusual for the famously stoic and private DiMaggio. Now, his heartbreak over the breakup of their marriage will get a rare public airing when "Marilyn Monroe's Lost Archives" goes up for bid at Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills next month. "I love you and want to be with you," DiMaggio said in one pained letter to Monroe from the collection, written when she announced she was filing for divorce after a matter of months in 1954. "There is nothing I would like better than to restore your confidence in me."

The 300 items also include love letters from Monroe's third and final husband, playwright Arthur Miller. There's also a handwritten letter from Monroe to Miller in which the woman who was arguably Hollywood's greatest sex symbol muses about her many insecurities. Other letters in the collection come from such friends as Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Jane Russell, the latter imploring Monroe in 10 neatly handwritten pages to give her marriage to DiMaggio another chance. Auction owner Darren Julien estimates the pieces could fetch $1 million or more. Click for more excerpts from the letters. (More Marilyn Monroe stories.)

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