Marilyn Monroe Collections Assembled for Her 100th Birthday Cut Through Hollywood Glamour to Reveal the Star’s Human Side

A selection of the movie star’s clothing, jewelry and dark, personal letters will be auctioned for the big anniversary of her birth

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

May 12, 2026 4:00 p.m.

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It’s about to be the “summer of Marilyn.” June 1 marks the 100th birthday of 20th-century Hollywood’s biggest star, Marilyn Monroe, with exhibitions, film screenings and an “official centenary book” marking the occasion.

As are auction houses. Heritage Auctions’ “Marilyn Monroe, Unfiltered” sale, set for what would have been Monroe’s big birthday, includes handwritten letters, watercolor paintings and other private effects.

“It’s really special because it’s not material ‌that’s ⁠been bought and sold over the decades,” Brian Chanes, Heritage Auctions’ senior director of Hollywood and entertainment, tells Reuters’ Matt Silverstein and Danielle Broadway. “This is something that’s a discovery.”

Born in Los Angeles in 1926, Norma Jeane Mortenson spent her youth in foster homes and an orphanage, while her mother often was confined in an asylum. She worked as a photography model before signing a short-term contract with Twentieth Century-Fox—at which point she adopted the screen name Marilyn Monroe. In the 1950s, she starred in the films Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire and There’s No Business Like Show Business. Monroe’s personality and bombshell looks became a widespread cultural obsession.

It was a persona Monroe carefully curated, says Sophia Serrano, associate curator at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which is planning an upcoming exhibition called “Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon.” Monroe’s public presence was “not just some kind of phenomenon,” Serrano tells Art & Object’s Jane Horowitz. “It was a very carefully planned, orchestrated image.”

“To many audiences, Monroe is an icon first and a performer second,” Kimberley Sheehan, the British Film Institute’s lead programmer, tells the Guardian’s Nadia Khomami. The film institute is putting on a two-month run of Monroe’s films this summer, including The Misfits, her last movie. But Sheehan calls Monroe “quite possibly the biggest star cinema ever saw and will ever see,” and “the original triple threat” who could act, sing and dance.

Heritage Auctions’ collection cuts through Monroe’s glitz and glamour to her inner life. It comes from the estate of late writer Norman Rosten and his wife Hedda. Per the statement from the auction house, the Rostens met Monroe through photographer Sam Shaw and became her close friends. After Monroe’s death, Hedda Rosten received the star’s wardrobe. Norman Rosten published Marilyn: An Untold Story, an intimate profile of the actress.

The auction includes watercolor sketches by Monroe herself; encouraging letters Norman Rosten wrote to her; and a draft of her will written by her third husband, The Crucible playwright Arthur Miller.

There are also several letters and notes Monroe wrote, which “read like diary entries,” writes Variety’s Tim Chan. They reveal Monroe’s painful personal struggles.

Monroe typed one letter, addressed to Norman Rosten, on stationary from the Hotel del Coronado in California. Dated September 11, 1958, it reads: “We are going through the Straits of Dire.” In purple-ink longhand, she added to the postscript, “I would have written this by hand but it’s trembling.” In the stationary’s colorful illustration of the beachfront hotel, Monroe drew a stick figure drowning in the water.

“You ⁠can feel ​the anguish in her writing,” Chanes tells Reuters.

Julien’s is also running an auction associated with Monroe’s 100th birthday. Its “100 Years of Marilyn” sale includes never-published photographs, makeup, clothing, annotated scripts and even a tile from Monroe’s bathroom on Fifth Helena Drive in Los Angeles—her last residence.

Julien’s estimates one purse could fetch $200,000, and there’s already a $1,000 bid on its bathroom tile. Heritage Auctions has placed starting bids of $20,000 on Monroe’s “Straits of Dire” letter. There’s a starting bid of $50,000 on three never-before-seen letters written by Monroe’s psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, which include a “blow-by-blow account of the day leading up to Monroe’s death.”

“While her image and story have been revisited time and again, opportunities to encounter her in such a direct and unfiltered way are exceedingly rare,” says Joe Maddalena, Heritage Auctions’ executive vice president, in the statement. “The extraordinary letters and notes preserved through her intimate and trusting relationship with Norman and Hedda Rosten reveal a side of Monroe that has remained largely unseen—deeply personal, searching and profoundly human.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.