Marilyn Monroe’s Last Possessions: The Story Her Artefacts Still Tell

Harriet Wilder
Oct 1
9 min read

Updated: 18 hours ago

Marilyn Monroe in white pants holding a book; background shows documents and black-and-white photo; text reads "What Marilyn Monroe Left Behind."

There is a moment in almost every Marilyn Monroe story when the camera pans away from the icon and lands on the room she has just left. The things remain. A bottle of Chanel No. 5 on a dressing table. A grey metal filing cabinet with a stubborn lock. A white baby grand piano with an old family ache running through its lacquer. If the life was comet bright, the artefacts are its cooling trail, the tangible pieces that outlasted the most famous woman in the world.

In the early hours of 5 August 1962, police arrived at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood. The official finding would be an overdose of prescription drugs at the age of thirty six. Yet within hours, attention began to drift from cause to consequence, from what happened to what would happen next to Marilyn’s belongings. Dr Ralph Greenson and Dr Hyman Engelberg were there. So was lawyer Milton “Mickey” Rudin. Publicist Arthur Jacobs left a concert at the Hollywood Bowl and rushed over, later telling friends the sight in her bedroom was “too horrible to talk about.” Eunice Murray, the housekeeper who raised the alarm, was found quietly washing sheets in the middle of the night. Peter Lawford, not at the house but deeply shaken by their last phone call, recounted her words: “Say good-bye to Pat. Say good-bye to the president. And say good-bye to yourself because you are a nice guy.” What followed would be the long afterlife of her possessions, a saga in which handbags and ledgers, rosary beads and receipts, would become the most eloquent witnesses.

Marilyn Monroe's minaudière compact containing eight Philip Morris cigarettes, a tube of lipstick, a clear plastic comb and loose powder. — Marilyn's minaudière compact containing eight Philip Morris cigarettes, a tube of lipstick, a clear plastic comb and loose powder.

The keeper of keys and the two cabinets

Into this charged room stepped a discreet figure who appears at the edges of the biographies and yet becomes central once the focus turns to objects. Inez Melson had been recommended by Joe DiMaggio to keep an eye on Marilyn’s affairs, and for years she had managed the practical business of caring for Gladys Baker, Marilyn’s mother, whose life was marked by long institutional stays. Melson had a gift for continuity. She took notes, paid bills, filed letters. After the funeral she sat with Marilyn’s half sister, Berniece Baker Miracle, and began the unglamorous work of sorting. “We sat around the fireplace,” Miracle later wrote, “watching Inez burn papers all day long.”

Two filing cabinets anchored this effort. One was grey and strictly businesslike, “legal size with lock.” The other was brown and more intimate, with a safe hidden behind a faux drawer. Frank Sinatra had suggested she buy them to protect her privacy. Inside lay the raw materials of a complicated life: carbon copies of thank you notes on onionskin paper, stacks of cancelled cheques, invoices from dressmakers and fur stores, telegrams, typed memos from secretaries, handwritten fragments from sleepless nights, favourite snapshots and mementos that meant the most to her. They were, as one writer later described, keys to the mystery that was Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe's typewriter and case — Marilyn's typrewriter

The grey cabinet was sold in an estate sale in 1963 and delivered to the West Hollywood office address of Inez Melson. The brown cabinet, removed by Joe DiMaggio several years later, was eventually brought to Melson’s home and remained in the family after her death in 1985.

For decades these two unremarkable pieces of office furniture would carry an outsized myth. Their contents would be photographed, argued over, sequestered in vaults and invoked in court filings. There were whispered claims of Kennedy letters. There were receipts that revealed how a star spent money with abandon and generosity.

There were lists that showed how she tried to keep control of a life that often ran away from her.

The paper trail of a person

It is tempting to think a legend is made of photographs alone, but the paper trail tells a different, more domestic truth. Marilyn kept almost everything that mattered to her work and to her day to day routine. Ledgers charted the steady blood flow of income and outgoings. The entries showed Paula Strasberg’s fees as acting coach and confidante. They showed payments to nurses at a time when Dr Greenson tried to stabilise her life with around the clock care. They showed overdrafts and cautions from her lawyer not to spend too quickly. Between the lines, they revealed a woman both famous and precarious, a person who was at once the centre of attention and always in danger of slipping through the cracks.

The receipts painted their own portrait. At Jax and Bloomingdale’s were bills for tight back zip trousers and simple knit tops she loved. At Maximilian Fur Company in New York there were storage slips for white ermine, ranch mink and fox stoles, all made out to Mrs A. Miller. Beauty appointments at Elizabeth Arden appeared with regularity. There were notes for a “hormonal shot,” reminders of a body that often refused to cooperate with the punishing schedules of film making.

Marilyn Monroe's personalized brown leather, six-ring Gucci address book — A personalized brown leather, six-ring Gucci address book with custom stamped “M.M.” on the front cover, belonging to Monroe circa 1955, with handwritten entries, many in Monroe’s hand. Contacts include Marlon Brando, “Mother Miller,” Lee Strasberg, Maurine Stapleton, and Harold Clurman, among others. The book includes various handwritten entries and notes throughout. Of particular note is Monroe’s handwritten list of very personal things she must make an effort to do, including “as often as possible to observe Strassberg’s [sic.] other private classes”; “never miss my actors studio sessions”; “must make strong effort to work on current problems and phobias that out of my past has arisen,” among other entries.

Among the most striking papers were letters dictated and then copied for her files. They have the offhand charm that people always remembered in conversation. “Dear Mr von Fuehlsdorff,” she wrote to the German Consulate, “Thank you for your champagne. It arrived, I drank it, and I was gayer. Thanks again.” A typed carbon to The New York Times Sunday editor Lester Markel mixed light political banter with slogans that undercut the heaviness of the campaign season: “Nix on Nixon” and “Back to Boston by Xmas Kennedy.” There were tender, funny notes to Arthur Miller’s children. To Bobby she wrote about meeting the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, noting that he had “a terrific sense of humour” and could dance. To Janie she wrote in the voice of Hugo the family basset hound, promising to behave and not trample the flowers she and Daddy had planted.

Some items were unassuming yet profoundly revealing. A small army issue sewing kit from the Korea trip that she described as one of the happiest experiences of her life. A snapshot of her standing in the passenger seat of a Jeep in that same winter of 1954, radiantly happy in a bomber jacket, the picture shuffled from handbag to handbag because she liked it best. A gold plated compact case dusted with the last traces of powder. A nearly empty bottle of Chanel No. 5 from the bedside table. Each object is a tiny aperture through which the person steps forward.

The will that made a second act for her things

On 16 August 1962, Marilyn’s will was filed for probate. It was practical, specific and pointed toward care. A one hundred thousand dollar trust was established to support her mother Gladys with five thousand dollars a year and to provide Mrs Michael Chekhov, widow of acting teacher Michael Chekhov, with an annuity. Her half sister Berniece and her former secretary and friend May Reis each received ten thousand dollars, with scope for Reis to receive more. Playwright and poet Norman Rosten and his wife Hedda were left five thousand.

The surprise for many was that twenty five percent of the residue would go to Dr Marianne Kris, the New York psychoanalyst who had once supervised her admission to the Payne Whitney Clinic when she was in crisis. The remainder of the estate, including the most intimate bequest of all, her “personal effects to be distributed among my friends, colleagues and those to whom I am devoted,” went to Lee Strasberg, artistic director of the Actors Studio and a central figure in the second act of her career. It was Strasberg and his wife Paula who had championed her move from studio bombshell to serious performer. As Arthur Miller observed admiringly, “She always sees things as though for the first time.” That wonder was nurtured at the Actors Studio.

The Strasberg bequest gave shape to the afterlife of her things. In 1999, the Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe sale at Christie’s in New York became known as the Sale of the Century. The beaded Jean Louis gown she wore to sing “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy set a clothing record. The white baby grand piano that had once belonged to her mother, lost when Gladys was institutionalised and later sought out and rescued by Marilyn, sold to Mariah Carey. Her platinum eternity band from Joe DiMaggio, a ring of quiet sentiment rather than show, fetched a remarkable price. The fever in the room was not just about celebrity. It was about the sense that these objects contained pieces of her story that had resisted explanation.

From Scudda Hoo to The Misfits, with the souvenirs to prove it

The span from her uncredited bit in Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! in 1948 to the last completed feature, The Misfits in 1961, is often told through images and scenes. The artefacts help fix the steps between. Acting class snapshots from the Actors Lab in 1947 show a serious, slightly plumper young woman sitting low to the floor, attentive and hungry for a craft that would take years to master. A receipt from Martindale’s Book Store in Beverly Hills records the purchase of Freud in three volumes, the slip made out to “Marilyn Monroe Miller.” Bills from a fur storage vault show a young star investing in the uniform of glamour, while deposit slips and bank warnings show the cost. A folded schedule shows the strain of long days. Together they are a bridge from studio ingénue to the poignant, open-nerved Roslyn in The Misfits, a part Arthur Miller admitted would challenge the greatest actresses and one he could not imagine anyone else carrying the way she did.

The moment the rooms emptied

The rooms of Fifth Helena Drive emptied quickly. DiMaggio chose an apple green sheath dress of nylon jersey for the funeral and sat vigil beside the body. Inez Melson took fifteen prescription bottles from the bedside table and began to move through the contents of drawers and cabinets, making calls, arranging changes of locks, steadying herself around the idea that the person was gone and only the person’s things remained.

A box of Marilyn Monroe’s conditioning cream for dry hair. Both of the tubes have been opened and partially used. Accompanied by a paper hair cap

The market, the vault and the question of who owns a memory

After the Christie’s sale, the market for Marilyn’s possessions did not cool; it matured. There were good faith exhibitions and there were careless ones. There were careful catalogues and there were doubtful claims. An entire profession grew up around proving that an object had been near her. The estate and others battled over rights and reproductions. One remarkable cache of material related to those two filing cabinets was photographed over two years, then swept into a bank vault as lawyers argued about ownership. It made a strange kind of sense. The person who had been watched all her life would continue to be watched in death, and the keepers of her belongings would themselves be watched.

Amid the clamour, a line by Billy Wilder came back again and again. Complaining with affection about how hard it could be to direct her, he conceded it was “worth a week’s torment to get three luminous minutes on the screen.” The things she left behind put flesh on that paradox. They show how much it cost to be luminous and how ordinary the struggle looked on paper.

Why these things still speak

Marilyn’s story has always sounded half like a prayer and half like a caution. “Cannot believe that Marilyn M. is dead,” wrote Truman Capote from Spain. “She was such a good-hearted girl, so pure really, so much on the side of the angels. Poor little baby.” Joshua Logan compared her “dumb blonde” creation to Chaplin’s Tramp, understanding that she had made a figure larger than herself. Fans wrote because they saw sadness in her eyes and felt less alone. Decades later, artists as different as Madonna, Charlize Theron and Scarlett Johansson would restage images not because they loved nostalgia, but because the pose contained a question: what price must be paid for such power.

The last room

The myth of Marilyn Monroe often begins with her death and moves backward. It is more honest to start with what remains and move forward. The objects tell a longer, slower story, one in which a working woman lays out the tools of her trade, fills drawers with notes and mirrors and invoices, moves money around, frets about health, buys gifts, writes giddy thank yous for champagne, keeps the things that please her and throws out the things that do not. The last room at Fifth Helena was once full of such ordinary clutter. When the people left, the room fell silent. The things did not speak, not at first. It took years for listeners to learn how.

Even now, much of that room’s story sits in a bank vault. The cabinets have been emptied, filled, and emptied again by curators and claimants. The piano has a different address. The powder has turned to a fine ghost. The bottle on the bedside table is dry. Yet the artefacts still do the one thing a star could never do for herself. They remain in place. They allow a legend to be handled without breaking. They persuade the present to slow down long enough to hear, in a secretary’s carbon copy and a dog-eared snapshot, the sound of a life being lived.

“Say good-bye to the president,” she told Peter Lawford. The world never quite managed it. Perhaps that is why the things keep speaking. They are the part of Marilyn Monroe that never left the room.