Today, June 1, Marilyn Monroe would have turned 100 years old. Collector Ted Stampfer has 1,500 objects from and about her, he estimates during a walk before the opening of Marilyn – 100 Years of Marilyn Monroean extensive, excellent exhibition of her life and career in the Groningen Forum. Part of his collection can be seen there: children’s drawings, clothing, a self-help book, fake eyelashes, an agenda, as well as a prescription for sleeping pill Phenergan that her doctor wrote the day before her death.
Stampfer had a cream-colored dress with mother-of-pearl glitter accurately recreated, he says. In May 1962, Marilyn Monroe sang in that dress – sultry, stoned, both? – “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden. In 2016, the museum chain purchased Ripley’s Believe It or Not! the dress at auction for $4.8 million. Marilyn wannabe Kim Kardashian was allowed to wear it to the 2022 Met Gala in New York and says she lost a lot of weight for it. But not enough, says Stampfer. “That dress has now stretched around the waist and a number of pearls are missing. Kardashian wore a white stole over the dress because she could not close the zipper. Even my mother immediately saw that it did not fit, the seams were completely wrong.”
As a collector, Ted Stampfer would rather put his money on ten small objects than on one such dress, he continues. As a boy, the 55-year-old German businessman became fascinated by Marilyn Monroe’s dubbed films on German television, read everything there was to read about her, collected clippings and photos and press releases. When the widow of her acting coach and heir Lee Strassberg auctioned off her belongings that had been in storage for 37 years in 1999, Stampfer made his move. In 2008, a museum temporarily loaned some objects, and not much later his hobby became his business. In addition to Groningen, he has spent the past four months working on an exhibition in the Swarovski Crystal Worlds of Wattens, Austria. Marilyn: Forever Inspiring and in Lisbon Marilyn: Icon of the Century.
Although Stampfer believes that some of her energy remained in his objects and that each exhibition provides relief, he is not a Monroe fanatic. “Of course I didn’t know the woman herself, so I keep a bit of distance. Ultimately I will also resell the collection.” Marilyn Monroe is also a trade: for example, you can buy an envelope from her own stationery collection in the gift shop in Groningen for 400 euros. A bargain.
Stampfer is not the only collector organizing exhibitions: the biggest is Scott Fortner, an expert from whose Marilyn Monroe Collection there will be three exhibitions in Los Angeles this year (Hollywood Icon), London (A Portrait) and Paris (Marilyn) allowed to putt.
A growing fascination
A century after her birth, Norma Jeane Mortenson – stage name Marilyn Monroe – is still Hollywood’s greatest icon. She stands for glamour, her image rights would currently earn the Authentic Brands Group around 80 million dollars a year. In 2012, her 50ste year of death, it was still 27 million. What explains this enduring, even growing fascination? After her breakthrough year in 1953, Monroe was a superstar for less than ten years with a sharply profiled image: the whispering, quasi-naive seductress with a peroxide blonde helmet. A creation about which she sometimes spoke in half surprise in the third person: what Marilyn had done again! Marilyn Monroe took Norma Jeane an hour and a half every day at the makeup table; she was always late because she felt – out of insecurity? – could not detach from the mirror.
After a difficult childhood in a foster home and orphanage – her single mother was psychotic – Marilyn Monroe struggled her way up in Hollywood as a starlet, defying the ‘casting couch’ and objectification. Once famous, she married and divorced the tough baseball hero Joe DiMaggio and the posh playwright Arthur Miller, started her own production company – unique at the time – and moved from Los Angeles to New York to be taken seriously not only as a film star but also as an actress – at The Actors Studio she trained in ‘The Method’. She was intellectually curious, had a quicksilver intelligence, was ambitious, brave and loyal. But she was also troubled, insecure and addicted to pills. A complex woman.
The opening of the Marilyn exhibition in Groningen is joyous on Friday, with a show orchestra and a Marilyn Monroe lookalike pouring bubbles from a huge champagne glass. Impersonator Suzie Kennedy sings ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’ on stage. Ladies dress in glitter, gentlemen in tuxedos: Groningen plays Hollywood.
Marilyn Monroe in Korea in 1954.
Photo Bettmann Archive
A troubled life crowned with an early death helps you become an icon: see also Elvis, Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson. But their music is still heard everywhere, while hardly anyone sees Marilyn Monroe’s feature films anymore. Most visitors probably know her from photos and fragments: Marilyn with a white dress above the subway grate The Seven Year Itch (her most expensive dress, by the way, sold for $5.65 million in 2011). And especially of echoes: Madonna’s tribute to her musical routine ‘Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend’ in the music video of ‘Material Girl‘. The Marilyn exhibition in Groningen says goodbye to its visitors with Monroe wannabees on a jumbo screen: Madonna, Beyoncé, Rihanna.
Feminist icon
For them, Marilyn Monroe is a feminist icon: a woman who in pre-feminist times used her sexuality to survive in a man’s world. That is also the Marilyn Monroe that collector Ted Stampfer wants to emphasize. “She struggled with problems, but look at the world she lived in. Marilyn had the courage to break the rules. To wear pants when dresses were required, to have herself photographed while training with weights, which was considered masculine at the time.”
The fact that she, once famous, defied the Fox studio and founded a production company herself, impressed Stampfer even more as a businessman. That strong Monroe is therefore emphasized in Groningen, and now actually everywhere. Her death is then an accident or plot, not fate. Although you can also read that telling, cynical quote from her own autobiography in the Groningen Forum: “Yes, I had something special and I knew what it was. I was that girl who would be found lifeless in her bedroom with an empty jar of sleeping pills in her hand.”
The vulnerable, self-destructive aspect, seeking validation from older men she called ‘Daddy’: that is less popular now. We prefer the strong Marilyn Monroe to the vulnerable Norma Jeane Mortenson that director Andrew Dominik showed in his visually stunning biographical film in 2022 Blonde – to be seen on Netflix: a traumatized ‘little girl lost’ driven to a premature death by abuse, contempt and sexism, for whom Marilyn Monroe was also a dysfunctional protection mechanism. When asked, collector Ted Stampfer says that he Blonde consciously did not see. “It gives a wrong impression of her, and something of that remains in your mind when you leave the room.”
