Marilyn Monroe's Lost Love Letters to Be Auctioned

Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe in 1955

It can no secret Joe DiMaggio loved Marilyn Monroe. The baseball great cried in her funeral and for 20 years had flowers placed at her crypt many times a week.

The public displays were unusual for the famously stoic and private DiMaggio. Right now, his heartbreak over the breakup of their marriage will get a rare public airing whenever "Marilyn Monroe's Lost Archives" goes up for bid at Julien's Auctions within 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 the girl 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. inch

The 300 items also include love letters from Monroe's third and last husband, playwright Arthur Miller. There's also a handwritten letter from Monroe to Burns in which the woman who was arguably Hollywood's greatest sex symbol muses about the girl many insecurities.

DiMaggio wrote in his letter that he learned Monroe was leaving behind him when he saw her make the announcement on television.

"My heart divided even wider seeing you cry in front of all these people, " he published in the letter addressed to "Mrs. Joe DiMaggio" and mailed Special Shipping.

Part of a three-page handwritten letter from Joe DiMaggio in order to Marilyn Monroe
 JAE C. HONG / AP PHOTO

Other letters within the collection come from such friends as Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Her Russell, the latter imploring Monroe in 10 neatly handwritten pages to provide her marriage to DiMaggio another chance.

"It really gives you the chills when you read some of the stuff and see the intimacy and the personal nature from it, " said auction curator Martin Nolan, who spent nine months arranging and cataloging the collection.

Auction owner Darren Julien estimates the pieces might fetch $1 million or more, noting a watercolor Monroe painted and prepared to give to President John F. Kennedy went for $80, 000 at an property auction nine years ago. Monroe's "collectability" has skyrocketed in recent years, driven in part through deep-pocketed Asian and European collectors with a fondness for American pop-culture artifacts, he said.

The fact that the centerpiece of this collection is not just celebrity tchotchkes however deeply personal artifacts is also expected to fuel interest.

"We anticipate a lot of followers will be here. They'll fly in from all over the world, " said Julien, that will put the items on display to the public at his Beverly Hills collection for four days before they go on the block Dec. 5-6.

Monroe, who passed away of a drug overdose at age 36 in 1962, willed "The Lost Archives" to her mentor, the legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg. He gave this to a friend he trusted would take proper care.

That friend's family, that Julien said wants to remain anonymous, obviously met Strasberg's expectations. Many of the characters look as pristine as the day their authors wrote them.

"Please, in case I've ever made you cry or made you even more sadder, even for any second, please forgive me, my perfect girl. I love you, " Burns wrote in a pencil-scribbled P. S. at the bottom of a typewritten letter.

In a answer one of his missives, Monroe takes issue with what the author of Death of the Salesman had called her nobility in handling a difficult childhood followed by general public adulation that nearly crushed her.

"In other words, there was no choice to create, the same road was always before me, " she wrote. "So that you can speak of my nobility, it really wasn't so noble. "

She went on to express: "It's doubly difficult to understand that you, the most different, most beautiful human being, chose me personally to love. "

Other items in the collection include a 19-minute reel of a film made for Monroe after her final picture, 1961's "The Misfits, " covered. It shows her frolicking happily at the beach with costar Gable as well as others.

Notably, there's also a framed letter she kept on her coffee table from outfit designer Cecil Beaton, who assured her she really was a fine actress.

"It's fantastic to see how loved she was, " Nolan said. "Like a person thought she was vulnerable and not loved and she craved love as well as she needed that reassurance. But she had it. She had this with Joe DiMaggio. She had it with Arthur Miller. "

As well as, so it seems, she still has it with much of the rest of the world.

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