Moments in Time: Marilyn Monroe

More than 50 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe continues to fascinate the public. The most recent example of her timeless, transfixing spell comes in the form of one of the legendary bombshell’s most admired assets: her gorgeous blonde hair. Moments in Time, a purveyor specializing in collectibles, is now offering up a lock of Monroe’s famous mane, giving the public a chance to own a piece of Old Hollywood history nonpareil. The cost for such an iconic piece of cinematic gold? A cool $16,500.

Housed in a display box, the hair clipping comes from the actress’s hairdresser Kenneth Battelle and is dated June 14, 1959. The paper box features two glass framed pieces: one which contains a lock of around 35 strands of hair (making each follicle worth somewhere around $471) and, next to it, there’s an image of the iconic actress in the middle of her signature laugh. Still, Marilyn Monroe’s legacy has cast a longer shadow than most, and a get like this will certainly go quickly. If you’re a Monroe aficionado, we’d suggest ponying up the dough as quickly as possible. As they say: Hair today, gone tomorrow. Source: robbreport.com

Marilyn Monroe has come to represent our notion (however nostalgic) of 1950s attitudes, as scholars like Sarah Paige Baty (in her essay American Monroe, 1995) show. As critic Richard Dyer argued in Stars (1980), "Monroe’s image must be situated in the flux of ideas about morality and sexuality that characterized the 50s in America and can be indicated by such instances as the spread of Freudian ideas in post-war America, the Kinsey report, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, rebel stars such as James Dean and Elvis Presley, etc. Marilyn Monroe’s combination of sexuality and innocence is part of that flux, but one can also see her “charisma” as being the apparent condensation of all that within her. Marilyn invented a persona—The Girl—that would at first seem to release her from the bad things of her childhood, but which later became like one of her childhood ghouls, leaning over her, making her all sex, suffocating her. Thus she seemed to “be” the very tensions that ran through the ideological life of 50s." —"The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe" (2005) by Sarah Churchwell