Marilyn Monroe photos to go on sale
Mike
and prints of Hollywood stars and celebrities from the 1950s
By Marcin Grajewski
WARSAW (Variety), April 20 - The Polish state treasury plans to sell
thousands of unpublished photographs of Marilyn Monroe and other Hollywood
legends, a government agency that owns the collection said Friday. The
collection of celebrated photographer Milton Greene, which also features
stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, was
acquired in 1995 by Poland's foreign debt agency from a U.S. businessman.
"THE TIME IS ripe to turn it into cash," said Piotr Grzeskiewicz, an
administrator of the assets of the liquidated Foreign Debt Servicing Fund
(FOZZ).
"We have to decide on the best way to sell the collection. We do not
want to spoil the market by flooding it with the photos," he said in an
interview.
The collection contains about 300,000 negatives and several thousand
prints of Hollywood stars and other celebrities, mostly from the 1950s. Its
value is at least several million dollars, Grzeskiewicz said.
The photographer who shot the pictures, Milton Greene, worked for
magazines such as Life and Vogue and died in 1985.
The best parts of his archive are the photos of Monroe, which Greene
took between 1949 and 1956 when he was the star's friend and business
partner, said Grzeskiewicz.
Their partnership, which involved film production, ended in 1956,
when the actress, known for movies such as "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and
"Some Like it Hot," married the playwright Arthur Miller.
GOOD PRICE EXPECTED
Grzeskiewicz said he expected a good price for the collection as
memorabilia of the sex icon usually arouse strong interest, despite last
month's failure to sell the nude pictures of her at an auction in the United
States.
He added he wanted to dispose of the collection because his main task
as the liquidator of the debt servicing fund was to generate cash.
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The Fund was created in the late 1980s by the then communist
authorities to secretly buy back Poland's foreign debt at large discounts on
secondary markets, a practice forbidden on financial markets.
When the country's new democratic governments began to liquidate the
Fund after the fall of the old regime in 1989, it appeared that more than
$100 million of its money was likely to have been embezzled by its managers.
Grzeskiewicz acquired the collection from a businessman who had been
used as a middleman in Polish debt buybacks. Grzeskiewicz said the man had
failed to return the Fund's money and instead handed over the collection.
FROM http://www.msnbc.com/news/562349.asp?0na=2224142-