PARTYING WITH THE PERSONAL BELONGINGS OF MARILYN MONROE

Last night we checked out the party at Christie's for the Marilyn Monroe auction. It was fun rubbing elbows with the odd but entertaining mix of folks who showed up, from recently installed Vibe editor Emil Wilbekin, to over-seasoned glamor dolls Arlene Dahl and Monique Van Vooren, to sexy crooner Lenny Kravitz (who came dressed in a psychedelic multi-colored fur-trimmed coat), to inane TV chatterboxes Richard Mineards and George Whipple, to the tightass pin-stripe-suit-and-velvet-headband-couples you always find at auction houses.

Scheduled for tonight and tomorrow night (October 27 and 28), the Monroe auction will give some of us ordinary people a chance to own 1500 items that have been irradiated by the most intense form of celebrity there is: the platinum and diamond eternity band that Joe DiMaggio gave Marilyn for their 1954 wedding (estimate: $30,000-50,000); the white baby grand piano that originally belonged to Marilyn's mom, which had been sold after mom was institutionalized but then rescued by Marilyn after years of searching (estimate: $10,000-15,000); the black sequinned dress that Marilyn wore in Korea in February, 1954, while singing to 10,000 soldiers (estimate: $30,000-50,000; plus lots of other dresses, furniture, jewelry, furs, shoes, books, odd household items, and, yes, a few bustiers.

Now, the only thing better than an open-bar party featuring choice-quality passed hors d'oeuvres, is one that's set amidst the personal belongings of one of America's greatest pop culture icons. But Marilyn goes beyond that, doesn't she? Her intelligence, talent, and beauty, the generosity obvious in both her performances and her public persona, her vulnerable yet still rather steely nature, the fact that she tangled with masters of the universe and may have been executed by one of them-- all that takes her beyond pop culture into some realm like religion. In fact, after wandering from gallery to gallery, finally coming into the spotlit presence of that spectacular "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" dress-- a dazzling beaded dream of idealized nudity-- we felt like we were entering the sanctum sanctorum of some eternal temple and coming face to face with the goddess. (Lucky bastard, JFK.)

Of course, a couple of glasses of wine amplified this effect. Actually, we stayed much later than we'd planned to (and staying too long at a party is something we hate doing because it kinda shows that you don't have any place more important to get to, which, in New York, means social death). But an interesting thing happened as the Christie's party thinned out: it became easier and easier to see the stuff we'd missed the first few times around. So we could zoom in even closer on all the details we really wanted to see-- inscriptions on photographs, notes in scripts, makeup stains around collars, hand-done stitches on the birthday dress-- and we wound up with an almost overpoweringly physical sensation of Marilyn herself: the woman whose feet once scuffed into those slippers after an exhausting day at the studio, whose shoulders once slumped beneath that bulky Mexican cardigan.

Yet, seeing all that stuff didn't feel as sad as other celebrity auctions have felt. Nureyev, Jackie O, the Windsors-- those auction viewings felt pathetic, even gruesome to us. This one had a real swinger vibe, like our fantasy of a Rat Pack party. The canned music helped-- upbeat standards from the '50s and '60s-- and then there was all that stardust...