Word: marilyne
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...wasn't entirely a cold call. Years earlier, at an investment conference, I had sauntered over to the Historic Documents booth (between Oil Drilling and Annuities) and had been struck by a remarkable letter from Darryl Zanuck to Marilyn Monroe. It was on 20th Century Fox letterhead, scolding Marilyn for her "completely impractical request" to have a special dialogue director work with her on the set of Don't Bother to Knock (a movie rated "don't bother to see"). "You have built up a Svengali," the letter read in part, "and if you are going to progress with your...
...name once upon a time. And the caller wasn't exactly a college kid reading a script; he was a former curator of the Smithsonian. Still, I was getting all set to find some delicate way off the phone ("Oh, gosh, the ambulance is here") when I remembered the Marilyn letter. Forget Abe Lincoln ("Dear Sir: Herewith I send you my autograph, which you request. Yours Truly, A. Lincoln": $5,000). What about Marilyn...
...seems this particular letter was indeed still available, and now its price was $9,500. Bear in mind that this was not a letter from Marilyn Monroe, merely addressed to her (611 N. Crescent Drive, Beverly Hills), and that if it was still available, that meant nobody, apparently, had wanted...
...tell you how much I wound up paying for my Marilyn letter because you'll think I'm a fool. (All right, I paid $7,500 -- more than I've ever spent on a car.) And I won't tell you how I managed to get the price down even that little bit. (All right, as part of the deal, I agreed to buy a second item, for even more -- a letter from Albert Einstein describing Hitler as a lunatic -- and so got a little bit of a break on both.) But I will tell you that when novices like...
...think you should pause before spurning the safety of a savings account or Treasury bill just because rates are low. Stocks are no bargain (though some fire-sale real estate may be). And I think that Albert Einstein, if not Marilyn Monroe, is likely to loom as large 1,000 years from now as Van Gogh. So given the choice between a little piece of Einstein for $15,000 or a work by Van Gogh for $15 million (and given $15 million), I would opt for the Einstein, spend a further $28 on socks (to give the economy a little...