A judge told an attorney for an auction house Monday that he wants to know who is in possession of a letter written by Marilyn Monroe to her longtime mentor and acting coach, pending the outcome of a trial over its ownership.
Robert Enders, an attorney for Calabasas-based auctioneer Profiles in History, said the letter’s purchaser — who is not identified by name or gender in court papers — advised him last week that the letter would be sent to the buyer’s personal attorney in Los Angeles for safekeeping.
Enders said the person in possession of the letter — from Monroe to acting coach Lee Strasberg — did not give him any specifics about who would receive the letter and when.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Richard Fruin said he wanted answers to both.
In an Aug. 11 hearing, Fruin suggested placing the letter with an independent third party, while its ownership was litigated.
He also asked plaintiff Anna Strasberg’s attorney, Bradley Mancuso, to let him know when his client would be available to be deposed by Enders.
Strasberg sued Profiles in History in May 2013, saying she learned in April 2013 that the letter, dubbed a “letter of despair” in a New York Post article, was missing her collection, which she inherited from her late husband – – the administrator Monroe’s estate.
The undated letter was penned on Hotel Bel-Air stationery.
“My will is weak but I can’t stand anything. I sound crazy but I think I’m going crazy … It’s just that I get before a camera and my concentration and everything I’m trying to learn leaves me,” Monroe wrote. “Then I feel like I’m not existing in the human race at all.”
According to court papers, Anna Strasberg thought the letter was with other Monroe memorabilia, locked in a filing cabinet at home.
The letter was bought via the Internet and sold by Profiles in History.
The buyer, however, is not a party to the case. But Strasberg’s attorney, Bradley Mancuso, said he may name him as a defendant.
While Monday’s deposition of his client would be done, he said he would rather wait until he knows whether or not to bring the buyer into the case. That way, Strasberg would only have to be deposed once.
“I’d like to know who we’re fighting and what we’re fighting over before I take the next step,” he said.
Strasberg lives on the East Coast, is 75 years old and in poor health, Mancuso said.
Mancuso said Stasberg believed the letter was stolen. But Enders told Fruin the consigner who provided the letter to the auction house said he got it from a member of the housekeepoing staff at the Hotel Bel-Air in the 1970s and that it was a draft of a letter never sent Lee Strasberg.
Strasberg, who wants unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, became heir to her husband’s estate, including the Monroe letters, when he died in February 1982 at age 80.
Monroe died in Brentwood in August 1962 at age 36 of acute barbiturate poisoning. The coroner’s office listed the death as a probable suicide.
—City News Service