The black and white photograph that shows actress Marilyn Monroe, President Kennedy, who seems to be turning away from the camera, and his brother Robert, is to be put for an auction.
The image will be put to be auctioned on Tuesday at the Art & Artifact Gallery in West Hollywood, California.
The photograph that has her wearing her revealing, rhinestone studded dress that she wore singing at Madison Square Garden in New York, is the only one photograph available that pictures JFK and Marilyn together.
The dress she is wearing was auctioned for £860,000 in 1999.
The photograph was clicked on May 19 1962 at a Democratic fund raising event after her infamous rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” for him. This was Marilyn’s last public appearance after which she had a mystifying death in August 1962. Since then, her affair with the President has been in news.
“There is no other known photo of Bobby [Kennedy] with Marilyn or JFK with Marilyn, and it’s not because they were never photographed together,” said filmmaker Keya Morgan, who is selling the print.
“In fact, they were photographed together many times, but the Secret Service and the FBI confiscated every single photograph.”
Mr. Morgan who bought the photograph for the documentary he is making about Miss Monroe claims that Mr. Stoughton told him that the photograph survived because when the agents came to confiscate it, the negative of the pictures were in the photographic dryer. Mr. Stoughton has not revealed the photograph since then because he didn’t want to upset the President’s wife, Jackie Kennedy, who was in good terms with him.
It is one of only 10 prints from the negative and is expected to reach £16,000 at auction. “You know, Marilyn died within months. President Kennedy died the next year and Bobby a few years from that. So what a haunting photograph, and it’s the only one of any of them together,” said Mr. Morgan.
The picture also shows President Kennedy’s aide American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr and singer Harry Belafonte. Schlesinger’s personal journal, published in 2007, quoted the impact Monroe had on him, at the private gathering. “The image of this exquisite, beguiling and desperate girl will always stay with me,” he wrote. “I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful; I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating.”
