THE LAST WILL OF MARILYN MONROE

Who inherited Marilyn Monroe’s estate? Per Monroe’s will, Monroe gave $10,000 each to her longtime assistant and to her half-sister. She put $5,000 in a trust fund for the education of her assistant’s child, and she left a $100,000 trust fund for her mother. 75 percent of Monroe’s intellectual property and estate were left to her acting coach, Lee Strasberg, and the remaining 25 percent was given to her New York psychiatrist Dr. Marianne Kris. “She felt that [Kris] was very helpful and sympathetic,” Sarah Churchwell, author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, told NPR in 2012. “She found that [Kris] was starting to help her understand what it was that she was going through.” After Dr. Kris died, a portion of her estate was transferred to the Anna Freud Centre in London, which works with children experiencing mental health issues. “That would have made [Monroe] really happy,” Churchwell said. “She did want to do good, and she wanted to feel as if she had accomplished something.”

When Monroe’s acting coach Strasberg died in 1982, his second wife Anna Mizrahi inherited Monroe’s estate and hired CMG Worldwide—a company that manages the estates of dead celebrities—to license Monroe merchandise and that’s when the Some Like It Hot star really started bringing in the big bucks. “We did hundreds and hundreds of programs with companies like Mercedes-Benz to Coca-Cola to fragrance, clothing, giftware, collectibles, paper products, things like that,” CMG CEO Mark Roesler told NPR. Mizrahi made Monroe one of the highest-paid dead celebrities in the world, according to Forbes. Marilyn Monroe LLC was established and between the years 1996 and 2000, she made more than $7.5 million in licensing revenue.

Monroe’s will stated that she wanted her personal effects and clothing to go to her friends and colleagues, but Mizrahi commissioned auctioneer’s Christies to sell off the items in 1999, including the famous peach-and-rhinestone dress she wore to sing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy (and which Kim Kardashian infamously wore to the Met Gala in 2022). The dress went for more than $1 million (it was sold again in 2016 for $4.8 million to Ripley Entertainment). Monroe’s cherished grand piano sold for $600,000 to pop icon Mariah Carey. “I wish her things didn’t have to be auctioned off,” Carey said at the time. “It’s a shame—I wish somebody had the money to buy it all and put it in a museum.” In 2011, Mizrahi sold her 75 percent stake in Monroe’s estate to Authentic Brands group for a deal estimated to be between $20-30 million...