I don’t know any man who was young in the early 1960s and who did not have a crush on Marilyn Monroe. As this generation is starting to face death, one rich man can be with Marilyn for eternity. The DailyNews reports:

Even in death, Marilyn Monroe is still snagging millionaires.

An unidentified deep-pocketed fan who clearly prefers blonds placed the winning $4.6 million bid Monday in an eBay auction for the crypt directly above the sexy screen icon’s grave. Beverly Hills widow Elsie Poncher put her husband’s strategically positioned crypt on the auction block with a starting price of $500,000. Bidding soared to $4.5 million three days later.
“Here is a once in a lifetime and into eternity opportunity to spend your eternal days directly above Marilyn Monroe,” the eBay auction description boasted. Richard Poncher was buried face down, looking at Marilyn, when he died 23 years ago at age 81, the posting revealed. His 80-year-old widow said she decided to move his remains and sell the valuable vault at the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery.

She plans to use the cash to pay off a $1.6 million mortgage on her Beverly Hills home.

“I can’t be more honest than that,” she told The Los Angeles Times. “I want to leave it free and clear for my kids.”

A woman who answered the phone at Elsie Poncher’s house said the family had no comment. “We still don’t know who bought it,” she said.

An eBay spokeswoman said privacy rules prohibit the company from revealing the winning bidder’s identity without prior consent.

Richard Poncher bought the crypt from Yankee great Joe DiMaggio during his divorce from Monroe, the widow said.

The Yankee Clipper had planned to be buried on top of Monroe’s grave, until their made-in-Hollywood romance turned sour.

Richard Poncher wasn’t a huge fan of Monroe at the time that he bought the crypt, but the bombshell grew on him over time.

As he lay dying, Poncher told his wife not to even think of burying him anywhere else.

“He said, ‘If I croak, if you don’t put me upside down over Marilyn, I’ll haunt you the rest of my life,’” Elsie Poncher said.

A cemetery spokeswoman said Monroe’s grave has helped make Pierce Brothers a top tourist destinations in Los Angeles.

“Anyone can walk through and see it during visiting hours,” she said.

Screen siren Natalie Wood, Dean Martin and Roy Orbison are buried nearby.

Monroe died of a drug overdose ruled a “probable suicide” at the age of 36 in 1962.

The star of “Some Like It Hot,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” was named the sexiest woman of the 20th century by both Playboy and People magazines.

The stone facade of her aboveground crypt stands out with a darker hue left by the fingerprints and lipstick marks of countless fans.
Source

Here is an account on the appeal she had on young people during her lifetime

Such a Sad, Sad Story
By Jonathan Yardley
Sunday, August 30, 2009

THE SECRET LIFE OF MARILYN MONROE

By J. Randy Taraborrelli

Grand Central. 560 pp. $26.99

A quarter-century ago, reviewing “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,” by Anthony Summers, in this newspaper, I wondered whether, with the publication of what was the 39th book about her, “enough has at last been said about this sad story.” Obviously my wonderings were very much in error. How many other books about her have been published between then and now I do not know, but here comes J. Randy Taraborrelli with what his publisher calls “the definitive biography . . . explosive, revelatory, and surprisingly moving.”

You will not be surprised to learn that in fact “The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe” is none of the above. Taraborrelli, a freelance journalist who specializes in gossipy fan bios of supermarket tabloid favorites—his subjects have included Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross and (of course) Jackie Kennedy—stakes his shaky claim to originality on two aspects of Monroe’s life: the three women who were central to her troubled childhood and adolescence, and the strong current of mental instability that ran through her mother’s side of the family. But these matters are well known to anyone who has followed Monroe’s life and career, and there is nothing “explosive” or even “revelatory” in Taraborrelli’s discussion of them.

Doubtless it will come as a surprise to younger readers that Monroe continues to be the subject of books, articles, documentaries, songs and heaven knows what else four and a half decades after her death—she committed suicide in 1962—but even today she remains what she was in the final decade of her life, an enduring presence in American popular mythology. I cannot cite statistical chapter and verse, but it seems a safe bet that if you say the name “Marilyn,” at least four out of five adult Americans will know immediately whom you mean. Of how many others can that be said? Elvis, Jackie, Di . . . the list is remarkably short.

This instant first-name recognition confers a kind of immortality, and Monroe’s shows no signs of fading. Only one of the 31 movies in which she appeared has real staying power—Billy Wilder’s brilliantly acerbic “Some Like It Hot” (1959)—yet her image, on film and in still photographs, remains to this day the American epitome of feminine beauty and sex appeal. The nude pinup for which she posed in 1949 seems positively tame today, yet it has lost none of its allure. The famous images of her face done by Andy Warhol may not be art, but they most certainly are iconography. Her marital and/or sexual connections to some of the most famous men of her day—Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, Frank Sinatra, John F. Kennedy—are still gossiped about, puzzled over, romanticized and vilified. In short, she endures.

I’m certainly not alone among Americans of a certain age in remembering exactly where I was on the day of her death. In the late afternoon of Aug. 5, 1962, I was leaving the Polo Grounds after watching the New York Mets split a doubleheader with the Cincinnati Reds when I saw, at the entrance to the 155th St. subway station, newsboys hawking tabloid extras with the news announced in big, black type. I was stunned, as obviously were all the others who crowded around to buy copies. After all she was only 36 years old—a mere 13 years older than I was—and recent photographs had suggested that she was at the height of her beauty. That she was dead was unbelievable and insupportable.

All of which explains why I continue to read, and occasionally to review, books about her. To the best of my recollection there isn’t a single good one. “Goddess” comes closest, though the prose is almost as indigestible as Taraborrelli’s, which is clumsy and breathless (he has a penchant for dropping in the occasional exclamation point, almost always inappropriately). Taraborrelli’s attempts at psychological analysis are either obvious or inept; his exploration of her erotic life is a mixture of sensationalism and incompetence (at one point he tells us that she “was not interested in sex,” a few hundred pages later that she was a creature of passion); and his analysis of her movies never tells us anything new, much less perceptive.

One reads doggedly through more than 500 pages of text and appendices hoping for some flash of insight, something to justify all the hours Taraborrelli spent cobbling this together, but not once does such a moment arrive. Someone who knows nothing about Monroe’s life and legend will find the essential facts here, but no pleasure is to be derived from Taraborrelli’s recital of them.

She was born Norma Jeane Mortensen on June 1, 1926, in the Los Angeles General Hospital. Though her mother, Gladys Baker, had been married previously, the identity of her father was and remains unknown. Gladys was unstable (to put it charitably) and turned the child over to a woman named Ida Bolender, who loved her and wanted to adopt her, but Gladys eventually reappeared and took the child back. It was Norma Jeane’s good fortune that her mother had a friend, Grace Atkinson McKee, who provided affection and guidance, but the child was made insecure and desperate for love, as she would remain for the rest of her life.

People realized early on that she was uncommonly beautiful, and Grace saw possibilities for her in the movies. Of course every pretty girl in Los Angeles had the same idea, but Norma Jeane had the goods. After becoming a widely published photographer’s model, she signed a contract with MGM soon after her 20th birthday, changed her name to Marilyn Monroe at the studio’s insistence, and began the rather uncertain progress toward the éclat she achieved thanks to the nude photo and the success of her first starring role, opposite Joseph Cotton in “Niagara” (1953).

A number of her subsequent films were box-office hits, notably “The Seven Year Itch” (1955), with its celebrated raised-skirt scene, but mostly she was cast in sexy blond roles, which she resented; she was intelligent and ambitious for more serious work, though how suited for it will forever remain a mystery. She married three times, never happily, and slept with many men, though exactly how many and with how much or how little pleasure, we also never will know. She was hooked on a pharmacopoeia of drugs, and at times drank too much, a dangerous combination that did nothing to improve her deepening insecurity and mental imbalance. Taraborrelli doubtless is right (though scarcely the first) to say that the institutionalization of her mother and grandmother haunted her, just as the children and grandchildren of suicides often are haunted by the fear that the same fate awaits them.

She was a decent, kind person who wanted to be loved but had execrable taste in men, too many of whom used and then abused her. Her story is inexpressibly sad, and even in the hands of one as inept as Taraborrelli it retains its power.