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Entertainment behind the scenes
Eternity with Marilyn Monroe goes back on auction block
If you didn’t succeed the first time in your bid to spend eternity in a crypt above Marilyn Monroe, try again.
That’s what the auction team handling the sale of the crypt is saying, after a previous eBay sale for $4.6 million fell through in August.
Eric Gazin, president of AuctionCause.com, told Reuters he believes there may have been some qualified bidders in the first eBay auction, but that there was no system in place to determine who really had the cash for the crypt, which is located at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles.
This time around, the sale will also be on eBay, but bidders will have to be ready to make a deposit of 1 to 5 percent of the cost of the crypt, and they will have to prove that they have sufficient funds to buy it.
The crypt is expected to sell for millions of dollars.
And the auctioneer has more details on Richard Poncher, the man who bought the space above Marilyn Monroe’s crypt from Monroe’s ex-husband Joe DiMaggio, after meeting the baseball slugger at a Beverly Hills restaurant. Poncher had a yearning for the crypt because he wanted to have in death what he never had in life, the chance to be face down on top of Marilyn Monroe, which is how his family placed him when he died in 1986.
It turns out buying the crypt was not the only bright idea that Poncher had in a long life as an entrepreneur. Gazin said that in the 1920s, Poncher was living in Chicago and learned that an armored car company was going out of business. Sensing an opportunity, he approached Al Capone and obtained a loan from the gangster to build armored cars for him.
I wonder whether you should be slightly less flippant about this. The idea that dead people wanted to both live as long as they lived and then die when they died seems somewhat improbable. An element of tragedy suggests itself.