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Size: 2 1/2" x 3 1/2"
💋 Marilyn in a black off-the-shoulder gown at the foot of a grand staircase, with her signature stamped in gold foil across the bottom. This is card #126 from Sports Time's 1995 Marilyn Monroe II set, new old stock, and I think it's one of the loveliest pictures in the whole run.
The front is the photograph inside a dark green marbled border with a thin gold rule, and a gold-foil facsimile Marilyn Monroe signature on a little gold plaque at the bottom. The back repeats the picture smaller and tells you about the movie:
"Marilyn was seldom more beautiful than as she appeared in 1950's "The Asphalt Jungle." Marilyn was loaned to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer specifically for the role of Angela Phinlay, and made a lasting impression within "Jungle's" heavyweight cast. Marilyn's best roles from these years usually came in non-Twentieth Century-Fox releases, with "Clash by Night" (RKO) another example."
Under that: ©1995 Sports Time, Inc. Design ©1995 The Estate of Marilyn Monroe. All Rights Reserved. The signature and Marilyn™ are trademarks of the Estate of Marilyn Monroe, Represented by The Roger Richman Agency, Inc. Beverly Hills, CA. And the number 126 in the corner.
The Asphalt Jungle is John Huston's 1950 heist picture for MGM, with Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, James Whitmore and Sam Jaffe. Marilyn plays Angela Phinlay, the young girlfriend of Calhern's crooked lawyer, Alonzo Emmerich. It got four Oscar nominations, for Huston's directing, the screenplay, Sam Jaffe and Harold Rosson's photography, and in 2008 the Library of Congress put it in the National Film Registry. Huston had wanted Lola Albright for Angela and changed his mind after Marilyn's screen test.
Now here's a fun one for the collector. The card says she was "loaned" to MGM, but in 1950 she wasn't under contract to anybody. Columbia had signed her in 1948 and didn't renew, and she was getting by on bit parts and modeling. What she did have was Johnny Hyde, a vice-president at the William Morris Agency, who met her in 1949 while Bruno Bernard was photographing her at the Racquet Club in Palm Springs. Hyde got her Angela in The Asphalt Jungle and Miss Caswell in All About Eve, and the buzz from those two parts let him get her a seven-year contract at Twentieth Century-Fox in December 1950. He died of a heart attack on December 18, 1950, just days after landing it.
The card's other example, Clash by Night, is Fritz Lang's 1952 picture for RKO with Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas and Robert Ryan. Marilyn plays Peggy, a lively cannery girl, and it was the first film to bill her name above the title. The comedies and the blonde bombshell parts came right after, and in 1999 the American Film Institute ranked her sixth among the greatest female screen legends.
Sports Time put out its first Marilyn Monroe set in 1993, 100 cards sold in silver foil packs of nine with ten chromium cards slipped in at random, and came back in 1995 with Marilyn Monroe II, numbered 101 to 200, which is where #126 comes from. Series II had its own insert cards too, Holochrome cards and gold signature cards among them. Sports Time also did Baywatch and Miller Brewing sets in 1995, a Beatles set in 1996, and several sets of Playboy covers.
That agency line on the back is a little piece of history of its own. Roger Richman started his Beverly Hills agency in 1978 to protect the names and faces of stars who had passed on, and he represented the heirs of Marilyn, Albert Einstein, Mae West, Sigmund Freud and the Marx Brothers, among many others. He co-wrote California's 1985 Celebrity Rights Act. Anna Strasberg, who inherited the Monroe estate from Lee Strasberg, hired Richman in 1983 to look after Marilyn's merchandise and ended that partnership in 1996, when the estate moved to CMG Worldwide. So this card comes from right near the end of the Richman years.
🖼️ Pop it in a top loader on the shelf beside your Monroe books, slide it into a binder page, or tuck it into a card for the Marilyn fan in your life.
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