Marilyn Monroe
Signed until 1962, so the supply is fixed — nothing new is being added to this market.
Recorded sales
| Date | What sold | Certified | Price | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-08-22 | Baseball signed by Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe described as the finest known Multi-signed | PSA/DNA Auto 7.5 | $384,000 | auction result |
| 2021-08-22 | 1954 Broadway playbill signed by Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe Multi-signed | PSA/DNA Auto 9 | $11,100 | auction result |
| 2020-05-20 | Signed and inscribed 1950 original studio 8x10 portrait | PSA/DNA Authentic Auto | $10,800 | auction result |
| 2023-11-18 | 2021-22 Panini Eminence cut signature card numbered 1 of 1 | $8,540 | auction result | |
| 2025-02-23 | 1961 Marilyn Monroe signed cheque | PSA/DNA Authentic Auto | $5,978 | auction result |
By certification level
These are 5 results this index has recorded from Heritage Auctions between 2020 and 2025, not every sale that happened. They under-represent inexpensive items, which sell constantly and are reported rarely, and they exclude private sales this index has no record of. Read them as documented evidence rather than as a complete market.
About this signature
- Status
- Signed until 1962supply is fixed
- Note
- Died 1962, before any signing industry; her market is documents and photographs
- On this index
- 0 listedno sales recorded yet
What does a Marilyn Monroe autograph cost?
Items she signed alone run from around six thousand dollars for a cheque to just under eleven thousand for an inscribed studio portrait. There is no cheap end to this market and there never will be: she died in August 1962, before the private signing circuit, before manufacturer autographs, and before anybody was producing signed material at scale. Everything that exists was signed in the ordinary course of her life.
Why did one baseball sell for three hundred and eighty-four thousand?
Because Joe DiMaggio signed it too. A signature by each of them is worth something in the region of six to eleven thousand dollars. The two together on one baseball, in an example described as the finest known, made $384,000 - roughly twenty-six times what the pair of them fetch separately. What is being bought is not two autographs but a single object that records a marriage, and that marriage lasted two hundred and eighty-six days in 1954. Both dual-signed results here date from that year. The other one, a Broadway playbill they both signed, made eleven thousand, so the premium is not automatic: it attaches to the object as much as to the pairing.
What sort of things did she actually sign?
Documents and photographs, overwhelmingly, plus cut signatures harvested from correspondence and mounted into modern products long after her death. One of the results here is a 2021 Panini card built around a cut signature, which is a piece of her handwriting in a holder made fifty-nine years after she died. There are no signed cards from her lifetime because nobody made any, and the shape of her market is entirely a fact about when she lived. We have written about DiMaggio's signature and his refusal to sign anything relating to her after her death.
Signatures are reproduced more often than most buyers realise, by outright forgery and also by machines and assistants signing on somebody’s behalf. Every item on this page has been examined by PSA/DNA, JSA, Beckett, SGC or CGC, and this index carries nothing else. That is a deliberate restriction, and the investigation that created the modern authentication industry is worth reading, along with what a certificate actually claims.