Did she or didn’t she? For six decades fans have speculated whether Marilyn Monroe had cosmetic surgery to jump-start her career. “Nobody really thought about Marilyn Monroe having plastic surgery. It was always speculation” said the Martin Nolan, executive director of Julien’s Auctions, to Reuters. “They thought she was such a natural beauty… They didn’t want to believe.”
Six X-rays and a file of doctors’ notes reveal the partial medical history of the “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” actress from 1950 to 1962, and are expected to sell for anywhere between $15,000 and $30,000 at the auction on Nov. 9th & 10th. This estimate is according to Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, California.
The seller received the items as a gift from Michael Gurdin, the Hollywood plastic surgeon that treated the glamorous golden girl during the latter part of Hollywood’s golden era.
Dr. Gurdin’s notes make reference to a chin implant placed in 1950, which he observed had slowly begun to dissolve. Monroe’s biggest films, such as “How to Marry a Millionaire,” & “Some Like It Hot,” were all shot after 1950. Plastic surgery at that time was very new and not at all common.
In 2010, a self-published memoir by Norman Leave, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, claimed that Monroe had underwent a slight rhinoplasty on the tip of her nose. The X-rays dated from June 7, 1962 show that Monroe saw Dr. Gurdin following a late night fall and a recent evaluation of the X-rays found a minute fracture, the auction house stated.
Monroe went under the alias name “Joan Newman” and by her married name, Marilyn Miller. Her X-rays list her height as 5 feet, 6 inches and her weight as 115 lbs.
The notes also indicate that in 1956 Marilyn suffered from neutropenia, a low level of a white blood cell type, and that she’d had an ectopic pregnancy in 1957.