Being in a particularly festive mood, I thought I'd share one of my favourite group-signed autographed pieces. I've had this for donkey's years. I bought it at auction before the auction house in question was even on the internet.

It is a film programme for the "Royal Fim Performance" of October 1956 that was attended by Queen Elizabeth and some pretty heavy-hitting actresses and a few less heavy-hitting actors too. Far and away the most important in fame and autograph terms was Marilyn Monroe, who was in England filming "The Prince and the Showgirl". Others attending included Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, Joan Crawford, Arlene Dahl, Vera Ellen, Victor Mature, Dana Andrews and - not quite Hollywood but a very famous comic in the UK at the time - Norman Wisdom. All of these have signed. As  a nice twist both Marilyn and Vera were in Love Happy together and I have a (very rare) British quad poster showing only Vera!

The programme was collected by a guy who collected autographs at many Royal Film Performance events in the 50s and perhaps 60s (I only remember others from the 50s, signed by people like Elizabeth Taylor). The auction house sold off each of the years separately but this was by far and away the "best" and it was the only one I bought. With hindsight I wish I'd bought them all, just to keep them together. I still have the whole programme so in theory I could get the page tipped back in if I ever felt the urge but to be honest the programme is really just full of adverts - though it is actually like a book. 

To me this was a must have as I am a big collector of Monroe, Bardot and Ekberg film memorabilia (posters, press photos etc.). I could well imagine that this is one of only a few  items in existence signed by all three of the top 50s "blonde bombshells" (I guess Mansfield fans may not agree that Ekberg is the third of them) and quite possibly the only one. I know that "group-signed" items are not always the most collected but this still seems pretty special to me.

I have subsequently seen that both the dress and the gloves Marilyn wore on this night were auctioned at other auction houses. The dress fetched about £30k and the gloves about £3k. Both sales took place well before I bought this piece. I'm not into buying celebrity clothing but had the gloves come up later I would have been tempted to have a bid. 

Here are the images. I've attached jpgs too.

Close-up

Full page

With photo (obtained from press agency but not vintage - I did buy vintage images later but didn't want to re-frame)

The reason I even thought of posting this was to continue a discussion we had recently about a couple of eBay items.

https://live.autographmagazine.com/forum/topics/two-authenticated-m...

The discussion included a Marilyn Monroe Miller autograph. Some contributors were sceptical because the "Ms" were broken. I think that my example shows that broken Ms are probably not such an issue. From the second "M" it is clear that Marilyn's pen was not always leaving ink on the paper. If you look closely at the close-up you can just see indentations of much bigger loops. For some reason Marilyn seems to have been able to apply pressure without applying ink - maybe she had difficulties using a fountain pen. Given that I cannot work out how she formed her first "M" I suspect the same problem arose there. The "y" in Marilyn is also practically missing.

Another question I posed was why Marilyn only wrote Miller at certain times in her marriage to Arthur. I guess in October 1956 she had not been married long. If anyone has any input on this please fire away. 

Finally, I mentioned that the eBay example had ink blobs in some odd places. I'm glad to say that all my blobs appear to be where they should be!

On that note, season's greetings from Switzerland!!!