I was the very first Playboy centerfold—in December 1953.

Hugh Hefner had seen pictures of me, he had to have me as his first centerfold—guaranteeing success for Playboy—but he never got around to paying me, not a penny.

(Don’t believe me? That Mr. Hefner didn’t give me a penny? See, he’d bought the right to the photograph from the photographer for $500. Not a thing to do with me.)

(Which doesn’t mean that Hugh Hefner wasn’t crazy for me. For sure, he was.)

(Oh, Mr. Hefner was romantic! After I died, he paid $75,000 to purchase the cemetery plot right beside me, and when he died, in 2017, at the age of ninety-one, he was buried there—right beside me. His Marilyn.)

Bidding will start in a few minutes! Please take your (reserved) seat.

Please do not stand in the aisle staring at me, Daddy. I told you that I am the actual Marilyn—I mean, Norma Jeane. And yes, I am alive—I am a living thing.

You’re blocking the way for other customers, Daddy. There will be plenty of time to stare at me once you’re seated and the auction begins.

You are a special Sotheby’s Platinum Plus client, Daddy. Which is why there is a nameplate on your chair. Which is why I am smiling and winking at you.

Would you like to love me? Take me home with you? Yes?

Desperate for love all my life. Not just when I was Norma Jeane, scrambling to be a photographer’s model and starlet. All my life, until the last night of my life (about which we don’t have to speak, nor will you wish to inquire, for of all things Daddy does not wish to know about his Marilyn, her final miserable days and nights), for I’d been taught by my (abandoned, scorned) mother’s example that if a woman isn’t loved, she is nothing.

If a woman is not beautiful, desirable, glamorous, “sexy,” she isn’t going to be loved, and if she isn’t loved, she is—nothing. And if she is nothing, she will be very, very unhappy; like my mother, she will end up in a lunatic asylum, where the predominant desire is to wish to die.

Daddy, I have a feeling you will like this: a low-down-dirty thrill to learn that I was married while in high school—16—very young for my age despite my shapely body—(but a virgin!)—and very lonely. Though my mother did not love me for more than a few fleeting seconds over the years and could not force herself to embrace me, let alone kiss me, I cried and cried for her in the orphanage, where I was placed when she could not care for me, and in the (19) foster homes where I was sometimes—not always, only just sometimes—sexually molested.

Well, we didn’t call it by such a nasty term, then. Not sexually molested. So vulgar! You might say interfered with. You might say drew unwanted male attention. You might say the way that girl looked, already at age 12, you could see she was trouble.

In the final foster home in L.A., my foster mother took pity on me, or maybe she was exasperated with me for my continual surprise when boys and men “interfered” with me. She’d had enough of my crying and didn’t like the way my foster dad was eyeing me, so she introduced me to a neighborhood boy a few years older than me, who proposed to me right away—and we were married right away—except—(I never understood why, I don’t understand even now)—my young husband, Jim, abandoned me after just a few months to join the Merchant Marines and get as far away from Los Angeles as he could.