“We Marilyn Monroe collectors have a saying: You don’t choose Marilyn, Marilyn chooses you,” says Scott Fortner, one of the premier collectors of Monroe’s personal items. Fortner says that behind the most glamorous star of the 1950s was a real person whose everyday life was just as luminous.
Fortner was “just a 12-year-old small-town Nebraska kid who didn’t know anything” about the ’50s when he watched The Jayne Mansfield Story on TV. Loni Anderson‘s portrayal of the busty bombshell ignited the young man’s curiosity about the 1950s, and it wasn’t long before he found his true icon: Marilyn Monroe.