Not to boast a little, but I wasn’t just the first—and most famous—Playboy centerfold, I was also the first Playboy cover. All over America on newsstands—the newest glossy magazine for men, with Marilyn Monroe on the cover! Though I am wearing a low-cut dress in this photograph, though I am not nude, yet how gorgeous I am, and how young!—my face distended by a wide red lipstick smile that will never, ever go out.

See, Daddy? Just the way I’m smiling at you right now.

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—sixteen—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 (nineteen) 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 twelve, you could see she was trouble.