Movie Memorabilia Fetch Record Prices : Photographs From Early Marilyn Monroe Modeling Assignment Bring $53,955

A collection of 96 color slides and six black-and-white prints of Norma Jean Dougherty--reportedly her third professional modeling assignment before she was packaged as Hollywood sex goddess Marilyn Monroe--sold Tuesday for $53,955 at Christie’s East auction house in New York City.

The photographs were sold in several lots by telephone to between three and five anonymous bidders, said Christie’s spokeswoman Lee Anne Fahey. She said the buyers, who did not want to be identified, did not indicate their plans for the pictures, which showed Norma Jean/Marilyn Monroe in a variety of Malibu beach settings in August, 1945.

The photographs, representing an all-day photo shoot for a $20 modeling fee, were taken by Bill Carroll, who owned a photo processing business in Los Angeles at the time.

Carroll, who later moved to San Marcos in northern San Diego County and is now a semi-retired free-lance writer and photographer, only used one of the pictures for a counter-top photo display card and stored away the others in a box.

Carroll said he never realized his model became Marilyn Monroe, whose career he never followed. He rediscovered the photographs in 1968--six years after her suicide--and said he still did not consider them valuable until another set of Norma Jean photographs were auctioned at Christie’s in London last year. Those 25 pictures--reportedly the first professional pictures ever taken of Norma Jean and cast as her “discovery pictures�--fetched $25,000.