Why Hugh Hefner Bought the Crypt Beside Marilyn Monroe at Westwood

Hugh Hefner’s crypt sits immediately beside Marilyn Monroe’s in the Corridor of Memories at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles. The neighboring names can suggest a personal relationship, yet the connection that brought them together began with a photograph purchased for a magazine. Monroe helped make Playboy possible without posing for it, and Hefner later paid to make that association permanent. Their adjoining burial spaces became the final, controversial expression of a relationship conducted largely through her image. That image began far from the cemetery. In May 1949, Monroe was an actress and model struggling to find steady work. Photographer Tom Kelley photographed her nude against red velvet and paid her $50. She signed the release using the name Mona Monroe. At the time, she was still years away from the fame that would make the photographs valuable to publishers. The payment was immediate income for a young woman short of money; it gave her no share in the much larger business eventually built around the pictures. By 1952, Monroe’s rising film career had transformed the significance of the calendar photograph. Its identification threatened the respectable public image that a Hollywood studio expected to manage for its actresses. Studio executives urged her to deny that she was the woman in the picture. She acknowledged it instead and explained that she had needed money. TIME’s August 11, 1952 report described an increase in fan mail after her admission and recorded her memorable answer when asked whether she had really worn nothing: “I had the radio on.” The public controversy, and her successful response, preceded Playboy. Hefner was preparing his new magazine in Chicago the following year. He wanted something that would make readers notice an unfamiliar publication. Recalling the launch in a 1999 Fresh Air interview, he said he had considered a three-dimensional pictorial but could not afford to supply the necessary glasses. He then learned that the John Baumgarth calendar company controlled the Monroe photograph. He drove to meet Baumgarth and obtained the right to reproduce it. The reported price was $500, ten times what Monroe had received for the original sitting. The first Playboy reached newsstands in December 1953. Monroe appeared clothed on its cover, while the nude calendar image appeared inside. This was a reuse of an existing photograph, rather than a sitting she had arranged with Hefner. Buying reproduction rights from the calendar company also did not mean obtaining Monroe’s personal approval. Asked about that issue on Fresh Air, Hefner answered, “We didn’t need her permission.” His explanation described the route by which the photograph reached his magazine; it did not establish that she had chosen to participate in the new venture. The commercial connection outlasted any possibility of a meeting. In a February 2011 CNN interview, Hefner said that he had spoken to Monroe once by telephone but had never met her in person. He credited her with the beginning of Playboy and its success. His later recollection makes the distance between the two people particularly clear: the woman who had become foundational to his business was someone he knew principally as a public figure. Sharing such a recognizable chapter in publishing history had not made them companions in life. Monroe died in 1962, aged 36. Her funeral took place at Westwood on August 8. A surviving funeral program and accompanying notice preserved by the Marilyn Monroe Collection document the arrangements overseen by her former husband Joe DiMaggio, her half sister Berniece Miracle and her business manager Inez Melson. The service was private, attended by a small circle of people close to her. Her burial established the location that would later attract Hefner. When he bought the adjoining crypt in 1992, three decades had passed since her death. The reported purchase price was $75,000. Hefner presented the choice as an affectionate, symbolic link to the actress whose photograph had helped launch his career. In 2009 he told the Los Angeles Times, “Spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up.” The words expressed his own wishes for the neighboring space. Monroe had died long before the transaction, and the purchase was no evidence of a mutual burial plan. The arrangement joined their names through a decision made by the surviving publisher. Hefner died on September 27, 2017, aged 91. Contemporary funeral reporting placed his private ceremony at Westwood on September 30, with his wife Crystal, his four children and some Playboy staff attending. He was interred in the crypt to Monroe’s left. The place he had reserved a quarter of a century earlier now held his remains, turning a frequently repeated statement about his eventual resting place into a visible feature of the cemetery wall. His death also renewed criticism of that choice. LAist’s contemporary account connected the burial controversy to Monroe’s lack of approval for the Playboy publication. It discussed writer Sady Doyle’s argument that the purchase extended the appropriation of her image into death. Hefner had described gratitude and symbolic closeness; critics saw another decision about Monroe being made without her participation. The earlier calendar scandal matters here: she had defended that photograph publicly in 1952, before Hefner published it. Her response to the scandal should not be mistaken for an endorsement of every later use. The attraction of their names continued to have a price. At Julien’s Auctions in March 2024, a different crypt near their adjoining spaces sold for $195,000. The auction house identified its buyer as Beverly Hills investor Anthony Jabin. A replaced marker from Monroe’s crypt also sold, for $88,900. These later transactions show how the burial site itself had become part of the market surrounding their fame. At Westwood, the adjacent plaques preserve the physical result of Hefner’s purchase: proximity he could acquire decades after Monroe’s death, beside a woman whose image had helped establish his public life.