How much is love worth? $1 million by court order.

When these photos appeared in 1998, more than 30 years after they were shot, people said "duh!" Marilyn is pretending to be Jackie Kennedy and LOL, Stern wanted to screw both of them. Stern claims the wig was to cover Monroe’s to too-many-times dyed hair. But he’s also the kind of guy who would definitely have been into Marilyn role-playing as Jackie.

Vogue ran some of the photos from this shoot the day after Monroe died,  but this one didn’t hit print until American Photo ran it with a story about Stern suing a photo collector for $1 million. The collector found the negatives in a jewelry box at a flea market. Stern says they were stolen, more likely he lost them in a state of grief for the death of his great love.

He said “I fell in love with everybody I photographed,” but he “would[‘ve] gamble[d] everything he had for a night with Marilyn Monroe.” At the time “everything” would have included a wife, children, lots of money, two houses, and an amphetamine addiction.

This photo came from his third shoot with Monroe. The first two sessions had been intimate, just the two of them in Hotel Bel-Air, but this shoot included a big production team which proved to be a mood killer. This was also the last shoot before her suicide, so the looming void probably wasn’t helping the romantic vibes.

Either way, Stern never got the passionate affair he dreamed of. As usual he had to settle for his camera instead of his penis, “Making love and making photographs were closely connected in my mind when it came to women.” Eh, OK, we’ll try not to think about the shoot you did with 16 year old Sue Lyons for Lolita, then.

He returned to Monroe's hotel room the night after the shoot, at midnight, looking for some closure for their non-existent tryst. “I wanted to photograph her one last time. She wasn’t moving. I looked around the room. It was like a bomb had gone off, bottles of champagne all over, Marilyn’s shoes in the corner, an overturned champagne bottle. I opened the door carefully. It was all over, she was asleep.” Spoiler alert: she was not just sleeping.