Marilyn Monroe tops the bill at auction

A PHOTOGRAPH from Marilyn Monroe's last session with Bert Stern, a self-taught photographer who became her confidant, fetched pounds 3,680 at Christie's sale of 20th-century photographs yesterday. The pre-sale estimate for this wistful shot was pounds 1,500 to pounds 2,000.

Six weeks after the shoot in 1962 for Vogue magazine, the Hollywood actress was dead.

Stern took nearly 2,700 photographs of Marilyn Monroe, including portraits, fashion photographs and nudes, during their three-day session at a Los Angeles hotel.

The sale, the auctioneer's first devoted to affordable 20th- century photographs for first-time buyers, came only three days after Christie's New York had set a world record price for a photograph of pounds 379,000 for a Man Ray portrait of his lover and model Kiki, taken in 1926.

The London sale proved that glamour sells; the photograph of a wrinkled Israeli wearing a knotted handkerchief, taken by the war photographer Robert Capa, made only pounds 552, below its pounds 800 to pounds 1,000 estimate. It was part of a lot of four portraits of Israelis taken in 1949 as part of Capa's series "Israel's First Year: A Report on a New State".

The fashion photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's female portrait "Faithful unto Death", with its customary rubber gear, made pounds 598, within the pounds 500 to pounds 700 estimate.

A pair of photographs of the hunky Paul Newman and Lee Marvin, taken during their filming of Pocket Money in 1972 by Terry O'Neill, a British photographer with a rising reputation, fetched pounds 575.

Gregory Heisler's intimate and atmospheric portrait of Louis Sarria, masseur to the former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, fetched pounds 897 against a bargain-basement estimate of pounds 500 to pounds 700. The higher price was achieved in spite of the print being creased. Heisler's work can sell for up to pounds 5,000.

The British are relatively new to photograph collecting, although it has been popular in the New York since the Seventies. The sale raised pounds 148,454, selling 67 per cent of 311 lots.