Man Alive: Meet the Agent for Dead Celebs
|
STUPID FUN
|
|
One celebrity rep, 200 deceased clients, and the biggest publicity rights case in U.S. history.
|
|
|
Over His Dead Body
“Roesler is taking a big risk,” says Tom Kelley Jr., who is going up against him in the war for Marilyn. The fight pits Monroe’s estate against Kelley and the heirs of three other photographers who took famous photos of Monroe. The issue: Who owns Marilyn? Roesler points to Monroe’s will, which left most of her unspecified assets to her acting coach, Lee Strasberg. Roesler has used the will to claim that Strasberg’s widow, Anna, owns Marilyn’s publicity rights—when her husband died, she inherited his interest in the Monroe estate. With Roesler as agent, that piece of Marilyn generates a reported $8 million a year—at least $5 million for Anna Strasberg and $2 million-plus for Roesler.
The photographers want more of that pie for themselves.
“My dad helped Marilyn out when she was an unknown model doing ads for a department store,” says Kelley, a mustachioed photographer whose father, Tom Kelley Sr., took the famous red velvet nude that became Playboy’s first centerfold. (Monroe was paid $50. Later, when a reporter asked what she had on during the shoot, she replied, “The radio.”) Unfortunately for Kelley Sr., he licensed reprint rights of the image to a cheesecake calendar maker for $900. Hugh Hefner then obtained licensing for them for $500. But Kelley retained other shots that he can market today. Or can he?
Milton Greene is another guy with a gripe. He took more than 4,000 photos of Monroe and even put her up in his home. She baby-sat his kids. Sam Shaw was another—he took the iconic
shot of Marilyn on a subway grate during the filming of The Seven Year Itch, the updraft blowing her dress up around her ears. The photographers’ heirs complain that Roesler has blocked their right to sell their Monroe photos to anyone they want. After years of butting heads, they’ve joined Kelley and another photog’s heirs in suing Roesler and Monroe’s estate. Three years later, after rounds of claims and counterclaims, we’re about to see who wins.
“The stakes are so high there’s no turning back. What is Marilyn worth if the photographers can license images like this?” Roesler asks, holding up a condom with the subway-grate shot on the wrapper. He wasn’t surprised when an auction house working on Kelley’s behalf tried to sell Monroe photos to Hustler. Monroe doesn’t belong in Hustler or on condoms, Roesler argues. Her image would be tarnished—along with her earning ability. Roesler even has some living celebrities backing him, such as Yoko Ono and Al Pacino.
Kelley wasn’t expecting such a high-stakes showdown. “To be honest,” he says, “I admire Mark Roesler. Look at the business he built! But in this case, you have to wonder about his strategy. He’s spent $12–$14 million to fight four little photographers. Why?”
Kelley and the other photographers’ heirs might be willing to settle out of court. But for Roesler the stakes may be higher than $14 million or even $100 million. If he loses, his foes could claim what Kelley calls “20 or 30 years of retroactive liability”—repayment of the millions Roesler has kept them from making. And he may lose the ability to protect his other dead clients in similar cases.
“This case didn’t have to go to trial,” Kelley says. “We could have coexisted.”
Wrong, says Roesler. “This is a war.”
Sometime in the next month, Roesler will climb the steps of a federal courthouse and go to war for his beloved Marilyn. The future of dead people may never be the same.
|
|
|
|
![](http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/maxim.dart/stupid_fun;pgs=back;tile=3;sz=300x250;ord="+cachebreaker+"?)
|
|
|