John T. Bone writes on www.johntbone.com: I used to be an artist. Well actually before that I used to be an art dealer.Shit it’s happening again, I just got out of bed, it’s 10:22pm, to write a piece about 2257 documentation and now my head is full of, well me really……
I got into Porn in early 1984 before that I had a store in Antiquarius an antique mall on Beverly Blvd.in Beverly Hills, actually I had two stores, a vintage clothing and jewelry store with my then wife Maria, the best wife I ever had, and a very expensive antique store specializing in Art Nouveau furniture, posters, objects and Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
I was also at that time a raging alcoholic and drug addict. I had been living in New York in the late 70’s and had been something of a personality in the arts, I did a lot of television, talking about the arts and I ran a bi-annual International art show. I came to LA early 80’s when the art market collapsed and I suddenly found my self with a huge inventory of over priced un-sellable beautiful things.
One night I was lying in bed watching TV when a program about the missing Marilyn Monroe diary was aired. A guy who said he had been her first husband was on with a famous private detective who’s name escapes me and they were talking about a missing diary that supposedly chronicled Marylyn’s affairs with both of the Kennedy brothers, what went on in behind the scenes in the Bay of Pigs stand off and other earth shattering insights into the Kennedy clan. Then they offered a meesly $10,000 reward for the return of the diary.
I was smoking a Hawaiian strain of marijuana that cost $100 a bud, and it just blew my mind that these guys were the biggest cheapest SoB’s in LA.
“Ten thousand fucking dollars” I remember saying “the cheap assed motherfuckers, it’s worth much more than that”
“Then do something about it” said Maria the greatest inspiration a con man could ever have.
The delusions of grandeur derived from the pot festered in my brain until I came up with a plan.
Business sucked, LA is not the place to succeed as an art dealer. I was pretty much broke although I owned some pretty neat stuff. The next morning I met with Douglas Villiers the owner of Antiquarius and told him about the TV show and suggested we offered $100,000 for the diary. Douglas an Englishman famous for his time in the London mobs was intrigued. He offered to pay for a publicist to promote the offer and of course the antique mall if I would be the front man, he was negotiating a film deal and was afraid that his past life in London might come out if the press looked at him too hard. So we hired a publicist immediately and the very same day informed the worlds press that I had a client who wanted to acquire the missing diary and was willing to pay $100,000. We of course prayed every night that the diary would never surface as none of us had a pot to piss in.
The press were in a feeding frenzy, I was on every TV and radio news channel in America. The next day I think every news paper in the free world carried the story. The press tried to tie me to the Kennedy family and suggested that one of them was my none existent client. By the end of the week the publicity had reached such a fever pitch that the Los Angeles authorities forced a reopening of Marilyn’s autopsy.
I had dinner one night during that week in a restaurant on La Cienega and as I waited for my car at the valet stand who should be standing next to me but the LA coroner, the very same coroner in fact that had done the original autopsy was now investigating his own results, we nodded.
It took two weeks for the nonsense to peter out and I remember one evening just as it was all dying down I was in the check-out line at he supermarket on Santa Monica Blvd, in West Hollywood counting my money to see if I had enough to pay for my groceries when my then wife Maria, the best wife I ever had, handed me a tabloid newspaper with the headline ‘Millionaire Beverly Hills art dealer offers $100,000 for missing Marilyn Monroe diary’. I put back the yogurt that I didn’t have enough money to pay for and bought the newspaper for my mum.
There is a book called ‘The life and curious death of Marilyn Monroe’ that is supposed to have recounted the story, I have never read it.
The funny part I guess would be what happened next.
Because of all of the publicity a guy came to my store to find me, he owned the second largest collection in the world of important movie costumes, Debbie Reynolds owns the largest, and he wanted to sell. I brokered a deal with Christie’s in New York to sell the collection and I handled the publicity myself and yes there was one Marilyn dress in the collection, her dress from The Prince and the Showgirl. On the eve of the sale Warner Brothers sent one of their top executives to New York to stop the sale and try to claim more than twenty of the costumes as property of Warner Brothers, but that is another story.
Because of the whole costume thing I started to buy and sell important costumes from the movies. Once I bought over 3000 costumes from the movie ‘The Wiz’ and made all of my money back on just two costumes Diana Ross’s ‘Dorothy’ and the ‘Tin Man’ the only Michael Jackson movie costume ever.
One day one of my jewelry clients, a very rich, very horny Beverly Hills lady was contemplating investing money in a porn movie and made it part of the deal that I would do the costuming for the movie. I was horrified at the time but she paid me a small fortune and before you could say “tell Ron Jeremy to take a shower” I was working in the porn industry. Mainly because I was raped in the wardrobe room by the star of the picture, Misty Regan, who later became the third Mrs. T. Bone, the worst wife I ever had.
Anyway that was not what I intended to write about, this was suppose to be one of my whiney pieces about how I used to make movies and now I dedicate more time to producing 2257 compliant documentation than I do to actually shooting the movie, but I can always write about that another time, can’t I?