Marketing Marilyn on Main Street Sag Harbor

[caption id="attachment_52216" align="alignnone" width="800"] The Sybil Douglas House at 189 Main Street in Sag Harbor, now being marketed as the Bert Stern House, features Mr. Stern's photographs of Marilyn Monroe. Michael Heller photos[/caption]

By Douglas Feiden

[caption id="attachment_52215" align="alignright" width="300"] 189 Main Street in Sag Harbor.[/caption]

The Sybil Douglas House at 189 Main Street is one of the oldest mansions on “Captains Row,” a classic five-bay Georgian treasure that was built on the site of the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum in 1790 and moved across the street and down the block in 1844.

Now, the white frame residence that was owned for 200 years by the descendants of Captain Douglas is about to be repositioned as the “Bert Stern House” after the advertising-fashion-and-celebrity photographer who owned it from 1992 until his death in 2013.

Shannah Laumeister Stern, his widow and longtime model who is the home’s owner, plans to transform it into a private showplace for her husband’s most celebrated works. That includes 1960s-era photos of Twiggy, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Catherine Deneuve and a cavalcade of the most beautiful women in the world.

Of course, no such list would be complete without that doomed star with whom Mr. Stern will forever be enjoined in the cultural pantheon:

Seven naked photos of a ravishing Marilyn Monroe from his iconic “Last Sitting” series — shot at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles for Vogue magazine in 1962, just weeks before her death — adorn the home’s parlor, music room, living room and bedrooms.

For about six months a year, Ms. Stern plans to occupy the house and use it to run the Bert Stern Trust, Bert Stern Productions and a future Bert Stern foundation she hopes to establish for the advancement of photography. Together, the three entities would encompass his estate, archives, brand, legacy, creative enterprises, unpublished images and artistic products for sale, she said.

For the other six months, she would rent out the four-bedroom, 3.5-bath, seven-fireplace, two-and-a-half story dwelling with its six-over-six wooden sash windows, shingles, gambrel roof, portico, pilasters, Ionic columns, ornately carved cornice and prominent end chimneys.

The Bert Stern Trust, which administers the estate, says it would love to see the property outfitted with a plaque and added to the Sag Harbor Historical Society’s walking tour, but it would not otherwise be open to the public.

“I’m standing inside his legacy and his art and his life’s work, and it’s something that brings me freedom and passion and joy,” Ms. Stern said. “And the idea is that it would also bring freedom and passion and joy to everybody else who sees it.

[caption id="attachment_52218" align="alignleft" width="420"] A portrait of Bert Stern from 1962 by Irving Penn hangs above one of Mr. Stern's own photos of his wife, Shannah Laumeister Stern.[/caption]

“I’m passionate about this house. There is so much love inside this house…We drank $2,000 bottles of Chateau Cheval Blanc 1982 in this house! We display his art on the walls, and it’s a place for you to display your own passion.”

Several scenes in Ms. Stern’s 2013 documentary, “Bert Stern: Original Madman,” about her bad-boy husband, were shot in the home’s sun-dappled attic, where he loved to photograph her.

The Corcoran Group, which has the listing and will market the property as the Bert Stern House, has posted the rental price at $44,000 for July and $55,000 for August, including Labor Day, said Susan Lahrman, the exclusive agent for the property.

“The house is full of history, and if you close your eyes, you are transported back to a time of yesteryear, a time of glamorous nights spent standing around the grand piano in the front parlor sipping a bourbon,” she said. “Or you could imagine a much harder life, in 1790, when whaling captains would set out to sea, and their wives would patiently await their safe return.”

The residence was originally built by Benjamin Huntting I, the whaling ship-owner and shipbuilder who in 1785 dispatched the Lucy to the waters off Brazil, financing what became the first successful deep-sea whaling expedition from Sag Harbor.

His son, Benjamin Huntting II, sold the home in 1838 to Captain Douglas, and a few years later, he moved it to its present location, directly across the street from the Hannibal French House on the east side of Main Street, according to the 1975 edition of “Guide to Sag Harbor: Landmarks, Home and History.”

Flash forward to 1982 when a famed commercial photographer who made his name during the golden age of advertising in the 1950s and 1960s spotted a beautiful 13-year-old girl roller-skating near Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park. Bert Stern took his first photo of Shannah Laumeister, and four years later, they met again.

“I told him I wanted to be shot like Marilyn Monroe,” Ms. Stern says. “I laid on a rock in Central Park, and he took this picture that was very special. We developed a photographic relationship in 1986. It became a romantic relationship when I was 19 that grew over time but didn't really develop until I was 23 or 24…

“It was on and off, but it was always coming back on. We simply couldn’t part.” Over a quarter-century, he shot literally tens of thousands of photos of her.

There was a 39-year age difference between the couple. And as it happened, Mr. Stern knew a great deal about the obsession an older man could possess for a girl on the cusp between childhood and womanhood.

[caption id="attachment_52217" align="alignright" width="372"] A 1960 poster from the movie "Lolita" hangs at 189 Main Street in the house now owned by Bert Stern's widow.[/caption]

In 1960, a friend, the director Stanley Kubrick, had asked him to shoot some promotional pictures of a 13-year-old actress, Sue Lyon, for the movie version of “Lolita,” the controversial Vladimir Nabokov novel he was about to film.

So Mr. Stern, who had friends in Sag Harbor, took Ms. Lyon, chaperoned by her mother, out of the city for a day, stopping to purchase some props — a red lollipop and a pair of red heart-shaped sunglasses — at the Five-and-Dime, now the Variety Store.

They drove to the lawn fronting Pierson High School for the photo shoot, and those glasses, and the red lipstick gloss worn by Ms. Lyon, whose lips are pursed on the lollipop, framed one of the most unforgettable images in modern photography, a portrait of a heart-stopping nymphette, which became the movie poster for “Lolita.”

That poster with the famous tagline — “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” — now hangs in the dining room at 189 Main Street.

Not far away are several of his “Last Sitting” images of Marilyn Monroe from 1962, including an early “selfie” of a clothed Mr. Stern next to his undraped subject with wine bottles, wine glasses and high-heeled shoes strewn about the floor.

“He really wanted to capture this magical night,” said Shirley Norman, director of operations for Bert Stern Productions. “She was beautiful and real and everything a man could want in a woman. And if he couldn't physically have her, the pictures were the next best thing. Maybe the pictures were even better.”

Ms. Stern’s radiant images also grace the house: “She had a light that intrigued him,” Ms. Norman said. “She was one of his muses, his last muse, and he loved her light and her youth.

“He loved women, he was baffled by them, he was intrigued by them, and he couldn’t get enough of them. He loved women so much that he wanted to show them as the goddesses they were.”