The crypt above the tomb of Marilyn Monroe was put up for sale on eBay last week. Bidding started at $500,000 and had risen to $4.5 million by Tuesday.

If you happen to have an extra $5 million or so lying around, it might not be too late. You could spend eternity resting on top of the movie goddess.

The current occupant of the crypt at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles is Richard Poncher, who died in 1986. He is being defenestrated, so to speak, by his widow, Elsie — not because she’s finally fed up by the fact her husband has been sleeping with Monroe for 23 years. She wants to put the money to good use. She’ll pay off the $1.6 million mortgage on her Beverly Hills home and have a few dollars left over for the grandkids.

Elsie told the Los Angeles Times that her husband bought the crypt from Joe DiMaggio in 1954, not long after the baseball great divorced Monroe, but well before the screen queen’s controversial death in 1962.

Elsie says it was her husband’s dying wish that he buried face down above Monroe. “He said, ‘If I croak, if you don’t put me upside down over Marilyn, I’ll haunt you the rest of my life,'” Elsie told the Times. She says that when he died at age 81 she personally saw to it that his wish was carried out.

After the sale, Elsie plans to have her husband’s remains moved to a second crypt he bought from DiMaggio for her. Her own postmortem wish is to be cremated.

Buyer beware, however. The new occupant of the slot above Monroe will have to share her for eternity with the man who helped make her a sexual icon. Hugh Hefner, now 83, bought the crypt next door to Monroe’s in 1992 for $75,000.

Just a few of the other notables buried in the tiny graveyard, a pocket of green hidden next to an alley off near Westwood Village, include Monroe’s “Some Like It Hot” costar Jack Lemmon and director Billy Wilder (buried in plots near Walter Matthau); Eva Gabor (with no date of birth on her marker) who is buried not far from her TV husband Eddie Albert and her friend Merv Griffin; authors Truman Capote and Will and Ariel Durant; actors Burt Lancaster, Donna Reed, George C. Scott and Natalie Wood; musicians Peggy Lee, Frank Zappa, Roy Orbison and Minnie Ripperton; comedian and singer Fanny Brice; television stars Jim Backus, Don Knotts, Sebastian Cabot and Bob Crane; Rat Packer Dean Martin; murdered Playboy pinup Dorothy Stratten, whose burial was arranged by Hefner; and Heather O’Rourke, the little blond girl from “Poltergeist.”

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