Marilyn Monroe

by Charles Casillo

  At this vulnerable crossroads, a Vogue spread must have seemed like a reassuring coup for Marilyn. She had never appeared in the fashion magazine so highly regarded for its style and sophistication. She immediately agreed to do it. The important sitting was set up for June 23, less than three weeks after she had been fired by Fox.

  But like most people on the planet, the photographer was still thinking “Delicious.” Many years later Stern admitted that what he really wanted was “to get Marilyn Monroe alone in a room, with no one else around, and take all her clothes off.” Stern felt that there wasn’t one great photo that defined Marilyn Monroe. Stern wanted to be the photographer to take it—that was his major goal: “How else could it be the definitive photo of Marilyn Monroe if she wasn’t naked?”

  Feeling that it might be difficult to get Marilyn to pose nude in a formal studio setting—he wanted something more personal—Stern secured a secluded suite at the Bel-Air Hotel. He covered the walls with seamless white paper and brightly lit the entire space so Marilyn would be free to move around and be spontaneous. He asked Vogue to send over a selection of filmy, see-through scarves designed by Vera Neumann, and assorted jewelry for her to play with while posing. Marilyn asked him to provide three bottles of Dom Pérignon champagne for the session. Stern knew better: He ordered a case.

  The shoot was set for 2:00 p.m. Stern’s assistant, Leif-Erik Nygårds, arrived, then Marilyn’s hairdresser, George Masters. The time ticked by, but Stern wasn’t concerned. By now “waiting for Monroe” was part of her legend. At 7:00 p.m. Marilyn strode in—alone. As with many people before him, Stern was quite taken with the living, breathing Monroe up close, in the flesh—no makeup and her hair in a scarf. “You’re beautiful,” he blurted.

  “Really!” Marilyn said with a smile. “What a nice thing to say.” Stern meant it. “I didn’t expect her to be so beautiful.”

  The bedroom of the suite had been reserved as her dressing room, and she began applying makeup. Stern wanted stunning pictures, but he also wanted to reveal something new in the most photographed woman of the generation. “I picked up my Nikon and watched her through the eyepiece,” Stern remembered. “My eye roved over her face, but I couldn’t find the secret of her beauty in any one feature.”

  When Marilyn leaned forward to the mirror to apply lipstick, her eyes caught sight of the scarves and glittering jewelry carefully laid out on the bed. Marilyn went over to inspect them. When she lifted a scarf to cover her face she could see right through it. She understood now. “You want me to do nudes?” she asked.

  Stern was rattled that Marilyn had seen through his plan so quickly. “Uh, well”—he stammered—“that’s a good idea.”

  Marilyn hesitated. She felt nervous and wanted to know how much would show. He replied to her vaguely that it depended on how he lit the shots. Looking back on it, Stern said, “I got the feeling she was delighted to do nudes—but she felt like she should be talked into it.”

  Imagine her confusion: One day she was on the phone with Brando talking about Macbeth; the next Vogue was asking her to pose naked. Marilyn was flattered, horrified, honored, excited, offended, and elated—all at the same time. Marilyn delighted in showing her body, but wasn’t she supposed to be working on a new image?

  Unsure, she called to her hairdresser, “George? What do you think about these scarves and doing nudes?”

  “Divine,” he said.

  That was the reassurance she was looking for, even though it was everything she was fighting against.

  She turned back to Stern. “What about my scar?” she asked. He hadn’t been aware that she had one—nor was the public. She explained that there was a scar on her torso from her gall-bladder surgery. “Will it show?” she asked.

  “If it does we can always retouch it,” he assured her. But Stern, who disliked retouching photographs, saw that she wasn’t completely convinced. “It took a little bit more coaxing,” he admitted. He assured her they wouldn’t be full nudes. “I said, ‘I really don’t think too much of anything will show through the scarves with the colors and the designs. I can light it in a way that suggests nudity more than showing it.’”

  “All right,” Marilyn said, less anxious.

  Stern was ecstatic. He had set out to photograph Marilyn Monroe nude, and within fifteen minutes she had agreed to do it. He hurried off to check the lights. “I wanted these pictures soft but sharp,” he explained. “A sharp Marilyn floating in light.”

  When asked to elaborate by this author about what he most wanted to capture in Monroe, Stern responded: “I wanted to discover and expose the secret to her beauty. Unlock the mysteries to her appeal. What set her apart? What made Marilyn Monroe the woman among millions of women?”

  Marilyn walked onto the set carrying a glass of champagne, covered in a sheer orange striped scarf, with her waistband rolled low. Stern saw the scar now on the right side of her midriff. “An imperfection that only made her seem more vulnerable and only accentuated the incredible smoothness of her skin,” he wrote.

  Marilyn’s age was very much on her mind. “How’s this for thirty-six?” Marilyn asked Stern, lifting the scarf to reveal her naked breasts. A few weeks earlier when a reporter mentioned her age, Marilyn retorted: “Thirty-six is just great when kids twelve to seventeen still whistle.” Stern declared he saw something in her: “Divinity. God. Living. Passion.” But at the time he responded, “I’m not afraid of you, Marilyn.”

  As always when working, Marilyn gave the camera her all. Under Stern’s often unforgiving lighting, she played with the scarves and beads, teasing the photographer, draping the scarves over her bosom, wrapping and unwrapping them around her body, hanging them from her teeth, raising them over her head. She held two chiffon roses up to her breast. That night she was on—alive with hope and desperation—fueled by champagne.

  * * *

  In retrospect Marilyn wasn’t only attempting to resurrect her career—she was trying to save her life. At one point Pat Newcomb stopped by with Peter Lawford—the two had been out to dinner. “She had practically nothing on,” Newcomb recalled. “‘This place is going to be barraged in the morning if you don’t get some clothes on,’” she joked. “‘What’s going on here?’ By then he’d taken all those nudes.”

  For hours Stern probed every inch of Marilyn Monroe with his camera, sometimes under lighting that would have been unflattering to a sixteen-year-old. Because of Marilyn’s exquisite bone structure and flawless features, her beauty was never in doubt. But as the night wore on and the champagne flowed more freely, her exhaustion set in. Stern’s camera continued clicking.

  The sitting lasted until 7: 00 a.m.

  The resulting photos from the June 23 session are as bipolar as Marilyn’s mind was that chaotic month. The pictures are alternately beautiful and creepy. They show her at her very best—a number of these photos are some of the most beautiful and timeless ever taken of her—and also at her most drunken, fragile worst. In these one-of-a-kind nude studies, Marilyn looks fresh, upbeat, vibrant, and gorgeous—and exhausted, pale, boozy, and somewhat weathered—a glamorous phantom.

  Eve Arnold, a photographer and friend who had photographed Marilyn many times, was appalled when she saw the resulting seminude pictures. “They were wild and almost out of control when he shot them,” Arnold said. “I don’t know whether she was hyped up from sheer excitation or whether she’d been drinking, or what had happened to her. But she was absolutely wild during that session.”

  In the softer-lighted shots Marilyn appears at her loveliest, and Stern’s mastery of the camera shines through. It is most likely how she looked in everyday life, in flattering lighting. Through the sheer scarves and gaudy jewelry, Marilyn exudes a palpable yearning to reveal her true self that is breathtaking and poignant. Never before was Marilyn’s beauty more fragile, vulnerable, indefinable.

  When Stern used sharper lighting and his camera moved in close with a stark approach, the results were at times unflattering, and coul
d be considered an exploitative examination. Stern seems to be attempting to penetrate and expose the enigmatic phenomenon that was Marilyn Monroe, to demystify her beauty.

  The bright lighting he chose at times exaggerated her laugh lines, pores, freckles, bleach-damaged hair, and the soft down on her face. Often one’s eye goes to the scar on her belly; the angry slash that she was so self-conscious about and was assured would be retouched was never retouched. “And it was a nasty scar,” Stern remarked years later.

  In addition, some of Stern’s seminude photos explicitly show the effect of her continuing weight loss. In the weeks since her naked skinny-dip, Marilyn seemed to have shed even more pounds.

  Always a healthy eater, by June, Marilyn would barely eat one meal a day, if at all. Mrs. Murray remembered her skipping many meals altogether. George Masters recalled her often existing on champagne and hard-boiled eggs. It’s impossible to say if Marilyn was developing an eating disorder, and her loss of appetite may have come from her depressions. But also, her obsession with weight loss stemmed from the fact that the voluptuous bodies of the 1950s—an ideal she helped create—were considered nostalgic by 1962.

  On seeing the photos after Marilyn’s death, the literary critic Diana Trilling said: “Her body looked ravaged and ill, already drained of life.” When Marilyn peeked over her shoulder, the spine in her beautiful back appeared more pronounced. Depending on the angle of her body and the pose, her breasts—which had helped propel her during her rise to stardom—sometimes appeared modest but perky, and in other shots they seemed deflated and a bit saggy.*

  To a number of Marilyn’s fans, these are their favorite photos of her because they reveal her flaws in a way that hadn’t been exposed before. They bring the goddess image down to earth, within reach. To some, the pictures only make her beauty more remarkable. That is Stern’s considerable achievement.

  * * *

  Marilyn wanted to see the photographs before their expected publication. Shortly before her death, Stern mailed her some of the pictures as a courtesy. “She hated a great many of them,” Eve Arnold said. Marilyn angrily tried to destroy some of them. Arnold explained: “What she returned to him had been gouged with some sort of a sharp instrument, a hairpin or something like that.” Marilyn also crossed many of the images of herself out with a red magic marker to make sure they’d never be seen.

  Her anger stemmed from the fact that some of the shots, harshly lit and extremely close up, clearly showed a more mature Marilyn Monroe. “The pictures that she was upset by were the ones that didn’t project her image of herself,” Stern said. Surely she saw that in many of the shots she was sensual and lovely but she had passed the age of strawberries and cream.

  When Stern got back the photos with her angry marks destroying them, he was furious. After her death he published all of the photos—every single one taken that night—and he featured them in several books. Eve Arnold strongly disapproved: “I feel that it is a kind of invasion. If somebody lends you their face, you owe them a courtesy.”

  Stern felt justified. “Just because she scratched them out doesn’t mean she is the ultimate purveyor of my work. I hadn’t signed any deal that she could destroy pictures she didn’t like. They are my pictures.” And since they were his pictures he didn’t feel it necessary to honor their agreement. “Well, we had a verbal agreement about me retouching her scar,” Stern countered when confronted. “But it was my understanding that they were to be retouched if they were to be used in Vogue, which these particular photos weren’t. Besides, after she died the verbal agreement became null and void.” He was blunter when asked by the columnist Liz Smith about his refusal to retouch: “She was dead, why bother?” But these were not to be the last photos Stern took of Marilyn for Vogue. But first she would do an important session with another photographer.

  * * *

  Energized by the session with Stern, the following weekend Marilyn turned to the camera once again for reassurance—this time for a series of photos that were to be used along with an in-depth interview for Cosmopolitan. She did two long days of shooting on June 29 and 30 with the photographer George Barris. In her brightly colored Puccis, Marilyn posed in and around the house of real estate magnate Walter Tim Leimert, a friend of Barris.

  The next day she did wonderful shots on a windy beach, frolicking in the waves and posing in the sand, sipping champagne or wrapped in a blanket. As usual that summer, she looked anywhere from a carefree, fresh-faced twenty-five to a troubled woman in lovely early middle age.

  After the all-night Stern session at the Bel-Air Hotel, Stern flew back to New York and showed the pictures to Vogue’s artistic director, Alexander Lieberman. He immediately started examining them with a loup. Describing the photos as “marvelous,” he explained to Stern that they also must be shown to Diana Vreeland, the whimsical new editor in chief, then in her first year at Vogue. But before Stern had even arrived back at his own office, Lieberman had left a message: Vreeland wanted a reshoot.

  It’s probable that Vogue simply wasn’t satisfied with Stern’s first set of photos. They didn’t suit the magazine’s style. Though they wanted an issue that featured Marilyn between their covers, they also wanted a new session where the editorial staff would exercise more control of the way Marilyn would appear—in high fashion. When she was reached in Los Angeles, Marilyn agreed to do additional photographs (she had yet to receive Stern’s proofs from the first sitting). Three more sessions were set up for July 10, 11, and 12.

  Astutely observing the new phase of Monroe’s beauty, Diana Vreeland wanted to see Marilyn in couture. Vreeland would later describe Marilyn as “the greatest chameleon that’s ever lived. She was enticing! She was appetizing! You wanted to take a bite out of her. That effect.” Vreeland was eager to see how the chameleon would adapt to Vogue fashions.

  An entire entourage was flown to Los Angeles from New York to oversee these sessions. A much larger, three-room bungalow at the Bel-Air Hotel (number 96) was reserved. A fashion editor, Babs Simpson, was present; Marilyn’s press secretary, Pat Newcomb, came along to supervise; and the renowned hairdresser Kenneth Battelle was there. Also present was Marilyn’s makeup artist, Whitey Snyder.

  This time dozens of beautiful Christian Dior haute couture garments had been supplied, along with evening gowns, furs, and diamonds. In addition a large assortment of shoes, hats, gloves, and coats had been sent. Since hairpieces were becoming extremely chic, a brunette wig was provided.

  This session seemed to be more in tune with the direction in which Marilyn hoped her image was going—stylish and sophisticated. Though she had posed for many of the great fashion photographers during her career, it was rarely about the clothes, and she never tried to compete with the sophistication of high-fashion models. Now Marilyn understood the value of fashion as part of her new maturing image. She worked hard at making the couture clothes work in a contemporary way.

  Marilyn had obviously done her homework by studying what was happening in the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. “In frame after frame, from her second Vogue session, she twists and contorts her body in an evocative ballet of exaggerated movement,” the photo archivist and curator David Wills stated. “In other photos from the shoot, she dons a black flipped wig with a diamond-shaped beauty spot that eerily suggests a fast-forward to 1964 or ’65.”

  Stern was taking the Marilyn high-fashion session with equal seriousness. With his high-fashion compositions and original use of backlighting, there is little trace of Lorelei Lee in any of Stern’s images of Monroe. Marilyn’s reinvention from sex symbol into fashion goddess was complete. In Stern’s fashion studies, Marilyn was decked out in gowns, furs, and towering architectural hairdos constructed with swirling hairpieces of platinum Dynel.

  Babs Simpson was also impressed with Marilyn. “She was absolutely perfect,” Simpson recalled. “But there was this awful hairdresser who kept giving her ice water that turned out to be vodka.” Once again she became inebriated.

&n
bsp; After six hours of posing in the formal clothing, Marilyn began to lose patience, becoming bored, disinterested.

  “She was combative in a way, confrontational,” Stern said.

  “What’s your premise?” Marilyn asked him coldly as he knelt in front of her, camera in hand. “Don’t you have any ambitions to do anything more?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “I want to get you into bed.”

  Drunk now, and tired of all the high fashion, Marilyn informed the people in the room that she wanted to do shots wearing a frilly, translucent bed jacket, and stormed off to change. Sadly, after hours of demonstrating that a chic and lovely Marilyn Monroe could be just as potent and intoxicating as a sexual one, Marilyn felt the need to go back to the cheesecake-type photos that had started her career fifteen years before. She emerged wearing the bed jacket, with a towel wrapped around her waist.

  Stern said, “Could everyone leave us alone?” The entourage moved into the adjoining room. Stern suggested that Marilyn take off the bed jacket and just cover herself with a sheet.

  As with the other important events in recent months, when plied with enough alcohol, Marilyn regressed to her sex-symbol image. A friend had recently revealed to a magazine that Marilyn’s two outstanding traits were “a need for love and a need to seduce.” Intent on seducing, Marilyn rolled around on the bed, laughing and flirting with the camera, letting the sheet drop a bit, hanging one leg off the corner of the bed, sipping champagne.

  Marilyn didn’t mind teasing seminudes, but under no circumstances was she about to give Stern what he wanted—full frontal. “I wondered how far he’d dare to push her,” Stern’s assistant, Nygårds, recalled in Icon magazine. “The atmosphere between Stern and Marilyn got worse and worse. She said ‘no’ and he kept going.”