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A days after filming nude in a swimming pool on the set of the 1962 drama Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn Monroe jumped into her black T-bird and drove her photographer, Lawrence Schiller, to Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard. Schiller had brought his negatives, now ready to be turned into prints. And in his bag Monroe brought him a pair of scissors, which he now reached for – and, in the light of the now familiar Hollywood streetlights, he began to cut the film into pieces.
“Ziiiip – who didn’t like them,” says Schiller, drawing out the wordsiiiiip.” He destroyed them? “Yeah, but it comes with the part,” laughs the 89-year-old, Monroe’s last photographer, recalling his 25-year-old kneeling down to pick up the trash and thinking: “Well, I could kill that one again..” In fact, he talks about his transformation without enthusiasm: “There was not a picture that he destroyed that I would have published.”
Two months later, Monroe died of a drug overdose. In the sixty years since then, it is perhaps this scornful Monroe who has been scorned in favor of legend – known as the “disruptor” of the bombshell that she fought to control, and was constantly created by others.
Yet as Rosie Broadley, the curator of the upcoming Monroe exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, writes in the accompanying brochure: “Monroe not only did, she led the way by saying that she had the right to ban any pictures she didn’t like.” Richard Avedon, Milton Greene and Bert Stern may have held the camera, but Monroe helped direct.
The collection forms the heart of the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, which would have been Monroe’s 100th birthday earlier this month. It shows the star not as a mere bystander, but as a permanent builder of his image. By all accounts, Monroe may be volatile, but she can also be grounded and tough. Broadley said, he “articulated so clearly” his powers that “often conflicted” with his lifestyle and problems when removed.
Schiller remembers the moment, back at the swimming pool in May 1962, when Monroe jumped into the water and, ignoring the orders of the director George Cukor, swam to where the light was better. In one shot, Monroe lifts her leg out of the water and drags it to the edge of the pool, like a shimmering nymph. In some places, she drops her scarf enough to reveal a small one behind her – like a cello, as if waiting to be played.
Before filming, Schiller remembers Monroe saying to him: “What would happen if I jumped in the swimming pool in my bathing suit, as they say, but I came out without it?” He replied: “You are already a famous woman, but if I take the pictures, you will do it.” me famous.” “Don’t be a joke, Larry,” Monroe complained. I can fire you in two seconds.” He laughs. “That was the relationship I had with him: I could tell jokes – and he could tell jokes that were painful and stinging, with lots of words. And you had to understand Marilyn’s voice.”
It is rare that Eve Arnold, one of Monroe’s photographers, explained, comparing the star to a woman in search of self-disposal, and the photographer seems to give her what she needs. How appropriate such a view seems when one looks at Schiller’s glittering images of her dancing in the moonlight, showing a joy that contradicts what was happening in her life. Monroe was in the middle of winter that summer: it was a year after her divorce from the playwright Arthur Miller, during which her surgery for women and spleen had overlapped with a terrible hospital stay in a mental hospital, along with a heavy dependence on alcohol and drugs.
“He was coming to work, he was late,” Schiller recalls. “And the studio was saying it was costing them millions, when they were costing millions on Cleopatra.”.” This brings us to another story of Monroe at the time: Elizabeth Taylor, her tabloid affair with Richard Burton and the $44m “disaster” she faced in Twentieth Century Fox that went bankrupt the following year. “What was on his mind,” says Schiller, “was: if I’m photographed a certain way, I’ll be on the cover of every magazine in the world—and Liz Taylor won’t be there anymore.”
Competition aside, perhaps his nude play was also part of what Arnold called the photo “getting him back”. Little by little – one upmanship, a very difficult attempt to reform – which, at the age of 36, was enough to restore the past like anything else.
“I don’t think of myself as a thing, but I’m sure a lot of people do,” Monroe said in a final interview before her death, just months after the pool shot. This brings to mind that I discussed with the photographer Douglas Kirkland in 2015, remembering the evening he spent photographing Monroe naked in bed in 1961. In some ways, he said that he thought he enjoyed making still images as much as he did in movies. “Why?” he asked. “Because he could write the words as he went, he could make things happen.” I didn’t tell him, ‘Turn this way, turn around, do this, do that. He did it himself. That was Marilyn.”
Again, this parallels what the National Portrait Gallery called Monroe’s “creative agency” outside of the camera, which told her what roles to play, how to look and where to stand. Schiller agrees with this formulation. “I don’t think any artist painted Marilyn because what Marilyn painted was what Marilyn wanted to paint. in the water with me. She wants to be a midnight dream with Cecil Beaton. The long and short of it was: he he controlled the stop camera.”
Away from the standard camera, however, it was a different story. In June, just days after Schiller photographed her laughing happily with her 36th birthday cake, Monroe was found to be suffering from anxiety after taking too many prescription pills. Five days later, Twentieth Century Fox fired Monroe for repeated absences and sued her for $750,000 for “breach of contract”. The film Something’s Got to Give, about a woman who returns from being lost at sea, has not been completed.
When I talk to Schiller, I see his reluctance to show the time he spent with the star near his death. “In front of the glass,” he says, “was a man to catch.” Yet he says that there is always something remote, weak and impossible. “He was like a deer in the woods, you wanted to capture him before someone shot him. He heard this in their last shot. “You wanted to capture him before tragedy struck again in his life.”
One day before Monroe’s death, on August 4, 1962, Schiller went to her home in Brentwood near Los Angeles. He “was out there with flowers”, he remembers, and they talked about the possibility of Playboy screen. Then at 5 o’clock in the morning, I received a call from a friend that Marilyn had died. It wasn’t. “I got into the car around 7 o’clock and went back. By this time, the media had surrounded the house, the glass of his bedroom window had been broken, and they were removing his body, covered in a gurney.”
It was a tragic death, Schiller says – and one he was forced to testify to. “Photography is part of my life,” he thinks. And so, it would appear, it was this woman. He still is. “Marilyn Monroe came into my life in 1960,” he wrote in his 2021 book Marilyn & Me, “and she’s still alive, breathing and amazing.” His magic still hasn’t faded.
