Marilyn Revisited
Friday, May 25th, 2007
Photographed by Lawrence Schiller © Polaris Communications Click photo to see more images from Marilyn Revisited.
The year was 1962, the last of Marilyn Monroe’s short life. In April she began shooting a comedy for 20th Century Fox called
Something’s Got to Give
, a remake of the film
My Favorite Wife,
cast opposite Dean Martin. This came about a year and a half after her starring role in
The Misfits,
with Clark Gable, and a little over a year after her divorce from playwright Arthur Miller.
The story of the filming of
Something’s Got to Give
has long since become Hollywood legend. Monroe’s frequent absences from the set, due to personal issues but also to health problems resulting from a severe respiratory infection, delayed shooting and angered the studio and the film’s director, George Cukor. Then, on May 19th, she added to the studio’s irritation by flying to New York City to attend a Democratic fundraiser and sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy, with whom she’d been having an affair.
When Monroe returned from New York, there was far more drama on the movie set than in the film itself. And the blonde star had a surprise in store for everyone when she arrived to shoot a scene in which she was to frolic in a swimming pool.
“There was a line in the script that said she appears nude,” recalls Lawrence Schiller, the famed photographer/writer/film producer, who was on the set that day to shoot a story about Monroe for
Paris Match
magazine. “[The script] didn’t say that she was going to be nude. [It said] she ‘appears’ nude. So you figured she was going to wear a flesh-colored bathing suit, but you had no idea what was going to take place.”
What happened on the set was this: After a few minutes of swimming in the flesh-colored bathing suit, Monroe slipped out of the suit’s top, and later its bottom. Shooting began. There are those who say Monroe, who had lost some 25 pounds since her last film, never looked more radiant and beautiful.
“I shot everything with a Nikon SLR and a 180mm Sonnar lens sold to me by [photojournalist] David Douglas Duncan for $50,” Schiller recalls. “The lens had been specially modified at
Life
to fit the camera. The color film was high-speed tungsten Ektachrome pushed one stop, and the black and white was Tri-X.
It was the first nude scene ever shot by a major Hollywood star, and the film might have gone on to be a major hit — except that it was never completed. In early June, angered at Monroe’s behavior, the studio fired her from the movie, only to rehire her at Dean Martin’s insistence and reschedule shooting for the fall. But on August 5, 1962 Marilyn was found dead in her home in Brentwood, apparently of a suicide or accidental overdose of pills.
Since then, Schiller’s pictures of the swimming pool scene have become historic photographic artifacts. Most of them have been published over the years, but not all. And while Schiller himself made prints of them from his negatives for
Paris Match
and other organizations, he never thought of the work as art or collectible, and never made archival prints for galleries and museums.
Recently, however, Schiller has done just that, working with the venerable Modernage lab in New York City to create a limited-edition set of his
Something’s Got to Give
images, as well as other work from 1960s and 1970s.
The Marilyn pictures are on display now at an exhibition called “Marilyn Monroe 12,” at the Pop International Galleries in New York City. The magnificent prints add a new footnote to Marilyn’s much-photographed life. They also should launch a reassessment of Schiller as a photographer.
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© Trent Parke/Magnum Photos Click photo to see more images from the Magnum Festival 07.
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