"Well, Marilyn. You are very famous and now you are going to make me famous ”, joked Lawrence Schiller the first day he arrived on the set of
Something's Got to Give
(something like 'Someone has to give in'), in May 1962. That joke worked be foreboding and also macabre: that movie would never end. Two months later, Marilyn passed away at her home in Brentwood (California) under strange circumstances. From that moment on, Schiller's portraits were destined to go down in history.
Schiller, who eventually became a writer and film director (he won an Oscar in 1975 for his documentary
The Man Who Skied Down Everest
) recounted his experiences during those days with Marilyn in a book published in 2012 and that now reissues Taschen,
Marilyn & Me
.
A myth, that of Marilyn, that this 2021 will only be reborn: the movie
Blonde
, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates of the same title,
will soon be released on Netflix
and which delves into the life of the Californian actress with Ana de Armas as the protagonist.
It is very easy to replace a photographer
"Don't be so arrogant," Marilyn replied to Schiller's joke. "It is very easy to replace a photographer." A phrase, also humorous, that immediately erased the smile from the photographer's face. By mid-1962 Lawrence was far from being a well-known photographer. He was 25 years old and had just opened a studio in Los Angeles. He was mainly dedicated to advertising photography, but from time to time the editors of some of the most relevant magazines assigned him important assignments such as following Nixon during the 1960 electoral campaign - which he ended up losing to JF Kennedy -, or portraying those attending Clark Gable's funeral for
Paris Match
.
They also used to send him to photograph shootings.
During the 1950s and 1960s, illustrated magazines were one of the most important means of communication for film studios: for a magazine like
Time, Life, Look
or
The Sunday Times to
include reports on its next release, it was a great helps in promoting it on a global scale.
It was in one of these jobs, photographing for
Look
on the set of
The Billionaire
(1960) that Schiller had met Monroe.
Putting into practice a sympathy that he acknowledges has helped him a great deal throughout his career, Schiller had fallen in love with the star.
Original negatives from Lawrence Schiller's session with Marilyn Monroe.
In the three days that he had spent with her in 1960, he ended up discovering that the actress had a personality that was very different from what she showed on screen. He found an intelligent, cultured woman who perfectly controlled her image and who constantly gave him ideas for his snapshots. “She knew better than anyone what worked best on camera. As an actress she was extremely insecure, but as a model she was not at all ”, says Schiller himself in the book.
Marilyn's life had gotten quite complicated in the two years between those two movies. Professionally, he was not doing well:
The Billionaire
was a commercial failure despite including such iconic songs as
My heart belongs to daddy
; and she didn't get to star in
Breakfast at the Diamonds either,
despite Truman Capote doing everything he could to get her hired. The filming in 1961 of
Rebel Lives
it was hell: the actress suffered from kidney stones, eye problems and a severe addiction to sleeping pills.
To make matters worse, after the filming, another of the stars of the film, Clark Gable, died and Monroe was blamed by the media for his death due to the long hours of waiting he subjected the team to under the harsh sun of the Nevada desert. .
The worst, however, was in his personal life.
After four years of marriage, she divorced Arthur Miller just after finishing
Rebel Lives
, whose script he had signed.
And then she had a short affair with Frank Sinatra that further aggravated her emotional problems.
She hit rock bottom when she was admitted against her will for three days in a padded cell of a psychiatric hospital in New York, from which her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio took her.
But despite all this storm of problems, in 1962, 20th Century Fox required his services: he would have to lose ten kilos to star in
Something's Got to Give
.
And she had no choice: she was bound by contract.
That pool scene
Schiller spent several days photographing the actress in her dressing room or preparing scenes with the rest of the cast, which included Dean Martin and Wally Cox, but since she had read the script for the film, she knew that the best photos would come when the scene was shot. in which Marilyn swam in a pool under the watchful eye of Martin.
That was the key moment, the one that would bring the covers that the studio, Monroe and the photographer himself longed for.
Each one, for different reasons.
One of the most famous images that Lawrence Schiller made of Marilyn Monroe on the set of 'Something's got to give'. Lawrence Schiller
In the filming plan it was clear that Marilyn would appear naked, but no one imagined that the actress was going to be really naked.
When, after a long wait, she appeared for the filming, she was wearing a blue bathrobe and underneath a bikini the color of her skin.
He jumped into the pool and Schiller started shooting with two cameras, one in color and the other in black and white.
As Marilyn splashed in the pool, the photographer noticed her bikini top disappeared first, then the rest. Between takes, the actress posed, she was having a great time. “Marilyn was a photographer's dream with her clothes on and much more without her clothes on,” says Schiller. His damp skin glowed, his gaze was radiant. He was a week away from his 36th birthday and he was better than ever. She was incredibly confident in front of the camera and her confidence was contagious. At that time, there was no trace of that woman who had gone through so many difficulties throughout her life. "
When the session ended after a couple of hours, Schiller knew that the material he had was top-notch. Sixteen rolls of 36 exposures in black and white and three in color. And while Monroe still needed to review and approve the images, she knew she wasn't going to be too strict, as she needed the publicity. The competition in Hollywood was brutal at the time: while Marilyn was filming
Something's Got to Give
, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke starred in
The Miracle of Ana Sullivan
; Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were with
What Happened to Baby Jane?
; Katharine Hepburn played
Eugene O'Neill's
Long Journey Into Night
; Geraldine Page and Paul Newman
Sweet Bird of Youth
;
Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon were to open
Days of Wine and Roses
and Gregory Peck played the lawyer Atticus Finch in
To Kill a Mockingbird
.
Marilyn gave her permission for more than fifty snapshots to be published.
The rest were destroyed by Schiller the next day, oblivious to the historical and commercial value that the images would have acquired only a few months later.
"He lived in the present and not in the future," he says in the book.
The actress put another condition: that none of the magazines that published them spoke of Elizabeth Taylor in that issue.
Cover of 'Marilyn & Me', just reissued by Taschen.Taschen
While Schiller was busy negotiating with the magazines interested in the photos, the filming of the film continued, but the atmosphere of the production had become rarefied to an almost unbearable level. The directors of the studio were angered by the continuous delays that Marilyn's behavior had caused in the film. She would show up late, leave the set for personal engagements (like singing a happy birthday to President Kennedy), or say she was ill. So Fox, after calculating that the actress's conduct had cost her more than half a million dollars, and verifying how little had been filmed, decided to fire her, sue her for damages and put an end to the project.
Although there was no longer a movie to promote, editors had no trouble finding a new approach to the photos, and
Life
magazine
was the first to cover one of the pictures of Marilyn by the pool on July 16, 1962. A This publication would be followed by many more around the world, which made Schiller a famous photographer and provided him with enough money to buy a house. "I'm going to hang a sign on the door that says, 'The house Marilyn bought," Schiller joked with the actress in those days. She told him that she was very happy to have helped him achieve it.
Marilyn was also very pleased with all the publicity the photos were generating.
Every few days Schiller brought her more national and foreign magazines with her image on the cover, which she had scattered around her living room.
The last time he visited her home, he found the actress tending the flowers in the garden, her hair down, no makeup, and a simple white dress.
The photographer noticed her a little more abrupt than usual, handed her the magazines, another set of photos for her approval that was destined to go out in
Playboy
and told her that he was going on vacation for a few days to Palm Springs.
They agreed to speak on his return and said goodbye as always.
August 5, 1962
On the second day of being at the beach, Schiller was awakened by a call before 7 a.m. Monroe had been found dead in her bedroom. Everything indicated that the cause of death had been an overdose of barbiturates, the pills he used to fall asleep. There was talk of suicide in the press, but in their last meeting Marilyn had not seemed like a person who wanted to die. "On the other hand, what does a suicide bomber look like?" Asks the photographer in the book.
The shock was total. Schiller went to the star's house with his camera and no one asked him for any type of accreditation; both
Life
and
Paris Match
had assigned him to cover the events of Marilyn's death and her funeral, which was arranged by her ex-husband, Joe DiMaggio. Although the marriage between them had been a disaster - especially because of his jealousy. somehow the former baseball player still felt responsible for the actress.
At the funeral many of the people who had marked the life of the star were missed. "His co-
stars
from
In Skirts Ya Lo loco
, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, weren't there," recalls Schiller. Directors George Cukor, John Huston, Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan weren't there. Her first husband, Jim Dougherty, and her third husband, Arthur Miller, neither. Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin and Wally Cox, either. Neither did the Kennedy brothers. DiMaggio was said to have ensured that those he thought had destroyed the actress's life were not invited to pay their respects. "
Lee Strasberg, who had been Monroe's teacher at the Actor's Studio, was in charge of pronouncing a few words at the funeral that are perhaps the most sensitive and, at the same time, the most accurate when decoding a character as complex as It was the Californian actress. He referred to her as “a legend” and described her as a “warm, impulsive, shy and lonely human being. Sensitive and very afraid of feeling rejected ”. She spoke of the hope she had for a future that would never come and also of "her light, a combination of melancholy, brightness and desire, which separated her from the world and at the same time made everyone feel drawn to her."
As the years went by, the Marilyn myth got bigger and bigger. According to Schiller, Monroe is far more famous today than she ever was in her day. And, in part, the photos from that day have definitely contributed to this, because they show the person Strasberg was talking about in his parliament at the funeral. An exceptional woman but who also held an unfathomable mystery. That he embodied that contradictory mix of sadness and loneliness in the midst of a cloud of sycophants. Schiller's chronicle, for its part, complements that vision and recreates before us a real, alive and extraordinary woman whose life ended abruptly and unexpectedly.
"Marilyn continues to be a living and extraordinary presence in my life," concludes Schiller, who is 84 years old today and lives in New York, in the last paragraph of the book.
"I still think of her often."
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