A final post (for now) on the Julien’s Legends series, in advance of the auction on June 13-14. As well as Marilyn’s bathrobe from How to Marry a Millionaire (see here) her costume from A Ticket to Tomahawk (1950) is also on offer. She wore it to perform ‘Oh, What A Forward Young Man You Are’ with Dan Dailey and her fellow chorines.
As well as an archive of material by Manfred ‘Linus’ Kreiner (see here), several other photographers are also represented.
UPDATE: I have now added the final bids for each item.
Marilyn at the Racquet Club in Palm Springs, by Bruno Bernard (1949) SOLD for $1,920
A collection of 10 original vintage film stills, together with approximately 25 publicity image photographs of Monroe (printed circa 1970s and 1980s), from the collection of actress Morgan Fairchild (SOLD for $768)
33 vintage lobby cards from the collection of Morgan Fairchild (SOLD for $768)Colour transparency from a publicity shoot for Niagara (1953) UNSOLDSilver gelatin print of Marilyn by Andre de Dienes (SOLD for $1,024)
Marilyn in 1962, signed by George Barris – from the private collection of the late Kim Goodwin (SOLD for $1,024)
“A group of seven color slides, all showing Marilyn performing for U.S. troops in Korea in 1954. Four slides show Monroe wearing a purple spaghetti-strapped dress on stage, three show her wearing a bomber jacket and pants in the camp, and one has a further handwritten annotation in black fountain pen ink reading in part ‘6 Feb 54 – A little/ closer this time.'” (SOLD for $448)
A group of 21 colour slides (SOLDfor $5,625)A black-and-white negative from Marilyn’s ‘Hooker’ series with Milton Greene; and a large screenprint from the Black Sitting, signed by Greene (from the collection of Morgan Fairchild) SOLD for $1,562.50 and $2,187.50, respectivelyScreenprint by Bert Stern, signed (from the collection of Morgan Fairchild) SOLD for $1,60010 large-format photos of Marilyn by Harold Lloyd (SOLD – three lots reached $3,200 each)Marilyn’s ‘revised final script’ for Something’s Got to Give, dated August 30, 1961. In fact, the screenplay would be revised several more times, even before the ill-fated production began shooting in 1962. (SOLD for $12,800)
In a tribute to filmmaker Agnès Varda, who died last week aged 90, Genna Rivieccio notes on her Culled Culture blog the parallels between Marilyn’s life and the tragic young heroine faced with a cancer diagnosis played by Corinne Marchand in Cléo From 5 to 7, the movie released just a few months before Marilyn’s death, and which helped to launch the French New Wave.
“Although Cléo is beautiful and has a relatively successful singing career, the dark shadow potentially case by the reaper above her won’t go away, nor is it remedied by seeing a fortune teller at the outset of the movie, one who confirms all her worst fears about waiting for some potentially fatal test results from her doctor.
Distraught at first over the reading, Cléo insists to herself that ‘as long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive,’ because ‘ugliness is a kind of death’ so how can she be suffering from it if she’s not aesthetically hideous? Even so, she is aware that if she is dying, it’s only the inside that will matter now–not from a personality or ‘good person’ standpoint, but in terms of it affecting whether or not her demise is imminent. To that former notion, however, Cléo suddenly becomes hyperconscious of the vacuity of her life. Buying hats, lounging around, cursing men. What does it all mean? And what can she do to go on preserving that vacuous little life? Thus, she tells her maid, Angèle (Dominique Davray) that she’ll kill herself if it turns out to be cancer. Angèle does little to comfort her, noting that ‘men hate illness’ and that Cléo ought not to wear a new hat on Tuesday as it’s bad luck.
So, too, did Cléo, a singer who bemoans wanting to project more poignant lyrics but then grows filled with melancholy as she sings a new composition filled with too much death imagery to bear. She wants to remain as she always has been in order to survive, to feel somewhat happy: at the surface of things. Unfortunately, like Marilyn Monroe before her, the woman endlessly preoccupied with her image and looks ends up driving any potential for real and meaningful love away. And as we all know, especially Narcissus, a reflection can’t reciprocate anything, nor love or hate you as much as you do it. Cléo’s childlike [im]maturity, is, in fact, directly related to her self-obsession. In being faced with the reality that her death is imminent, however, she is forced to come to grips with certain truths both about herself and existence that she never would have otherwise.”
PS: And if you should doubt Marilyn’s influence on the nouvellevague, this photo taken by George Barris just weeks before her death is glimpsed briefly in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a 1964 musical directed by Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy, and starring lifelong MM fan Catherine Deneuve. (According to IMDB, the film is set in 1957 which makes it a goof.) And in Demy’s 1963 film Bay of Angels, Jeanne Moreau donned a Monroesque blonde wig to play an unhappy divorcee (not unlike Roslyn in The Misfits) who becomes addicted to gambling.
Ian Griffiths, the British-born creative director of the Italian women’s fashion house, Max Mara, has talked about Marilyn’s influence on his work in a new interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. (The Jean-Louis designs worn by Marilyn in Let’s Make Love, and the iconic beach jacket she wore on Santa Monica Beach for photographer George Barris, were major inspirations for Max Mara’s Fall 2015 collection.)
“My first celebrity crush was Marilyn Monroe. In her films, I saw strength and talent in her above and beyond the blonde bombshell she was portrayed as. You could see her intelligence, and beneath that vulnerability there was a strength I admired.
When I became a punk in the ’70s, Marilyn emerged as a symbol of rebellion. We subverted the whole meaning of Marilyn and played with it in our scene. We wore T-shirts with her face on it and peroxided our hair.”
Photos of Marilyn – signed by photographers William Carroll, Laszlo Willinger, Kashio Aoki, Milton Greene, Bert Stern and George Barris – plus paparazzi shots from events such as Ray Anthony’s ‘My Marilyn’ party, are up for bids at an online sale at Julien’s Auctions on December 10. A bathroom tile from her final home is also on offer, with an estimate of $2,000-$2,5000. (And don’t forget the Essentially Marilyn auction at Profiles in History on December 11.)
There are several Marilyn-related items in the Property From the Collection of Hugh M. Hefner sale, set for auction at Julien’s this Friday (November 30.) A personal copy of Playboy‘s first issue – featuring Marilyn as cover girl and centrefold – is estimated at $3,000 – $5,000. Other lots include the 1974 calendar seen above, a tie-in with Norman Mailer’s Marilyn; several photographic books about Marilyn (by Janice Anderson, George Barris, Bert Stern, Susan Bernard and Anne Verlhac); a box decorated with a painting of Marilyn by Tony Curtis; a Marilyn-themed bowling shirt and tie; prints by Bruno Bernard, Milton Greene and Jack Cardiff; and a rather silly ‘trick photo’ appearing to show Hef checking out Marilyn’s cleavage (though in reality, of course, they never met.)
UPDATE: Hefner’s copy of the first Playboy issue was sold for $31,250.
It’s still not too late to celebrate Marilyn’s birthday, and on June 21, Pop International Galleries in New York launches an exhibit in her honour, curated by Andrew Weiss and featuring hand-signed photos by William Carroll, Laszlo Willinger, Bert Stern and George Barris.
This gorgeous mural by Jonas Never in Venice Beach, Los Angeles – based on a George Barris photo of Marilyn from 1962 – was posted by singer Lana Del Rey on Twitter today.
Meanwhile in Vauxhall, South London, MM superfan Valerie shared this with me – inspired by Marilyn’s 1953 shoot with Alfred Eisenstadt for LIFE magazine.
Surgical scars can be seen on Marilyn’s tummy in two of her final photo shoots, with George Barris (left) and Bert Stern (right), and in her ‘nude’ swim scene for the unfinished Something’s Got to Give, as Mehera Bonner reports for Marie-Claire. Marilyn underwent an appendectomy in 1952, and had her gallbladder removed in 1961, a year before she died. She also underwent several operations to alleviate her endometriosis and help her to have children, sadly without success. While surgical procedures are considerably more sophisticated today, our expectations have also increased. While there’s something rather liberating about these gorgeous, unaltered shots, it’s also important to remember that Marilyn – who exerted rigid control over her photo shoots, if not her movies – may herself have wanted to airbrush these photos had she lived long enough to fully review them. In fact, she vetoed many of Stern’s images, marking the rejects with an orange ‘X’; but after her death, he published the session in its entirety.
Now you see her, now you don’t: Marilyn in ‘Something’s Got to Give’
“Though she was famous for her perceived ‘perfection’ and ‘flawlessness’ (all the eye-rolls at the inherent sexism that goes into these terms), Marilyn Monroe had a pretty big scar across her stomach—which appears in both the Last Sitting and in Something’s Got to Give.
The scar itself is the result of gallbladder surgery that occurred before Stern’s famous images were taken. He says Marilyn was self-conscious about it, and called upon her hairdresser George [Masters] for reassurance before shooting. When Stern noticed the scar, he reportedly remembered Diana Vreeland saying to him, ‘I think there’s nothing duller than a smooth, perfect-skinned woman. A woman is beautiful by her scars.’
Diana Vreeland is right: women *are* beautiful with scars. But she’s also incorrect about women without them being dull. Either way, the sometimes-removal of Marilyn’s scar offers a fascinating insight into beauty standards in Old Hollywood—did she ever truly have agency as to how her body was portrayed?
Ironically, Something’s Got to Give was the first time Monroe was ‘allowed’ to expose her belly button on film—as most of her previous swimwear moments were high-waisted. Before her death, she’s said to have quipped ‘I guess the censors are willing to recognize that everybody has a navel.’
Following their previous online sale featuring photos of Marilyn in January (see here), Julien’s have announced another internet auction, ‘Iconic Imagery of Marilyn Monroe.’ Ending on August 13, the lots include photos by Douglas Kirkland, George Barris and others.
150 photos of Marilyn taken by George Barris in the weeks before she died are the centrepiece of a dedicated auction at Paddle8 in New York, reports Vanity Fair.
“The auction, called Platinum Blonde: Collectible Marilyn, takes place in New York from August 2 to 11, also includes memorabilia—including Monroe’s eighth-grade class photo from Ralph Waldo Emerson Middle School and movie posters from classics like Some Like It Hot and The Seven Year Itch—from the late star, who would have turned 91 this year.
Barris, who originally met with Monroe to do a Cosmopolitan story from the set of Something’s Got To Give, instead became a confidant of sorts in the final weeks of her life. The two began working on a book about Monroe’s life; Barris interviewed her extensively and began to photograph her as well.
In the 1980s, private collector acquired the images from Barris, who died late in 2016. In this auction, these three lots are presented in the original photoboxes from Barris, ranging from 43 to 63 images in each, with estimates from $8000-24,000. The Paddle8 auction, to [Dean] Harmeyer’s knowledge, features the biggest collection of Barris’s work to ever go on sale.”
