Marilyn Monroe 1926-1962
Marilyn’s personal script for her last, unfinished movie, Something’s Got to Give – is currently on auction at Paul Fraser Collectibles, reports The Independent. (A signed note from Marilyn, penned during filming of The Prince and the Showgirl, is also for sale.)
Legendary columnist Liz Smith marks the 50th anniversary of Marilyn’s death at the Huffington Post, revealing a wish shared by many of Monroe’s fans – for all deleted scenes from her movies to be restored.
“In the years since I’ve had this column, I’ve probably written as much about this young woman, so long gone, than other stars who were, or are, alive and thriving. Indeed, my column was the impetus for 20th Century Fox to dig out the many glorious hours of the unfinished Something’s Got To Give, which gave the lie to the idea Marilyn was performing in a drug-and-drink-induced coma. In fact, it seemed that director George Cukor was playing the diva on this set. (And by the way, there are plenty of MM’s deleted scenes from Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch and Bus Stop, crammed into film vaults, still to be mined. Fox, are you listening?)”
This floral-print dress, designed by Jean-Louis and worn by Marilyn in the ill-fated Something’s Got to Give, was bought on Ebay last year for $57,000 by Deborah Burke of Stamford, Connecticut.
The dress was featured on last week’s Final Offer show, on the Discovery Channel. A preview video was posted on MSNBC. (Spoiler: one collector offered Burke $800,000, but she decided to hold out for a million, reports Huffington Post!)
Norma Jeane Mortenson (aka Marilyn Monroe) was born on June 1, 1926, 86 years ago. This photo, taken by Lawrence Schiller in 1962, shows her celebrating her 36th birthday with co-star Dean Martin, on the set of Something’s Got to Give.
Writing for The Guardian, Lawrence Schiller picked this shot from the pool scene in Something’s Got to Give as his personal favourite.
“When she jumped into the water with her bathing suit on, I looked at her as if she were an athlete. My adrenaline was going. She was moving so quickly there wasn’t time to focus the camera, so I had to anticipate what she would do next. In a lot of my pictures of Marilyn, her body is always to one side, because I needed to have room for what she might do with the rest of the shot. This was always my favourite. I still get a little laugh inside me when I look at it.
When the shoot was over, I rang the magazine and it hit me: wow, she did it! I realised at the same moment how desperate she was. When she had nothing left, to prove that she could still get more publicity than anybody else, out came the birthday suit again.
Marilyn approved certain pictures, and they went all over the world. I had no ethical qualms about that; she could have changed her mind. But I had no sense of history and threw the rest away.
She was fired from the film and died several months later. I couldn’t believe it. I rushed to her house, then the mortuary and went into journalistic mode. I was there to capture events. A photographer owes it to history not to get emotionally involved. My 10-year-old daughter said of this picture, ‘It says everything but shows nothing.’ Even a child could work out the innocence and desperation it captures.”
Marilyn & Me launched this week at New York’s Taschen Bookstore. MM fan Edgar Freire attended, and took photos.
While signing books, Schiller told the New York Daily News, ‘I photographed some women who were extraordinary — but nobody that could turn it on like a light switch as Marilyn did. All you had to do was absorb and preserve what Marilyn was doing, and you had great images.’
Larry Schiller has also been interviewed for TV’s Today show. You can watch the video now at MSNBC.
Playboy chief Hugh Hefner has responded to Vanity Fair‘s cover story on Larry Schiller’s ‘Lost Monroe Nudes,’ reports the New York Post.
‘On the Playboy website, [Hefner] posted, “None of these nude photos were lost — in fact, they are in the Playboy photo archives, or have been previously published in Playboy.”
One of Monroe’s final acts had been to return a nude photo to Schiller. She had written, “Send this to Playboy, they might like it.”
Sniped Playboy, “And, indeed, we did like it. So much, that we ran them 48 years ago, in our January 1964 issue, or again in January 2005. Sorry, Vanity Fair. Sometimes when something is too good to be true, it really is too good to be true. In the parlance of today: You got got.”
A Vanity Fair spokesperson said that while editors realize that some of the pictures previously appeared in Playboy — a fact mentioned deep in the article — there are quite a few that never were published.’
Though Marilyn never actually posed for Playboy, and never met Hefner personally, she was its first cover girl in 1953, and has been regularly featured in the magazine ever since.
You can read the aforementioned 1964 issue, and others, over at Everlasting Star
The Tagliatella Galerie, Paris, is currently hosting an exhibition featuring Lawrence Schiller’s photos of Marilyn on the set of Something’s Got to Give, and depictions of the star in Pop Art, running through to June 30.
Over at Huffington Post, veteran columnist Liz Smith shares her thoughts on the new Vanity Fair spread – and Monroe’s supposed rivalry with Elizabeth Taylor:
‘As it always happens–especially with Marilyn–what Schiller said about the shoot, and Monroe, fifty years ago, has altered considerably. The passage of time has improved his memory.
Initially, in the wake of the photo-shoot, Marilyn cheerfully and casually remarked to Schiller, “Oh, I’ll be so happy to see all those covers with me, instead of Liz!” A remark any actress in 1962 might have made, looking at the reams of publicity Taylor was generating from her Roman love affair with Richard Burton.
But now Schiller piles it on, saying Marilyn told Life magazine that there was to be no mention of Taylor anywhere in the magazine, in the issue in which, she, Monroe, appeared. Absurd. No actor had such power over Life magazine. They would have told her to take her naked tush to Look, and see if she fared better there…
Some other “Marilyn” quotes are dodgy as well. But who’ll be reading anyway? The pictures are lovely.’
This summery shot of Marilyn, taken in 1949 by Andre de Dienes, makes the cover of Vanity Fair‘s June issue (due out very soon), with a feature on Larry Schiller’s ‘lost Monroe nudes’ from the making of Something’s Got to Give inside.
“Just 23 years old at the time, Schiller, at the set on assignment for Look magazine, had no idea that he was getting to know the icon in some of her most vulnerable moments. In an adaptation of his memoir about their sessions together, Schiller recounts intimate and telling conversations that illuminate the private struggles that consumed the starlet in her final days.”
Schiller’s photos of Marilyn have also been published in the New York Daily News…
This preview shot from the upcoming Vanity Fair special (June issue) is featured on the CBS website, alongside an interview with photographer Larry Schiller.
‘”I start shooting her from the dressing room,” he recalls. “And she says, ‘You know, you’re not going to get a good picture from there. But if you go over there you’re going to get something really nice.’ And so I go over there and she turns over her shoulder, and she looks at me and she’s just a different woman. She’s Marilyn Monroe.
“But basically I lifted another camera and I shot just one frame. It’s just an extraordinary first real portrait I ever did of her.”
The Xs on Schiller’s proof sheet are from Marilyn’s own hand. Of all of his shots that day, she only approve done. “That was the moment that I knew that Marilyn knew more about photography at that moment than I did,” Schiller said.
But he would learn.’
Schiller’s photography will also be the subject of an exhibition at New York’s Steven Kasher Gallery in June. Check the website for rare photos of Marilyn!