Marilyn & Me Page 2

The door to the dressing room was wide open, and Marilyn, sitting in front of her makeup mirror, noticed me. Staring at her face in the mirror, I saw that her lips formed the word “Okay.”

  Whitey turned back to me. “Okay,” he said and ushered me in.

  As I entered, I could feel the tension in the air. There was nowhere to sit except on the floor, in the corner, so that’s where I sat.

  “I’m just not ready,” Marilyn said, looking at herself in the mirror.

  “I don’t know if it matters, because everyone’s gone to lunch,” I replied, not knowing if she was talking to me or to herself.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. “All I have is champagne, but I can send my driver to get some food.”

  “No, I’m fine. I need to lose weight.”

  “Why? You’re not an actor,” she said a bit playfully.

  “My wife’s beginning to notice,” I replied.

  “You’re married?” she said. “How nice.”

  “Just,” I said. “For about ten weeks.”

  “First time?” she asked.

  “And last, I hope.”

  “Be careful what you hope for. You never know how things will turn out.”

  Of course, she was speaking from experience. Later, I would come to measure her life by the men who had shared it with her: her agent Johnny Hyde, Marlon Brando, Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Arthur Miller.

  Whitey came back in and confirmed that the crew had gone to lunch.

  “Want anything?” he asked.

  “Cottage cheese and fruit,” Marilyn said as she daubed mascara on her eyelashes.

  When Whitey left, she looked at me in the mirror.

  “Aren’t you here to take some pictures?”

  Then she turned toward me, and I immediately picked up my camera and started snapping. I noticed instantly how quickly she changed, and how beautiful she looked through the lens.

  “That’s great,” I said. “That’s terrific.” I was babbling.

  “How often do you lie?” she asked suddenly, cutting me off.

  I hesitated. Did she think I was lying? “What do you mean?”

  “Photographers lie to people all the time.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, searching for something more intelligent to say, something that would speak to her concerns, though I didn’t know what they were. “I used to lie about my age when I was sixteen,” I finally said.

  “What was wrong with being sixteen?”

  Relieved that she wasn’t mad at me, I decided to tell her a little more about myself. “My photographs were always being rejected by magazines,” I told her. “I would send my story ideas to picture editors, and they always turned me down. I got so many rejections that I used to pin the letters up on the bathroom wall and sit on the toilet and read them. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that they were rejecting me because of my age, not my work. I guess they figured that a sixteen-year-old couldn’t deliver the goods.”

  “I could tell you all about rejection,” Marilyn said. “Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.”

  “But look at you now,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she replied evenly. “Look at me now.” Her remark hung in the air.

  “I don’t understand!” I blurted out. I knew that I was betraying my ignorance or my youth, but I really didn’t understand, and I wanted to. “You’re a star!” I continued. “Your face is on magazine covers all over the world! Everyone knows Marilyn Monroe!”

  She didn’t say anything for a while. When she did, her voice wasn’t exactly soft.

  “Let me ask you, Larry Wolf—how many Academy Award nominations do I have?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. And it was true. I had no idea.

  “I do,” she said. “None.”

  Just then the door opened, and Whitey came in with her food. But Marilyn wasn’t interested in eating.

  “Marilyn is waiting,” she said to him. It was an odd remark, and very odd for her to refer to herself in the third person, I thought. But somehow I knew that she was telling Whitey it was time to get her ready for the cameras. He left, saying he would look for Agnes I decided to continue photographing Marilyn.

  She stopped me.

  “Nobody should ever be photographed while they’re eating,” she said, even though she hadn’t taken a bite.

  “So you lied about your age to get some work,” she said, continuing our conversation where we’d left it off.

  “Yeah, and it worked,” I said. “That got me started, and before long I was getting published—a little in Life, but mostly in Paris Match and the sports magazines.” Then I started to brag, hoping it would impress her. I was, after all, twenty-three years old. “I won the Graflex awards,” I said. “And an editor for the New York Times even wrote this article in U.S. Camera magazine about me.”

  I found myself talking nonstop. Marilyn began to pick at her fruit, eating a strawberry, a piece of cantaloupe, and a slice of orange. She was not listening to me, but I continued to rattle on, telling her about having shot some nude photos in the basement of the home of the president of Pepperdine College, which I had attended.

  “And then I photographed these baton twirlers in shorts for the Saturday Evening Post. The school got mad at me because it gave the wrong impression of Pepperdine, which was supposed to have a religious environment.”

  Finally, I caught her attention.

  “Girls in shorts … nudes in the basement … how naughty,” she remarked sarcastically. Her mouth was half-full.

  “In those days, I was trying to get into Playboy, doing test shots. Eventually, it paid off. Since then I’ve shot three Playmates for them. And I got paid $1,000 for each centerfold.”

  Then I found myself asking her about her famous nude calendar. “How much did they pay you for that?”

  “Nothing,” she replied without hesitating. She didn’t seem to mind answering my question. “They didn’t pay me anything for that first one, which Playboy used as a Playmate. And I’ve never met Hefner.”

  “He lives at the Garden of Allah when he’s in L.A.,” I told her. “Why don’t you just knock on the door and surprise him.”

  “I know that place. That’s where I saw Errol Flynn play the piano.” She smiled knowingly.

  “I have the best Hefner story,” I said. “You know how he’s supposed to have made it with all those Playmates? Well, after I shot my first two for him, he called me and said he had dinner with this fantastic chick, and he went on about how well-endowed she was, and how she had the perfect face and body to be a Playmate. Since Playboy is all about boobs, I figured she must be a knockout, so I made arrangements to shoot her. I went to the Harold Lloyd estate just north of Sunset, and—get this—as soon as she undresses, I see that she’s flat chested.”

  Marilyn was laughing by then. “So what did you do?”

  “I shot her from behind.”

  “So you made a mountain out of a molehill,” she joked.

  With both of us in a good mood, I started shooting again. And before I knew it, Marilyn decided she was ready to go on set.

  Leaving the dressing room and followed by Whitey and Agnes, she turned to me. “When will I see your pictures?”

  “I can have them for you tomorrow,” I said.

  “Good,” she replied, and added, “I always have a full-length mirror next to the camera when I’m doing publicity stills. That way, I know how I look.”

  Her remark came out of nowhere, and I found myself asking, “So do you pose for the photographer or for the mirror?”

  “The mirror,” she replied without hesitating. “I can always find Marilyn in the mirror.”

  The photos I took during my three days on the set were all black-and-white. They were candid, journalistic pictures, not studio portraits. There was no manipulation of lighting, no posing. The idea was to capture her at ease. While I was shooting, Marilyn never worried about whether I was shooting her rear end or whether I was aiming too high
or too low—she knew she would be able to reject the ones she didn’t like.

  Once I got the proof sheets back from the lab, I had no trouble returning to the set to see her. When it came to looking at photographs of herself, Marilyn was all business. I gave her the small contact sheets and a magnifying glass. The images were so small that it was very difficult for her to see them, so sometimes she’d cross out an image with a red marker just because she couldn’t make it out.

  Marilyn didn’t have a preconceived idea of how she wanted to be seen by the public. All she wanted was to make sure that her face or body wasn’t deformed in any way. She didn’t want to see her head or neck turned a way in which lines or wrinkles might appear. If she was wearing, say, a tight dance outfit and was swinging around a pole, she wanted to be sure that her legs looked right. She was interested in the total image, so she was very, very careful about what her entire body looked like. If the whole picture worked, Marilyn was happy.

  At the bottom of one of my proof sheets she wrote with that red marker: “Explain or remove sweat pads.” She had marked a shot of her with Montand, and damned if I could see the sweat on her face that she saw. When I looked at the entire image, not just her face, I noticed a tissue under her right arm that she kept to catch the perspiration on her body. She wanted the tissue retouched out just in case this shot was going to be published without a caption explaining that she was perspiring under the hot lights while rehearsing.

  “You see what I’m saying?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course,” I answered, though it would be years before I really understood what she’d been concerned about back then. I was too green.

  I never discussed with Marilyn whether I thought an image was good or bad. She knew what she was doing. And my goal was to have as many approved pictures as I could. We both got what we wanted.

  As luck would have it, I’d meet Marilyn again. By then, we’d both have a little more experience with life.

  Chapter 3

  Parachuting In

  Shortly after I photographed Marilyn, my wife, Judi, and I settled into a small ground-floor apartment in West Hollywood. The living room/eating area was an L-shaped room with the kitchen off to the side. By then I had opened up a studio on Sunset and was doing advertising photography while waiting for magazine assignments. I loved traveling. I loved the adventure of parachuting into someone’s life and trying to tell a story in a few pages of a publication. I didn’t have to be a specialist in anything, and it was exciting moving from one story to another.

  Look had hired me again. I had shot covers for TV Guide. I’d done stories on the Colorado River for Life and photographed more motion pictures for different magazines. I had gotten my big break when Paris Match assigned me to cover the final weeks of Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, in October and November 1960. One of my photographs earned me the National Press Photographers Association Picture of the Year Award. It was election night, and Nixon was conceding to Jack Kennedy. Nixon’s wife, Pat, stood by his side, a tear in her eye. That was the first time that every magazine editor realized that I could deliver.

  Less than two weeks after I took that picture, on November 19, it seemed I was moving back in the direction of Marilyn when, on another assignment from Paris Match, I photographed what is now a classic image of Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart at Clark Gable’s funeral, capturing the sadness and the loss on their faces. The editor in chief called to congratulate me.

  Since I retained the copyright and publication rights to all my photos, an important agent, Tom Blau, took me on and started to syndicate my photographs all over the world. It wasn’t long before my wife and I moved into a larger apartment and I was driving a Mercedes 220. I talked a lot, I told stories about the people or events I covered, and by November 1961 Judi and I had become the parents of a baby girl, Suzanne.

  As my ego was being fed and getting healthier, I would soon discover that Marilyn’s was shrinking.

  In those same two years, Let’s Make Love died at the box office. The press reported that Marilyn had suffered a third miscarriage, and her next picture, The Misfits, with the dream cast of Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach, fell apart when John Huston, who directed it, was at a loss trying to get Marilyn to work on time. Her eyes didn’t focus, and she eventually had to return to Los Angeles from location for a hospital rest. Filming in Nevada was shut down for ten days. Shortly after the movie was finished, Gable died and Marilyn was unfairly blamed for his death—they said she had kept him waiting too many hours in the broiling-hot desert sun. Marilyn’s six-month affair with Frank Sinatra, which followed, didn’t seem to solve any of her emotional problems. Against her will, she spent three days in a locked and padded room at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York. After being rescued from there by Joe DiMaggio, she had gallstone surgery. At the same time, she suffered from chronic constipation and debilitating insomnia. Back in California, she found a new psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who saw her five times a week. She also bought a house, her first one. It was in Brentwood, between Beverly Hills and the Pacific Palisades. She also trimmed down twenty pounds to make Something’s Got to Give for 20th Century–Fox, to which she was still under contract.

  Chapter 4

  Photographers Can

  Be Easily Replaced

  The next time I saw Marilyn was almost two years later at Peter Lawford’s Malibu beach house, where I had been shooting him for Paris Match. One evening he invited me to photograph him at a cocktail party he was throwing, but he made it a point to say that I shouldn’t bother his guests.

  A little after I arrived, I saw Marilyn in conversation with, I think, the historian Arthur Schlesinger. They were standing in a corner of the living room. Marilyn was holding a drink. I decided not to reintroduce myself, hoping rather that she might notice me. I stood off to the side, out of her line of sight, and heard snippets of their conversation. Mostly they talked politics: “Bay of Pigs”; “Communism”; “civil rights.” Marilyn wasn’t a dumb blonde with Schlesinger. She wasn’t asking questions; she was giving opinions. That night I remember her voice being deeper, with some authority. I was impressed.

  In May 1962, Paris Match assigned me to photograph Marilyn in Something’s Got to Give, in which she would co-star with Dean Martin and Wally Cox. After Marilyn approved me, I asked Perry Lieber, from Fox’s publicity office, for a copy of the script so that I could get some idea of the story and of what scenes might work best photographically. By then I had learned a lot more about the business. I understood the power of publicity and of Life magazine in the United States and Paris Match abroad. I’d become a much better businessman, maybe a little tough. I understood the value of exclusivity to a photographer.

  I soon discovered that Jimmy Mitchell, the studio photographer, and Don Ornitz for Globe Photos would also be covering the movie. Ornitz, who had photographed Marilyn in 1951, early in her career, was a fine photographer of women, and I gave Globe a call to touch base with him. Don was out sick, I was told.

  When I looked over the script, which contained numerous pages of revisions, it didn’t take me very long to find the one scene I was sure I wanted to shoot: when Marilyn jumps into a swimming pool to seduce Dean Martin, who is looking down at her from a balcony. This scene would shoot for several days in May.

  I knew I had to call Pat Newcomb, Marilyn’s personal press representative, whom I had not met in 1960. Pat suggested that we meet at Marilyn’s house to discuss the shooting schedule. I didn’t understand what there was to discuss: Marilyn swims, I shoot during rehearsals or camera setups, she gets out of the pool, I shoot her wearing a bathing suit. And I cover some other scenes that are on the schedule to flesh out my coverage.

  Meanwhile, Globe called me back to say that Don Ornitz was still out sick and that William Read Woodfield might be covering for him. I’d never heard of Woodfield, and I didn’t know that although he had photographed Hollywood, he was more of a writer than a photographer. W
hen I asked to meet him, I was told he’d meet me on the set. That was it.

  When I arrived at Marilyn’s new house, at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, I found the one-story Spanish-style home almost bare. The house wrapped around a nice-size pool in the back, and there was a guesthouse. There was no art on the walls, just a few pieces of furniture, and loose tiles were scattered all over the living room and kitchen floors. Later I would learn that her bedroom contained only a mattress and two small tables. There was nothing on the walls in there, either.

  Marilyn, wearing checkered capri pants, a white blouse, and very little makeup, looked almost ordinary that morning. Pat Newcomb was there, partially silhouetted against the window, a lean athletic look about her. Marilyn was preoccupied with the tiles and jumped right into conversation with me. “Larry, let me borrow your one good eye.”

  Pat looked puzzled by this remark, but I thought it was funny.

  “What do you think of these?” Marilyn asked, pointing to a couple of tiles. “I’m redoing the kitchen. I’m picking them out myself.”

  “Hi,” I said to her and looked down at the tiles. “Nice to see you again.”

  “You too, Larry.” Then Marilyn said something like, “You get any badder since I last saw you?”

  Again, I remember Pat Newcomb looking confused. One good eye? Badder? What was Marilyn talking about?

  “Quite a bit,” I said. I was pleased that she remembered our joking, but I knew that this wasn’t the time to talk about myself.

  “So, whaddya think? Which color tiles should I get for the kitchen?”

  “I like the blue,” I said.

  “Nah,” she replied. “That’s swimming pool color.”

  Pat Newcomb was getting restless, and she suggested that we get started on the matter at hand. In time I would come to understand that Pat was fiercely loyal to Marilyn. Her job was to protect Marilyn from the press. But Pat was more than just a protector: she was Marilyn’s friend and confidante. She had devoted herself to Marilyn and was a true professional in every aspect of her job.