Marilyn & Me Page 3

  In the living room, Marilyn got down to business. “I don’t think there should be a lot of photographers shooting me on this movie,” she said in her breathless voice. “Like the studio did on The Misfits.”

  Then Pat continued on behalf of Marilyn. “I’m sure you and Paris Match can supply other foreign magazines with pictures.”

  “I’ve seen Elliott Erwitt’s pictures.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Elliott’s sweet,” Marilyn replied.

  “What did you think of Inge Morath?” I asked, referring to another photographer who had covered that movie. “She’s a pretty extraordinary photographer!” From Marilyn’s expression I could immediately tell that I’d made a mistake.

  “Well,” Marilyn said, holding her breath for a beat, “she wound up marrying my ex-husband just a few months ago.” Then she changed the subject. “I’d like you to shoot me with Wally,” Marilyn said, meaning her co-star Wally Cox. “He’s so funny.”

  “What I’d really like to shoot is—”

  “Wait, let me guess,” she interrupted me. “Splish-splash.”

  “The pool sequence is sure to be published everywhere,” I said. “It’ll be just like Sam Shaw’s photo of you from The Seven Year Itch,” referring to the famous image of her with her white dress flying up and her underwear showing.

  She thought for a while and then continued. “I’ve been thinking about this scene. I’ll have the bathing suit on when I jump in, but I’m thinking about coming out without it.”

  Interrupting, Pat said to her, “You’re joking, aren’t you?”

  Not responding to Pat’s comment, Marilyn went on in a slightly stronger voice. She was now looking at me as she spoke. “Fox should start paying as much attention to me as they are paying to Elizabeth Taylor.” She was referring to the fact that Taylor was receiving $1 million for Cleopatra and she was only getting $100,000. Everyone knew the studio was generating publicity from Taylor’s affair with Richard Burton. Now it looked like Marilyn wanted to show Fox that she could get the same kind of coverage without having an affair with someone.

  “Larry,” she said, looking intently at me. “If I do come out of the pool with nothing on, I want your guarantee that when your pictures appear on the covers of magazines, Elizabeth Taylor is not anywhere in the same issue.”

  “You’re really thinking of doing this?” Pat asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Marilyn replied.

  I looked at Pat, remembering newsreel footage of her shielding Marilyn from the vulture-like photographers who gathered around when she emerged from that psychiatric hospital in New York. I was having a hard time reconciling these two images. With me, Marilyn seemed so tough and determined, and yet she needed so much medical care. It was as if she was a wounded animal constantly looking for a way out of the darkness.

  “Well, Marilyn,” I said, standing up, “you’re already famous. Now you’re gonna make me famous.”

  “Don’t be so cocky,” she replied, wiping the smile off my face. “Photographers can be easily replaced.”

  I looked over at Pat, who was finally smiling. “Larry,” Pat said as I made my way out the door, “don’t forget that Marilyn has approval of all your photographs.”

  I was driving home when it occurred to me to wonder about Billy Woodfield. Had Marilyn or Pat also talked to Globe? Had they made a deal with Woodfield too? And then there was Jimmy Mitchell, the studio photographer. What would happen with his photos? Marilyn didn’t want a situation with a lot of different photographers milling around the set, but there were going to be three of us shooting there at the same time. Three sets of photos. That meant that none of us would have exclusivity. The value would increase only if there was just one set of photographs.

  Day and night, all I could think about was how I could get better shots of Marilyn than Woodfield or Mitchell. As a photojournalist, I was there to tell a story as much as to capture an image, and once we started shooting, I knew my competitive instincts would kick in and I’d get my shots. But the business side of me knew that Marilyn Monroe had not appeared nude since some calendar shots of her were published in 1952, and that if she was willing to show the world her body at age thirty-five, then those pictures would be worth a fortune—if only one person could control the market, that is.

  Knowing that I needed time to ingratiate myself, I got to the set a few days before the shooting of the pool sequence. Each motion picture was like a new love affair. A friend of mine once described them as “short sweet love stories.” I started my assignment by shooting Marilyn with her entourage and Dean Martin. They were decent shots and a good warm-up for me to get known around the set and, little by little, zero in on Marilyn. In the afternoon Pat Newcomb arrived and began clowning around with Martin. In between setups I had an opportunity to be in Marilyn’s dressing room, even though I was not part of her entourage of Agnes, Whitey, and Paula Strasberg, the wife of Marilyn’s drama coach, Lee Strasberg.

  Marilyn had two dressing rooms on the lot, one on the set and one in a bungalow next to the studio commissary. In the bungalow, where Paula practiced lines of dialogue with Marilyn, I captured their relationship. Marilyn would often sprawl out on the couch wearing a white robe, her bare legs tucked up under her. One day, she sat there as Paula walked into my frame to put something on the coffee table. It was already covered with food and a cake. The composition was perfect, and I pressed the shutter release. The picture said it all: Paula was there to serve Marilyn.

  Paula Strasberg was an enigma to me. She was there, but she was always in the background. Marilyn needed her advice and had insisted that the studio hire her as a personal acting coach. Since Marilyn couldn’t have Lee Strasberg on set, because he was working with needy actors in New York, his wife, Paula, would do as an extension of him. Paula was like a Svengali to Marilyn. At work, her mother hen, her shadow. She never left Marilyn’s side. She seemed to be able to anticipate her moods and desires. Paula believed in Marilyn, and that allowed Marilyn to believe that she could become a great actress. Directors feared Paula because Marilyn didn’t listen to them and listened to Strasberg instead. Every time I saw Paula, she was wearing a black cape and a black hat. She wore black so that she would be less noticeable. I adopted that habit from her. In the coming years, whenever I would shoot on a movie set, I’d wear a dark shirt and black pants.

  As confident as Marilyn was in front of a still camera, she was completely unnerved by a motion picture camera. There was no mirror she could look into once the director called, “Action!”

  One day, as we were sitting around in the bungalow dressing room, another photographer stopped by. It was George Barris, who would be photographing Marilyn at home and on the beach in Santa Monica for Cosmopolitan. Barris had come by for a short interview and wanted to shoot her on the set.

  “This is Larry, he’s on set,” she said as she introduced me. We shook hands. George did his interview and then told Marilyn he’d see her at her home later as he left. I was relieved. That was one less photographer I might have to deal with, and I thanked her.

  “What for?” Marilyn asked.

  “For your vote of confidence,” I said.

  “This is your job, Larry,” she said. “George has me at home.”

  I went back to taking pictures, patting my chin to indicate she should look up a bit, tilting my head slightly to get her to do the same. She followed my lead faultlessly, knowing now that I knew how to use the ambient light. Then unexpectedly she asked, “How’s the marriage working out?”

  “Judi’s terrific,” I said. “She’s a great mother. We’re looking to buy a house somewhere in the Valley.”

  “Did you always want to get married?”

  “Being a nice Jewish boy, for me, it just seemed the right thing to do,” I replied. “Judi is the first person I thought about having a family with.”

  “You’re lucky you found her,” Marilyn said, her eyes drifting. Then she added, coyly, “You know, I’m Jewish to
o.”

  I remember having read that she converted just before marrying Arthur Miller. “You don’t look it,” I joked.

  Almost as if on cue, a knock on the door broke our conversation. “Time, Marilyn.” She ignored the knock but got up to prepare to walk back to her dressing room on the shooting stage, where Whitey and Agnes could get to work. Agnes found her hair was very thin and applied some products to it to give it body. Waiting for the assistant director to escort Marilyn to the set, Paula started to read lines aloud with her. I could see that this would be a long day, and I asked Marilyn what time she thought we might be through.

  “Oh, I don’t know, probably very late,” she said. Then she added, “Your wife is expecting you.”

  “Not that. It’s just … well, you know, the baby, Suzanne, she likes to see me before she goes to sleep. But it’s okay, really.”

  “She’ll survive,” Marilyn said. Considering her childhood, I imagined she was thinking that there are a lot worse things that can happen to a kid than not having her father to tuck her in for one night.

  “It’s tough on Judi,” I said, “because I’m away so much.”

  That night we worked late, and when we were through, Marilyn was tired, though she did say sorry to me as she returned to her dressing room. By the time I got back to our apartment on Orange Grove, Suzanne was fast asleep. Judi was still awake, sitting in the living room with a smile on her face.

  “Why are you up?” I asked.

  Someone had come to the door and woken her. It was a deliveryman holding two dozen roses and a note from Marilyn Monroe: “Sorry for keeping Larry so late.” That blew me away. And it still touches me. I don’t think she did it for me and my wife so much as for herself. It seems like the kind of gesture she would have appreciated someone extending toward her.

  “She must really like you,” Judi said.

  “Who knows,” I said. “I like her. She’s so insecure about her acting. You’d think a star like her would be gliding through life. But she seems to always be struggling with something.”

  “Since when did you become an analyst?” Judi asked.

  The next day, when I knocked on Marilyn’s dressing room door, I was holding one of the roses. “You should have seen the look on my wife’s face.”

  “I’m glad it kept you out of the doghouse,” Marilyn said, taking the rose and putting it behind her ear.

  I was not quick enough to have snapped a picture, but it’s an image I still remember.

  On Thursday, May 17, Marilyn showed up to work on time and was finished with her scenes before noon. For a change, nobody had to wait for her. What they didn’t know was that Peter Lawford had come to the studio by helicopter to pick up Marilyn and take her to the airport. From there, they would fly to New York, where Marilyn had agreed to sing “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy at a Democratic Party fund-raiser at Madison Square Garden. Later, this would become an issue. Marilyn had informed Fox that she had been asked to do this, but the studio let her know that because the filming was already behind schedule, they didn’t want her to leave and miss more days. Marilyn didn’t argue; she just went to New York to celebrate the president’s birthday. By then, there were rampant rumors that she was having an affair with the president and, some believed, with his brother the attorney general as well, but that would always remain part of the mystery around her.

  I, like countless others, watched news footage of her sexy, almost tipsy performance as Lawford introduced her as “the late Marilyn Monroe,” making fun of her reputation for keeping everyone—and now even the president—waiting. It was a performance that no viewer would ever forget. She was wearing a skintight rhinestone dress, and her platinum-blond hair seemed to glow. And the way she whispered the song, pausing between each phrase, must have sent shivers up the president’s spine.

  Marilyn was en route to New York when Fox sent her attorneys a breach-of-contract letter. She was furious. She was convinced that this wasn’t about her movie but about the heavy, unexpected losses the studio was taking on Cleopatra. The studio seemed blind to the publicity she had generated for them with her appearance at the Garden. Instead, they were turning Marilyn’s trip east into a power play against her.

  Marilyn flew back to L.A. on Sunday and was on the set the next day ready to work. Everyone could see that her director, George Cukor, acted coldly toward her; no doubt he’d been told what the studio was up to. Marilyn worked a full eight hours but refused to work with Dean Martin the next day because he had a cold. Martin took the rest of the week off, which meant that the pool scene was moved to Wednesday. Just Marilyn and her bathing suit.

  Pat Newcomb called me on Tuesday night to confirm that the swimming pool scene would be shot the next day. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it, but I did call my photo agent, Tom Blau, in London to give him a heads-up. I told Blau that if I got some really good pictures, he might have to fly to L.A.

  Chapter 5

  A Photo That Said Everything

  But Showed Nothing

  Billy Woodfield, all three hundred pounds of him, arrived on set just as I did. I could see immediately that he had a winning personality, but what I really saw when I looked at him was who he represented: Globe Photos. I worried that Globe would try to go beyond its agreed distribution territory, the United States, and sell Woodfield’s pictures around the world. Even though we hadn’t yet started shooting, the thought of being scooped or of losing what I thought would be a really big payday upset me.

  Fox had built the swimming pool on a large soundstage that contained a tank. When Dean Martin returned to work, he would be filmed on a balcony, looking down at Marilyn, who was to be in the water, frolicking, and thereby turning him on. The line in the script said she appeared nude; it didn’t say that she was going to be nude.

  Cukor had set up several cameras, knowing he would have to shoot at least six or seven setups. He’d need close-ups, long shots, and a high angle from Dean Martin’s point of view on the balcony, which meant there’d be time in between setups to take photographs. There was great anticipation, made only greater because Marilyn was, as usual, late. George Cukor was miffed. He paced the set, fuming. When Marilyn finally emerged from her dressing room, she was wearing a blue terrycloth bathrobe and a flesh-colored two-piece bathing suit underneath. Basically, it was a bra and panties. The beating of my heart went into overdrive.

  Marilyn jumped into the pool and dog-paddled around. The water had been heated to ninety degrees, making it like a warm bath. She was like a child, floating on her back. There was no dialogue; she gave a little giggle followed by a little laugh, which was quite different from her giggle and laugh while sitting with me in her dressing room. This was the giggle and the laugh of her character. Then she floated over to the pool’s edge, lifted her head and shoulders out of the water, and peeked over the rim while keeping the rest of her body in the water. After a few more giggles, Marilyn lifted her right leg over the pool’s edge, still keeping her body hidden behind the pool’s rim. I hit the shutter release on my camera several times before moving to a ladder that I had placed close by earlier in the day. Four or five steps up I found another angle that showed Marilyn’s playfulness. Just as quickly as she’d come to the pool’s edge she moved back toward the center of the pool. As my daughter, Suzanne, would say many years later, this was a photo that said everything but showed nothing.

  What was unusual was that Paula Strasberg wasn’t hiding behind the lights. Marilyn didn’t seem to need anybody today. She looked confident.

  Standing far apart from each other, Woodfield and I started shooting some pictures with our long lenses. I didn’t worry about Jimmy Mitchell, because I never considered a studio photographer competition.

  Then, all of a sudden, Marilyn swam back up to the edge of the pool, and now she didn’t have the bra on, only her panties, which she had rolled up like a thong. She sat on the edge of the pool posing for our cameras. Looking this way and then looking away. Then a l
ook over her shoulders, a look directly into my camera’s lens. Immediately, I wondered when we were going to see it all. With two motorized Nikons around my neck, one for color and one for black-and-white, with a 180 mm lens on one and a 105 mm on the other, and with Marilyn about twenty feet away, I was working to get as many images on film as possible in the shortest period of time.

  I really didn’t care how the three cinematographers and the soundmen reacted to the noise of my cameras. There were no actors performing. This was a scene where the dialogue and sound effects would be added later. If the noise of my cameras bothered someone, they’d let me know. But no one said a word. All eyes were trained on Marilyn.

  Whitey Snyder moved to the pool’s edge for a few seconds to ensure that her makeup didn’t run. Agnes came over and worked on her hair, even though it was soaking wet. I was so fixed on Marilyn that I don’t even remember seeing Woodfield or Mitchell, who were also shooting. I was oblivious. I was waiting to approach Marilyn, but I wasn’t confident enough, so I went over to Whitey, who was now standing near me, and I asked, “Do you think I can go in and suggest something?” He laughed at my naïveté.

  Eager, I realized I had to wait for the right moment. It came about when Marilyn returned from her dressing room a second time. “Don’t forget—you want covers all over the world,” I said as she passed by. When there was no reaction, I realized that she hadn’t heard me. My voice hadn’t risen above a whisper.

  At poolside Marilyn took off her blue bathrobe, hiding her body as she slid into the water. A few moments later, when she raised herself from the water, I could see that her panties were gone. She’d done it! And she was having a lot of fun. She was enjoying it!

  And for a few minutes, while the crew repositioned the cameras, instead of returning to her dressing room a third time, she stayed and posed for the still cameras. Nobody had to ask her to turn right or turn left; she knew exactly what to do.