Marilyn & Me Page 4

  Marilyn was a photographer’s dream subject with her clothes on and even more stunning with them off. Her wet skin glistened. Her eyes sparkled. Her smile was provocative. She was a week away from her thirty-sixth birthday, and she looked as good as she had ever looked. She was so sure of herself in front of the camera that her confidence was infectious. There was no hint of the woman who had been in trouble for most of her life. As I shot, I was sure that the pictures I was taking were going to be beautiful and unforgettable. The curve of her spine complemented her natural curves as the water reflected the lights, and the whole scene sparkled. I wasn’t even thinking about how many of these images she would approve. How could she not approve them all? She was giving it her best, and her best was as good as it got. She was, after all, Marilyn Monroe!

  In all, I shot sixteen rolls of thirty-six-exposure black-and-white and three rolls of color, constantly adjusting my cameras, checking exposure, checking the shutter speed, moving so that the key lights produced the right highlights on her body. The black-and-white film was Tri-X, and the color was high-speed Ektachrome. The scene was repeated time and time again so that the director could capture it from every conceivable angle. It wound up taking a full day, but the actual shooting was only two hours.

  The director finished at around five in the afternoon, and immediately I rushed to the phone, just outside the soundstage doors, to call Tom Blau and Paris Match to let them know what I had. I realized it was almost three in the morning in Europe, but I didn’t care. I told Tom, “You better get on a plane. I’ve got Marilyn Monroe in the nude, and we’re gonna make a lot of money.”

  Tom balked. “Can’t you put them on a plane?”

  “No, Tom, I can’t,” I said. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

  Then I called Roger Thérond, the picture editor at Paris Match. The magazine’s switchboard was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, because Match covered the world. Not having ever called Thérond at night, I needed the magazine to put me through to his home. Just then Woodfield came through the soundstage door, carrying his camera bags. I had barely talked to him all day, but I knew I had to say something before he left.

  “Billy,” I said, still holding the phone, “two sets of pictures only make the price go down. One set of pictures makes the price go up. I think we should become partners.” Woodfield kept walking and had passed through the outside doors just as I was put through to Thérond.

  “Roger,” I shouted. “You won’t believe what happened. The first nudes of Marilyn Monroe in over ten years. The pictures are going to blow your mind!”

  “How soon can we get them?” Thérond said in his heavy French accent. “Should we fly a writer there?”

  “No, no, you don’t need to. The pictures speak for themselves, Roger.” What I didn’t tell him was that Marilyn still had to approve them. I was just hanging up with Thérond when Woodfield walked back in.

  At first he didn’t say a word, but obviously he was ready to talk. “Let’s go to the commissary and talk about this,” he said in a low voice. On the way, I talked, not letting him say much. “Let’s put our pictures together, sell them all over the world—here in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan.” I didn’t even know whether Woodfield owned his pictures or Globe did. Maybe Billy didn’t even know at that point. All I knew was that I owned my photographs and he came back to listen.

  “Fifty-fifty,” I said. “Both our names and copyrights on the pictures.” The public wouldn’t have to know which pictures I shot or which ones Billy took. “We’ll sell them together all over the world,” I said, concluding my pitch.

  Finally, Billy spoke. “You’re saying fifty-fifty between us?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “and my agent will do the selling.”

  “And what about Globe?” he said.

  “That’s between you and Globe,” I replied. “I’m making a deal with you, not with them. You develop your film, and you decide what you’re going to do.”

  Billy didn’t agree right away; he wanted some time to think it over. I told him that if he liked the idea, he should come to my studio the next afternoon, after we finished on the set. After he left, I walked back to Marilyn’s dressing room and knocked on her door, but she didn’t answer. I knew she was there, but she wasn’t there for me, so I left.

  The next morning, before I went to the studio, I called Dick Pollard, the picture editor of Life. “When can we see them?” he asked after I told him what had taken place. I felt his eagerness on the phone. “As soon as Marilyn approves them,” I replied.

  That morning I shot some more scenes on the set, but Marilyn was in a strange mood, so I kept my distance.

  When she finished filming with Wally Cox, she passed me on her way back to her dressing room and asked, “When do I see the pictures?”

  She wasn’t smiling or being coy, and I sensed her steely determination. What had happened between us the day before was business, and the business was self-promotion. At the same time Fox was invested in Something’s Got to Give, and film production was a serious business. Was the picture going to be closed down? As Marilyn was shooting this movie, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke were starring in The Miracle Worker; Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were making What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; Katharine Hepburn was doing Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night; Geraldine Page and Paul Newman were doing Sweet Bird of Youth; Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon were about to pour their guts out in Days of Wine and Roses (a motion picture that I also photographed); Burt Lancaster was playing an unusual prisoner in Birdman of Alcatraz; and Gregory Peck was re-creating Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Marilyn knew that her movie wasn’t going to get the notices that these other films would receive unless she did something to bring it to the public’s attention, and what better way to do that than to reveal herself in a manner that could not be ignored? She had done her part, and I’m sure she wanted to see if I had done mine. Why she seemed to trust me I still don’t know.

  But first I needed to know if Billy would partner with me. That afternoon he came to my studio and said, “All right. I’m willing to make the deal.” We shook hands. There was no signed contract.

  “Where’re your pictures?” I asked as I reviewed my black-and-whites. “Let’s look at yours and look at mine, and then let’s pick the ones we want to show Marilyn.”

  “I’m not giving you any,” he said. “You go with all your pictures, and just give me half the money.”

  This was unexpected, and worrisome. “Isn’t Globe going to sell your shots?” I asked.

  “Not if they don’t have them,” he replied. “And they don’t.”

  My visceral reaction was that I was paying him half my income for exclusivity. Was that a good deal? I wondered. I had no idea, but I told him that we should move ahead with that understanding.

  Then Billy brought up something I hadn’t thought about. “What are we going to do about Jimmy Mitchell’s pictures?”

  I couldn’t believe that I had put Mitchell out of my mind so easily.

  “The most important thing is to get the studio to kill Mitchell’s pictures,” Billy continued. Obviously, he had thought this through. “They’ll want the publicity that ours can generate.”

  That made sense because the studio’s free handouts would be nonexclusive and wouldn’t be taken as seriously by magazine editors. Exclusivity would enhance the promotional value of our photographs. Billy said he knew Fox’s head of publicity, Harry Brand, and I knew the studio’s front man, Perry Lieber. We agreed to approach them separately and persuade them that our pictures would have more value to magazines if they had to pay for them rather than the studio giving out free images.

  Remembering how Marilyn had had to squint to see the black-and-white contact sheets, and how she sometimes crossed out some images simply because she couldn’t see them well, I decided to show them to her differently this time. I went through all the images on all the rolls and combined my fa
vorites into groups, placing them between two pieces of optical glass. I then put them in an eight-by-ten enlarger and projected the resulting image onto a sixteen-by-twenty sheet of photographic paper. I took these large proof sheets to Marilyn the next morning, knowing she wouldn’t have to use a magnifying glass or hold anything up to the light.

  I planned to leave her alone to review the images and return at the end of the day to pick them up. As usual, Marilyn was sitting in the chair in front of her makeup mirror, wearing a white robe, when I entered her dressing room. Seeing me in the mirror, she swung around in her chair, her robe slightly open, to reveal that she wasn’t wearing underwear. I didn’t lift my camera. It just didn’t feel right.

  As I handed her the proof sheets, she asked, “Where’s the color?”

  “Being processed,” I said. “I’ll have them tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be home,” she said. “I’ll see you there.”

  Marilyn glanced at the black-and-whites. “Not bad,” she said, but then pointed to one image, “but not this one.” It was a shot in which the muscles in her legs were emphasized too much. As she handed the proof sheet back to me, I noticed it was the only shot she had crossed out. I could hardly believe it—only one edit!

  “See you tomorrow,” Marilyn said suddenly. “I’ll give the rest back to you then.”

  I could see that she had had it and was kind of ushering me out, and I didn’t mind it at all. I couldn’t wait to pick up the color from the lab the next day.

  On the set, Marilyn had been joking with Wally Cox. Now, at the end of the day, when she came out of her dressing room, he was waiting for her, and they walked onto the lot together. She was wearing the fur cap from her last scene, white capri slacks, and a beautiful sweater, and she had a mink coat slung over her shoulder. I decided to continue shooting and followed them as they got into a limo, which had been waiting for them. Neither of them seemed to mind that I was still shooting. In the backseat, where they were snuggling and laughing, I noticed a few bottles of beer by Marilyn’s feet.

  Wally looked at me and said, “We’re going to Mulholland. Why don’t you come along?” He meant they were going to Marlon Brando’s house, which was on Mulholland Drive above Bel Air.

  There had been numerous stories over the years about Marilyn and Marlon, who knew each other from the Actors Studio. Wally was Brando’s best friend, and I really didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to photograph them together at Brando’s secluded home. At the same time, I knew that Judi and the baby were waiting at home and that the photo lab was developing my color pictures.

  Instead of getting into their limo, I said I’d follow in my own car. That would be better, because I’d be able to leave when I wanted to.

  “Okay, see you!” Marilyn squealed, and the limo took off, leaving me behind to run as fast as I could to my car in the parking lot. They were not waiting for me, and the fact was that I didn’t know where on Mulholland Drive Brando lived. By the time I reached my car, my energy was gone, and I was upset with myself. I should have gotten into the limo, I was thinking.

  As smart as I think I was, I was not as smart as I should have been.

  When I got back to my apartment, Judi asked me how it went with Marilyn.

  “She approved all the black-and-whites except one,” I told her.

  “That’s wonderful,” Judi said and went back to taking care of Suzanne.

  I didn’t tell her about missing out on the chance to shoot Marilyn and Wally Cox at Brando’s house.

  Chapter 6

  Who Is Dom?

  The next day, Saturday, in the afternoon, I got my color from the lab. Looking them over, I saw a lot of potential cover shots. Billy stopped by my studio and asked me who the agent was that was going to sell the photos. I told him about Tom Blau, who’d be arriving the next day from London, and who he represented: Tony Snowdon, Cecil Beaton, and Yousuf Karsh. Billy also gave me a few of his color shots and a couple of black-and-white prints. Marilyn had never seen or approved them, and I didn’t really want to revisit the black-and-whites with her. Billy and I agreed to hold his shots and leave well enough alone with Marilyn. That was when Billy brought up Globe. They were not happy with my agent making all the sales. It was obvious they also wanted to represent the pictures, so I agreed with Billy that they could sell them in a few countries, pending Blau’s approval when he arrived.

  Marilyn had now had most of the day to look at the black-and-white proof sheets I’d left with her and to talk to whomever she might talk to for advice, to hear what her shrink had to say about them, and her publicist, her hairdresser, her secretary, and her masseuse. I had no idea whether she shared them with the people she surrounded herself with or if she kept them to herself. As an actress she was enormously insecure, but as a model she was totally self-assured. I had discovered back in 1960 that she knew better than anyone else what made Marilyn Monroe work and what didn’t. So when I pulled up to her house after sunset in the cul-de-sac drive off Carmelina in Brentwood, I just took a deep breath and wished myself luck.

  She answered the door herself. “Here you go, let’s exchange,” she said, handing me the oversize envelope with the black-and-white proofs. I gave her the one I was holding, with the strips of color. Still standing in the doorway, she pulled out one of the strips, held it up, then put it back in the envelope with the others and said, “Let’s go get Dom.”

  Who is Dom? I wondered. All I could think was that I was going to have to deal with someone new now and that this was a wrinkle I hadn’t anticipated. Instead of asking me inside to meet Dom, however, she grabbed a cardigan and headed for her car. I think it was a T-Bird, but I don’t recall for sure. Marilyn motioned me in and drove us to Sunset, then headed east to the Strip. Near Schwab’s drugstore, where Lana Turner was said to have been discovered sipping an ice cream soda at the counter, Marilyn parked the car under a streetlamp and told me to wait—she’d be right back. A few minutes later, she came out of Schwab’s holding a brown paper bag. Back in the car, instead of starting the engine, she reached into the bag and pulled out “Dom”—a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne. She popped the cork like a wine steward, took a drink from the bottle, and said, “Pictures?”

  I was upset. This was not the time or the place—sitting in a car under a streetlamp. “Let’s not look at them now,” I protested. But Marilyn just took another swig, handed me the bottle, and said, “Let’s see.”

  Reluctantly, I reached into the envelope in my lap and pulled out the filmstrips. At the same time, she reached into her purse and took out an Eastman Kodak loupe—a very good magnifying glass—and what looked like a pair of scissors. She held one strip up against the streetlight, and zip! She snipped an image in half. Then she took the bottle from me, knocked it back, handed it back again, and zip, cut another shot in half.

  “Larry, you’re not drinking,” she said.

  “No, I’m not. I’m just scared that I may wind up with no color shots,” I replied. With nothing more intelligent to say, I blurted out, “What kind of scissors are those?”

  “They’re pinking shears,” she said.

  “What are pinking shears?”

  “You don’t know anything about women’s dresses, do you? When you hem a dress, you use these to cut the fabric.”

  Now I decided to take a drink, but it didn’t go down smoothly, not while she had those pinking shears in her hand. I was lost—it was almost dark. I couldn’t see the pictures she was looking at. I wasn’t being consulted. On a few pictures, she zip-zipped twice! I was trying to figure out how many strips of color I could keep inside my envelope without showing her.

  She held up a strip where her rear end was highly defined. “Johnny Hyde used to say my behind was like a colored woman’s,” she said. “Only he didn’t say ‘colored.’ Colored blood turns a lot of men on.” Zip!

  I was at a loss over what to say. Again, I just blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “You know what Yousuf Karsh said to Anna Mag
nani when he showed her his proofs from one of his shoots?” I said. “He apologized for all the wrinkles in her face that his lighting had produced and said he’d retouch the photos. And you know what Magnani said? She said, ‘Don’t you dare take them out. I worked too hard for those wrinkles.’ ”

  I had caught her attention. Marilyn looked at me for a couple of seconds, and then she said, “Maybe if I had those types of wrinkles, Fox would take me more seriously.”

  “She does have an extraordinary face,” I said. I was hoping to divert her attention away from those pinking shears.

  “I met her once when I won the Donatello Award for The Prince and the Showgirl. She hugged me for the cameras, and she called me a putana when she thought I wasn’t listening.”

  “What’s a putana?”

  “Look it up. It’s Italian.” Zip! Zip! Zip!

  By the time Marilyn was through with her editing, she had cut about 70 of the approximately 108 color images. Seventy sounds like a lot, but 38 approved sounded even better. The next day I would throw away all the cut-up images, oblivious to their historical value. I was living in the present and not the future.

  It was dark when we finished the champagne, and as we drove back to her house, she reminded me of our deal: she didn’t want to see Elizabeth Taylor in any of the magazines that her pictures were going to appear in.

  The Dom had loosened her tongue, and she started talking about how badly Fox had treated her, how the executives had no respect for her or her talent, and how she’d really like to stick it to them. She was rambling on, and my mind was wandering. I was beginning to calculate the projected number of magazine covers we could generate from the strips of approved color images in my lap. As she drove along Sunset, I was wondering how Billy and I were going to let the world know about what we had. There was no Internet in those days. No faxes. It was one thing to have the pictures and quite another thing to contact every editor in the world, and it was still another thing to sell them. I wasn’t worried about Paris Match, and with Tom Blau arriving the next day, I felt I was on the right road. I kept thinking about Life magazine. It was my dream to land a cover, and I was sure that one of the pictures could make that happen. Life was a deal I would make myself.