Marilyn & Me Read online

  Marilyn was quiet for a minute. She seemed a little upset. “Where are they?”

  “In my car.”

  “Well, go get them.”

  I ran out to my car to get the enlarged proof sheet. Back in the house, I held my breath as she looked at the images. She took her time, looking at her curvaceous, incredible body.

  “Don’t like this one,” she said, pointing. “This one either. But this one is okay. Go.”

  Marilyn approved just the one image. It was a full-body shot taken from the side. In it, she was about to put on her bathrobe, and her full left breast and nipple were showing. That was all I needed. Hefner would have something exclusive, which meant dollars to Billy and me.

  Later that night I told Billy the good news, and he came up with the asking price. I came up with a new concept to make sure that we would get the fee we wanted.

  And Marilyn would get what she wanted too: the use of her looks, her body, her ability to generate publicity, as a weapon against the studio. She wanted to be the center of attraction sexually, and she was.

  Since Hefner knew me, we decided that I would call him in Chicago, where he spent most of his time. He returned my call within a day. He’d seen Life, he said, so I told him what we had that nobody else had seen, noting that Marilyn had approved the shots. The negotiations went smoothly. We offered him that one nude shot exclusively and gave him nonexclusive access to everything else that Billy and I had distributed. Hefner agreed to pay us our asking price of $25,000—the most money Playboy had ever paid for a photograph. We were ecstatic. The house I wanted was within reach.

  I was pushing for Playboy to use one of our pictures on the cover, but Hefner had a better idea: he wanted to put Marilyn not only on the front cover but on the back cover as well.

  “I want her on the front cover with something covering her, and on the back I want bare ass,” he told me. But we didn’t have any images that would produce this effect. All the photographs had been taken from the same angle.

  That got me to thinking. How could we make this happen? I came up with an idea of shooting Marilyn in a studio, using a huge seamless roll of paper, in a U shape, placing her in the center and using two cameras, one in the front and one in the back, and shooting through two small holes in the paper. In that way, her body would protect the cameras from seeing each other. The cameras would shoot at the same time, capturing Marilyn from the front wearing a beautiful white mink stole over nothing, and the back view would show her bare ass. I told Hefner my idea, and he had one of his own. He said he’d write us a letter with his suggestions and that we should show it to Marilyn. It would take a few days to reach us via airmail, he said.

  While we waited for Hefner’s letter, I drove over to Marilyn’s house without having called to let her or Pat Newcomb know. I had made some eleven-by-fourteen black-and-white prints that I wanted to give her, and I thought I’d let her know what Hefner was thinking before his note arrived.

  At the door, Marilyn’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, asked me if she was expecting me. I said no, that I had just stopped by to give her some prints. She suggested that I wait in the backyard, by the pool. After about fifteen minutes I heard Murray talking to someone inside. From the pool area I could see into the house through a window. She was talking to two men, one of whom I thought I recognized: Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general of the United States, brother of the president. Eunice led them into the backyard, just as she had done with me. They stood off in a corner opposite mine. Kennedy was with his aide Ed Guthman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter whom I would come to know and work with while photographing Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign, just before his assassination.

  I walked over and introduced myself to Kennedy as an acquaintance of Marilyn’s, mentioning that I had once photographed him playing backgammon at Peter Lawford’s house in Malibu. He was wearing a polo shirt over light-colored slacks and was polite and cordial. I mentioned to Guthman that the iconic image of Richard Nixon conceding to John F. Kennedy was my work. I was talking to fill the space. I could see they hadn’t expected to find someone else waiting for Marilyn. The atmosphere was uncomfortable. I was asking myself how I was going to get out of there when Marilyn appeared at the other end of the pool.

  She was wearing a one-piece bathing suit under a white robe. She dropped the robe, smiled at us without saying a word (though I’m not sure she even saw me there), and dived straight into the pool. Kennedy and Guthman had big smiles on their faces as they watched her swim toward them. I felt like an intruder, like a messenger who had come to deliver a package and wound up being party to a secret he didn’t quite understand. I was holding the envelope with the prints of her nude swimming scene and fantasizing that she might do that again.

  When Marilyn came to the edge of the pool and lifted herself out of the water, she had her swimsuit on. She grabbed a towel, and that was when I was sure she had noticed me. After she had greeted everyone, I said I had come over to give her a few prints and that I’d be on my way. No one implored me to stay, and I left without saying anything to her about Playboy.

  Hefner’s letter was dated July 10, and I think I received it the following week. His whole idea was that Marilyn should offer a “peekaboo bareness” rather than full-on nudity, as this was more provocative.

  Larry and Bill—

  If this letter doesn’t do it—nothing will.

  When I got to thinking about the whole idea, after we finished talking on the phone, it occurred to me that getting Marilyn actually interested in posing for this cover was the greatest gimmick in the world, and would tremendously enhance everything we are doing. Nor does the back-view shot have to be nude, as we originally planned. All we need is nudity under a very transparent nightie, or perhaps a shortie nightgown, with little ruffled panties that are sufficiently pulled up around the rear to make it enticing. Let’s try for the pure nudity under the negligee, of course, but if that can’t be swung, then the shortie nightie—if it is properly posed—can do the trick. The important gimmick is that the cover must have a peekaboo bareness and provocativeness about it, when we see it from behind—otherwise it has lost its point. But we can achieve this with a quite transparent nightie, or else with the shortie nightgown that breaks just above the cheeks of the derriere, and tightly pulled up ruffled panties that break high on the cheeks, like a ballerina’s (or one of our bunny’s) costumes, if Marilyn will then give us the slightest little bend at the hips, so that the derriere is thrust back ever so slightly, and provocatively.

  I wasn’t kidding when I said that this cover can really be sensational and the talk of all the industries—magazine, movie and all the rest. Let’s see how they react to it.

  H.

  Shortly after receiving the letter in July, I took it over to Marilyn’s house to show it to her. When I pulled up, I found her around back, organizing things for either the guesthouse or the garage.

  “You won’t believe who may be staying here,” she said, perky and full of pep.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “He’s a writer and I read him when I was very young.”

  At the time, I didn’t know a lot about writers, so I didn’t venture a guess.

  “Mr. Carl Sandburg!” she said in girlish delight. “He’s also a poet. And he wrote an amazing biography of Abraham Lincoln, which I read.”

  I would later find out that Marilyn had met Sandburg first while making Some Like It Hot, and then again on the Fox lot during Let’s Make Love. At the time he was rewriting the dialogue for George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told. Sandburg was now eighty-four years old, so I assume that Marilyn’s relationship with him was platonic. Years later I would see Arnold Newman’s photos of Sandburg and Marilyn dancing together at the apartment of Henry Weinstein, the producer of Something’s Got to Give.

  Hefner’s letter was in my pocket, but I was hesitant to show it to her. She was so friendly and candid that I didn’t want to spoil anything by bringing out a lett
er that asked her to wear a “transparent nightie” and “ruffled panties” and to pose with “the slightest little bend at the hips, so that the derriere is thrust back.” If Marilyn was going to be willing to pose for the cover of Playboy, she wouldn’t need directions on how to pose. The idea of putting her on the front and back covers would be enough of an enticement for her. So I left Hefner’s letter in my pocket and instead talked to her about its contents.

  “Marilyn,” I said, “Hefner has purchased the other images that you approved, and when he publishes them in November or December, he wants to put you on both the front and the back covers of the magazine. It’s never been done before.”

  In response, Marilyn changed the subject.

  “Didn’t I already get you a house?” she asked.

  “We’ve put a down payment on one with a pool,” I replied. Then, trying to get back to business, I said, “A Playboy cover will keep your publicity going.” She was always interested in keeping that up. She had just finished a Life magazine interview with the writer Richard Meryman. It came out a month after the pool shots were published.

  As I talked, I could see that the Playboy idea appealed to her, but she said that she didn’t want to commit without asking Pat Newcomb’s opinion.

  “That’s fine,” I replied, “but I don’t think Pat likes me that much.”

  “How can anybody not like you, Larry?” she said. “You’re a happily married one-eyed photographer who got me another Life cover.”

  I liked her teasing, but I was focused on business. I wanted to get her to agree to the deal.

  “Life started the ball rolling, but the front and back of Playboy will make more waves,” I said. And then a new inspiration hit me. “And what if we print the front and back covers on clear plastic, like a see-through thing that you could peel off and then put together in a frame, so you could see the whole of you, like two eight-by-ten photos in a clear plastic frame? That would be pretty spectacular.”

  “You’re always full of ideas,” Marilyn said, but I couldn’t figure out if she really liked this one.

  “I had an idea for some time also,” she said, and told me that she’d been thinking about making a movie about Jean Harlow and that she had met with Harlow’s mother just that past weekend. “Ever since I was a young girl, I was told I was the next Jean Harlow,” she continued. “Her mother said I reminded her of her daughter. You know she was just twenty-six when she died?”

  “I didn’t know,” I confessed.

  “She died of kidney failure,” Marilyn continued.

  “Sad,” I replied.

  Knowing I shouldn’t push Marilyn on the subject of Playboy, I left upset without getting an answer.

  Later I would learn that Marilyn had surgery a few days later at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to alleviate her chronic endometriosis, a condition that caused her abdominal, pelvic, and back pain. She was in and out of the hospital within a day, and on July 25 Fox’s Peter Levathes went to her house. With all the publicity from those swimming pool photographs, along with the enormous outpouring of affection from her fans, he wanted to apologize. He said that Fox had made a huge mistake by firing her from Something’s Got to Give. He told her that the studio was dropping the lawsuit against her, and he offered her a new contract, with a raise in salary from $100,000 to $250,000. Dean Martin would be available in October, and Levathes proposed that as a new start date. Knowing that Marilyn liked Jean Negulesco, her How to Marry a Millionaire director, he wanted her approval so that the studio could make an offer and replace George Cukor.

  Fox might have been backtracking in its relationship with Marilyn, but the studio itself was in turmoil. A few days after he visited Marilyn, Levathes was fired, along with some board members. Darryl F. Zanuck, who looked favorably on Marilyn, was made vice president of 20th Century–Fox, and Marilyn decided to let things settle down at the studio before she agreed to return to the film. Frank Sinatra was singing at the Cal Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe, and Marilyn went to see him and to personally thank Dean Martin, who was also there, for sticking up for her when Fox tried to replace her.

  When Marilyn returned to Los Angeles, she saw her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio, had Robert Kennedy at her house for dinner, and began thinking about appearing on the front and back covers of Playboy.

  On Friday, August 3, I was packing a suitcase for a weekend trip to Palm Springs with Judi and Suzanne when Pat Newcomb called. “It’s not going to happen,” she said curtly. “So you should stop pushing it.”

  “What’s not going to happen?” I asked, playing dumb, but I had a sinking feeling.

  “Playboy,” she said. “I’m totally opposed to it. I don’t think Marilyn should do it. You guys have done very well with the pictures, but it’s Marilyn’s life, and she’s got her own problems. Let’s not add any more to them.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  And then, filling the void, Pat continued. “Let it be,” she said.

  There was no sense trying to change her mind, because it sounded as if she was relaying what Marilyn had told her to say. But I wasn’t ready to give up unless I heard it from Marilyn herself. I decided that before heading off to Palm Springs the next morning, I would take some prints of her, drive to her house, and let her tell me personally that the deal was off.

  On Saturday morning, at around 9:00 a.m., I drove to Brentwood.

  Marilyn was in the front yard, dressed in a simple, light-colored slacks outfit. She was on her knees, I think doing something with the flowers. As I got out of the car, she stood up and looked as if she’d been expecting someone else. Her hair was uncombed and loose, her face without makeup. You’d never know it was Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t look like any of the pictures that I had taken.

  “I didn’t know you were going to come by,” she said. She wasn’t very friendly, and she seemed impatient.

  “I just wanted to drop these off for you to see,” I said, handing her an envelope with a few prints and more foreign magazines with cover shots of her. “I’m taking Judi and the baby to Palm Springs for the weekend, but when Pat called last night to say you were no longer interested in doing Playboy, I just wanted to hear it direct from you.”

  “Pat wasn’t authorized to make that call,” she said, and I saw that she was upset. It was the first time I felt anger coming from her.

  “Should I discuss this with Pat on Monday?” I asked.

  “It’s still about nudity. Is that all I’m good for?” she replied, but I didn’t think she was looking for an answer. “I’d like to show that I can get publicity without using my ass or getting fired from a picture,” she continued. “I haven’t made up my mind yet. Let’s leave it at that. I’ll call you.”

  Her expression said, “Leave me alone.”

  Without another word, I handed her the envelope.

  “I’ll look at them,” she said.

  “And I’m out of there,” I said to myself.

  Chapter 8

  August 5, 1962

  In Palm Springs, Judi, Suzanne, and I checked into a junior suite at the Ocotillo Lodge and spent the afternoon around the pool and making plans for Sunday—maybe some shopping and then a drive into the desert. It was good to relax for a bit, I thought, but that didn’t last long.

  On Sunday morning, Billy Woodfield called me at the hotel before 7:00 a.m.

  “Marilyn’s dead,” he said.

  “Come on, Billy,” I murmured into the phone and hung up on him.

  He called right back. “Larry, put on the radio. It’s news. She’s dead.”

  Now I was fully awake, and I understood that he wasn’t jerking me around. “I’m coming back,” I said. “Her house?”

  “Yes,” Billy replied.

  I just didn’t understand it. Marilyn Monroe was dead at thirty-six. I don’t remember what I thought or discussed with Judi on the drive back to Los Angeles, but I remember keeping the radio on all the way home. The early reports were of suicide, but she hadn’t seemed suicidal when I
saw her the previous morning. On the other hand, how would I know what “suicidal” looks like? I’d read that she had had such episodes in the past and that she’d been revived every time.

  Back in L.A., I dropped Judi and the baby off, grabbed my bag of cameras, and headed up Santa Monica Boulevard to Brentwood. My adrenaline was coursing through my body. I had to put my emotions on hold so that I could deal with her death professionally. When I arrived at her house, I saw that the front gate was wide open and that there were people all over her lawn. Pat Newcomb, with dark sunglasses on, was being helped into the backseat of a car by a police officer. A second later, Eunice Murray emerged from the house and was taken to the same vehicle. She was white as a sheet. The car drove off.

  There were cops all around, but nobody was asking for press credentials, which I didn’t have with me. As I walked around, I noticed three or four other photographers and a few newsreel cameramen. That was when I saw a broken window on the right side of the house. Inside I could see what looked like an empty bedroom, but I could not see the bed. I lifted my Leica and started shooting. Then my eye caught someone who might have been Mickey Rudin, Marilyn’s attorney. He was walking beside another man, who was leading Marilyn’s dog out of the house. Earlier, Marilyn’s body strapped to a gurney, beneath a coroner’s blanket, had been wheeled out a side door. Marilyn—so alive before my cameras—was now dead. She was being taken to the coroner for an autopsy.

  Photos of that day showed me dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and dark-colored slacks with only one camera around my neck. My attempts to remain professional were to no avail. I just stopped taking pictures and returned to my car. I don’t even remember whether I went home or just hung out with Woodfield.

  Months later, it would be confirmed that Marilyn spoke on the phone with Peter Lawford on the evening of her death. Joe DiMaggio’s son would tell friends that he called her asking for advice about his girlfriend. FBI files released four decades after her death revealed that in Los Angeles Bobby Kennedy had borrowed a car that afternoon and had driven over to see Marilyn, though he was known to be in Northern California that night. When you string these facts together, it didn’t seem like Marilyn was on the brink of taking her life.