For the star’s 100th anniversary, Lawrence Schiller relives the nude photoshoot that showed, far from being a ‘messy’ blond bombshell, Monroe was a shrewd controller of her image.
A few days after a nude swimming pool shoot on the set of the 1962 comedy Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn Monroe drove her photographer, Lawrence Schiller, to Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard. Schiller had brought his negatives, ready to be turned into prints. In her purse, Monroe had brought her scissors, and under the glow of the legendary Hollywood hangout’s streetlights, she began cutting the colour film into pieces.
“Ziiiiiip – the ones she didn’t like,” says Schiller, animating the sound. “Ziiiiiip.” She destroyed them. “Oh yeah, but that came with the territory,” laughs the now 89-year-old, the last living photographer of Monroe. He recalls bending down to pick up the debris, thinking: “Well, I would’ve killed that one, too.” He speaks of her editing with admiration: “There wasn’t a picture she destroyed that I would’ve published.”
Two months later, Monroe died from a drug overdose. In the six decades since, this negative-snipping Monroe has been downplayed in favour of the myth – the so-called “messy” blond bombshell who struggled for control. Yet as Rosie Broadley, curator of the Monroe exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, writes: “Monroe not only performed, but also directed and claimed the right to veto any images she did not like.”
This takeaway forms the heart of the National Portrait Gallery show, timed for what would have been Monroe’s 100th birthday. It portrays the star as an active architect of her own image. Monroe could be brittle, but also tenacious and firm. She “so brilliantly conveyed” her vitality, says Broadley, that it was “frequently at odds” with the reality of her struggles.
Schiller recalls the pool shoot in May 1962, when Monroe jumped into the water and, disregarding director George Cukor’s commands, swam to where the light was better. In one shot, she lifts her leg out of the water and hooks it on the pool edge, like a glistening nymph. In another, she drops her towel to reveal the small of her back.
Before the shoot, Monroe asked Schiller: “What would happen if I jumped into the swimming pool with my bathing suit, but I come out with nothing on?” He replied: “You’re already a famous woman. But if I take those photos, you’re going to make me famous.” Monroe jibed: “Don’t be so cocky, Larry. I could fire you in two seconds.” He laughs. “That was the relationship I had with her.”
Eve Arnold, another of Monroe’s photographers, likened the star to a woman in pursuit of her lost self. Schiller’s snapshots of her skinny-dipping display a joy that belies her freefall that summer: a year after her divorce from Arthur Miller, gynaecological and gallbladder surgery, a stint in a psychiatric clinic, and worsening dependency on alcohol and prescription drugs.
“She was showing up for work, showing up late,” recalls Schiller. “The studio was saying it was costing them millions.” Another subtext was Elizabeth Taylor, her affair with Richard Burton, and the $44m “disaster” Cleopatra. “What was in her mind,” says Schiller, “was: if I do this shoot in a certain way, I’m going to be on the cover of every magazine – and Liz Taylor won’t be.”
Perhaps her naked pool frolics were part of what Arnold called the photograph “giving her back herself”. Less a simple case of one-upmanship, more a complex attempt at reclamation. “I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have,” Monroe said in her final interview.
Photographer Douglas Kirkland remembered photographing Monroe naked in bed in 1961. He said she enjoyed making still images as much as movies. “Because she could write the script as it went along. She could make things happen. I did not tell her, ‘Turn this way, turn that way.’ She did it herself. That was Marilyn.”
Schiller agrees: “I don’t think any photographer captured Marilyn because what they captured is what Marilyn wanted them to capture. She controlled the still camera.” Away from the camera, however, it was a different story. In June, days after Schiller photographed her with her 36th birthday cake, Monroe was found depressed having consumed many pills. Five days later, Fox fired her for repeated absences and sued her for $750,000. The film Something’s Got to Give was never completed.
Schiller senses reluctance to overplay his time with the star. “In front of the lens, she was somebody for me to capture.” Yet he says there was always something distant, fragile, more elusive. “She was like a deer out in the woods. You wanted to capture it before somebody shot it.”
The day before Monroe died, on 4 August 1962, Schiller visited her home. She was “just out there with the flowers”, and they spoke about a possible Playboy cover. “Then at five in the morning, I got a call that Marilyn was dead. I thought it was a joke.” It wasn’t. “By then, the media had surrounded the house, the glass to her bedroom window was broken, and they were removing her body, covered on a gurney.”
“Photography is part of the texture of my life,” Schiller ponders. And so was this woman. “Marilyn Monroe came into my life in 1960,” he wrote in his memoir Marilyn & Me, “and she is still a living, breathing, extraordinary presence.”
Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 4 June to 6 September. Lawrence Schiller’s Marilyn & Me is published by Taschen.
