Marilyn Monroe: The Naked Truth Part 3

‘Tomboy’ Marilyn on the set of  The Misfits, photographed by Eve Arnold

There was no greater publicist for Marilyn Monroe than Marilyn herself. She was able to manipulate her image to great effect. When she was on the threshold of global fame in Hollywood, Marilyn used her body to get where she wanted. In her own words, she summed up her approach: ‘As soon as I could afford an evening gown, I bought the loudest I could find. It was a bright-red, low-cut gown and it infuriated half the women in the room because it was so immodest. I was sorry in a way to do this, but I had a long way to go, and I needed a lot of advertising to get there.’

One of the most enduring images we have of Marilyn Monroe is a video taken several weeks before her death where she famously sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to President Kennedy at his birthday party at Madison Square Garden. Guests at the event  said her $6,000 dress was so tight she was sewn into it.  Documentary film maker, Patrick Jeudy, made Marilyn: The Last Sessions based on the book by Michel Schneider who narrates the film, based on Monroe’s tape recordings with her last psychoanalyst, Dr Ralph Greenson, before her death. Schneider comments in the film that ‘they didn’t understand, it wasn’t her dress that was her skin, but her skin that was a piece of flesh clothing. It was her skin that prevented her from being naked.’

The dress Marilyn wore to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to President Kennedy

In the documentary we hear Marilyn reveal to her analyst that she actually struggled with the medium of film, confessing to a fear of words. She muses: ‘with words it’s so hard, but it’s so easy for me with my body.’ She goes on to discuss her preference for photography as a medium of expression. Schneider says that when she felt low, she would call upon photographer friends to meet with her to take her picture. According to Schneider, she felt able to express difficult emotions through photography far more effectively, as there was no speech, no language to stutter over, only her image.

Photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt at home

The photographer Eve Arnold developed a lifelong friendship with Monroe. The two seemed to have a mutual understanding of each other as artists and shared a love of photography As a result, they formed a working partnership which produced some of the most memorable and mesmerising shots of Monroe. Arnold claimed in the 1987 documentary Eve and Marilyn: ‘ Over the years I found myself in the privileged position of photographing someone who I had first thought had a gift for the still camera and who turned out had a genius for it.’ Eve wrote: ‘I never knew anyone who came close to Marilyn in natural ability to use both photographer and still camera. She was special in this, and for me there has been no one like her before or after. She has remained the measuring rod by which I have – unconsciously – judged other subjects.’

Eve Arnold’s eerily prophetic shot of Marilyn on the set of The Misfits

Most actors are uncomfortable before the still camera, Arnold noted, but with Marilyn the opposite was true. ‘She didn’t have to learn lines as she did for her movies,’ Eve commented. ‘She could let her imagination range freely without concern for onsistency or continuity, she could be a different Marilyn for each photographer or each frame of film.’

Whereas in her film roles, Marilyn was often typecast as a ‘dumb blonde’, as a model ‘she could call the shots, dictate the pace, be in control.’ Even in her early ‘cheesecake’ poses, or with more experienced photographers like Eve’s old mentor, Richard Avedon, Monroe’s joyful, innocent persona transcended cliché. ‘No matter how the photographer tried to use her in terms of his own personality and style,’ Eve remarked, ‘it is always she who imposes herself to have the final look.’ Arnold commented that although candid shots of Monroe were almost impossible, Marilyn liked Eve’s looser, more informal, more intimate approach to photographing her – in stark contrast to the rigid, posed photographs of the studios.

But working with Marilyn presented unusual challenges. ‘A camera anywhere near her would bring out a mob,’ Arnold remembered, adding, ‘the idea of the candid shot was impossible with her. She always knew – as though, wherever she was, whether in a dressing room, resting on a plane or walking in the desert, her own built-in mechanism sensed the camera and responded before the first click was heard.’ Nonetheless, Monroe was at her most creative when being photographed. ‘If it is true, as some has said of her, that all her life she pursued a search for a missing person – herself –’ Arnold mused, ‘then perhaps Marilyn, a creature of myth and illusion, found herself not in the fleeting film image, but in the photograph, which would seem to give her concrete proof of her being.’ 

George Cukor, director of Something’s Got to Give, her final unfinished film, also commented on her fear of words. He stated that Marilyn ‘preferred to let her body do the talking’, she hated words so much. In fact, in the famous photoshoot which took place on the film’s set, where we see Marilyn nude in a swimming pool, it was in fact Marilyn who suggested being nude for the shots, not the photographer. Lawrence Schiller, the photographer on the set of Something’s Got to Give – reports that the reason behind this was that she was concerned about being paid less than Elizabeth Taylor at the time of filming, and the issue was bothering her.  When she felt her popularity was waning, or felt under threat from her peers, it was her body she would return to boost her popularity, but also through which she felt she best expressed herself. Schiller commented: ‘She suggested jumping into the pool clothed, but coming out nude – a kind of resigned awareness of where her bankability lay.’

Lawrence Schiller claimed this the best photo of his career

This rather sad recollection tells of a Monroe with a resignedness as to what the public wanted from her – or at least what she thought they expected. He says ‘When the shoot was over, I rang the magazine and it hit me: wow, she did it! I realised at the same moment how desperate she was. When she had nothing left, to prove that she could still get more publicity than anybody else, out came the birthday suit again.’

It was as if she were coming full circle in posing nude, as she had done at the beginning of her career. The difference being at the beginning of her career she was entering the world of Hollywood as a wide eyed innocent, full of hopes and dreams for the future. In this final shoot, was a more cynical and fragile Marilyn – loved by the world, but ultimately lonely, addicted to pills and growing older in an industry obsessed with youth, plagued with ill health and studios seemingly determined to bring her down due to vague (and unfounded according to at was to be one of her final photo shoots it is interesting that Marilyn returned to her body to ‘do the talking’ for her. She chose to present herself to us at her most vulnerable – literally naked, when she felt not only vulnerable in her career, but also, with the foresight of what was to come in a matter of weeks, undoubtedly vulnerable in her personal life also. Marilyn literally stripped herself bare to her public. She gave everything of herself that there was to give, and the public greedily lapped up all she had to offer. Perhaps this is part of her ultimate allure – Marilyn truly gave herself to her public. She, it would seem, was prepared to give her audience what she believed they wanted in order to get in return the adoration she so craved. In return, her image was devoured by the media and the public alike. Marilyn, so unloved as a child, wanted so desperately to be loved as an adult, and ended up giving herself to a fickle Hollywood machine that could not provide her with what she desired emotionally. Ultimately, as the title of her last unfinished film tellingly foretold ‘something had to give.’

Lawrence Schiller later said the photos of Marilyn in the pool on the set of Something’s Got To Give, were the best photos he ever took – they were so entrenched with meaning.  For Schiller there is a sense of sadness and desperation in her actions. But there is also a sense of triumph. For Marilyn – it was through her skin that she felt her most expressive and empowered and as Eve Arnold commented – in control. She gave what she wanted to give, albeit with (according to Schiller) a sense of desperation at the state of her career – but it was her idea, her choice, her body to give. The photo shoot of Something’s Got to Give can be seen as Marilyn, saying her final goodbye to her audience, her way. Two months later, she was dead.

Marilyn on the set of her last film, the unfinished Something’s Got to Give