Marilyn Monroe Made Being Photographed an Art
In May of 2022, the actress, reality-TV star, and lingerie mogul Kim Kardashian arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the annual Met Gala, wearing another woman’s dress. It was sixty years old, made of delicate beige marquisette fabric embellished with more than six thousand hand-sewn rhinestones, and had been worn in public only once before: by Marilyn Monroe, in May of 1962, onstage at Madison Square Garden for a birthday gala honoring President John F. Kennedy. When Monroe put on the gown, made specifically for her by the Hollywood dressmaker Jean Louis (based on a sketch by the designer Bob Mackie, when he was just starting out), she was thirty-five, and in the last year of her short life. She wore the dress in the hope that it would be an event, but, of course, Monroe was by then so famous that she was an ongoing event, no matter what she had on; she was pursued, ceaselessly, by cameras, by journalists, by powerful men, by studio nabobs, by fans and hangers-on.
Even when she was just beginning her career, as a young contract player in the studio system, the amount of fan mail she amassed (several thousand letters a week, by 1952) startled executives to whom she was just another disposable—or, at least, interchangeable—bottle blonde. The outpouring was less shocking to Monroe, who had been aware of her ability to captivate since she was a teen-ager. “When I was eleven, the whole world was closed to me, and I just felt I was on the outside of the world,” she told the Life magazine editor Richard Meryman, in the summer of 1962, during a six-hour conversation that would come to be known as the last interview. “Suddenly, everything opened up. . . . It was just sheer pleasure. Every fellow honked his horn, you know, workers driving to work, waving, you know, and I’d wave back. The world became friendly. All the newspaper boys when they delivered the paper would come around to where I lived, and I used to hang from the limb of a tree, and I had sort of a sweatshirt on. I didn’t realize the value of a sweatshirt in those days.”
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Over time, Monroe came to realize not only the value of a sweatshirt (along with a well-fitting sweater, a plunging neckline, a fluttery sundress, a halter top, a lamé gown, and a terry-cloth robe) but also exactly how to make it work for her in pictures: how to befriend the camera, even when she was lonely (and she was often very lonely). She was an uncanny beauty—the sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, the bobbed bunny-tail nose, the accentuated beauty mark, the overdrawn smile—but that wasn’t what made people rush to send pounds of fan mail. Hollywood was full of beauties. What people fell for was the way Monroe knew how to be photographed; she had the rare ability to seem, at least in still photos, both completely spontaneous and incredibly deliberate.
Take a promotional shot she posed for in 1952, to promote her role in the thriller “Niagara”: she sits on a low stone wall in front of the rushing waters of Niagara Falls, in a red blouse that accentuates her décolletage. She is leaning ever so slightly to one side, smiling as she turns her face into the sun to catch the light. Her hands are clasped in her lap, and she is leaning forward onto one heel, so that the toe of her red pump arcs ever so slightly off the ground. At first, the shot looks like a candid, slyly captured moment of a performer in repose. But look closer: her collarbone is slightly pushed forward, her neck stretched long, her feet deliberately pointed with balletic tension. In Monroe’s best portraits, she seems to be almost pushing through the frame. The photographer Burt Glinn, who shot Monroe at a variety of parties in the nineteen-fifties, said, of this strange quality, that Monroe “had no bone structure—the face was a Polish flat plate. Not photogenic in the accepted sense, the features were not memorable or special; what she had was the ability to project.”
Projecting oneself out into the world is an act of faith. Once a photograph exists in the public sphere, you rarely have control over where it will go, or how far it will travel into the future. As her celebrity grew, Monroe negotiated a unique level of command over how images of herself were created; for the most part, she had veto power over who shot her and when, and she fought hard to retain approval over which shots could appear and which negatives must be destroyed. She viewed her work with photographers as an active collaboration. She needed the camera and the camera needed her; it was a fair transaction.
In 1952, when a reporter uncovered a series of nude photographs that Monroe had taken for a pinup calendar, in 1949, she handled the scandal with winning pragmatism. At the time, she was a rising starlet on a new contract at Twentieth Century Fox. Fox’s publicity team told her to deny and deflect. But Monroe, who had done the shoot for fifty dollars in order to pay her rent at the Hollywood Studio Club, a sort of dormitory for young women trying to break into the movie business, felt there was no reason to hide what she had done. If anything, Monroe’s admission—that, despite her natural gifts, she had to scrap on her way to success—only further endeared her to the public. The director Billy Wilder, who worked with Monroe on both “The Seven Year Itch” (1955) and “Some Like It Hot” (1959), said, of the photographs, “When you come right down to it, that calendar is not repulsive. It’s quite lovely. . . . It appealed to people who like to read about millionaires who started life selling newspapers on the corner of Forty-second and Fifth Avenue, then worked their way up. . . . Here was a girl who needed dough, and she made it by honest toil.”
Monroe sailed over that hurdle, along with many others, because she was, as she herself admitted many times, almost constitutionally incapable of cynicism—a small miracle, given her chaotic upbringing. Monroe’s gift (and, sometimes, the source of her despair) was her refusal to grow jaundiced in the face of adversity. She could retreat from pain—those who worked with her noted that she sometimes seemed to be in a “daze,” as if she were peering out through a scrim—but she never fully inoculated herself from it. In a journal entry from around 1951, she wrote a poetic note to herself about tuning in to the force of her own emotions: “What do I believe in / What is truth / I believe in myself / even my most delicate / intangible feelings / in the end everything is / intangible / my most precious liquid must never spill / life force / they are all my feelings / no matter what.”
It was Monroe’s innate sensitivity that made her such an adept comedic actress; her humor was not a blunt instrument but, rather, something odder and wobblier, alluringly off tempo. I hesitate to call her style of acting instinctive, because that word, so often used to describe Monroe, seems to imply that she never worked to refine her craft, but she did have a regularly surprising, sui-generis way of approaching a line—the breathy, cooing voice; the flustered, heaving sighs; the nonchalant, matter-of-fact way she made silly pronouncements. In “Some Like It Hot,” in which she played a daffy travelling musician named Sugar Kane, she said the line “I’m not very bright, I guess!” with such lemony brightness that you doubt the very premise of it. Monroe was regularly fed up with the way that Fox continued to typecast her in “dumb blonde” roles—the scheming platinum flapper Lorelei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), the shortsighted Pola Debevoise in “How to Marry a Millionaire” (1953), an unnamed muse simply called “the girl” in “The Seven Year Itch”—but she rarely managed to deliver a performance that did not, in some way, radiate with smart choices.
Monroe was, at her core, a seeker. She wanted more than she started out with: more love, more freedom of movement, more security, more respect, more forgiveness, more control. At times, her search for mentors led her to people who, under the guise of trying to protect her, pushed her in directions that she didn’t want to go, or latched on to her fame like eager barnacles; but she rarely let those relationships linger for long—if anything, Monroe was fairly ruthless when it came to detaching herself from those she felt were siphoning, rather than enriching, her energies. Over time, through sustained effort, she managed to carve out possibilities for herself in an industry that was not known for giving in to its stars’ demands. In 1954, at the height of her fame, she abandoned her Fox contract to move to New York, where she studied at the Actors Studio and underwent psychoanalysis in an attempt to deepen her relationship with her craft. While in New York, she founded her own production company, alongside the photographer Milton Greene. Through the company, they produced “The Prince and the Showgirl” (1957), in which she starred opposite Laurence Olivier. When she returned to Fox, she was able to negotiate newly favorable terms; she could choose the director and the cinematographer on all her films, and she could make her own projects outside the studio. (Where Fox continued to undercut Monroe was on her salary; despite the fact that she earned millions for the studio, she was paid just a hundred thousand dollars per picture.)
Over and over, Monroe said that she cared more about advancing herself as an artist than as merely a product. Yet because she was so effective at branding herself—she knew the power of her own physical presence—the press, both in Monroe’s own time and for decades afterward, failed to take her ambitions seriously. As the critic Daphne Merkin wrote, in this magazine, 1999, “a good deal of energy was expended on trying to convince people that there was a serious contender inside the bimbo curves—a concept that continues to be treated with a creeping note of disdain.”
Merkin also contended that “what’s clear is that Monroe believed in her rapport with the public more than she believed in her rapport with Hollywood.” This is nowhere more apparent than in the contrast between the ease Monroe felt in front of a photographer’s lens and her struggles to adapt to working on film sets. She regularly showed up late, and she was known to forget lines and stumble over words. She was jumpy and unsettled before big scenes, often to the point of frozen terror; but, as Billy Wilder once said, when given enough trust and leeway, Monroe always came through: “If she showed up, she delivered, and if it took 80 takes, I lived with 80 takes, because the 81st was very good.” For Monroe’s part, she attributed her lateness to a sort of fierce perfectionism; she didn’t know how to show up without giving her all, and it took her a long time to work herself up to the point where she felt she was ready to give it. “I guess people think that why I’m late is some kind of arrogance,” she told Meryman, in her final interview, “and I think it is the opposite of arrogance. I also feel that I’m not in this big American rush, you know, you got to go and you got to go fast but for no good reason. The main thing is, I want to be prepared when I get there to give a good performance or whatever to the best of my ability.”
To many of her contemporaries, Monroe was a vexing bundle of contradictions: a girl who rose up from poverty to sing about diamonds; a kittenish pinup who read Dostoyevsky; a Hollywood native who yearned for New York; a woman who took naturally to her bleached artifice. People were always trying to figure her out, to root around into her background in an attempt to explain her appeal. In 1956, one reporter spent weeks trying to determine whether Monroe was truly the brain behind several of her infamous, quippy Monroe-isms—such as, when asked what she wore to bed, answering, “Chanel No. 5,” or, when asked if she had anything on during her nude photo shoot, replying, “I had the radio on.” In the end, the reporter came to the conclusion that the one-liners were Monroe’s own, a judgment backed up by an anonymous Fox press agent who had been one of the main liaisons between Monroe and the studio. “Give her a minute to think,” the press agent said, “and Marilyn is the greatest little old ad-lib artist you ever saw.”
The public’s obsession with getting to know the “real” Marilyn Monroe did not dissipate with her untimely death, on August 4, 1962, from what most experts have determined was an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. The actress’s fate has proved to be perennial catnip for journalists, biographers, historians, novelists, screenwriters, conspiracy theorists, Redditsleuths, and academics; she has been the subject of more theorizing, rampant speculation, and secondhand psychoanalysis than perhaps any other celebrity of the twentieth century. There is a consistent sense of overdoneness about her story, that it has all been said, that there are no new angles. And yet, there is also the persistent feeling that the closer one gets to Monroe, the less one understands her. Nearly everyone who tries to write about Monroe acknowledges this challenge of approaching her as a subject. (The writer Lisa Cohen, in a wonderful 1998 essay on Monroe in the Yale Journal of Criticism, describes this writerly anxiety as “a sort of agonized address to the archive.”)
In the digital age, images of Monroe—already a staple of pizza parlors and street murals—have proliferated exponentially online, and as A.I. threatens to replicate her image ad infinitum, stretching even further away from the source material, her legacy has spun deeper into abstraction. Kardashian’s Met Gala dress, which she borrowed from the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! archives and which, to this day, remains the most expensive celebrity dress ever sold at auction, felt like an easy quotation, but not necessarily one grounded in historical context. Kardashian claimed to wear the dress to honor the theme of the Costume Institute’s exhibition that year, which covered the history of American fashion. “What’s the most American thing you can think of?” she said to Vogue. “And that’s Marilyn Monroe.”
But the gown, like Monroe herself, has more to it than just a vague perfume of voluptuous Americana. When Monroe wore the dress, she was in the middle of a transitional period. Her five-year marriage to Arthur Miller had fallen apart, and she had undergone gallbladder surgery that required a lengthy recovery. When she was finally ready to go back to work, she had not stepped onto a film set in nearly a year. At her studio’s behest, she met with the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, who sold her on the idea of doing a remake of the 1940 screwball comedy “My Favorite Wife,” to be called “Something’s Got to Give.”
Around the same time, in early 1962, Monroe bought herself a cozy three-bedroom hacienda-style bungalow in Brentwood, Los Angeles—the first house she’d ever owned that was truly her own. To fill up the house, she took a weeklong trip to Mexico, where she scoured furniture stores and artists’ stalls. According to Meryman, she was thrilled to have a place to herself. “She exulted in it,” he wrote. Monroe told him that she planned to convert her garage into a quiet sanctuary for others who were looking for a soft place to land. She wanted to create “a place for any friends of mine who are in some kind of trouble, you know, and maybe they’ll want to live here where they won’t be bothered till things are okay for them.”
And yet she still felt restless. She missed the first days of filming on “Something’s Got to Give,” owing to illness. Then, despite the studio’s protestations, she flew from Los Angeles to New York City to serenade J.F.K. at Madison Square Garden. Monroe’s work on the film was crisp, compelling, and very funny. But Fox executives, reportedly frustrated with her many absences, fired her from the film in June. Some historians have since determined that the dismissal may not have had as much to do with Monroe’s attendance as the studio claimed; that summer, “Cleopatra,” and its endless shoot, was costing Fox millions. As the film scholar Michelle Vogel theorized, “Something’s Got to Give” and Marilyn Monroe were the scapegoats for anxious studio executives who felt that both productions were “spinning out of control.”
Shortly after Fox fired Monroe, she sat for the long interview with Meryman, in part so that she could reclaim the narrative and exercise some level of agency over her story. “An actor is not a machine, no matter how much they want to say you are,” she told Meryman, adding, “This is supposed to be an art form, not just a manufacturing establishment. The sensitivity that helps me to act, you see, also makes me react. An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?”
Before Meryman left Monroe’s house one night,she told him that, in the end, what mattered most was that she tuned into her own honesty, despite the vortex of celebrity that threatened to strip it away. “With fame,” she said, “you know, you can read about yourself, somebody else’s ideas about you, but what’s important is how you feel about yourself—for survival and living day to day with what comes up.” ♦
This is drawn from “Marilyn Monroe 100.”