Marilyn & Me (10 page)

Meanwhile, Tom Blau, who had flown back to England, was making deals in Europe and Asia, and then I flew to New York over the weekend to make a deal at
Life
. The picture editor, Dick Pollard, didn’t like my conditions at first, but seeing that he could do nothing about them and liking the photos enough to want to run five or six pages of them, he agreed. Later that day he asked me how much I wanted, including for the cover. I told him
a lot
—around $10,000. I understood the value of exclusive U.S. rights. I had sold the teen heartthrob Fabian Forte’s first kiss to a fan magazine for $5,000, and this was the first time I had something that I knew the whole world would want. But what was really most important to me was the cover. “Just kidding,” I added before he could protest. “You can have the entire set—but no more than six pages—and the cover for $6,000.” Dick nodded and said
Life
would publish the following week on June 16, which would become the worldwide release date of the photos.

I had a deal, and I had my first
Life
cover.

J
ust as Henry Weinstein feared, Marilyn called in sick the following Monday, and once again filming was delayed. But this time the studio didn’t react benevolently. Peter Levathes, the head of Fox, wanted to see how much of the film had been shot and how much of Marilyn was in the can. Someone had calculated that of the thirty-three working days since the start of the shoot in April, Marilyn had only been available for thirteen days. Levathes looked at forty minutes of Marilyn in character and didn’t think much of what he saw. There were moments of the Monroe magic, he thought, but not enough to warrant the studio continuing with her. The breach of contract would now be enforced, the picture would be shut down until they found a replacement for Marilyn, and the cast would be so informed.

On June 8, one week after her birthday, Marilyn was fired from
Something’s Got to Give
.

Columnist Sheilah Graham broke the story, quoting producer Weinstein. “The studio does not want her anymore. Every time she says she is ill and we have to close down the picture, 104 persons lose a day’s pay.… She seemed quite well last Friday when they gave her a birthday party on the set.… She has not reported to work since. Marilyn’s absence has cost the studio more than half a million dollars.” The next day, Fox sued Marilyn to recover its damages.

It seemed that there was no longer a movie to promote. Still, I knew that every magazine editor would find a new angle for the photos. The film-going public would never see Marilyn’s last movie. Our pictures would now be seen in a new light. The dark side of Marilyn Monroe would be exploited. Dark, but still beautiful.

Before I left the lot for good, Billy and I decided to give Jimmy Mitchell $10,000, since his photographs had been killed and we thought it only fair to share some of our projected income with him. As a set photographer, he was earning between $200 and $300 a week, so we knew that ten grand would go a long way. We gave the money to Perry Lieber and asked him to pass it on to Jimmy. A few years later, I ran into Jimmy, and he put his arm around me and said, “You really knew what to do with those photos, didn’t you?”

I did. The sales far exceeded even our own high expectations. The worldwide release of the photos was scheduled
for mid-June. In something less than two weeks before that date, Tom Blau had received commitments totaling over $65,000, a lot of money in those days, and that didn’t include my separate negotiation with
Life
. After commissions and expenses from just the initial sales, Billy and I expected to clear $30,000 each—the biggest payday for any photographer up to that time (with the single exception of David Douglas Duncan’s famous pictures of Pablo Picasso).

On June 16, there was Marilyn in a blue robe on the cover of
Life
(cover dated June 22, 1962). And there she was, that same week, in various states of dress and undress, on the covers of the most important foreign magazines. On June 18 she was even on the front page of the
San Francisco Chronicle
—which we sold for $1,000 because Billy had a special relationship with that paper and he wanted to repay a favor.

Once the magazines appeared, I went to see Marilyn at home, bringing her a copy of the
Chronicle
, which I suspected she might not have seen. The issue of
Life
was on her coffee table.

“Just what you said it would be,” she said on greeting me.

“Well, now I have money for a down payment, so I can look for a house.” Then I joked, “See what tits ’n’ ass can do?”

“That’s how I got my house and swimming pool,” Marilyn said, laughing. “There isn’t anybody that looks like me without clothes on,” she added.

“I’m going to have a little wooden sign made,” I continued. “It’s gonna say, ‘The house that Marilyn bought.’ I’m going to hang it over the front door.”

That’s when she told me how happy she was to be able to help me get my first house, happy that she could do something positive for someone.

I also told Marilyn that Judi and I were thinking of having another child. When I said that, her reaction was visible. Marilyn seemed to disappear inside of herself, almost as if she had to say something that scared her.

“I’ve always wanted a baby,” she said in a voice so quiet that it wasn’t more than a whisper.

I didn’t know what to say. She seemed not to be talking to me. It was almost as if she was talking to her shrink.

“Having a child,” she continued. “That’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child, and I fear a child.”

I don’t remember everything she said, but I do recall her mumbling something about the sanity or craziness that part of her family represented. She used the words “nuts” and “weak.” I remember words like “misery” and “unhappiness.” Later I would read that her grandfather had been insane and that he took his own life. But during our conversation, all I saw was fear in Marilyn’s face.

And I remember her saying something like, “Whenever it came close, my body said no, and I lost the baby.” I remember her talking about being afraid that she’d wind
up like her mother, who had been in and out of mental institutions her whole life. And I could see how that scared her.

And then, all at once, Marilyn pulled herself together. She looked at the cover of
Life
, smiled, and, her voice returning to its normal tone, said, “The shape I’m in, I’ll have a child.” I took the clue and moved on to business.

When I’d originally shown Marilyn the black-and-white proof sheets, I had purposely left out two strips of images that revealed more body, because I was afraid she would kill them. In fact, in those days, no general interest magazine would have shown the images we had, because they were too revealing for the era. But Billy and I knew that
Playboy
would jump at the opportunity to publish them, now that the other photos had been released. They would want to publish what nobody else had seen—full bust with nipple.

And now that Marilyn was talking about how good she looked in the nude, I thought it was an opportune time to bring up
Playboy
.

“Marilyn,” I started, “I was going through my camera bag and found a roll of film that wasn’t developed. When I developed them I discovered that some images were a bit more risqué than the others.” And then I took a deep breath and continued, “I’m pretty sure
Playboy
would love to publish these. No question Hefner will agree to the same conditions we got everywhere in the world.”

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.