Marilyn & Me (2 page)

As the studio publicist walked me to one of the many soundstages, this wasn’t the first time I’d seen large trucks containing recording equipment parked outside and a red light flashing in front of the entrance, indicating that filming was in progress. We waited a few seconds, and the light went off. Then the publicist led the way through the heavy soundproof doors. Inside, large arc lights and dolly tracks were being moved from one side of the stage to another.

Walking past the hub of activity, we arrived at a dressing room at the back of the soundstage. I have to admit I was excited, but I tried not to show it. The publicist said that we had to wait right there. Somewhere in the distance I could hear music and the sound of someone singing. Then, suddenly, the music stopped, and as if out of nowhere Marilyn appeared. There she was, wearing a black leotard and sheer black stockings, her face as soft as a silk bedsheet but her expression saying she’s
unapproachable
.

She passed by me as if I wasn’t there and started walking up the dressing room stairs.

“This is Larry,” the publicist said. “He’s with
Look
magazine. He’ll be around for a few days.”

Marilyn stopped, turned toward me, and took a step down. Unexpectedly, her eyes lit up and she smiled.

“Hi, Larry from
Look
. I’m Marilyn.”

“And I’m the Big Bad Wolf,” I replied. I had no idea where that came from, and that made me even more nervous
than I already was. I stuck my hand out to shake hers, and the three cameras dangling from my neck banged into each other.

Marilyn giggled. And then she broke out into laughter. “You look a bit young to be so bad.”

“I’m twenty-three, but I’ve been shooting since I was about fifteen,” I managed to answer. It did no good to tell myself that she was just a thirty-three-year-old woman. She was Marilyn Monroe, and I was there to photograph her! I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life.

“Twenty-three? I made
The Asphalt Jungle
when I was twenty-three,” she said, almost nostalgically.

Then Marilyn walked up the last two steps and leaned against the green door of her dressing room. “Come on in, Mr. Wolf,” she said in her soft voice. I’d thought that this was just her movie voice, but it seemed that it was actually the way she talked. It was thrilling.

Taking one of my Leicas from around my neck, I followed behind her. Once I was at the door, I did what I was there to do: as soon as she sat down in front of her large makeup mirror, I started shooting. I had gotten off only a few shots when a short woman appeared in the dressing room and began combing Marilyn’s hair.

Marilyn, who had final photo approval of my images, caught my eye in the mirror and, without turning around, said, “That’s not the best angle for me. If you go over there”—
tilting her head slightly, indicating a spot to the left—“you’ll get a better photo, because the light will be better.”

I moved to where she suggested, and at that moment she turned her head halfway in my direction. Looking over her left shoulder, she flashed a coy smile that told me all I needed to know about Marilyn Monroe: she knew who she was, she knew who I was, she knew what to do, and she may have understood light better than I did and that would be to my advantage.

I changed cameras and lifted the Nikon with the 105 mm telephoto lens. Marilyn smiled at me, and I pressed the shutter. Immediately, I knew I had the shot. In fact, Marilyn had shown me what other photographers who had shot her knew—that when she turned herself on to the camera, the photographer didn’t have to be more than a mechanic; it was almost as if she were both the shooter and the subject.

Before I moved to find another angle, she turned back to the mirror and continued.

“There’s something different about you,” she said while her hairdresser, Agnes, worked on her.

I was surprised that she wanted to talk about me. “My smile?” I said.

“No,” she said.

Marilyn seemed to be looking me over. “It’s your eye,” she said suddenly. “You didn’t close your left eye when you were shooting.”

I’d been photographing people up close for nearly a decade, from the governor of California, to pretty girls, to great athletes, and no one had ever noticed that before or said anything to me about it.

“That’s because I’m blind in that eye,” I said.

The look on her face changed from curiosity to concern. “Was it an accident?” she asked.

As a photographer, I always tried to distinguish myself from others. I tried to ingratiate myself, hoping that my subjects would feel comfortable as I photographed them. With Marilyn, I didn’t have to work too hard at it. Her question had given me an opening. I’d never before used my disability to cozy up to a subject, but now I jumped in, not knowing how deep the well was.

“I was seven and we lived in an apartment building in Brooklyn that had a dumbwaiter—”

“I know what that is,” she interrupted, like a schoolgirl responding to a teacher’s explanation. “I lived in Brooklyn for a while with Arthur.” She was referring to her current husband, the noted dramatist Arthur Miller.

I decided to continue my story, not knowing what else to do. “In each apartment there was a door that opened onto a shaft—that’s where we threw away our garbage.” Marilyn was silent, listening. “My mother had asked me to throw something out, and I went out into the hallway, opened the door, and stuck my head inside out of curiosity. At that
exact moment, someone on a floor above was throwing an umbrella down the shaft. It hit me in my eye. The next thing I knew, my mother was screaming and my uncle was carrying me. I didn’t lose the eye, but I did lose most of my sight.”

Marilyn’s manner seemed to shift as the details of my story unfolded. Her lips opened, and I saw how perfect her teeth were. Her eyes became warmer and watery, as if what I was describing gave her comfort. It was an odd reaction, and I did not understand it. It would be many years before I came to realize that some questions in life simply have no answers.

“Oh my God,” she said, her voice an octave lower than what it had been a minute earlier. “That’s such a tragic story!”

“It isn’t so bad,” I said. “I don’t know anything other than the sight I have. Maybe I see things the way the camera does—flat. It has never inhibited me.”

“But it must have changed you,” she said. “Something like that—it changes you.”

“Well,” I replied, “it changed the way my parents saw me. They were always worried that I might lose my other eye. And they even made me wear glasses when I didn’t need them.” I paused. “I’m sure they were good to me after that.”

“Oh,” she said, “I bet they were good to you before that. This probably just made them more appreciative.”

At that moment, the publicist knocked on the dressing room door to tell me that Marilyn was about to leave for the day and that I could return tomorrow to continue my shooting.

“Okay,” I said. And I turned to Marilyn. “See you tomorrow.”

“Yes, tomorrow,” she said, “Mr. Wolf.”

E
ager to begin photographing Marilyn, I got to the set early the next day only to find everyone standing around and waiting. Marilyn was in her dressing room, the door closed. One hour passed. Two. Three. I soon discovered that she followed her own clock. It seemed not to matter to her that there was a schedule or that her delays cost the studio more money. As I would learn, she considered herself underpaid and had been battling Fox for years. The gossip was that she thought the studio didn’t respect her talent as an actress and that she felt Fox didn’t treat her fairly. I had read that for
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, which she’d made in 1953, Jane Russell was paid $200,000 while Marilyn,
the
blonde referred to in the title of the movie, earned all of $1,250 per week—about $15,000 for the entire picture.

Also on the set that morning was Marilyn’s co-star, Yves Montand. Like everyone else, he was waiting for her. Every
so often he would come out of his dressing room to smoke a cigarette, and John Bryson, a
Life
photographer and an idol of mine, would appear and photograph him. Bryson, with his great mustache and six-foot-two-inch frame, projected tremendous confidence as he went about his work.

In those days, magazine photographers were very important to the studios, because our pictures landed on the covers of magazines like
Life
,
Look
,
Paris Match
, the
Sunday Times
, and
Stern
and helped promote the studios’ movies all over the world. Over the years, Marilyn had been photographed by some of the greats: Eve Arnold, Philippe Halsman, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Richard Avedon, Arnold Newman, and Milton Greene. At age twenty-three, my ambition was to one day have a photograph of mine on the cover of
Life
, which was what Bryson was on the set to do. So while everyone waited around on the soundstage, I walked over to Marilyn’s dressing room, hoping to catch her accidentally on purpose when she finally decided it was time to appear.

It was mid-afternoon, and, wearing a stunning white dress, Marilyn came into sight, standing just inside the doorway of her dressing room, her face as fresh as the morning. I lifted my camera, my left eye wide open. When she reached the last step, she saw me, smiled, and turned on her famous wiggle walk, placing one foot almost directly in front of the other. I walked backward taking her picture.

“You’d better watch out,” she warned. “You’re gonna fall
over something.” Right after she said that, I stumbled a little and she laughed.

“I told you—you’ve gotta watch your back.” And then she added, “Because no one else will.”

Just then Yves Montand appeared to discuss the upcoming scene with Marilyn. As I reached for a camera with a different lens, Marilyn asked, “You want us to walk toward you?”

“That would be great,” I replied.

I was getting the shots I needed, and I was also wondering why Marilyn was being so friendly toward me. Maybe it was because of what I had told her about my childhood accident. I could see that the story had touched her. Later I would learn that her own childhood was fraught with misery, that she claimed to have been abused as a child. Now, looking back, I understand that her scars were psychological, and perhaps deeper than physical scars would have been. Whatever her reason, back in 1960, she was surprisingly warm and open with me, and we connected on some level. What I was experiencing with Marilyn gave me more confidence to communicate with celebrities, therefore helping me grow professionally.

Everyone on the set seemed relieved now that Marilyn had finally appeared. They reacted as if they all had amnesia.
How they had hated waiting, waiting, and waiting—wasting so much time. And yet when the cause of all this anxiety walked in front of the cameras, smiling at everyone, making no apologies, everything was forgiven. I watched the scene unfold, and I faded into the background, as a good photojournalist is supposed to do, like a stagehand doing his job.

Montand, who seemed nervous and concerned about his accent, was also waiting on the set. He had starred in
Les sorcières de Salem
in 1957—a French film version of the Arthur Miller play
The Crucible
—and
Let’s Make Love
was his first American film. He saw it as a launching pad to stardom outside Europe. Many of Marilyn’s films featured average-looking men like Tom Ewell (
The Seven Year Itch
) and Tommy Noonan (
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
), and they got to live out every man’s dream of seducing, or being seduced by, Marilyn Monroe. With the suave, handsome Montand, Fox was hoping that women would also flock to theaters to live out
their
fantasies. On the set, you didn’t need to hear rumors of a physical attraction between Marilyn and Montand, because you could feel the heat they generated.