Marilyn & Me (3 page)

Later, I read that Montand called Marilyn a simple girl without any guile, claiming that she’d had a schoolgirl crush on him but that it could never break up his marriage to Simone Signoret. And Arthur Miller would say that his marriage to Marilyn was so beyond repair that anyone who could
give her comfort was comforting to him. I didn’t know any of this when I looked at them through my Nikon’s 105 mm lens. I saw only the way she approached Montand from above as he lay on the couch, sliding on top of him, wrapping her leg around his body like a snake. My adrenaline was so high—I’d never experienced anything like it. It was the first time I witnessed Marilyn’s sensuality at work, as well as her ability to turn it on and off.

Marilyn was all business when the cameras started rolling. It took her hours and hours to get herself psyched up to do each scene, but when she was ready to be the character the role demanded, there was no denying her power. Montand was a good-looking guy (though he had a large nose and a small chin), but nobody watched him in their scenes together. Everyone was focused on Marilyn.

On my third and last day, I arrived at 8:30 a.m. Marilyn was scheduled to be on set by 9:30, but when she hadn’t appeared by noon, the crew broke for lunch. I decided to just knock on her dressing room door. She didn’t seem to mind my being around, and I’d seen Bryson do it with Montand, so I decided to try it myself.

“This lousy movie! Fucking studio!” I heard from behind the door. The moment didn’t seem quite right for me to make a move and I turned to leave, but just then the door
opened. Whitey Snyder, Marilyn’s makeup man, on his way out of her dressing room, looked at me, not knowing why I was knocking.

“Hi,” I said. “I was just wondering if I might be able to shoot some candids.”

The door to the dressing room was wide open, and Marilyn, sitting in front of her makeup mirror, noticed me. Staring at her face in the mirror, I saw that her lips formed the word “Okay.”

Whitey turned back to me. “Okay,” he said and ushered me in.

As I entered, I could feel the tension in the air. There was nowhere to sit except on the floor, in the corner, so that’s where I sat.

“I’m just not ready,” Marilyn said, looking at herself in the mirror.

“I don’t know if it matters, because everyone’s gone to lunch,” I replied, not knowing if she was talking to me or to herself.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “All I have is champagne, but I can send my driver to get some food.”

“No, I’m fine. I need to lose weight.”

“Why? You’re not an actor,” she said a bit playfully.

“My wife’s beginning to notice,” I replied.

“You’re married?” she said. “How nice.”

“Just,” I said. “For about ten weeks.”

“First time?” she asked.

“And last, I hope.”

“Be careful what you hope for. You never know how things will turn out.”

Of course, she was speaking from experience. Later, I would come to measure her life by the men who had shared it with her: her agent Johnny Hyde, Marlon Brando, Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Arthur Miller.

Whitey came back in and confirmed that the crew had gone to lunch.

“Want anything?” he asked.

“Cottage cheese and fruit,” Marilyn said as she daubed mascara on her eyelashes.

When Whitey left, she looked at me in the mirror.

“Aren’t you here to take some pictures?”

Then she turned toward me, and I immediately picked up my camera and started snapping. I noticed instantly how quickly she changed, and how beautiful she looked through the lens.

“That’s great,” I said. “That’s terrific.” I was babbling.

“How often do you lie?” she asked suddenly, cutting me off.

I hesitated. Did she think I was lying? “What do you mean?”

“Photographers lie to people all the time.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, searching for something more intelligent to say, something that would speak to her
concerns, though I didn’t know what they were. “I used to lie about my age when I was sixteen,” I finally said.

“What was wrong with being sixteen?”

Relieved that she wasn’t mad at me, I decided to tell her a little more about myself. “My photographs were always being rejected by magazines,” I told her. “I would send my story ideas to picture editors, and they always turned me down. I got so many rejections that I used to pin the letters up on the bathroom wall and sit on the toilet and read them. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that they were rejecting me because of my age, not my work. I guess they figured that a sixteen-year-old couldn’t deliver the goods.”

“I could tell you all about rejection,” Marilyn said. “Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.”

“But look at you now,” I said.

“Exactly,” she replied evenly. “Look at me now.” Her remark hung in the air.

“I don’t understand!” I blurted out. I knew that I was betraying my ignorance or my youth, but I really
didn’t
understand, and I wanted to. “You’re a star!” I continued. “Your face is on magazine covers all over the world!
Everyone
knows Marilyn Monroe!”

She didn’t say anything for a while. When she did, her voice wasn’t exactly soft.

“Let me ask you, Larry
Wolf
—how many Academy Award nominations do I have?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And it was true. I had no idea.

“I do,” she said. “None.”

Just then the door opened, and Whitey came in with her food. But Marilyn wasn’t interested in eating.

“Marilyn is waiting,” she said to him. It was an odd remark, and very odd for her to refer to herself in the third person, I thought. But somehow I knew that she was telling Whitey it was time to get her ready for the cameras. He left, saying he would look for Agnes I decided to continue photographing Marilyn.

She stopped me.

“Nobody should ever be photographed while they’re eating,” she said, even though she hadn’t taken a bite.

“So you lied about your age to get some work,” she said, continuing our conversation where we’d left it off.

“Yeah, and it worked,” I said. “That got me started, and before long I was getting published—a little in
Life
, but mostly in
Paris Match
and the sports magazines.” Then I started to brag, hoping it would impress her. I was, after all, twenty-three years old. “I won the Graflex awards,” I said. “And an editor for the
New York Times
even wrote this article in
U.S. Camera
magazine about me.”

I found myself talking nonstop. Marilyn began to pick at her fruit, eating a strawberry, a piece of cantaloupe, and a slice of orange. She was not listening to me, but I continued to rattle on, telling her about having shot some nude photos in the basement of the home of the president of Pepperdine College, which I had attended.

“And then I photographed these baton twirlers in shorts for the
Saturday Evening Post
. The school got mad at me because it gave the wrong impression of Pepperdine, which was supposed to have a religious environment.”

Finally, I caught her attention.

“Girls in shorts … nudes in the basement … how naughty,” she remarked sarcastically. Her mouth was half-full.

“In those days, I was trying to get into
Playboy
, doing test shots. Eventually, it paid off. Since then I’ve shot three Playmates for them. And I got paid $1,000 for each centerfold.”

Then I found myself asking her about her famous nude calendar. “How much did they pay you for that?”

“Nothing,” she replied without hesitating. She didn’t seem to mind answering my question. “They didn’t pay me anything for that first one, which
Playboy
used as a Playmate. And I’ve never met Hefner.”

“He lives at the Garden of Allah when he’s in L.A.,” I told her. “Why don’t you just knock on the door and surprise him.”

“I know that place. That’s where I saw Errol Flynn play the piano.” She smiled knowingly.

“I have the best Hefner story,” I said. “You know how he’s supposed to have made it with all those Playmates? Well, after I shot my first two for him, he called me and said he had dinner with this fantastic chick, and he went on about how well-endowed she was, and how she had the perfect
face and body to be a Playmate. Since
Playboy
is all about boobs, I figured she must be a knockout, so I made arrangements to shoot her. I went to the Harold Lloyd estate just north of Sunset, and—get this—as soon as she undresses, I see that she’s flat chested.”

Marilyn was laughing by then. “So what did you do?”

“I shot her from behind.”

“So you made a mountain out of a molehill,” she joked.

With both of us in a good mood, I started shooting again. And before I knew it, Marilyn decided she was ready to go on set.

Leaving the dressing room and followed by Whitey and Agnes, she turned to me. “When will I see your pictures?”

“I can have them for you tomorrow,” I said.

“Good,” she replied, and added, “I always have a full-length mirror next to the camera when I’m doing publicity stills. That way, I know how I look.”

Her remark came out of nowhere, and I found myself asking, “So do you pose for the photographer or for the mirror?”

“The mirror,” she replied without hesitating. “I can always find Marilyn in the mirror.”

The photos I took during my three days on the set were all black-and-white. They were candid, journalistic pictures,
not studio portraits. There was no manipulation of lighting, no posing. The idea was to capture her at ease. While I was shooting, Marilyn never worried about whether I was shooting her rear end or whether I was aiming too high or too low—she knew she would be able to reject the ones she didn’t like.

Once I got the proof sheets back from the lab, I had no trouble returning to the set to see her. When it came to looking at photographs of herself, Marilyn was all business. I gave her the small contact sheets and a magnifying glass. The images were so small that it was very difficult for her to see them, so sometimes she’d cross out an image with a red marker just because she couldn’t make it out.

Marilyn didn’t have a preconceived idea of how she wanted to be seen by the public. All she wanted was to make sure that her face or body wasn’t deformed in any way. She didn’t want to see her head or neck turned a way in which lines or wrinkles might appear. If she was wearing, say, a tight dance outfit and was swinging around a pole, she wanted to be sure that her legs looked right. She was interested in the total image, so she was very, very careful about what her entire body looked like. If the whole picture worked, Marilyn was happy.

At the bottom of one of my proof sheets she wrote with that red marker: “Explain or remove sweat pads.” She had marked a shot of her with Montand, and damned if I could
see the sweat on her face that she saw. When I looked at the entire image, not just her face, I noticed a tissue under her right arm that she kept to catch the perspiration on her body. She wanted the tissue retouched out just in case this shot was going to be published without a caption explaining that she was perspiring under the hot lights while rehearsing.