A few days after a nude swimming pool shoot on the set of the 1962 comedy Something's Got to Give, Marilyn Monroe drove her photographer, Lawrence Schiller, to Schwab's Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard. Schiller had brought his negatives, ready to be turned into prints. Monroe brought her scissors, and under the streetlights, she cut the color film into pieces.
“Ziiiiiip – the ones she didn’t like,” says Schiller, now 89, the last living photographer of Monroe. “Ziiiiiip.” She destroyed them? “Oh yeah, but that came with the territory,” he laughs, recalling his 25-year-old self picking up the debris, thinking: “Well, I would’ve killed that one, too.” He speaks of her editing with admiration: “There wasn’t a picture she destroyed that I would’ve published.”
Two months later, Monroe died from a drug overdose. In the six decades since, the myth of the “messy” blond bombshell has often overshadowed her agency. Yet, as Rosie Broadley, curator of the Monroe exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, writes: “Monroe not only performed, but also directed and claimed the right to veto any images she did not like.”
The exhibition, timed for what would have been Monroe’s 100th birthday, portrays her as an active architect of her own image. Broadley notes that Monroe “so brilliantly conveyed” her vitality that it was “frequently at odds” with the reality of her struggles when the cameras were put away.
Schiller recalls the pool shoot in May 1962, when Monroe ignored director George Cukor’s commands and swam to where the light was better. In one shot, she lifts her leg out of the water, hooking it on the pool edge like a glistening nymph. In another, she drops her towel to reveal the small of her back.
Before the shoot, Monroe asked Schiller: “What would happen if I jumped into the swimming pool with my bathing suit, but I come out with nothing on?” He replied: “You’re already a famous woman. But if I take those photos, you’re going to make me famous.” Monroe jibed: “Don’t be so cocky, Larry. I could fire you in two seconds.” Schiller laughs: “That was the relationship I had with her: I could crack a joke, and she could crack a joke back that was more poignant and piercing, with a lot of subtext. And you had to understand Marilyn’s subtext.”
Photographer Eve Arnold likened Monroe to a woman in pursuit of her lost self, with the photographer giving her what she was missing. This observation resonates with Schiller’s glittering snapshots of Monroe skinny-dipping in the moonlight, displaying joy that belies her freefall that summer: a year after her divorce from Arthur Miller, gynaecological and gallbladder surgery, a terrifying stint in a psychiatric clinic, and worsening dependency on alcohol and prescription drugs.
“She was showing up for work, showing up late,” recalls Schiller. “And the studio was saying it was costing them millions, while they were spending millions on Cleopatra.” Another subtext was Elizabeth Taylor, her affair with Richard Burton, and the $44m “disaster” that almost bankrupted Twentieth Century Fox. “What was in her mind,” says Schiller, “was: if I do this shoot in a certain way, I’m going to be on the cover of every magazine around the world – and Liz Taylor won’t be.”
Perhaps her naked pool frolics were also part of what Arnold called the photograph “giving her back herself”. Less a simple case of one-upmanship, more a complex attempt at reclamation. “I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have,” Monroe said in her final interview.
Photographer Douglas Kirkland, who photographed Monroe naked in bed in 1961, said she enjoyed making still images as much as movies because “she could write the script as it went along. She could make things happen. I did not tell her, ‘Turn this way, turn that way, do this, do that.’ She did it herself. That was Marilyn.”
Schiller agrees: “I don’t think any photographer captured Marilyn because what they captured is what Marilyn wanted them to capture. She wanted to be the splish splash in the water with me. She wanted to be the dream in the middle of the night with Cecil Beaton. The short and long of it was: she controlled the still camera.”
Away from the still camera, however, it was a different story. In June, a few days after Schiller photographed her with her 36th birthday cake, Monroe was found depressed, having consumed many prescription pills. Five days later, Twentieth Century Fox fired her for repeated absences and sued her for $750,000 for breach of contract. Something’s Got to Give was never completed.
Schiller speaks of Monroe with a sense of fragility. “She was like a deer out in the woods. You wanted to capture it before somebody shot it. You wanted to get it alive before it no longer existed.” He felt this on their final shoot. “You wanted to photograph her before some tragedy entered her life again.”
The day before Monroe died, on 4 August 1962, Schiller visited her home in Brentwood. She was “just out there with the flowers”, and they spoke about a possible Playboy cover. “Then at five in the morning, I got a call from my friend that Marilyn was dead. I thought it was a joke.” It wasn’t. “I got in the car at about 7am and drove back. By then, the media had surrounded the house, the glass to her bedroom window was broken, and they were removing her body, covered on a gurney.”
It was a tragic death, Schiller says – one he felt compelled to pay testimony to. “Photography is part of the texture of my life,” he ponders. And so, it would seem, was this woman. “Marilyn Monroe came into my life in 1960,” he wrote in his 2021 memoir Marilyn & Me, “and she is still a living, breathing, extraordinary presence.” Her magic has still not dimmed.
Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 4 June to 6 September. Lawrence Schiller’s Marilyn & Me is published by Taschen.
