Page 65 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“IT WAS MARILYN who was the hit of the evening,” Time magazine reports on the gala.

Marilyn’s personal publicist, Pat Newcomb, has an idea how to close the gap.

But he does clear her to shoot a solo sequence. Something’s Got to Give screenwriter Nunnally Johnson calls it the “midnight skinny dip.”

The cameras shoot close-ups, long shots, wide shots. In the rushes, though, it’s revealed that the bathing suit straps are visible across the shoulders.

“That’s easily solved,” Marilyn calls from the pool. “I’ll just take it all off.”

The “spontaneous” declaration is part of Newcomb’s plan. Yesterday, the publicist had telephoned Schiller, who’s booked to be on the lot shooting a story for Paris Match .

“I would plan to be on the set all day tomorrow if I were you, Larry, and bring plenty of film,” Newcomb told him. “Marilyn has the swimming scene tomorrow and, knowing Marilyn, she might slip out of her suit!”

Marilyn adds her own instructions. “Larry, if I do come out of the pool with nothing on, I want your guarantee that when your pictures appear on the covers of magazines Elizabeth Taylor is not anywhere in the same issue.”

Newcomb tips off two other photographers: William Reed Woodfield of Globe Photos and Fox photographer Jimmy Mitchell.

Schiller selects a long lens and focuses his camera on Marilyn as she moves through a series of poses.

One leg over the edge of the pool. Laughing and splashing in the water.

Lying on the pool deck under artfully draped towels.

It’s as Marilyn glides through the water that the photographer suddenly realizes “she didn’t have the top of her swimming suit on. ”

He keeps shooting. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen rolls of film. And when he finishes working in black-and-white, he does four rolls of color.

Westfield, too, gets a shot of Marilyn shedding her suit poolside.

Marilyn Monroe is taking her clothes off on Stage 14! Security is posted at the doors to keep out Fox employees eager for a look.

Marilyn doesn’t mind the commotion. She’s taken uppers for mood and painkillers for her thumping earache, and she can’t feel a thing. Least of all how cold the water is.

The shoot goes on for four hours.

“I had been wearing the suit, but it concealed too much,” Marilyn says afterward, “and it would have looked wrong on the screen … The set was closed, all except members of the crew, who were very sweet. I told them to close their eyes or turn their backs, and I think they all did. There was a lifeguard on the set to help me out if I needed him, but I’m not sure it would have worked. He had his eyes closed too.”

It’s a marketing masterstroke. What the Taylor-Burton affair has done for publicizing Cleopatra, Marilyn’s nude photo shoot will do for Something’s Got to Give .

While the rolls of film Mitchell snapped are studio property—a show is made of placing them in a bank vault to signal their immense value—Schiller suggests to Woodfield that the two of them combine forces.

“Bill, two sets of photos will just drive down the price. One set, and we control the market for these pictures.”

Marilyn personally reviews every image. She’s “a very intelligent businesswoman about these things,” Schiller observes. She approves the ones she likes and cuts through the ones she doesn’t with a pair of scissors.

Hugh Hefner offers $25,000 for a single shot, shattering the ceiling of what Playboy magazine has ever paid for an image. The photos sell to seventy magazines worldwide. Life chooses a rather demure snap—Marilyn poolside in a blue robe—for the cover of its June 22 issue.

Twenty-four-year-old Schiller thanks Marilyn for engineering the biggest payday of his career so far. “See what tits ’n’ ass can do?” he jokes.

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

Yet she hardly feels secure.

It’s still about nudity. Is that all I’m good for?