Page 69 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Photographer Bert Stern has been in Rome on the set of Cleopatra, shooting Elizabeth Taylor in a pleated Fortuny dress and a gold serpent belt to promote the Fox film in Vogue .

The magazine next sends Stern to Los Angeles to photograph Marilyn for its August issue, her first-ever appearance in the fashion magazine.

“Really? What a nice thing to say,” she replies.

On the way to creating something “pure Marilyn,” they have a lighthearted and intimate sitting, just the two of them, a hairdresser, an assistant—and three bottles of Dom Perignon.

“Can you get me some scarves?” Stern had asked Vogue . “Scarves you can see through—with geometrics. And jewelry. Jewelry doesn’t need too many clothes, right?”

It doesn’t take long to get Marilyn on board with the idea of a near-nude shoot. Her only concern is the noticeable reminder of her June 1961 gallbladder surgery. “What about my scar?” she asks. “Will it show?”

Stern assures her they can retouch the photos if necessary, though personally he prefers seeing a small imperfection.

After that, Marilyn is unselfconscious, happily shedding clothes, frolicking with sheer scarves, flowers, and jewelry.

The shoot lasts twelve hours, ending around seven in the morning.

Vogue commissions an eight-page editorial and sends Stern back to shoot three more days to fill the space. This time, it’s about the clothes.

Marilyn poses first in a backless black Dior gown, then in a column dress, but it’s not until she’s undressed and again rolling around in the crisp white hotel linens that Stern gets the images he really wants.

When Stern later sends her his negatives, Marilyn sends them back with orange x ’s through the ones she dislikes. She is a woman in control.

Richard Meryman, Life magazine’s human affairs editor, initially requested an interview with Marilyn after meeting her in New York earlier that year.

Now Marilyn sets strict parameters. Meryman must provide the interview questions, as well as the transcript, and must grant her approval over the content before it’s printed.

“You can have all the clearance rights you wish,” he assures her. “And, yes, you can destroy negatives.”

Marilyn has had plenty of reasons to mistrust the press. “They go around and ask mostly your enemies,” she explains. “Friends always say, ‘Let’s check and see if this is all right with her.’ … Most people don’t really know me.”

Meryman wants to get to know her. He’s especially interested in Marilyn’s experiences with fame. “I do hope that you might find it an interesting topic to explore.” He agrees to her conditions and on Wednesday, July 4, brings his tape recorder to 12305 Fifth Helena Drive.

She looks great but is clearly troubled, the journalist thinks when she greets him.

A tour of the house is Marilyn’s version of a personality test. She loves the home she’s chosen, but she requests that photos of it be minimal.

“I don’t want everybody to see exactly where I live, what my sofa or my fireplace looks like. Do you know the book Everyman ? Well, I want to stay just in the fantasy of Everyman.” She’s only got one major regret about the house. “I live alone and I hate it!”

She’s still waiting for the furnishings she chose in Mexico to arrive, but she’s added some decorative touches. Meryman admires a leather-covered coffee table, a tin candelabra, and wooden folding stools.

“Good,” Marilyn says, “anybody who likes my house, I’m sure I’ll get along with.”

Negotiations about restarting the production of Something’s Got to Give are still ongoing. She’s weary of conflict.

“Have many friends called up to rally round when you were fired by Fox?” Meryman asks.

Marilyn sits in silence, finally looking Meryman full in the face.

“No,” she all but whispers.

People can be so unkind. Even her stepchildren have been taunted because of their relationship to her.

Arthur Miller’s son Bobby once tried to hide from her a magazine article he worried would hurt her feelings.

Joe DiMaggio Jr. endured cruel teasing, “Ha, ha, your stepmother is Marilyn Monroe, ha, ha, ha.”

It’s no surprise that Marilyn is wary of being a punch line.

“I hope you got something here,” she says to the journalist, “but please don’t make me look like a joke!”

On Saturday, July 7, Richard Meryman returns to Marilyn’s Brentwood home with his colleague, Life photojournalist Allan Grant. Grant is well-regarded, especially among celebrities—he’s “very handsome and glamorous, two virtues that made him popular in Hollywood.”

Though the shoot is meant to start at noon, it’s four o’clock before Marilyn is ready.

Not due to the vanity or arrogance she’s been accused of, so much as a complete inability to stay on task.

“There was none of the fearful moping and preening in front of mirrors I had heard so much about. She was entirely cheerful and utterly disorganized,” Meryman observes.

“The necessary mechanics of daily living were beyond her grasp; she always started out behind and never caught up.”

Once she’s finally ready—casually dressed in slim capri trousers and a soft, dark sweater—Grant selects an Italian-style carved chair with light green velvet upholstery and positions it under a window to catch the best light and the thick foliage outside.

Marilyn is in a playful mood, posing on and around the chair, at one point piercing the seat’s fabric with one of her spike heels, and causing a small crack in the wood when she poses on the chair back.

“Forget Monroe the movie star,” Grant’s been instructed, “and simply photograph Marilyn the person.”

Meryman is interested in both.

On why she became an actress: “I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house …

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night.

Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. ”

On being objectified: “Sometimes I’m invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table like a musician who’ll play the piano after dinner, and I know you’re not really invited for yourself. You’re just an ornament.”

On respecting the artistry of her craft: “An actor is not a machine, no matter how much they want to say you are. Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer.”

“I was never used to being happy, so that wasn’t something I ever took for granted,” she tells Meryman.

“Fame to me certainly is only a temporary and a partial happiness, even for a waif and I was brought up a waif. But fame is not really for a daily diet, that’s not what fulfills you.

It warms you a bit but the warming is temporary.

It’s like caviar, you know, it’s good to have caviar but not when you have it every meal every day. ”

And if fame leaves her?

“If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.”

Two days later, as agreed, Meryman brings over the final draft of his story, “Marilyn Lets Her Hair Down About Being Famous,” for approval. Marilyn has it ready when he returns later that day, with only a few small changes penciled in.

She’s pleased with the story and appreciates how Meryman’s captured her voice. “Hey, thanks,” she calls out as he departs.

George Barris and Marilyn first met on the set of The Seven Year Itch, when he photographed her in and around New York City.

Now Cosmopolitan magazine has commissioned a photographic essay, and he approaches Marilyn about collaborating on a series of sessions and interviews.

“Are you happy or unhappy?” Barris asks.

“I think I’m human,” Marilyn says. “I have my down moments, but I’m also robust. I think I’m more robust than down … I’m human.”

Barris makes her words the theme of the shoot. “She would hide nothing in our photos. No magic, no makeup or retouching of our finished photographs.”

She asks Barris to select some costumes and props.

“Off to Saks,” he writes, “for a bulky sweater, terry cloth three quarter hooded beach jacket, a blanket, a large towel for those peek-a-boo beach shots, and a sexy bikini. I did not buy Marilyn any undergarments—she never wore them.”

Marilyn also brings some of her own clothes, including a sweater that she purchased in February at a market in Toluca, Mexico.

Friday, July 13, is the final day of the shoot. This time on Santa Monica Beach at sunset.

The low-lying gray clouds create a moody, almost mysterious effect. And the shifting natural light should perfectly capture an enigmatic movie star in the throes of a metamorphosis.

The real Marilyn Monroe, the real Norma Jeane. That’s who Barris is looking to meet on the beach that day.

And he does.

She projects such joy when the camera’s on, Barris muses. The world can’t forget her face.

The sun is setting and the temperature dropping as he shoots down to his very last roll of film. Even the champagne he’s brought as fortification is losing its effect. He sees Marilyn shivering but she never complains.

The last photo he takes is of Marilyn bundled in her Mexican sweater, her blond hair blowing in the sea breeze.

Her face softens with affection, and her lips pucker, as if to blow him a kiss.

“This one’s for you, George,” she says.

When Marilyn and George Barris meet at her home to review the photos he’s taken, she spends five hours looking carefully at each one, using a red pencil to cross through her rejections.

“I’m in your hands now,” Marilyn says. “I trust you.”

“Don’t worry,” Barris says. “I’ll never hurt you. When this is published, there won’t be any changes.”