Page 90 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“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 askedVogue. “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.

Voguecommissions 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 orangex’s through the ones she dislikes. She is a woman in control.

Richard Meryman,Lifemagazine’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 thecontent 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 wanteverybodyto see exactly where I live, what my sofa or my fireplace looks like. Do you know the bookEveryman? 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 ofSomething’s Got to Giveare 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,Lifephotojournalist 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.”

---