Marilyn

It doesn't seem possible, but it has been almost a quarter of a century since Marilyn Monroe died. Marilyn and I were born the same year (1926) and we grew up in the same sexually repressive America of the Thirties and Forties. Nudity became a symbol of sexual freedom to both of us, and it played an important part in both of our lives.

"The urge to go nude was her most public whim," reported Time magazine." I dreamed I was standing up in church without any clothes on,' she recalled, 'and all the people there were lying at my feet.' Years later, she posed nude for Christendom's most famous calendar, and from that moment on, she was the only blonde in the world."

When Playboy published that Tom Kelley nude as our first Playmate of the Month (though we called her Sweetheart of the Month in our initial issue), the future of both the actress and the publication seemed assured and were forever after interconnected. I wrote of her on that occasion, "She can put more sensual appeal into a simple glance or movement than any Oomph, It, Snap, Crackle or Pop girl in Hollywood's sensual history. She's as famous as Dwight Eisenhower and Dick Tracy, and she and Dr. Kinsey have so monopolized sex this year [1953], some people in high places are investigating to make certain no antitrust laws have been bent or broken."

We continued to chronicle her career throughout the decade. In the December 1960 issue, we devoted a pictorial toast to her titled The Magnificent Marilyn. It included a provocative photo of her having breakfast in bed shot by Hollywood glamor photographer André de Dienes; a sophisticated series of black-and-white stills taken by Milton Greene while she was in New York studying with Lee Strasberg; and a previously unpublished double exposure from her original nude calendar shooting that resulted when Kelley, understandably disconcerted, neglected to change film between poses.

We had been planning a December 1962 pictorial of Marilyn, shot by Lawrence Schiller and William Read Woodfield, of the nude swimming scene for the never-completed 20th Century Fox film Something's Got to Give, directed by George Cukor and co-starring Dean Martin. Agnes Flanagan, Marilyn's hair stylist, reported, "After she made the swimming sequence, she asked me, 'Do you think it was in bad taste?' I told her there was nothing suggestive about it at all. Her figure was more beautiful than it had ever been. A perfect body like Marilyn's looks beautiful nude, and beauty is never vulgar. Her animal magnetism, though sometimes flamboyant, always had an appealing, childlike quality which seemed to be poking fun at the very quality she symbolized."

I had intended to shoot a very special 1962 Christmas-issue cover of Marilyn posing with a white fur that would prove to be more revealing when the reader opened the magazine to a reverse image shot simultaneously from the rear. Those plans never materialized, because Marilyn died of an overdose of barbiturates in August of that year.

Playmate Sheralee Conners posed for the two-sided December 1962 cover, and we postponed the nude swimming-pool pictures a year, publishing them in the January 1964 issue as part (continued on page 214)Marilyn(continued from page 94) of a 14-page tribute titled MM Remembered, which included a reprint of the original Playboy calendar pose and a striking semi-abstract portrait of her painted by Willem de Kooning during the period of his world-famous Woman series.

In the years that followed her death, Marilyn Monroe's stature and fame simply increased throughout America and the world.

Clark Gable remarked during the filming of The Misfits, which proved to be the last film that either of them would complete, "She's something different to each man, blending somehow the things he seems to require most."

Billy Wilder, who had directed her in Some Like It Hot, observed, "There will never be another one like her. ... She had flesh which photographs like flesh. You feel you can reach out and touch it."

"Flesh impact" is Wilder's term for the effect. In Some Like It Hot, released in 1959, her impact was all at once incendiary and luminescent. Similarly, for soul impact, Wilder and his writing partner, I.A.L. Diamond, gave Marilyn the most elegiac line of her career: "Story of my life--I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop." Norman Mailer, in his artful biography, likened her psyche at that moment to a "fragile shell." He wrote, "She is in the unendurable position of protecting an exquisite sensitivity which has been pricked, tickled, twisted, squashed and tortured for nearly all of her life." As she throatily boop-boop-a-doos her way through the tune I Want to Be Loved by You, her vulnerability is in full view. Wilder said of this performance, "When Monroe is on the screen, the audience cannot keep their eyes off her."

The celebrated photographer Philippe Halsman articulated the Monroe photogenic appeal this way: "Her inferiority complex, her pathetic, almost childlike need for security are the very things that made her irresistible." Sir Laurence Olivier, her co-star in The Prince and the Showgirl, noted that she was "happy as a child when being photographed."

The observations are valuable. On an ethereal level, her relationship with the camera may well have been the only fulfilling one she knew. In her unfinished autobiography, Marilyn recalled her earliest nude-modeling experiences: "Sitting naked in front of a camera and striking joyous poses reminded me of the dreams I used to have as a child."

Her childhood, as we've seen belabored elsewhere, was disconsolate. She never met her father, barely knew her mentally unbalanced mother and, in a futile attempt to discover herself, was married--albeit briefly--at the age of 16. She longed to emulate her idol Jean Harlow and was deeply bereaved by the star's death. Ironically, the cinematographer who shot her first Fox screen test said of Norma Jean Dougherty (nee Mortenson, a.k.a. Baker), "She radiated sex like Jean Harlow." Throughout her life, she craved attention and drew it implicitly. Marveled a press agent, "She had such magnetism that if 15 men were in a room with her, each man would be convinced he was the one she'd be waiting for after the others left."

Beginning in 1946, when she was 19 and a hungry ingénue with the Blue Book Modeling Agency in Los Angeles, Norma Jean became a regular visitor to the Sunset Strip studio of the calendar artist Earl Moran, who, along with George Petty and Alberto Vargas, elevated the pinup to high art. He created his work by first photographing his models, and then, based on the print he found most provocative, he etched a charcoal outline to be fleshed in with pastels. The final sketches were both whimsical and coyly suggestive, a combination evocative of the tame prurience that tweaked America in those more innocent times.

Playboy recently discovered a remarkable trove of never-before-published Moran photographs, seminude portraits of Norma Jean that predate the famous Kelley nude-calendar shooting. Over four years, posing almost monthly at the rate of ten dollars per hour (each session lasted two hours), she and Moran captured moments so indelible and engaging that it is a wonder they have never previously emerged in their original form. Here she demonstrates a visceral ebullience that perhaps tells more about her difficult youth than do the reams of ponderous psychoanalysis manufactured every year since her death. There is an unshackled, euphoric quality on display in these pictures. We hear stories of how young Norma Jean was an astute study as a model. She asked innumerable questions of her photographers, intricate questions about the emotional nuances achievable in the poses she struck. She would then immediately concentrate her sensuous magnetism before the cameras.

"Emotionally, she did everything right. She expressed just what I wanted," Moran has said. "Her movements, her hands, her body were just perfect."

If her life, as has been suggested, was an endless yearning for approval, her sessions with Moran and all of her other photographers must have felt positively liberating. Mailer wrote, "She becomes the artist when she takes a pose: She paints the picture into the camera, and few photographers will fail to pay her homage."

"I liked my body," she would later write. "People have curious attitudes about nudity, just as they have about sex. Nudity and sex are the most commonplace things in the world. Yet people often act as if they were things that existed only on Mars. I thought of such matters as I posed. ..."

Her professionalism in posing is a theme that resonates. It was a passionate exercise for her, one she conducted with conscientious self-scrutiny and astonishing poise. "I'll focus on her," lensman Earl Theisen explained, "and then, looking in the finder, I can actually see the sex blossoming out, like it was a flower. If I'm in a hurry and want to shoot too quickly, she'll say, 'Earl, you shot it too quick. It won't be right. Let's do it over.'"

Gloria Steinem recently contributed to the ever-burgeoning speculative necrology of Marilyn Monroe with an insightful and unique biography. Attempting to conjure an alternative life for this promising woman had she not become a sex goddess, Steinem postulates, "A student, lawyer, teacher, artist, mother, grandmother, defender of animals, rancher, homemaker, sportswoman, rescuer of children--all these are futures we can imagine for Norma Jeane." (Note: The addition of the E was an affectation Marilyn adopted as a model, perhaps in an effort to glamorize herself.)

The impulse to fantasize over what might have been, however intriguing, seems to unnecessarily denigrate what she actually was. Marilyn Monroe did, at some point and in every sense, swallow Norma Jean whole. Her identity quavered privately, but stardom was always her dream. She bolstered a sorrowful life by inventing a new one for herself. Marilyn was self-created, exultantly so, and she always understood the implications of the creation.

"I have always had a talent for irritating women since I was 14," she wrote, essaying a mixture of dismay and pride. "When I see women frowning in my direction and cutting me up among themselves, I really feel sorry--not for them but for their menfolk. I have a feeling that such women are poor lovers and sexual cripples. The only thing they are able to give a man is a guilt complex."

It was her modeling, in fact, that sparked Hollywood's interest. She had briefly fretted for her steadily rising acting career when the Kelley calendar nude became public knowledge. "I thought this would push me into the cold again, she recalled. Her fears were instantly allayed; the nude was integral in her glimmering ascendance in Hollywood. The actual upshot: "Everybody in the studio wanted me as a star in his movie. I finally went into Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and, after that, How to Marry a Millionaire. I liked the fact that I was important in making them a great financial success and that my studio cleaned up a fortune, despite that its chief had considered me unphotogenic. ... I liked the raise I finally received to $1200 a week."

Newspaperman and screenwriter Ben Hecht cannily asserted after her death, at a time when the film community was fraught with guilt, "Marilyn had been wrecked by the circumstances of her life since the age of five. The truth about Marilyn Monroe is that she was saved by Hollywood. Fame saved her. The spotlight beating on her 24 hours a day made the world seem livable to her. ... It was the only world in which she could thrive. The real world held only hobgoblins for her, terrors that harried her nights."

A producer, she related in her memoirs, once brusquely advised her, "All you have to do is to be Marilyn Monroe." Yet nothing could have possibly been more challenging or intangible. More than any other figure in show-business history, she was, and is, a symbol. She is the celestial enigma with which every incandescent blonde has since been (usually unfavorably) compared. Her style was both timeless and matchless, her elegance ineffable.

As Diana Trilling deftly eulogized her, "She was alive in a way not granted the rest of us. She communicated such a charge of vitality as altered our imagination of life, which is the job and wonder of art."

Marilyn was art, purely and utterly. The palpable honesty we cannot help seeing in these poses is as bracing a tribute to her dreams as we can hope to encounter. If the story of her life was, indeed, to cling to the fuzzy end of the lollipop, she left all the sweetness for the rest of us.