Marilyn & Me
Authors: Lawrence Schiller
Copyright © 2012 by Lawrence Schiller
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Toronto.
DOUBLEDAY
is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Estate of Norman Mailer for permission to reprint an excerpt from
Marilyn: A Biography
by Norman Mailer, copyright © 1973 by Norman Mailer and Alskog, Inc. All rights reserved.
Jacket design by John Fontana
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Schiller, Lawrence.
Marilyn & me : a photographer’s memories / Lawrence Schiller.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Monroe, Marilyn, 1926–1962. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. 3. Schiller, Lawrence. I. Title. II. Title: Marilyn and me.
PN2287.M69S355 2012 791.4302′8092—dc23
[B] 2012005702
eISBN: 978-0-385-53668-4
v3.1_r1
For Nina
,
my friend and caring wife
I
n November 1963, at the age of twenty-six, I started to use a tape recorder to preserve the events of my life. By that time I was an accomplished photojournalist, working for glossy picture magazines all over the world. I began interviewing the subjects of my stories and recording them, thereby not only beginning to preserve history but also giving myself a unique education. You see, I grew up not being able to spell or read well (I would later discover that I was dyslexic). So I had found a road to learning.
In 2007, when I was seventy, I asked a friend, the author Larry Grobel, to interview me two times a week, week after week, month after month, to preserve the events of my very full life, because, as I have often said to my own subjects,
you owe it to history
. It’s from this series of interviews, which are still ongoing, that I have gathered my recollections to write about Marilyn Monroe.
The events and conversations in this book have been reconstructed to the best of my memory. To confirm my impressions, I’ve also relied on documents and notes from my personal archives and the knowledge of others who knew Marilyn and me during this period of time. Many of the words remain vivid in my mind, and therefore I felt confident in placing the dialogue in quotation marks, making the transition from memory to print more fluent. The photographs are, of course, all mine.
The sound of Marilyn’s voice still rings true in my ears. Once you heard it in person, you’d never forget it.
W
hen I pulled in to the 20th Century–Fox studios parking lot in Los Angeles in my station wagon in April 1960, I kept telling myself that this was just another assignment, just another pretty girl that I was going to photograph. But in fact it wasn’t just another assignment, and she wasn’t just a pretty girl. In 1956, when I was a college photographer, I had seen her angelic face on the cover of
Time
magazine. After that, as I began to make my way in photojournalism, I got assignments to shoot Jimmy Stewart and Lee Remick in
Anatomy of a Murder
and the dancer Julie Newmar in
Li’l Abner
, but it had never even occurred to me that I might get a chance to photograph the star who was every man’s—and woman’s—fantasy. But now, four years later,
Look
magazine had hired me to do just that. In a few minutes, I’d be meeting
the
Marilyn Monroe, face-to-face, on the set of
Let’s Make Love
.