Marilyn & Me by Lawrence Schiller

his son in his military uniform, at the funeral. The tragedy, love, and unrelenting sadness of the moment were all on the great DiMaggio’s grief-stricken face.
    I was there with other members of the press to take pictures, not to shed tears. In addition to my coverage of the funeral,
Life
asked me to send them some head shots taken in May during the filming of
Something’s Got to Give
. The next morning the picture editor called to tell me that my photograph of Joe DiMaggio and his son would run across two pages. I was afraid to ask him whose image of Marilyn had been selected for the cover. I figured that it had to be one by one of the great photographers: Milton Greene, Richard Avedon, Arnold Newman, or Alfred Eisenstaedt.
    On Monday morning I went to the
Life
offices in Beverly Hills to get an advance copy of the magazine. I was stunned to discover that they had used one of my photographs on the cover, the image where she was wearing the golden fur cap with the matching fur surrounding her neck, the picture where she looked like she was breathing in a little more air, the ethereal shot where she looked like an angel. It’s the Marilyn I most remember, and it was on the cover of
Life
magazine.

Afterword

The Years That Followed
    I n the years that followed, I’ve thought a lot about the little time I spent with Marilyn and how it seemed to go beyond my being a photographer and her being “Marilyn Monroe.” As a photographer, I’m always talking about myself in order to build relationships with my subjects, but I never expected one to develop with Marilyn.
    She was
Stars and Stripes’
Cheesecake Queen of 1952;
Look
magazine’s Most Promising Female Newcomer; and
Photoplay’
s Fastest Rising Star that same year.
Redbook
named her Best Young Box Office Personality in 1953; and she received Golden Globe Awards for World Film Favorite in 1953 and 1961 and Best Actress in a Comedy for
Some Like It Hot
. It was her iconic status as both America’s Sweetheart and America’s Sex Symbol that made me believe that all I’d ever do was photograph her. I realize now that I spoke to her in paragraphs, babbling on and on, while she talked sparingly but concisely. And maybe that’s why I remembermuch of what she said and how she felt poorly treated by the people she worked for. She had thought a lot about those things, and when she said them to me, they came out plainly and clearly.
    Even though Marilyn always had people around her, I felt she was a lonely person. Almost everyone in her circle was there to serve her: do her hair, do her makeup, fix her wardrobe, handle her publicity, schedule her day. She had an acting coach to guide her; a driver to run her errands; a masseur to relieve her backaches; a psychiatrist to listen to her heartaches; and a bunch of doctors to give her pills to help her sleep or keep her awake, to calm her down or speed her up. But despite this assortment of helpers, she was, ultimately, alone.
    I never had a desire to interview her, so our exchanges evolved naturally, always beginning with the camera and photographs. I wasn’t a writer at the time. I didn’t go home and jot down what we had talked about in a diary. Sometimes I would tell my wife things she had said, and other things she said just stuck in my memory. As her legend grew after her death, I thought about her, and I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to recapture her and the days on and off the sets of
Let’s Make Love
and
Something’s Got to Give
.
    The Marilyn I remember is not the Marilyn I’ve read about in the books that have appeared in the fifty years since her death. I wasn’t a party to her reliance on barbiturates;I couldn’t swear to any of her alleged affairs. I did see Bobby Kennedy at her house, but I didn’t see him in her bedroom. I overheard some of her heated comments about studio executives, but I never saw the violent rages that were later reported. I saw her complexity and her kindness. She