One photographer's view of Marilyn Monroe
(CBS News) The body of work of one photographer is something to behold - not surprising, considering the glamorous subject with whom he was fortunate enough to work. Tracy Smith reports:
It's as if we've walked in on something private. But the story these images of Marilyn Monroe - and the man who took them - may be as revealing as the pictures themselves.
In 1960 Monroe was shooting "Let's Make Love" with Yves Montand, and photographer Lawrence Schiller was on assignment for Look magazine.
When asked to describe the first time he met Monroe, Schiller said, "Well, I was 23. And I was scared - am I allowed to say scared s***less?"
And who wouldn't be? After all, she was one of the biggest stars on the planet. Schiller was a relative newcomer, with more guts than experience.
"I start shooting her from the dressing room," he recalls. "And she says, 'You know, you're not going to get a good picture from there. But if you go over there you're going to get something really nice.' And so I go over there and she turns over her shoulder, and she looks at me and she's just a different woman. She's Marilyn Monroe.
"But basically I lifted another camera and I shot just one frame. It's just an extraordinary first real portrait I ever did of her."
The Xs on Schiller's proof sheet are from Marilyn's own hand. Of all of his shots that day, she only approve done. "That was the moment that I knew that Marilyn knew more about photography at that moment than I did," Schiller said.
But he would learn.
By 1962, Elizabeth Taylor was riding a global tidal wave of publicity, and Schiller says Marilyn Monroe worried that her own star was fading.
"She felt she was unappreciated. Studios didn't take her serious," Schiller said. "She's a tremendous, insecure person."
At the time, Monroe was shooting the never-finished film "Something's Got to Give" with Dean Martin. Schiller, again on assignment, says Marilyn had an idea for the pool scene that would make waves (and magazine covers).
"When you get right to the point, she was thinking about jumping in the swimming pool but coming out with nothing on," he recalled. "We didn't know if she was really kidding. At one point I realize that she's kind of serious. And I say, 'But Marilyn, you know, you're already famous. You know, now you're going to make ME famous!' I was very cocky in those days."
"And what did she say to that?" Smith asked.
"Well, she just looked at me and said, 'Don't be so cocky, Larry. Photographers can easily be replaced.'"
While shooting this scene, the star wore a skin-tone suit. But between takes, she slipped it off. Standing poolside, Schiller caught it all on film. Risque, yet somehow still innocent. The images, as Schiller put it, show nothing - and say everything.
"She said, 'If you release those pictures, I want to make sure in the same issue I don't see Liz Taylor anywheres,'" he said. There was NO mention of Liz in the issue of Life magazine.
Smith asked about suggestions from Monroe's press agent that Schiller was exploiting the actress. "Well, there's no question that the pictures were exploiting her," he said.
"Did you feel like you were exploiting her?" Smith asked.
"Well, let me say this: Marilyn needed the exploitation for her own purposes. And I was the instrument. She wanted to deliver a message to that studio, all right. Now, therefore I don't think I was exploiting her. Because in essence, you might say you were in partnership with her, an unspoken contract, an unspoken agreement."
In any case, the images are as hot as ever.
The June edition of Vanity Fair will devote a section to Schiller's photos. They'll appear in two editions of his upcoming book, including a signed, silk-bound coffee table version by Taschen.
You can also see them - in the flesh, as it were - at New York's Steven Kasher Gallery in June, Schiller's first one-man show.
"Do you get nervous about these sort of things?" Smith asked.
"Of course I'm nervous," he replied. "I don't know if anyone's going to show up."
"It IS Marilyn Monroe," Smith said.
"Yes, but how many times have people seen Marilyn Monroe? Are they going to come out and see her again? Maybe someday they'll come out and see my work without it being Marilyn Monroe!"
And there's a lot to see: Schiller covered Ali-Patterson, Redford-Newman, Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand. He captured the joy of Sophia Lauren's Oscar win, the tear in Pat Nixon's eye as her husband conceded to John Kennedy, and the rifle used in the president's murder, held aloft in the Dallas police station.
"How do you tell a story in one image? How do you tell the whole story?" Schiller said. "It's like my picture of Lee Harvey Oswald with a 21-millimeter lens. I didn't want a picture taken far away like everybody else. I wanted to feel the pores on his skin, of the man who is being accused of killing Kennedy."
He got close to the president's brother Bobby on the '68 campaign trail: "He was like everybody. He'd sleep on the floor just like we would, if it was a long night."
He describes one picture he took of RFK: "You can see [him] very pensive, looking out the window as he's coming into L.A., unknown the tragedy that is going to befall him and his family.
"And he was very cooperative. He understood the power of the media, as his brother did. That family knew that they could be elected if they did the right thing with the media."
But there were limits to what Schiller's subjects would tolerate. And Schiller says Marilyn Monroe seemed to reach hers when, on the last day of her life, Schiller spoke with her about selling even more revealing photos to Playboy.
"She turned, in a way, in the middle of the conversation, that says, 'Am all I good for is my body?' She was very, very upset that again, it was her body. It was not her talent. It was not her ability to tell a story to play a role. And I had to get the hell out of there. And I did."
Schiller said her reaction made him realize "I had gone too far, right."
He said that on that last day she did not seem suicidal. "She didn't look as if she might take her life. I think she just took too many pills with drinking that night, you know, and lost track of what she was doing.
"Look, night is a safe haven to many, many celebrities. Darkness is a harbor in which you pull into. Unfortunately, this was one night that she didn't come back from the darkness."
Schiller was at her home as the coroner removed her body, and at her funeral with grief-stricken former husband Joe DiMaggio.
A Lawrence Schiller image of Marilyn Monroe - her eyes fixed on a distant horizon - became an epitaph.
When asked who is the equivalent of Marilyn today, Schiller responded, "I don't think there is one. She was Marilyn Monroe and I don't think we should look for somebody to replace her, and I don't think we should try to compare her to anybody. Let her be who she was and let us remember her as she was."
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