Recommendations of the Editorial team
Lawrence Schiller’s “Marilyn & Me” is one of those coffee table books that is both a historical source and a myth machine. The book lives from the aura of a moment: Marilyn Monroe in the summer of 1962, a few weeks before her death, when those famous pool photos were taken on the set of “Something’s Got to Give” that show Monroe naked in the water. Schiller was 25 at the time, ambitious and not yet a star photographer. Monroe knew that. She probably also knew that these pictures would benefit both of them.
Schiller may be prone to self-mythologizing, but the famous dialogue – “You’re already famous. Now you’re going to make me famous” – takes little of the power away from the photos. Monroe isn’t a perfectly lit diva here, and she vacillated wildly between professionalism and exhaustion. The book reminds us that in 1962, Monroe was perhaps Hollywood’s most important glamor figure, but also a public figure whose fragility had become part of the marketing.
The famous pool scene itself is now part of the canon of pop history. Monroe is said to have initially hesitated about being photographed without a bikini, but then realized the PR value of the pictures. Fox was in the middle of production problems. The film was considered a chaos project. Monroe often arrived late on set. With her nude photos, Monroe controlled the headlines again, at least for a short time. The fact that she was dead a few months later gives the images a retroactive melancholy (which Schiller uses in the book in a very calculated way). Schiller’s gaze may therefore be male and voyeuristic. But that’s also how he found access to Monroe.
That’s why “Marilyn & Me” is strongest when it’s not trying to be sentimental.
- Lawrence Schiller. Marilyn & Me
- Hardcover, 23.2 x 31.6 cm, 1.95 kg, 200 pages
- bags.com
- EUR 60
