Nicky Haslam, working for Vogue, delivered this dazzling picture to the dazed, haunted star just before she died in 1962. She would have turned 100 on June 1 this year
Two indelible images were engrained in my mid-teen mind.
The first was seeing, one blustery June day in 1953, the just-crowned Queen: youthfully pearlescent, sensitive, smiling through rain from that great ornate carriage as she passed, quite close, beside the windows of my father’s club in St James’s.
And, not very long after – having hared across those hard-won playing fields of Eton, over lanes and ditches, to the Gaumont in Slough – seeing, in celluloid colour, the world-heralded Marilyn Monroe in There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954).
While an afternoon audience of housewives swooned at the gyrations of co-star Johnny Ray, I was enraptured by the sashaying form, the lyre-like arms, the wide luscious mouth, the mouche – the trembling, exquisite being that was Marilyn.
These two women, born six weeks but worlds and time and cultures apart, both young, assured and vivacious at so early a milestone in their diverse futures had, at those first coups d’oeil, equal promise of pleasure, security, endurance and a touching similarity in their shimmering white, diamonds and radiance.
The Queen recently confided to a friend that she’d rather longed to be an actress had statecraft not been her destiny.
But Marilyn had to contend with the pitfalls of actually being an actress in order to become queen of a more calumniatory empire.
Too soon we were to learn of the canker in Marilyn’s crimson rose. Too soon came the revelations of a chaotic upbringing, deeply contorted emotions and betrayed trust. We watched, and wondered, for the next decade, at her sublime beauty, her innate goofiness, the promise of her pout, her glorious gaiety. There was always that nagging feeling that, deep down, almost nothing was right with, or for, her.
That, despite the glamour in pink satin, the black monkey fur, the swirling white and the desert-bleached denim, it was all, inevitably, a charade.
A few years pass and, while the perfection of her image remains unchanged, one’s heart is in one’s mouth on her behalf. She’s private. She’s ill. She’s late. She’s seeing Peter Lawford; she’ll see only Natasha Lytess, her drama coach. No, she won’t see anyone; she’s a recluse.
The nearest I came to her was one sultry Los Angeles summer night. In a bar on Hollywood and Vine, I’d picked up a leathered hunk. Later, lazily, from his Brentwood veranda, he gestured to a one-storey across the street. ‘That’s Marilyn’s.’ He would have known: he was Peggy Lee’s hairdresser.
So this was the house, pale and faded under its dusty greenery, that was to be there for the entire rocky ride, mute witness to the DiMaggio jealousy, the humiliation by Arthur Miller, the ill-fated venture with Milton Greene, the unborn child (by Tony Curtis), the clutches of the Kennedy cabal and reports of fiasco footage on the set of Something’s Gotta Give, her unfinished last film.
A couple of Julys later, there’s a conspiratorial but palpably joyous atmosphere in our art department at Vogue in Manhattan.
On the lay-out pinboard, among the dedicated editorial pages for the September issue, are 14 starkly white double-page spreads – no hint as to their content. The editors, Diana Vreeland, Alex Liberman and co, buzz around them proudly, congratulatorily, changing the order and shape with sotto voce gestures.
Whatever this project is, it’s mammoth. Eventually I find out, and I am sworn to secrecy: the photographer Bert Stern has done a sensational shoot with Marilyn.
And, what’s more, she’s agreed to be photographed naked.
So she’s all right! She’s back!! On top!!! Everything’s gonna be OK.
The contacts come in. Exclaimed, rhapsodised, pored over… Here she is, once again. Glorious, restored, ravishing, the honey-dewed skin, the gold-dust shoulders, the ice-white cowlick, the coral lips quivering.
Then someone remembers she has photo approval.
There’s a conference, and… ‘Erm, Nicky’ – Priscilla Peck, the art director, is the acme of politesse – ‘Erm, could you, erm, take these up to Miss Monroe?’ I am presented with a heavy white envelope and a red Chinagraph pencil. ‘And please wait while she chooses.’
At 6.30 that evening, I ring the bell of the apartment at 444 East 57th Street. Nothing. I ring again. A small dog barks shrilly; then footsteps. The door opens. The goddess is mere inches from my eyes.
But hers are red, her greasy face and smudgy lips framed by lank, lifeless hair. She wears a shapeless grey tracksuit with make-up stains at the neckline. She looks half-dazed, almost haunted. The dog barks again.
‘Be quiet, Maff,’ she rasps, her hand half-shading her gaze.
I hold out the bulging envelope ‘My editor has asked me to…’
‘Thank you, honey, but I’m running late.’ She half-closes the door, then looks down. ‘Are they OK?’
‘Yes, they’re wonderful. Of course they’re wonderful. How could they not be?’
‘Oh, thank you, honey…’ The mascara-messed eyes look up at me, her voice strangely remote. ‘Do you mind if we look at them right here? I’m kinda…’
She opens the envelope and holds each contact sheet against the door, with the wax crayon expertly and unhesitatingly circling the ones she likes, X-ing others, and, sucking her teeth, puts a pale thumbnail through total rejects.
Just as we started on the colour transparencies, a telephone rang, faintly, in a distant room. Marilyn looked panicked. The grubby, unwashed reality gathered up these last images of her golden glory in her arms, thrust them into mine, and ran unsteadily away down the corridor. The dog barked again. The telephone stopped ringing.
Marilyn’s door was still open when the elevator arrived.
She died three weeks later.
