Marilyn & Me (6 page)

“Oh, I don’t know, probably very late,” she said. Then she added, “Your wife is expecting you.”

“Not that. It’s just … well, you know, the baby, Suzanne, she likes to see me before she goes to sleep. But it’s okay, really.”

“She’ll survive,” Marilyn said. Considering her childhood, I imagined she was thinking that there are a lot worse things that can happen to a kid than not having her father to tuck her in for one night.

“It’s tough on Judi,” I said, “because I’m away so much.”

That night we worked late, and when we were through, Marilyn was tired, though she did say sorry to me as she returned to her dressing room. By the time I got back to our apartment on Orange Grove, Suzanne was fast asleep. Judi was still awake, sitting in the living room with a smile on her face.

“Why are you up?” I asked.

Someone had come to the door and woken her. It was a deliveryman holding two dozen roses and a note from Marilyn Monroe: “Sorry for keeping Larry so late.” That blew me away. And it still touches me. I don’t think she did it for me and my wife so much as for herself. It seems like the kind of gesture she would have appreciated someone extending toward her.

“She must really like you,” Judi said.

“Who knows,” I said. “I like her. She’s so insecure about her acting. You’d think a star like her would be gliding through life. But she seems to always be struggling with something.”

“Since when did you become an analyst?” Judi asked.

The next day, when I knocked on Marilyn’s dressing room door, I was holding one of the roses. “You should have seen the look on my wife’s face.”

“I’m glad it kept you out of the doghouse,” Marilyn said, taking the rose and putting it behind her ear.

I was not quick enough to have snapped a picture, but it’s an image I still remember.

On Thursday, May 17, Marilyn showed up to work on time and was finished with her scenes before noon. For a change, nobody had to wait for her. What they didn’t know was that Peter Lawford had come to the studio by helicopter to pick up Marilyn and take her to the airport. From there, they would fly to New York, where Marilyn had agreed to sing “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy at a Democratic Party fund-raiser at Madison Square Garden. Later, this would become an issue. Marilyn had informed Fox that she had been asked to do this, but the studio let her know that because the filming was already behind schedule, they didn’t want her to leave and miss more days. Marilyn didn’t argue; she just went to New York to celebrate the president’s birthday. By then, there were rampant rumors that she was having an affair with the president and, some believed, with his brother the attorney general as well, but that would always remain part of the mystery around her.

I, like countless others, watched news footage of her sexy, almost tipsy performance as Lawford introduced her as “the late Marilyn Monroe,” making fun of her reputation for keeping everyone—and now even the president—waiting. It was a performance that no viewer would ever forget. She was wearing a skintight rhinestone dress, and her platinum-blond
hair seemed to glow. And the way she whispered the song, pausing between each phrase, must have sent shivers up the president’s spine.

Marilyn was en route to New York when Fox sent her attorneys a breach-of-contract letter. She was furious. She was convinced that this wasn’t about her movie but about the heavy, unexpected losses the studio was taking on
Cleopatra
. The studio seemed blind to the publicity she had generated for them with her appearance at the Garden. Instead, they were turning Marilyn’s trip east into a power play against her.

Marilyn flew back to L.A. on Sunday and was on the set the next day ready to work. Everyone could see that her director, George Cukor, acted coldly toward her; no doubt he’d been told what the studio was up to. Marilyn worked a full eight hours but refused to work with Dean Martin the next day because he had a cold. Martin took the rest of the week off, which meant that the pool scene was moved to Wednesday. Just Marilyn and her bathing suit.

Pat Newcomb called me on Tuesday night to confirm that the swimming pool scene would be shot the next day. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it, but I did call my photo agent, Tom Blau, in London to give him a heads-up. I told Blau that if I got some really good pictures, he might have to fly to L.A.

B
illy Woodfield, all three hundred pounds of him, arrived on set just as I did. I could see immediately that he had a winning personality, but what I really saw when I looked at him was who he represented: Globe Photos. I worried that Globe would try to go beyond its agreed distribution territory, the United States, and sell Woodfield’s pictures around the world. Even though we hadn’t yet started shooting, the thought of being scooped or of losing what I thought would be a really big payday upset me.

Fox had built the swimming pool on a large soundstage that contained a tank. When Dean Martin returned to work, he would be filmed on a balcony, looking down at Marilyn, who was to be in the water, frolicking, and thereby turning him on. The line in the script said she appeared nude; it didn’t say that she was going to
be
nude.

Cukor had set up several cameras, knowing he would have to shoot at least six or seven setups. He’d need close-ups, long shots, and a high angle from Dean Martin’s point of view on the balcony, which meant there’d be time in between setups to take photographs. There was great anticipation, made only greater because Marilyn was, as usual, late. George Cukor was miffed. He paced the set, fuming. When Marilyn finally emerged from her dressing room, she was wearing a blue terrycloth bathrobe and a flesh-colored two-piece bathing suit underneath. Basically, it was a bra and panties. The beating of my heart went into overdrive.

Marilyn jumped into the pool and dog-paddled around. The water had been heated to ninety degrees, making it like a warm bath. She was like a child, floating on her back. There was no dialogue; she gave a little giggle followed by a little laugh, which was quite different from her giggle and laugh while sitting with me in her dressing room. This was the giggle and the laugh of her character. Then she floated over to the pool’s edge, lifted her head and shoulders out of the water, and peeked over the rim while keeping the rest of her body in the water. After a few more giggles, Marilyn lifted her right leg over the pool’s edge, still keeping her body hidden behind the pool’s rim. I hit the shutter release on my camera several times before moving to a ladder that I had placed close by earlier in the day. Four or five steps up I found another angle that showed Marilyn’s playfulness. Just
as quickly as she’d come to the pool’s edge she moved back toward the center of the pool. As my daughter, Suzanne, would say many years later, this was a photo that said everything but showed nothing.

What was unusual was that Paula Strasberg wasn’t hiding behind the lights. Marilyn didn’t seem to need anybody today. She looked confident.

Standing far apart from each other, Woodfield and I started shooting some pictures with our long lenses. I didn’t worry about Jimmy Mitchell, because I never considered a studio photographer competition.

Then, all of a sudden, Marilyn swam back up to the edge of the pool, and now she didn’t have the bra on, only her panties, which she had rolled up like a thong. She sat on the edge of the pool posing for our cameras. Looking this way and then looking away. Then a look over her shoulders, a look directly into my camera’s lens. Immediately, I wondered when we were going to see it all. With two motorized Nikons around my neck, one for color and one for black-and-white, with a 180 mm lens on one and a 105 mm on the other, and with Marilyn about twenty feet away, I was working to get as many images on film as possible in the shortest period of time.

I really didn’t care how the three cinematographers and the soundmen reacted to the noise of my cameras. There were no actors performing. This was a scene where the dialogue
and sound effects would be added later. If the noise of my cameras bothered someone, they’d let me know. But no one said a word. All eyes were trained on Marilyn.