Marilyn & Me (8 page)

On the set, Marilyn had been joking with Wally Cox. Now, at the end of the day, when she came out of her dressing room, he was waiting for her, and they walked onto the lot together. She was wearing the fur cap from her last scene, white capri slacks, and a beautiful sweater, and she had a mink coat slung over her shoulder. I decided to continue shooting and followed them as they got into a limo, which had been waiting for them. Neither of them seemed to mind that I was still shooting. In the backseat, where they were snuggling and laughing, I noticed a few bottles of beer by Marilyn’s feet.

Wally looked at me and said, “We’re going to Mulholland. Why don’t you come along?” He meant they were going to Marlon Brando’s house, which was on Mulholland Drive above Bel Air.

There had been numerous stories over the years about Marilyn and Marlon, who knew each other from the Actors Studio. Wally was Brando’s best friend, and I really didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to photograph them together at Brando’s secluded home. At the same time, I knew that Judi and the baby were waiting at home and that the photo lab was developing my color pictures.

Instead of getting into their limo, I said I’d follow in my own car. That would be better, because I’d be able to leave when I wanted to.

“Okay, see you!” Marilyn squealed, and the limo took off, leaving me behind to run as fast as I could to my car in the parking lot. They were not waiting for me, and the fact was that I didn’t know
where
on Mulholland Drive Brando lived. By the time I reached my car, my energy was gone, and I was upset with myself. I should have gotten into the limo, I was thinking.

As smart as I think I was, I was not as smart as I should have been.

When I got back to my apartment, Judi asked me how it went with Marilyn.

“She approved all the black-and-whites except one,” I told her.

“That’s wonderful,” Judi said and went back to taking care of Suzanne.

I didn’t tell her about missing out on the chance to shoot Marilyn and Wally Cox at Brando’s house.

T
he next day, Saturday, in the afternoon, I got my color from the lab. Looking them over, I saw a lot of potential cover shots. Billy stopped by my studio and asked me who the agent was that was going to sell the photos. I told him about Tom Blau, who’d be arriving the next day from London, and who he represented: Tony Snowdon, Cecil Beaton, and Yousuf Karsh. Billy also gave me a few of his color shots and a couple of black-and-white prints. Marilyn had never seen or approved them, and I didn’t really want to revisit the black-and-whites with her. Billy and I agreed to hold his shots and leave well enough alone with Marilyn. That was when Billy brought up Globe. They were not happy with my agent making all the sales. It was obvious they also wanted to represent the pictures, so I agreed with Billy that they could sell them in a few countries, pending Blau’s approval when he arrived.

Marilyn had now had most of the day to look at the black-and-white proof sheets I’d left with her and to talk
to whomever she might talk to for advice, to hear what her shrink had to say about them, and her publicist, her hairdresser, her secretary, and her masseuse. I had no idea whether she shared them with the people she surrounded herself with or if she kept them to herself. As an actress she was enormously insecure, but as a model she was totally self-assured. I had discovered back in 1960 that she knew better than anyone else what made Marilyn Monroe work and what didn’t. So when I pulled up to her house after sunset in the cul-de-sac drive off Carmelina in Brentwood, I just took a deep breath and wished myself luck.

She answered the door herself. “Here you go, let’s exchange,” she said, handing me the oversize envelope with the black-and-white proofs. I gave her the one I was holding, with the strips of color. Still standing in the doorway, she pulled out one of the strips, held it up, then put it back in the envelope with the others and said, “Let’s go get Dom.”

Who is Dom? I wondered. All I could think was that I was going to have to deal with someone new now and that this was a wrinkle I hadn’t anticipated. Instead of asking me inside to meet Dom, however, she grabbed a cardigan and headed for her car. I think it was a T-Bird, but I don’t recall for sure. Marilyn motioned me in and drove us to Sunset, then headed east to the Strip. Near Schwab’s drugstore, where Lana Turner was said to have been discovered sipping an ice cream soda at the counter, Marilyn parked the car under a streetlamp and told me to wait—she’d be
right back. A few minutes later, she came out of Schwab’s holding a brown paper bag. Back in the car, instead of starting the engine, she reached into the bag and pulled out “Dom”—a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne. She popped the cork like a wine steward, took a drink from the bottle, and said, “Pictures?”

I was upset. This was not the time or the place—sitting in a car under a streetlamp. “Let’s not look at them now,” I protested. But Marilyn just took another swig, handed me the bottle, and said, “Let’s see.”

Reluctantly, I reached into the envelope in my lap and pulled out the filmstrips. At the same time, she reached into her purse and took out an Eastman Kodak loupe—a very good magnifying glass—and what looked like a pair of scissors. She held one strip up against the streetlight, and
zip
! She snipped an image in half. Then she took the bottle from me, knocked it back, handed it back again, and zip, cut another shot in half.

“Larry, you’re not drinking,” she said.

“No, I’m not. I’m just scared that I may wind up with no color shots,” I replied. With nothing more intelligent to say, I blurted out, “What kind of scissors are those?”

“They’re pinking shears,” she said.

“What are pinking shears?”

“You don’t know anything about women’s dresses, do you? When you hem a dress, you use these to cut the fabric.”

Now I decided to take a drink, but it didn’t go down smoothly, not while she had those pinking shears in her hand. I was lost—it was almost dark. I couldn’t see the pictures she was looking at. I wasn’t being consulted. On a few pictures, she
zip-zipped
twice! I was trying to figure out how many strips of color I could keep inside my envelope without showing her.

She held up a strip where her rear end was highly defined. “Johnny Hyde used to say my behind was like a colored woman’s,” she said. “Only he didn’t say ‘colored.’ Colored blood turns a lot of men on.”
Zip!

I was at a loss over what to say. Again, I just blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “You know what Yousuf Karsh said to Anna Magnani when he showed her his proofs from one of his shoots?” I said. “He apologized for all the wrinkles in her face that his lighting had produced and said he’d retouch the photos. And you know what Magnani said? She said, ‘Don’t you dare take them out. I worked too hard for those wrinkles.’ ”

I had caught her attention. Marilyn looked at me for a couple of seconds, and then she said, “Maybe if I had those types of wrinkles, Fox would take me more seriously.”

“She does have an extraordinary face,” I said. I was hoping to divert her attention away from those pinking shears.

“I met her once when I won the Donatello Award for
The Prince and the Showgirl
. She hugged me for the cameras,
and she called me a
putana
when she thought I wasn’t listening.”

“What’s a
putana
?”

“Look it up. It’s Italian.”
Zip! Zip! Zip!

By the time Marilyn was through with her editing, she had cut about 70 of the approximately 108 color images. Seventy sounds like a lot, but 38 approved sounded even better. The next day I would throw away all the cut-up images, oblivious to their historical value. I was living in the present and not the future.

It was dark when we finished the champagne, and as we drove back to her house, she reminded me of our deal: she didn’t want to see Elizabeth Taylor in any of the magazines that her pictures were going to appear in.

The Dom had loosened her tongue, and she started talking about how badly Fox had treated her, how the executives had no respect for her or her talent, and how she’d really like to stick it to them. She was rambling on, and my mind was wandering. I was beginning to calculate the projected number of magazine covers we could generate from the strips of approved color images in my lap. As she drove along Sunset, I was wondering how Billy and I were going to let the world know about what we had. There was no Internet in those days. No faxes. It was one thing to have the pictures and quite another thing to contact every editor in the world, and it was still another thing to sell them. I wasn’t worried about
Paris Match
, and with Tom Blau arriving the next day, I felt I was on the right road. I kept thinking about
Life
magazine. It was my dream to land a cover, and I was sure that one of the pictures could make that happen.
Life
was a deal I would make myself.

“Are you here, Larry?” Marilyn asked.

“I’m not a champagne person,” I replied.

“How can anybody not like champagne?” she asked, laughing a little sarcastically.

Not responding to her question, I asked one of my own. “When did you start liking champagne?”

“Let’s see, I think when Norma Jeane got married, she had a little,” Marilyn replied, referring to her given name.

After a pause Marilyn continued as she drove toward her home. “I never wanted to be Marilyn—it just happened. Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane.”

When we got back to her house, she dropped me off at my car, said good night, and pulled away without looking back. I stood there wondering how she was going to spend the rest of the night.

When I got home, I found Billy there, having coffee and chatting with Judi. He was waiting impatiently to find out how it had gone. He also said that he’d figured out how to publicize the photos and get the world’s attention.

“Let’s give the story to Joe Hyams,” he suggested.

I knew Joe, who sometimes wrote for
Time
magazine, and I realized immediately that Billy was onto something.
Time
wasn’t only huge in America. It also had a European edition and an Asian edition. More important, every editor of every foreign publication read
Time
.