Marilyn & Me

by SCHILLER, LAWRENCE

• ISBN13: 9780385536677
• ISBN10: 0385536674
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-05-29
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Summary

When he pulled his station wagon into the 20th CenturyFox studios parking lot in Los Angeles in 1960, twenty-three-year-old Lawrence Schiller kept telling himself that this was just another assignment, just another pretty girl. But the assignment and the girl were anything but ordinary. Schiller was a photographer for Lookmagazine and his subject was Marilyn Monroe, America's sweetheart and sex symbol. In this intimate memoir Schiller recalls the friendship that developed between him and Monroe while he photographed her in 1960 and 1962 on the sets of Let's Make Loveand the unfinished feature Something's Got to Give, the last film she worked on. Schiller recalls Marilyn as tough and determined, enormously insecure as an actress but totally self-assured as a photographer's model. Monroe knew how to use her looks and sexuality to generate publicity, and in 1962 she allowed Schiller to publish the first nude photographs of her in over ten years, which she then used as a weapon against a studio that wanted to have her firedand ultimately succeeded. The Marilyn that Schiller knew and writes about was adept at hiding deep psychological scars, but she was also warm and open, candid and disarming, a movie star who wished to be taken more seriously than she was. Accompanying the text are eighteen of the author's own photographs, some never previously published. Many writers have tried to capture her essence on the page, but as someone who was in the room with her, a young man Marilyn could connect with and trust, Schiller is able to give us a unique look at the real woman offscreen.