BY JOE ELLIOTT
“Make your life be your art and you will
never be forgotten.†(Charlotte Eriksson). I first fell in love with
Marilyn Monroe when I was sixteen, after seeing her on television in the movie “Bus
Stop.†By then she was long gone, but that didn’t matter. To me, she was like
something from outer space, a goddess dressed in black fishnet and gold tassel.
I’ll admit it’s a feeling I never quite got over. Marilyn had that effect on
some men, both those who knew her (Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, for example)
and millions of others like me who were her fans. Among the innumerable
critical brickbats tossed at her both in her lifetime and later was the charge
she was a terrible actress. I have always thought these criticisms somewhat
unfair. While not a great actress, she was nonetheless quite competent in a
number of roles. That is, when she was actually given the chance to act and not
just served up as window dressing. Rewatching “Bus Stop†recently, I was struck
anew at how really funny she could be. Forget all that stuff about her sad
life, the broken marriages, the desperate desire to be taken seriously as a
thespian. All that may be true, but her real talents lay in comedy. Like her
gifted miscast cinematic sisters, Clara Bow, Marion Davies and Jean Harlow,
Marilyn was born to play funny. Often she upstaged the best of them too,
including in “The Prince and the Showgirl,†a film she made with Laurence
Olivier. In it, she makes “the world’s greatest actor†look downright dull. On
the other hand, there was that face, that body. For a generation of men, it
defined rightly or wrongly what feminine sex appeal was all about. All of these
qualities shine forth in The
Essential Marilyn Monroe by
Milton H. Greene: 50 Sessions (ACC Editions), just released last
month. Of the book’s 284 images, 160 have never before been published.
Marilyn seems completely at ease in most of these photos.
You can tell she and the photographer trust and like each other. She is at
turns playful and happy, sad and reflective. None of it to me seems too
contrived. Instead, she is allowing us to see her in a way she would never permit
with any other camera man. She is fully naked (which had nothing to do with
taking her clothes off). Not all the shots
show her at her best. In some she appears, though still alluring, tired and
somewhat shopworn. These are among my favorites in the collection. I like to
think I’m getting a candid peek behind the carefully crafted, bloodless façade
of the manufactured Marilyn. For my money, she was most appealing when she
wasn’t doing anything much at all in front of the lens, just looking -- which
she often is in the Greene sessions. One photo, chosen by Greene’s son, Joshua,
for the cover of this expansive volume, is a prime example of the species. She
is gorgeous.
Marilyn and Milton
Greene shared a special bond. Not only were they personal friends, she even
lived with his family for a time in the 1950s. I imagine this as a happy period
for her. She felt completely safe with him in a way she rarely did with anyone.
It shows. The great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said that capturing
the right image on film was an act of extraordinary physical and intellectual
joy. As it turns out, that concept works both ways, for the photographer and
the viewer. Greene clearly wanted us to see the woman others seldom glimpsed or
even imagined. He succeeds brilliantly in that ambition. The glorious thing is
it’s all here in this fabulous photo collection, one for the ages. For the
Marilyn fan, it doesn’t get much better.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON