{"id":293,"date":"2026-05-31T11:35:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T11:35:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=293"},"modified":"2026-05-31T11:35:26","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T11:35:26","slug":"marilyn-monroe-made-being-photographed-an-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=293","title":{"rendered":"Marilyn Monroe Made Being Photographed an Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In May of 2022, the actress, reality-TV star, and lingerie mogul Kim Kardashian arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the annual Met Gala, wearing another woman\u2019s dress. It was sixty years old, made of delicate beige marquisette fabric embellished with more than six thousand hand-sewn rhinestones, and had been worn in public only once before: by Marilyn Monroe, in May of 1962, onstage at Madison Square Garden for a birthday gala honoring President John F. Kennedy. When Monroe put on the gown, made specifically for her by the Hollywood dressmaker Jean Louis (based on a sketch by the designer Bob Mackie, when he was just starting out), she was thirty-five, and in the last year of her short life. She wore the dress in the hope that it would be an event, but, of course, Monroe was by then so famous that she was an ongoing event, no matter what she had on; she was pursued, ceaselessly, by cameras, by journalists, by powerful men, by studio nabobs, by fans and hangers-on.<\/p>\n

Read more \u201cBackrooms,\u201d \u201cObsession,\u201d and Hollywood\u2019s Zoomer-Horror Renaissance<\/a><\/p>\n

Even when she was just beginning her career, as a young contract player in the studio system, the amount of fan mail she amassed (several thousand letters a week, by 1952) startled executives to whom she was just another disposable\u2014or, at least, interchangeable\u2014bottle blonde. The outpouring was less shocking to Monroe, who had been aware of her ability to captivate since she was a teen-ager. \u201cWhen I was eleven, the whole world was closed to me, and I just felt I was on the outside of the world,\u201d she told the Life<\/em> magazine editor Richard Meryman, in the summer of 1962, during a six-hour conversation that would come to be known as the last interview. \u201cSuddenly, everything opened up.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. It was just sheer pleasure. Every fellow honked his horn, you know, workers driving to work, waving, you know, and I\u2019d wave back. The world became friendly. All the newspaper boys when they delivered the paper would come around to where I lived, and I used to hang from the limb of a tree, and I had sort of a sweatshirt on. I didn\u2019t realize the value of a sweatshirt in those days.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Over time, Monroe came to realize not only the value of a sweatshirt (along with a well-fitting sweater, a plunging neckline, a fluttery sundress, a halter top, a lam\u00e9 gown, and a terry-cloth robe) but also exactly how to make it work for her in pictures: how to befriend the camera, even when she was lonely (and she was often very lonely). She was an uncanny beauty\u2014the sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, the bobbed bunny-tail nose, the accentuated beauty mark, the overdrawn smile\u2014but that wasn\u2019t what made people rush to send pounds of fan mail. Hollywood was full of beauties. What people fell for was the way Monroe knew how to be photographed; she had the rare ability to seem, at least in still photos, both completely spontaneous and incredibly deliberate.<\/p>\n

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Take a promotional shot she posed for in 1952, to promote her role in the thriller \u201cNiagara\u201d: she sits on a low stone wall in front of the rushing waters of Niagara Falls, in a red blouse that accentuates her d\u00e9colletage. She is leaning ever so slightly to one side, smiling as she turns her face into the sun to catch the light. Her hands are clasped in her lap, and she is leaning forward onto one heel, so that the toe of her red pump arcs ever so slightly off the ground. At first, the shot looks like a candid, slyly captured moment of a performer in repose. But look closer: her collarbone is slightly pushed forward, her neck stretched long, her feet deliberately pointed with balletic tension. In Monroe\u2019s best portraits, she seems to be almost pushing through the frame. The photographer Burt Glinn, who shot Monroe at a variety of parties in the nineteen-fifties, said, of this strange quality, that Monroe \u201chad no bone structure\u2014the face was a Polish flat plate. Not photogenic in the accepted sense, the features were not memorable or special; what she had was the ability to project.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Projecting oneself out into the world is an act of faith. Once a photograph exists in the public sphere, you rarely have control over where it will go, or how far it will travel into the future. As her celebrity grew, Monroe negotiated a unique level of command over how images of herself were created; for the most part, she had veto power over who shot her and when, and she fought hard to retain approval over which shots could appear and which negatives must be destroyed. She viewed her work with photographers as an active collaboration. She needed the camera and the camera needed her; it was a fair transaction.<\/p>\n

In 1952, when a reporter uncovered a series of nude photographs that Monroe had taken for a pinup calendar, in 1949, she handled the scandal with winning pragmatism. At the time, she was a rising starlet on a new contract at Twentieth Century Fox. Fox\u2019s publicity team told her to deny and deflect. But Monroe, who had done the shoot for fifty dollars in order to pay her rent at the Hollywood Studio Club, a sort of dormitory for young women trying to break into the movie business, felt there was no reason to hide what she had done. If anything, Monroe\u2019s admission\u2014that, despite her natural gifts, she had to scrap on her way to success\u2014only further endeared her to the public. The director Billy Wilder, who worked with Monroe on both \u201cThe Seven Year Itch\u201d (1955) and \u201cSome Like It Hot\u201d (1959), said, of the photographs, \u201cWhen you come right down to it, that calendar is not repulsive. It\u2019s quite lovely.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. It appealed to people who like to read about millionaires who started life selling newspapers on the corner of Forty-second and Fifth Avenue, then worked their way up.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Here was a girl who needed dough, and she made it by honest toil.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Monroe sailed over that hurdle, along with many others, because she was, as she herself admitted many times, almost constitutionally incapable of cynicism\u2014a small miracle, given her chaotic upbringing. Monroe\u2019s gift (and, sometimes, the source of her despair) was her refusal to grow jaundiced in the face of adversity. She could retreat from pain\u2014those who worked with her noted that she sometimes seemed to be in a \u201cdaze,\u201d as if she were peering out through a scrim\u2014but she never fully inoculated herself from it. In a journal entry from around 1951, she wrote a poetic note to herself about tuning in to the force of her own emotions: \u201cWhat do I believe in \/ What is truth \/ I believe in myself \/ even my most delicate \/ intangible feelings \/ in the end everything is \/ intangible \/ my most precious liquid must never spill \/ life force \/ they are all my feelings \/ no matter what.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was Monroe\u2019s innate sensitivity that made her such an adept comedic actress; her humor was not a blunt instrument but, rather, something odder and wobblier, alluringly off tempo. I hesitate to call her style of acting instinctive, because that word, so often used to describe Monroe, seems to imply that she never worked to refine her craft, but she did have a regularly surprising, sui-generis way of approaching a line\u2014the breathy, cooing voice; the flustered, heaving sighs; the nonchalant, matter-of-fact way she made silly pronouncements. In \u201cSome Like It Hot,\u201d in which she played a daffy travelling musician named Sugar Kane, she said the line \u201cI\u2019m not very bright, I guess!\u201d with such lemony brightness that you doubt the very premise of it. Monroe was regularly fed up with the way that Fox continued to typecast her in \u201cdumb blonde\u201d roles\u2014the scheming platinum flapper Lorelei Lee in \u201cGentlemen Prefer Blondes\u201d (1953), the shortsighted Pola Debevoise in \u201cHow to Marry a Millionaire\u201d (1953), an unnamed muse simply called \u201cthe girl\u201d in \u201cThe Seven Year Itch\u201d\u2014but she rarely managed to deliver a performance that did not, in some way, radiate with smart choices.<\/p>\n

Monroe was, at her core, a seeker. She wanted more than she started out with: more love, more freedom of movement, more security, more respect, more forgiveness, more control. At times, her search for mentors led her to people who, under the guise of trying to protect her, pushed her in directions that she didn\u2019t want to go, or latched on to her fame like eager barnacles; but she rarely let those relationships linger for long\u2014if anything, Monroe was fairly ruthless when it came to detaching herself from those she felt were siphoning, rather than enriching, her energies. Over time, through sustained effort, she managed to carve out possibilities for herself in an industry that was not known for giving in to its stars\u2019 demands. In 1954, at the height of her fame, she abandoned her Fox contract to move to New York, where she studied at the Actors Studio and underwent psychoanalysis in an attempt to deepen her relationship with her craft. While in New York, she founded her own production company, alongside the photographer Milton Greene. Through the company, they produced \u201cThe Prince and the Showgirl\u201d (1957), in which she starred opposite Laurence Olivier. When she returned to Fox, she was able to negotiate newly favorable terms; she could choose the director and the cinematographer on all her films, and she could make her own projects outside the studio. (Where Fox continued to undercut Monroe was on her salary; despite the fact that she earned millions for the studio, she was paid just a hundred thousand dollars per picture.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Over and over, Monroe said that she cared more about advancing herself as an artist than as merely a product. Yet because she was so effective at branding herself\u2014she knew the power of her own physical presence\u2014the press, both in Monroe\u2019s own time and for decades afterward, failed to take her ambitions seriously. As the critic Daphne Merkin wrote, in this magazine, 1999, \u201ca good deal of energy was expended on trying to convince people that there was a serious contender inside the bimbo curves\u2014a concept that continues to be treated with a creeping note of disdain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The Paperboy\u2019s Secret<\/a><\/p>\n

Merkin also contended that \u201cwhat\u2019s clear is that Monroe believed in her rapport with the public more than she believed in her rapport with Hollywood.\u201d This is nowhere more apparent than in the contrast between the ease Monroe felt in front of a photographer\u2019s lens and her struggles to adapt to working on film sets. She regularly showed up late, and she was known to forget lines and stumble over words. She was jumpy and unsettled before big scenes, often to the point of frozen terror; but, as Billy Wilder once said, when given enough trust and leeway, Monroe always came through: \u201cIf she showed up, she delivered, and if it took 80 takes, I lived with 80 takes, because the 81st was very good.\u201d For Monroe\u2019s part, she attributed her lateness to a sort of fierce perfectionism; she didn\u2019t know how to show up without giving her all, and it took her a long time to work herself up to the point where she felt she was ready to give it. \u201cI guess people think that why I\u2019m late is some kind of arrogance,\u201d she told Meryman, in her final interview, \u201cand I think it is the opposite of arrogance. I also feel that I\u2019m not in this big American rush, you know, you got to go and you got to go fast but for no good reason. The main thing is, I want to be prepared when I get there to give a good performance or whatever to the best of my ability.\u201d<\/p>\n

To many of her contemporaries, Monroe was a vexing bundle of contradictions: a girl who rose up from poverty to sing about diamonds; a kittenish pinup who read Dostoyevsky; a Hollywood native who yearned for New York; a woman who took naturally to her bleached artifice. People were always trying to figure her out, to root around into her background in an attempt to explain her appeal. In 1956, one reporter spent weeks trying to determine whether Monroe was truly the brain behind several of her infamous, quippy Monroe-isms\u2014such as, when asked what she wore to bed, answering, \u201cChanel No. 5,\u201d or, when asked if she had anything on during her nude photo shoot, replying, \u201cI had the radio on.\u201d In the end, the reporter came to the conclusion that the one-liners were Monroe\u2019s own, a judgment backed up by an anonymous Fox press agent who had been one of the main liaisons between Monroe and the studio. \u201cGive her a minute to think,\u201d the press agent said, \u201cand Marilyn is the greatest little old ad-lib artist you ever saw.\u201d<\/p>\n

The public\u2019s obsession with getting to know the \u201creal\u201d Marilyn Monroe did not dissipate with her untimely death, on August 4, 1962, from what most experts have determined was an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. The actress\u2019s fate has proved to be perennial catnip for journalists, biographers, historians, novelists, screenwriters, conspiracy theorists, Redditsleuths, and academics; she has been the subject of more theorizing, rampant speculation, and secondhand psychoanalysis than perhaps any other celebrity of the twentieth century. There is a consistent sense of overdoneness about her story, that it has all been said, that there are no new angles. And yet, there is also the persistent feeling that the closer one gets to Monroe, the less one understands her. Nearly everyone who tries to write about Monroe acknowledges this challenge of approaching her as a subject. (The writer Lisa Cohen, in a wonderful 1998 essay on Monroe in the Yale Journal of Criticism<\/em>, describes this writerly anxiety as \u201ca sort of agonized address to the archive.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In the digital age, images of Monroe\u2014already a staple of pizza parlors and street murals\u2014have proliferated exponentially online, and as A.I. threatens to replicate her image ad infinitum, stretching even further away from the source material, her legacy has spun deeper into abstraction. Kardashian\u2019s Met Gala dress, which she borrowed from the Ripley\u2019s Believe It or Not! archives and which, to this day, remains the most expensive celebrity dress ever sold at auction, felt like an easy quotation, but not necessarily one grounded in historical context. Kardashian claimed to wear the dress to honor the theme of the Costume Institute\u2019s exhibition that year, which covered the history of American fashion. \u201cWhat\u2019s the most American thing you can think of?\u201d she said to Vogue<\/em>. \u201cAnd that\u2019s Marilyn Monroe.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the gown, like Monroe herself, has more to it than just a vague perfume of voluptuous Americana. When Monroe wore the dress, she was in the middle of a transitional period. Her five-year marriage to Arthur Miller had fallen apart, and she had undergone gallbladder surgery that required a lengthy recovery. When she was finally ready to go back to work, she had not stepped onto a film set in nearly a year. At her studio\u2019s behest, she met with the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, who sold her on the idea of doing a remake of the 1940 screwball comedy \u201cMy Favorite Wife,\u201d to be called \u201cSomething\u2019s Got to Give.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around the same time, in early 1962, Monroe bought herself a cozy three-bedroom hacienda-style bungalow in Brentwood, Los Angeles\u2014the first house she\u2019d ever owned that was truly her own. To fill up the house, she took a weeklong trip to Mexico, where she scoured furniture stores and artists\u2019 stalls. According to Meryman, she was thrilled to have a place to herself. \u201cShe exulted in it,\u201d he wrote. Monroe told him that she planned to convert her garage into a quiet sanctuary for others who were looking for a soft place to land. She wanted to create \u201ca place for any friends of mine who are in some kind of trouble, you know, and maybe they\u2019ll want to live here where they won\u2019t be bothered till things are okay for them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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And yet she still felt restless. She missed the first days of filming on \u201cSomething\u2019s Got to Give,\u201d owing to illness. Then, despite the studio\u2019s protestations, she flew from Los Angeles to New York City to serenade J.F.K. at Madison Square Garden. Monroe\u2019s work on the film was crisp, compelling, and very funny. But Fox executives, reportedly frustrated with her many absences, fired her from the film in June. Some historians have since determined that the dismissal may not have had as much to do with Monroe\u2019s attendance as the studio claimed; that summer, \u201cCleopatra,\u201d and its endless shoot, was costing Fox millions. As the film scholar Michelle Vogel theorized, \u201cSomething\u2019s Got to Give\u201d and Marilyn Monroe were the scapegoats for anxious studio executives who felt that both productions were \u201cspinning out of control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shortly after Fox fired Monroe, she sat for the long interview with Meryman, in part so that she could reclaim the narrative and exercise some level of agency over her story. \u201cAn actor is not a machine, no matter how much they want to say you are,\u201d she told Meryman, adding, \u201cThis is supposed to be an art form, not just a manufacturing establishment. The sensitivity that helps me to act, you see, also makes me react. An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Meryman left Monroe\u2019s house one night,she told him that, in the end, what mattered most was that she tuned into her own honesty, despite the vortex of celebrity that threatened to strip it away. \u201cWith fame,\u201d she said, \u201cyou know, you can read about yourself, somebody else\u2019s ideas about you, but what\u2019s important is how you feel about yourself\u2014for survival and living day to day with what comes up.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Looking Back at Lewis and Clark<\/a><\/p>\n

This is drawn from \u201cMarilyn Monroe 100<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rachel Syme, in an excerpt from \u201cMarilyn Monroe 100,\u201d writes about a dress of Monroe\u2019s that Kim Kardashian wore to the Met Gala in 2022, and about Monroe\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":292,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-page-turner"],"yoast_head":"\nMarilyn Monroe Made Being Photographed an Art - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=293\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Marilyn Monroe Made Being Photographed an Art - 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