The Last Sitting

There's a great piece in today's Times about a Marilyn Monroe exhibit on display in Paris. The photos were taken at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles in the weeks before her death on Aug. 5, 1962. Like many a gay-boy, I was completely taken with Marilyn as a child, drawn to her ultraglamorous look that masked a deeply insecure inside. I used to think, How could someone so beautiful have any problems? (!!) "The Seven Year Itch" and "Some Like it Hot" are two of my favorite films ever -- and the scene in "The Misfits" where she pleads for the cowboys to leave the horses alone still gives me chills every time I watch it.
At 36, these photographs capture Marilyn Monroe as a an actual human being, which somehow makes her more beautiful than ever.

“She was going through a hard time with her health, her career and her men,” the photographer Bert Stern said, recalling that she had just been fired from the set of George Cukor’s unfinished movie, “Something’s Got to Give.” “I thought the photo session would be uplifting for her.”

Stern was on assignment for Vogue, but he notes in the catalog that he had always hoped to photograph Monroe nude and brought only some chiffon scarves and jewelry as accessories. Monroe’s assistant told him to order three bottles of Dom Perignon Champagne. Monroe arrived five hours late -- Stern remembers the day as June 22 -- and, he says, within 15 minutes she had agreed to pose “topless” with the scarves.

“We worked from about 4:30 p.m. to about 3 a.m.,” he said from New York. “But then Vogue decided the first session was too sexy, and they wanted me to go back two or three weeks later and do fashion. After a while, she said: ‘I’m tired of doing fashion. Can we go back to doing what we did the first day?’ That’s when we did the pictures of her on the bed. By then, she was pretty drunk.”