Bella Femme

Eye of the Devil

The Misfits (dir. by John Huston, 1961)

rare photos of young Marilyn Monroe by Joseph Jasgur, 1947

   I was going to meet Andy, and I went down to the street, and for a while nobody came, and then he showed up with Edie and Chuck Wein. But I didn’t know that they were going to be in the picture… Edie sort of took it over, you know?   She had the bright and the smarts and the instinct… She was going to sit in the ground and lean against it [a manhole], and put her legs up in the air. I don’t want to take credit for any kind of creativity on that… She kind of took over the whole session because Andy didn’t say a word.     I didn’t think of her as a great beauty. I thought of her as a kind of vivacious and lively woman… I think she was attractive, but the thing that made her better is that she made a room kind of come alive when she came in it because, you know, she and Andy used to go to parties kind of as a prop for a party. A party was considered a success if Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick came in. Well, when they came in Andy sort off… you never saw him at all after that, unless he was taking pictures with his Polaroid camera. Edie was the one that gobbled up the room with her energy.     She really, as somebody said, she really could say hello.    When she was with Andy, she reminded me of a Scott Fitzgerald lady, you know? She was alive, and she was able to put a party aspect on everything… So when we did this picture… She lit that thing up. She made it a picture, she made it an occasion.     It was her spirit that set that shot up.   - Burt Glinn 

Life was a perpetual dance party… The great temptation about the Factory was that it was a perpetual party in one place or another. So that there was an opportunity to endlessly experience the sense of life as a joy. -Donald Lyons

The Misfits; Eve Arnold

Marilyn Monroe and Thelma Ritter in The Misfits

I found myself in the privileged position of photographing somebody who I had first thought had a gift for the camera, but who turned out had a genius for it. She had a naive quality, but she also had a great sense of showmanship and self-promotion. She was very clever. She was able to assess each photographer. Even if it was only an amateur with a box camera, she worked with the same intensity and diligence that she would have if she were working with a top professional. She would photograph ten pounds lighter which is against every rule in the book. The smile was brilliant. Her skin was translucent, white, luminous. She was always sort of golden-looking, and because she had a down of just very fine golden hairs on her face it trapped the light and caused an aureole to form, giving her a faint glow. It was extraordinary. I’ve never seen it before. It was a nimbus, so that she looked almost angelic. -Eve Arnold