A Thing of Beauty

Sophia Loren looking at Jayne Mansfield’s things-that-must-not-be-named, 1957. @staff

Marilyn Monroe photographed on the set of  Something’s Got to Give @staff

Marilyn Monroe, exhibiting her “female-presenting nipples”, photographed by Tom Kelley, 1949.   @staff 

From Milton’s Marilyn: “On September 9th she flew without Joe to New York for location filming for ‘The Seven Year Itch’. The next day she reported to Milton’s [Greene] Lexington Avenue Studio. With the festive participation of Dom Perignon, he shot her in various buoyant juxtapositions to a wicker chair, but the highlights of that sitting resulted from a mistake. He captured her as a ballerina - which certainly she was not - when the costume he ordered proved to be too small. "That’s all right” he said, “just hold it up against you.” Some of the most poignant photos of Marilyn Monroe emerged, to be sure, but something more. The pictures became more generic portraits of a dancer to challenge even the sketches of Degas.“ 

The Wild One (1953)

I had great respect for her as an artist and as a person. She was a lovely girl. She had a great mind. The girl’s got character. The first sixteen years of her life was enough to floor most of us. She never fully realized herself. The best years for her were ahead of her, the best years were the years to come. -Carl Sandburg

My mom asked me if the prayer for the wild at heart was for me or if that was something that I thought had pained me throughout my life. But it’s for everybody I know. I don’t think I know one person who I think can be completely who they are every second of the day, who feels completely free. So it’s kind of a prayer for everybody to find their happiness, to break out. And Tennessee Williams also writes that a bird or an animal feels comfortable in a cage it grew up in — it represents security as well as confinement to be in that cage. So anything that makes us comfortable, those things are cages around us. [x]

There’s a book by Rainer Maria Rilke that’s helped me a lot: Letters to a Young Poet. Without it I’d probably think I was crazy sometimes. I think that when an artist-forgive me, but I do think I’m becoming an artist, even though some people will laugh; that’s why I apologize- when an artist tries to be true, you sometimes feel you’re on the verge of some kind of craziness. But it isn’t really craziness. You’re just trying to get the truest part of yourself out, and it’s very had, you know. There are times when you think, “All I have to be is true.” But sometimes it doesn’t come so easily. And sometimes it’s very easy. -Marilyn in an interview with Georges Belmont, editor of the French magazine Marie Claire, 1960

From Here to Eternity

Do I Wanna Know?

Eye of the Devil

It begins here for me on this road. How the whole mess happened I don’t know, but I know it couldn’t happen again in a million years. Maybe I could of stopped it early, but once the trouble was on its way, I was just goin’ with it. Mostly I remember the girl. I can’t explain it - a sad chick like that, but somethin’ changed in me. She got to me, but that’s later anyway. This is where it begins for me right on this road.

Marilyn Monroe photographed by John Vachon, 1953.

Marilyn by Alfred Eisenstaedt in May 1953.

Marilyn on Person to Person in April 1955.

Marilyn Monroe on the set of Niagara, 1952.