Daily #MarilynMonroe 💋
Happy Wednesday! Can just see the weekend peeking through the rest of the week! 🫣👀😄
MM photographed during the famous “Last Sitting” by Bert Stern in June 23-25, 1962 at Suite 261 of the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, CA for Vogue magazine. This sitting took place just 6 weeks before Marilyn’s tragic passing and by the time Vogue published these images in September ‘62, they sadly served as an unexpected, posthumous tribute to one of Hollywood and America’s brightest & most enduring stars 💫✨
Howard Hawks on working with Marilyn Monroe:
"Marilyn Monroe was the most frightened little girl who had no confidence in her ability. She was afraid to come on the screen. Very strange girl. And yet she had this strange effect when she was photographed. Nobody dated her, nobody took her out, nobody paid any attention to her. She’d sit on the set with practically nothing on, and a pretty extra girl would walk by and everybody’d whistle. But she got out in front of the camera, and the camera liked her, and all of a sudden she was a great sex symbol.
Fortunately, I had her in a couple of the first pictures that she did 'Monkey Business' (1952) and 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' (1953), when she wasn’t worried. And also I had Jane Russell’s help in making 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'. We had a lot of fun doing the picture, but there were a lot of times when I was ready to give up the ghost. Jane Russell would say, “Look at me—all he wants you to do is such-and-such a thing.” And Marilyn would say to her, “Why didn’t you tell me?” But I had an easy time compared to some of the directors who worked with her afterward. Because after she got very important she became more and more frightened, and she just didn’t want to come out and do a scene. She didn’t think she was good enough to do the things that she did.
She was always better in fantastic material, wasn’t she? Like in 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'?
There wasn’t a real thing about her. Everything was completely unreal. They tried to make her play real parts in a couple of pictures, and the pictures were disasters. 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' was the first one where she really went good, and then they had no sense to stick with that."
("Hawks on Hawks", Joseph McBride, 1982)
P.S: Remembering Marilyn Monroe on her 100th birthday!