Finally, the photographer broke the silence about the day the actress was filming a sequence in the pool. At the end, she took off her bikini and posed challenging the norms of the time.
Larry Schiller, the photographer who captured Marilyn Monroe n-ked in the pool during a break from filming his latest film "Something's got to give", reissues the book in which he recounts his relationship with the actress, which paved the way for red carpet of fame and his passage into history.
The actress filmed a sequence in the pool, at the end, she took off her bikini and posed defiantly to the norms of the time.
"She did not undress before me, she undressed before the world. She knew how to handle publicity, she was a very intelligent woman," she says in an interview with Efe Larry Schiller, who reissues "Marilyn & Me" (Ed. Taschen).
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"I knew that with those images I would appear in all the magazines in the world", it was his way of showing the studio what he was worth.
It was the actress who proposed to him to do this pose to outshine a Liz Taylor who at that time was going through a brilliant moment, after the filming of "Cleopatra".
The photographs of the protagonist of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (Gentlemen prefer blondes) were sold for 150,000 dollars (about 125,000 euros), while a photograph of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton had reached one million. But, "Marilyn thought she was much more of a star than Liz."
Something in which Schiller (New York, 1938) agrees with him, fifty years later. "Today Marilyn is remembered more than Liz Taylor", he has pointed out in a virtual dialogue, in which he assures that a large part of her attractiveness lay in the innocence that the actress gave off; that and the most tragic moments of her life.
Although the photographer modestly affirms that there are better photos of the actress, the truth is that the combination of all these images makes her figure remain in everyone's mind. They are also the last pose of the actress, although he acknowledges that the "tragic way in which she died" has a lot to do with her mythologization.
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Schiller defines Marilyn Monroe as an adventurous woman, who made herself after a difficult childhood; that she knew how to live "life intensely".
A life full of "contradictions", where fame, from which she sometimes wanted to run away, fed on her marriages, like her - she relates - when she married baseball star Joe DiMaggio.
"Hundreds of people were chasing them through the streets", to the fame of one was added that of the other. "He was possessive and couldn't tolerate everyone going crazy to be around her and get an autograph."
The photographer points out that her second husband, the writer Arthur Miller, always tried to delve into her mind to "understand and discover her", however, she did not accept that "intrusion". Everything ended between them when she read the script for "The Misfits" (Rebellious Lives) that reunited her with Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. She "felt that she had violated her privacy."
"She wanted to maintain the duality between Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane," she knew who and when she had to be one or the other, the photographer explains.
When she found out that she had passed away she couldn't believe it, a moment in which she perceived the ephemerality of life, "how easy it is to be there one moment and not the next." He had been with her the day before, "asking if he wanted to take any other pictures."
The day she died she did not think it would be a historic moment, "the Kennedy assassination was." However, the perception of her changed when on the tenth anniversary of the death of the actress, articles that remembered her did not stop happening.
"It was on that date that I first published all my photographs with her. A moment in which I realized the longevity of her legacy," says Schiller.
He photographed her on several occasions, snapshots that have brought him fame and fortune, but when he took those photographs, in 1962, Schiller was already a recognized reporter. In 1959 he had won the Best American Photography Award for the image of former US President Richard Nixon after he lost the election to John F. Kennedy.
The archive of more than 15,000 images of him treasures the photograph of the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, minutes after being captured. "An image that says it all." In addition to another historical of the South African leader Nelson Mandela.
"Marilyn brought me more fame and of course longevity. Those images were solid ground for my legacy," says the photographer of magazines such as "Life", "Playboy" or "Time", while showing some of his work through his laptop .
He is the author of recognized images, even with a "better composition". Buster Keaton, Barbra Streisand, Alfred Hitchcock, or Paul Newman and Robert Redfort playing ping pong are some of the most famous.
"Paul Newman impressed me more than anyone else in the world," he says of the actor he photographed five times. A person he describes as generous, he "thought more of others than of himself."
Schiller stopped taking photographs in 1976. His last job was to portray Muhammad Ali in the World Heavyweight Championship in Manila (Philippines) against Joe Frazier, a moment in which the cinema had already knocked on his door .
"I took all my cameras from then, sold them and dedicated myself to making movies," concludes the director of "The Executioner's Song" or "American Tragedy," among others.
