Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation

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In 1959, Arnold worked on a film set for the first time, photographing Joan Crawford, who had criticised Monroe’s scanty attire at an awards ceremony just a few years before. Nobody was more surprised than Eve when Crawford stripped off for the camera. In February 1956, Lois Smith – Marilyn’s New York publicist – invited Eve to a press conference at the Plaza Hotel. Marilyn was to announce her latest film project, ‘The Sleeping Prince’. Her co-star, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Sir Terence Rattigan, author of the original script, had flown in from London to meet her.

Eve Arnold began photographing Marilyn Monroe after the actress saw her pictures of Marlene Dietrich in Esquire. They met at a party and Monroe asked: “If you could do that well with Marlene, can you imagine what you can do with me?” So began their professional relationship, which, over the years, turned into friendship. Arnold photographed Monroe six times over the decade she knew her; the longest of these sessions being a two-month stint during the filming of The Misfits.When I turned up late to her flat one day Eve decided to give me guidance on punctuality. But it felt like a friend giving some loving advice. As a photographer, Eve Arnold was known for getting beneath the surface of her subjects, for capturing something of the real person hidden behind the persona. Happily, Marilyn was rescued. They met again soon after, as MM was visiting the Rostens over Labor Day weekend (traditionally the first in September.) To avoid another circus, Eve took Monroe to an abandoned children’s playground near Mount Sinai, Long Island.

Photo Booth – First Ladies" by Maria Lokke, The New Yorker, January 11, 2012. Retrieved 4 March 2012.This article was amended on 26 July 2023 to correct the name of the exhibition, which in a previous version was stated as “To Know About a Woman”. Marilyn Monroe learning her lines during the filming of The Misfits, 1960. Photograph: Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.” Eve had her first experience of working with a movie star when she photographed Marlene Dietrich during a recording session, for ‘Esquire’, the upmarket men’s magazine. Some time later, Eve met Marilyn at a party given by John Huston at Manhattan’s 21 Club. “Marilyn asked – with that mixture of naïveté and self-promotion that was uniquely hers – ‘If you could do that well with Marlene, can you imagine what you could do with me?’” Arnold has recalled. She had planned to study medicine. But while Eve was working as a bookkeeper for a New York estate agent during World War II, a boyfriend gave her a Rolleicord camera. In 1943, she answered a newspaper ad asking for an ‘amateur photographer’, and became manager of America’s first automated film processing plant, in Hoboken, New Jersey.

In later years, she received many other honours and awards. In 1995, she was made fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and elected Master Photographer – the world’s most prestigious photographic honour – by New York’s International Center of Photography. In 1996, she received the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for In Retrospect. The following year she was granted honorary degrees by the University of St Andrews, Staffordshire University, and the American International University in London; she was also appointed to the advisory committee of the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford, UK. She has had twelve books published. The show takes its cue from a quote from Arnold: “I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.” Set across three rambling floors of a Georgian townhouse and coaching annexe in the self-consciously picturesque Sussex town of Petworth, it uses the space well to tell the episodic story of a pioneering photographer. The first woman to be admitted to the Magnum photographic agency, Arnold moved from moody social documentary to glamorous travel journalism, via myth-making for Hollywood, Washington DC and London. From there came the poster plan, which he hopes will help preserve her legacy and introduce his grandmother’s work to new generations. “The themes she photographed are ever-present, if not more so – racism, sexism, inequality … not to mention the humanity she brought to her work.” Three months later, Marilyn died. In a 1987 documentary, ‘Eve and Marilyn’, Arnold spoke of her deep regret at having missed her final opportunity to work with Monroe. Striking similarities with the Vanessa Redgrave image … behind the scenes at a fashion show in Harlem, 1950. Photograph: Eve Arnold EstateMarilyn confided to Eve that as a little girl, moving between foster homes, she would dream that Gable was her father. “This tale she told while sitting with a set of proof sheets and a red grease pencil in front of her, editing pictures of herself playing a love scene with Clark Gable. She looked pensive for a moment, sighed and came up with another of her ‘can you imagine’ sentences: ‘Can you imagine what being kissed by him meant to me?’” Arnold, also self-taught, related to Marilyn’s intuitive style. “We were both gamblers,” she reflected. “We both trusted ourselves and each other to carry us through.”

Travel formed a cornerstone of her life's work. While much was published in picture magazines during their heyday from the 1950s to the 1980s, Arnold often developed her themes so extensively that they merited full-length books. She took the subject of women further in her books The Unretouched Woman (1976) and All in a Day's Work (1989), and, using her long stays abroad, in the series In China (1980), In America (1983) and The Great British (1991, published in the UK as Eve Arnold in Britain). Marilyn changed into a one-piece with a leopard-skin print. “The idea of the leopard in the bulrushes appealed to her sense of comedy,” Eve remarked. “She was intrepid. She stood in (the swamp), sat in it, lay in it until the light started to go and I called a halt. She climbed out, covered in mud, but she was exhilarated – and giggling.” Another round of interviews followed. Eve’s photographs of this eccentric junket are touching and funny. A demure, elegant Marilyn greeted each well-wisher, young and old, rich and poor, with unaffected warmth. Michael Arnold had a touchingly close relationship with Eve. “She wasn’t really a granny type of granny, she was just a really cool woman that was like a friend and mentor to me,” he said. “She always had so many stories to tell and she would very rarely tell the same story twice.”I’m thirty-four years old. I’ve been dancing for six months (on ‘Let’s Make Love’), I’ve had no rest, I’m exhausted. Where do I go from here?” It was almost 5 pm – ‘the magic hour’, when the day is at its most golden. They drove on to deserted marshland. “The timing for the marshes was just right,” Eve noted, “the light soft and shadowless and ranging from pale yellow through deep saffron.” After a stopover in Chicago, they were driven to Champaign, and then taken by automobile cavalcade with the governor’s own motorcycle escort to Bement. The local media was alerted and chaos ensued. The new photographic art collection, entitled Marilyn, features eight images, including six pictures capturing Monroe's unguarded moments during the filming of The Misfits in 1960.