100 Years

Marilyn Monroe and Magnum

Perhaps the most recognizable Hollywood personality of the 20th century, Marilyn Monroe was immortalized through the lens of Magnum photographers, whether charming the camera on set or poised in moments of reflection.
Gaining close access to capture Monroe’s essence, Magnum members including Elliott Erwitt, Cornell Capa and Dennis Stock have created some of the most notable photographs of the American icon but none more so than Eve Arnold. Having met at the start of their careers, Arnold and Monroe formed a close friendship and working relationship which lasted over 10 years.

Behind the Image: Marilyn Monroe by Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold spent a decade photographing one of the silver screen’s most enduring figures, Marilyn Monroe, capturing her both on set and in intimate moments behind the scenes. Following Monroe’s projects throughout her career, Arnold’s lens offers a window into the actor’s inner world. For the centennial of Monroe’s birth, we reveal the story behind this featured image, available in the Magnum Editions collection, as a limited-edition 8×10″ archival pigment print of only 100 each.

In 1960, nine Magnum photographers found themselves in the searing heat of the northern Nevada desert. The first to arrive were Inge Morath and Henri Cartier-Bresson — it was the end of their 18-day cross-country road trip together from New York to Reno, documented in Morath’s book Road to Reno. Eve Arnold, Cornell Capa, Bruce Davidson, Elliott Erwitt, Ernst Hass, Erich Hartmann and Dennis Stock eventually followed suit.

The occasion was the filming of American playwright Arthur Miller’s first screenplay, The Misfits, written for his then-wife, and one of Hollywood’s favorite stars, Marilyn Monroe. Casting her in the leading role as Roslyn Tabor, a young divorcee, alongside co-star Clark Cable, was, in Miller’s eye, a means of dismantling her pin-up girl image and establishing her as a more serious actor. It was also, in part, with the hope of rebuilding her confidence after suffering from two miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy.

“I just thought it would be a terrific gift for her, because she’d never had a part where she’d been taken seriously, and she really wanted to do that,” Miller said in the documentary, Arthur Miller - Writer. “It’s not that I object to doing musicals or comedy, [...] but I would like to do dramatic parts too,” Monroe said in a “Person to Person” interview in 1955. In reality, the film set became a stage for tumultuous circumstances to unravel: Monroe’s insecurities, her barbiturate and alcohol abuse — resulting in a 2-week hospital leave — and the disintegration of her marriage with Miller.

“The general mood was…it depends on how late in the film you were,” said Eve Arnold in the documentary Marilyn Monroe and the Making of The Misfits. “Early on I understood it had been a honeymoon, but as time wore on, and the tempers started to get more and more frayed, it became very difficult. They were months behind schedule and they were way over budget. So that mood permeated the whole place.”

“She treated Miller very badly during the film,” recalls Arnold. “They shared a flat and he moved out, and she was very unhappy during that whole period. She had taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. It was very sad to watch her during this time. The dream had gone.” Monroe divorced Miller after the film was released in 1961. It would be her last film before her death the following year, on August 5, 1962, at the age of 36.

Of all the photographers who came and went on set, Arnold forged the strongest bond with Monroe. Having photographed her across 10 years of her career, Arnold had gained the actor’s trust, and was able to access her in more candid, private moments, often revealing her fragility and unrest. Monroe was also fond of Arnold’s approach — she had seen her images of Marlene Dietrich, who Arnold portrayed as a driven woman dedicated to her craft.

In Arnold’s featured image, Monroe lies in bed, a white sheet draped over her evocatively. Her pose is relaxed, serene — one hand in her hair, eyes sleepily sensual. She is between takes while shooting a scene with Clark Gable, whose character in the film, Gaylord Langland, wakes her with a kiss and makes her breakfast. Yet beneath her seductive, blissful demeanor for Arnold’s lens is an emotional storm. Sustaining herself on prescription drugs, she struggled to learn her lines despite her ever-present acting coach, and would be late on set.

In the memoir, In Retrospect, Arnold writes, “My most poignant memory of Marilyn is of how distressed, troubled and still radiant she looked when I arrived in Nevada to work on The Misfits. She asked immediately how she looked, and she wanted and needed reassurance. It was four years since we had worked together, and she looked into my eyes for a long moment to make sure she could still trust me. Then she drew her breath, sighed and said, “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?”

“She was not asking me – she was asking herself. This was less than a year before she died. It occurred to me then that when she had lived with the fantasy of Marilyn that she had created, that fantasy had sustained her, but now the reality had caught up with her and she found it too much to bear,” Arnold adds. Miller wrote elements of Monroe’s own turmoil into her character in The Misfits. “I think you’re the saddest girl I’ve ever met,” Clark Gable’s character says to Monroe. “You’re the first man who ever said that,” she replies. “I’m usually told how happy I am.”

“If you see the movie carefully, you see how vulnerable, how unhappy [Marilyn] was for various reasons,” says co-star Eli Wallach in Marilyn Monroe and the Making of The Misfits. “One, I think, is Arthur had written a valentine to this woman, a love piece. Each male in the movie spoke of how glorious she was, how wonderful, how sensitive. And each one was going to resurrect and save that woman. That made her more unhappy.”

After hearing of Monroe’s death a year after the film’s release, Miller was shocked. When a reporter asked if he would be attending her funeral, Miller replied, “She won’t be there.”

In 1987, Arnold published her photobook Marilyn Monroe, a complex portrait of the actor throughout their 10-year relationship, including Monroe’s final film. This collection of images attests to the pair’s close bond, their rare collaborative spark, and the artist that they saw in one another. “She was quick and perceptive,” Arnold writes, “would listen when I explained why a certain picture or situation was necessary, and would concur if she was convinced. If not, we would battle it out until one or the other backed down.”

While Arnold would photograph Monroe again before her death in 1961, their collaboration on set of The Misfits captures the actor’s many truths, both troubled and exuberant, melancholic and tender.

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"She was intelligent enough and sharp enough and beautiful enough to be able to manipulate almost any situation, so it became something which was totally her own..."

Eve Arnold on Marilyn Monroe

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