Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation

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Michael, when someone expects you to be on time it’s very respectful to honour that. You’ll go a long way in life if you learn this simple lesson.” 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. Gerhard Bissell, Arnold, Eve, Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon ( Artists of the World), Suppl. I, Saur, Munich 2005, from pg. 458 (in German). In two massive projects, Arnold captured the collective lives of whole nations - China and America - and the individual circumstances of many ordinary people. 'From the very beginning of my becoming a photographer', she once wrote, 'high on the agenda was a plan to go to China'. After applying annually for a visa for 15 years, in 1979 she was finally successful. Preparing to document the reality of post-Cultural Revolution China, then a nation of 800 million, she methodically set up a scheme categorised into landscape, people, work and living. In two long trips she travelled with the official interpreter of the tourist bureau, covering over 60,000 kilometres, from Beijing to Mongolia, up the Tibetan plateau and across the Gobi desert. Her 12,000-transparency record of China on the brink of industrial reform shows a country of bewildering diversity, a world of peasants and city workers, athletes and students, government officials and Buddhist monks. Photographs were displayed at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 1980 - Arnold's first major solo exhibition. Her book In Chinawas published the same year, winning the National Book Award in the United States, and she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers.

Marilyn Monroe learning her lines during the filming of The Misfits, 1960. Photograph: Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos Michael Arnold said his grandmother grew up as one of nine children in a poor Russian Jewish immigrant family. “She didn’t talk about this much but it definitely had a bearing on her desire to make photography accessible to all.”Unlike other photographers (especially male ones), Arnold prioritised a compassionate approach, reflecting the real intimacy between the two women. As a female photographer in a male-dominated field, Eve knew how to play a role to thrive and gain access to certain people and places (perhaps even taking inspiration from Monroe). “She could be formidable and fierce and knew how to get what she wanted, but she could also be gentle and unassuming,” Michael says. She lived by her philosophy, that “if you are careful with people, they will offer you part of themselves. That is the big secret.”

Our ‘quid pro quo’ relationship, based on mutual advantage, developed into a friendship,” Eve wrote. “The bond between us was photography. She liked my pictures and was canny enough to realise that they were a fresh approach for presenting her – a looser, more intimate look than the posed studio portraits she was used to in Hollywood.”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.

Whereas in her film roles, Marilyn was often typecast as a ‘dumb blonde’, as a model “she could call the shots, dictate the pace, be in control.” Even in her early ‘cheesecake’ poses, or with more experienced photographers like Eve’s old mentor, Richard Avedon, Monroe’s joyful, innocent persona transcended cliché. I was never late for her again. And indeed my propensity for lateness was almost entirely cured by those well placed, caring words.

Arnold’s output is still largely an untapped mine, given she took around 250,000 photographs in her career. Only around 2,000-3,000 have been digitised. 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. As an old friend, Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder applied her foundation, Marilyn looked around and said, “Whitey, remember our first photo session? There was just you and me – but we had hope then.” She adored all of it. She loved the attention and she loved these very handsome men. What she didn’t like was the fact that they were all such polished actors. When they kept changing lines they would just reel them off and they would be word-perfect. And she would have difficulty because a) she didn’t have the training, and b) because she was troubled and it was difficult to remember the lines when she was going through a trying time.

The daughter of Russian immigrant parents, she was highly conscious of a worldwide legacy of pogroms and diasporas. As she told me in 1991: "I don't feel at home anywhere. I feel at least as much at home here [in London] as any place else. I tell myself we're all world citizens. There's a kind of displacement that takes place, and friends and colleagues become your family." Being a woman helped me to understand her moods and responses,’ Eve said. ‘Also, my being another woman avoided the male-female byplay that my male colleagues tell me is necessary in their sessions to produce intimate pictures.” Eve Arnold to receive Lifetime Achievement Award at Sony World Photography Awards 2010". Aesthetica . Retrieved 2019-06-12. Arnold was one of the first women to be associated with Magnum, and became a full member in 1957. In 1974 she published her monograph The Unretouched Woman – a book documenting the experience of being a woman, through a woman’s perspective. 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.” In another of Eve’s books she wrote:

For Marilyn, Arnold believed, “Being photographed was being caressed and appreciated in a very safe way. She had loved the day and kept repeating that these were the best circumstances under which she had ever worked.” In 1979, aged 67, Eve embarked on another ambitious project. Published as ‘In China’, her best-selling book “captured a vast nation on the brink of momentous change.” Her other books include ‘Unretouched Woman’ (1976); ‘The Great British’ (1991); a memoir, ‘In Retrospect’ (1995); and ‘Film Journal’ (2001).