Just a Tomboy: Marilyn Monroe Seen Beyond Stardom by Eve Arnold on the set of The Misfits

Marilyn Monroe photographed by Eve Arnold on the set of “The Misfits”, 1961

Lost in thought, rehearsing her lines, with the Nevada Desert as background, Marilyn Monroe is caught by photographer Eve Arnold unguarded, like a foreigner in an otherworldly landscape, displaying a frailty that is hard to imagine someone, at least of all Marilyn Monroe, could reveal in such less than private a place, a movie set. She is on the set of The Misfits, from 1961, her last completed film. In less than a year, she would be dead. Her co-star, Clark Gable, died within days after the film wrapped. More than photographing a film being made or actors behind the scenes, Eve Arnold caught on film nothing less than the fragility and futility of human kind. They say that sometimes you can see the soul of a film in a photograph taken on the set. But that only very rarely happens. Eve Arnold managed to capture not only the soul of the film, but the souls of its actors, and not just in one photograph, but in many of the photographs taken on the set of John Huston’s film. She recognised the soul of the actor and transformed it into photographs. And that is the rarest gift a photographer can possess. It is her photographs, more than the film itself, that have become memorable for carrying the visual resolution of the film and of its actors into the public consciousness for decades.

Photographs by Eve Arnold from the set of “The Misfits”, 1961

“I knew I belonged to the public and to the world not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I never had belonged to anything or anyone else.” Marilyn Monroe remains the biggest movie star of all time. And yet it is this Marilyn Monroe in blue jeans – which is closer to the real Marilyn than the Marilyn that the star-image makers who put her in fur, sequins, pink and silver, cared for her to envision and that was gazed at on billboards, posters and magazines – that is deeper engraved in the public consciousness. Once again, Eve Arnold’s photographs from the set of The Misfits had an important role to play. The photographer saw beyond stardom and made a whole world see too.

By the very nature of photography, you have to get in close in order to get a good picture. But on a movie set, that can become a very challenging job and to do it well can be extremely difficult. That’s the job of the film set photographer. Because a good unit still photographer must get close while remaining unseen, is ever-present yet invisible, incredibly quiet and gentle, yet forceful and determined. They may be obliged to keep the distance, but they must know how to be in the right place at the right time, which is everywhere and at any given time. And so not only do they require technical skill, but they must know and respect film and possess a keen understanding of human behavior and patience. They record not only the situation that is presented to them and document the film as it’s being made, but also capture the moment. That moment of intensity, of an actor immersed into a role, or that moment of earnestness or contemplation between takes that makes the viewer forget that a film is being made and seems depicted from life itself, not a staged set or still-frame of what’s seen on screen but something much more real and authentic. It’s not just about the image, but about the feeling… a stolen moment.

Marilyn Monroe photographed by Eve Arnold on the set of “The Misfits”, 1961

I like this Marilyn in blue jeans. A tomboyish, typically American girl, with a very natural and understated way of dressing. Simple, confident, modern, in pared-down colours, it was this remarkably cool, ahead of her time style that she would many times emulate off-screen. Marilyn played a great role in making jeans the mainstay garment of the twentieth century, part of America’s heritage, but, most importantly, part of modernity. She was one of the very first women in Hollywood stars to demonstrate the appeal of jeans. On screen, she wore them for the first time in Fritz Lang’s noir drama Clash by Night (1952). Marilyn plays Peggy, a small-town girl working at a fish can factory and the girlfriend of Joe Doyle. She has a mind of her own and she is looking for more than marriage and being a dutiful wife. And when Joe’s sister, Mae (Barbara Stanwyck), returns home after having failed to fulfill her big ideas in the big city, Peggy instantly feels a connection with her – her right to being independent, to having her own dreams, to laying down your own rules and abiding by them rather than society.

Jeans are probably the mainstay garment of the twentieth century, part of America’s heritage. James Dean and Marlon Brando made denim defiant and sexy in the 1950s – the first decade in which young people’s style was distinguished from their parents’. Soon Marilyn became the female version of the look, equally sexy and rebellious. I think her look in jeans rather than her image in sequins and diamonds that has always played a big part in Monroe’s statute as one of America’s biggest symbols of youth culture, her pervasive image having held an influence over generations ever since. One of the most unconventionally beautiful images of Marilyn, taken by Philippe Halsman, show Marilyn in full hair and make up, wearing men’s jeans and lifting barbells. Marilyn’s beauty was matched by her boldness and bravery.

Marilyn Monroe photographed by Eve Arnold on the set of “The Misfits”, 1961

Marilyn would wear again jeans in The Misfits, her last film, like a preordained message of how she should be remembered. Even Jean Louis’ dresses created for her for the film pale in comparison to the denim on denim look, the legendary pair of Levi’s jeans and the Lee denim jacket, punctuated with the perfect break-up item, the white shirt. The jacket was a Storm Rider model, launched in 1933, with blanket lining and corduroy-lined collar, which the likes of Paul Newman and Kirk Douglas used to sport. But worn by her, it became the most influential denim jacket, even for men.

John Huston, her director on this film, as well as on her first significant acting role, The Asphalt Jungle, observed in an interview with Peter S. Greenberg for Rolling Stone magazine, from 1981, and republished in the book John Huston Interviews (The University Press of Mississippi), that she had “the ability to go down within herself and pull up an emotion and put it on the screen.” In an earlier conversation, from 1974, with Rosemary Lord, he said he would “put Katey Hepburn at the top of my list of actresses – and Marilyn Monroe of course. What they say about her now… It’s tragic exploiting a tragic memory. Good hearted girl – a great heart she had. I think the Bogarts and the Monroes were new in their own generation – they weren’t like anybody else, and people are never replaced.” But “thanks to this medium,” he continued, “they’ll be there for a long time.”

In the same interview mentioned above, Huston remembered how even in The Misfits, when everyone knew there was definitely something wrong with Marilyn, a premonition of doom closing in, there was still a freshness about her that had endured from the first time he met her, when they did the screen test for The Asphalt Jungle. And that was the uniqueness of Marilyn. That appeal is still there, in the public’s collective memory, in all her films. It is argued that her public image lives on because she brought in people a feeling that she was headed for disaster, that she showed a vulnerability that made people feel very protective towards her. Her appeal has to do with more than that, just as it has to do with more than her sex appeal. Because she moved men just as much as she moved women. Just like James Dean. She brought along not just a new look, but a new voice. And in none of her films seems that image more penetrating than in these two films, Clash by Night and The Misfits, where she dressed so casual and free, the voice of every generation since.

Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable photographed by Eve Arnold on the set of “The Misfits”, 1961

“She was a sort of a valiant, funny, witty woman when I first met her,” Eve Arnold remembered as stated in the Magnum book Eve Arnold: Lives Behind Photographs. By 1960, when Eve was on set for The Misfits, she was “still all of that, but there was a string of sadness underlying it.” One day after seeing the rushes, Monroe asked Eve, “How do I look?”. Eve replied that she looked wonderful. Monroe said, “I’m tired. I’ve been on the last film for six months, I’ve been dancing for six months, I’m thirty-four years old, you know, what’s going to happen to me?”

Eve Arnold was given exclusive access to shoot the production of the film in the Nevada Desert – Magnum had negotiated exclusive rights to film the shooting and Arnold was one of the few photographers Marilyn trusted. Eve’s portraits of Marilyn are among her most famous works and the most intimate portraits of Marilyn. They had met in 1954 at a John Huston party and they developed a relationship based on mutual respect and appreciation that lasted until Marilyn’s death in 1962. “If you’re careful with people and if you respect their privacy, they will offer part of themselves that you can use,” Eve Arnold told a BBC interviewer. “At photo sessions, she was in total control,” the photographer recalled. “She manipulated everything – me, the camera. She knew a lot about cameras and I had never met anyone who could make them respond the way she did.” […] “I never knew anyone who even came close to Marilyn in natural ability to use both photographer and still camera. She was special in this, and for me there was no one like her before or after. She has remained the measuring rod by which I have – unconsciously – judged other subjects… She had learned the trick of moving infinitesimally to stay in range, so that the photographer need not refocus but could easily follow move,ents that were endlessly changing. At first I thought it was surface technique, but it went beyond technique. It didn’t always work, and sometimes she would tire and it was as though her radar had failed; but when it did work, it was magic. With her it was never a formula, it was her will, her improvisation.”

It may be that Marilyn Monroe had an astounding feel for the camera, that she was the one who guided it. And yet that doesn’t take anything away from Eve Arnold’s ability to aim the camera, with acuteness, respect and humility, an inconspicuous glance at her muse. She is sexy and innocent, adulated and lonely, contemplative and lost. She’s her entire lifetime in a few shots. She is forever.

Photographs by Eve Arnold from the set of “The Misfits”, 1961