In the photograph she is studiously learning her lines, every inch the poised and professional actor. But in reality Marilyn Monroe was in turmoil: a marriage falling apart, chronic insecurity and a debilitating dependency on alcohol and pills.
The picture is one of a series of unpublished photographs of Monroe from the set of her final completed film, seen here for the first time. Taken by Eve Arnold, Monroe’s friend and one of the most admired and distinctive photographers of the 20th century, they show someone who is extraordinarily beautiful and instantly recognisable, but also normal and vulnerable.
“There is something about the one where she’s in the car,” said Michael Arnold, Eve’s grandson who manages the family archive. “It’s not the typical glamour shot you often see with Monroe, there’s an ordinariness about it … she is going about her craft, she’s learning her lines. There’s something about the composition which makes it special.”
The 15 images are being released by the estate to help fulfil the wishes of Arnold for her work to be a kind of affordable, accessible folk art. Buying an Arnold print would normally cost more than £1,000. The new images are being offered for £30 as posters.
In another one Monroe is more whimsical, according to Michael Arnold. There is a similar pensiveness but she is aware she’s being photographed and is playing up to it.
It is from the set of the 1961 film The Misfits, which was, to say the least, a troubled production. The film was written by Arthur Miller, a titanic playwright but an inexperienced film writer, as a valentine for Monroe, his wife. A dream team was assembled including John Huston as director and the actors Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. At the time it was the most expensive black and white film ever made.
Huston was often drunk, falling asleep on set in the searing heat of the Nevada desert. Monroe, whose marriage to Miller was falling apart, woke up groggy most days and was late all the time. The Misfits was the last completed film for Gable and Monroe, and a commercial failure, probably better regarded today than it was at the time.
“[Monroe] confided in Eve that she was struggling, she was finding it difficult to come to terms with the image that everybody had created of her, she was exhausted at having to live up to that,” said Michael Arnold.
When Eve Arnold died in London in 2012, aged 99, it was front-page news. Born in Philadelphia, she became a photographer in her 40s and was the first woman to join the Magnum photographic agency.
She photographed the rich and famous and the down-at-heel. Robert Capa, a co-founder of Magnum, once described her work as falling “between Marlene Dietrich’s legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers”.
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.”
When he took over managing her archive he came across a quote in which his grandmother said: “I would prefer photography to be a folk art – cheap and available to everybody, rather than elevated to mandarin proportions created through an artificial scarcity.”
That triggered memories of a story about her first London show when Arnold wanted students to be able to afford her work and so she sold prints at hugely reduced prices. Later on she would discover that art dealers had bought them to sell for a profit.
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.”
Michael said Eve was groundbreaking. One of the first subjects she chose to cover was black fashion shows in Harlem, a vibrant world almost totally ignored by the media. Her images were picked up by Picture Post and went around the world.
Other images being released as posters reflect the diversity of Arnold’s career: a Mongolian girl at one with her horse; a training session for civil rights activists on how not to react to provocation during sit-ins; and a Cuban fisher joyously spending time with his family.
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.”
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 posters will be available to buy from evearnold.com/posters from Thursday.