Marilyn's Last Sessions Read Online Free PDF

all the time. They look plain, or even ugly, at certain moments and from
certain angles. And that’s what beauty is, a temporary quality rather than a state. But she didn’t seem to understand what I was saying.’ Greenson didn’t give his colleague
the chance to respond, but that didn’t surprise Wexler. He knew it was questions Ralph Greenson was short of rather than answers.

 
Los Angeles, Downtown
1948
    The first photographer in the life of the woman still known as Norma Jeane Baker, André de Dienes, was a good-looking thirty-three-year-old, who had been brought over
from Europe in the early 1940s by the producer David O. Selznick. He had hired Norma Jeane for her first modelling job, a five-week road trip through California, Nevada and New Mexico in 1945. She
was nineteen.
    At the end of the 1950s, Life magazine commissioned him to do a photo shoot of Marilyn and her drama coach, Natasha Lytess, a failed Hollywood actress of Russian extraction who had
emigrated from Berlin. The set-up was straightforward enough, an acting lesson at Lytess’s Beverly Hills house, but things went badly from the start. Lytess and de Dienes argued. De Dienes
didn’t like what Marilyn was wearing: a voluminous blouse that covered her completely, and a long, unattractive skirt almost down to her ankles. He hated her formal hairstyle and wanted to
show her as glamorous, provocative, desirable. He suggested to Marilyn that she take off her clothes and stand there, facing Natasha, wearing only her short, black slip with her hair messed up.
‘Make real dramatic movements,’ he told her. ‘I want action going on for the pictures.’ Natasha had other thoughts. She started shouting that Marilyn was going to be a
dramatic actress, not a ‘sex-bobble’. De Dienes pointed out that Marilyn’s sex appeal was the reason she was becoming famous, then packed up his equipment and stormed out, yelling
he didn’t work with hypocrites.
    Throughout her life, photography would represent a haven Marilyn could retreat to whenever she was suffering. The greater her anguish at the prospect of shooting, the more acute her terror at
having to repeat a scene twenty times in front of a hundred people, the more the ballet of a man dancing round her armed with a camera seemed to shelter her from her fears.
    Look bad, dirty, not just sexy . Such, no doubt, were the dismal instructions the unknown cameraman gave Marilyn before he started rolling his camera in some squalid
Willowbrook apartment in downtown Los Angeles. The resulting film lasts three minutes forty-one seconds and is in black and white. Originally silent, it has since been soundtracked with an extract
from a Monroe song, ‘My Heart Belongs To Daddy’.
    Provided it’s not a fake, this short film is the first trace of Marilyn on celluloid. To survive in Hollywood, as a twenty-two-year-old, she sold what she had to whoever wanted it: her
body to producers and its image to the anonymous spectators who watched the pornographic shorts with titles like Apples, Knockers and Cokes that were shot on the fringes of the studios. This
one, Porn, is particularly horrific. The actress enters in a black dress, which she takes off to reveal a black négligée and suspenders. She seems large somehow, her stomach,
her thighs, even her head, her russet-brown hair hanging limply over the left side of her face. Her leaden movements and vague gestures as she takes a tawdrily wrapped box from a man exude
something irredeemably crude and exhausted. If it weren’t for the glimpse of her face in the last shot, when she smokes a cigarette as she looks down at the man she has just had sex with, one
might doubt it was Marilyn Monroe. Only the smile is hers.
    This sequence of undressing and desolate intercourse seems like some primeval form of pornography, mesmerisingly ugly in its evocation of how cruel sex can be. The fact it is silent makes it
seem even more like the visual representation of a moan