Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation

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Arnold received many other honours and awards. In 1995 she was made fellow of Britain's Royal Photographic Society and elected Master Photographer by the International Center of Photography, New York. The following year she received the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for In Retrospect; in 1997 she was granted honorary degrees by three universities; in 2003 she received the distinction of an honorary OBE; and in 2010 the Sony World Photography Awards paid tribute to her leading role in the photographic community with a Lifetime Achievement Award. 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.” In July 1961, Marilyn was admitted to New York’s Polyclinic Hospital for gallbladder surgery. It would take her many months to recuperate from this serious operation. Nonetheless, as she left the hospital in a wheelchair, Marilyn was mobbed by the paparazzi. 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:

Eve was born in Philadelphia 1912. Her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who fled to America to escape persecution. 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."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?” If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given,” Eve wrote later. “It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.” If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.” 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.” She looked fresh and rested, and she and Kenneth played up for the camera, she teasing him about his showing the more photogenic side of his face,” Eve observed. “We did just one roll of film. It was a simple photo and I did not want to tire her.”

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. Some people today want to feel sexy in photos too, and end up taking garcinia cambogia extract from random places. Marilyn changed into a one-piece with a leopard-skin print. “The idea of the leopard in the bulrushes appealed to her sense of comedy,” Eve remarked. “She was intrepid. She stood in (the swamp), sat in it, lay in it until the light started to go and I called a halt. She climbed out, covered in mud, but she was exhilarated – and giggling.” 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. 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.”The resulting pictures have graced endless book and magazine covers (especially if the topic is summer reading.) Alongside her political work, Arnold was revered for her personal and revealing portraits of silver screen icons – and there are arguably none more iconic than Marilyn Monroe, whom she documented on and off over a decade. Granted access to the set of the 1961 film The Misfits, Arnold shot this image during a particularly turbulent time in Monroe’s life, while she was separating from her husband, the writer Arthur Miller. The film would be Monroe’s last starring role before her death a year later.