“The phone rang and somebody said, ‘Hello,’ and I said, ‘Hi, is Marilyn there?’ and she said, ‘No, she’s not,’ and I said, ‘Well, this is Mike. I’m in class with her. Could you take a message?’ And she said, ‘Well, it’s a holiday,’ because it was the Fourth of July weekend, and that, to her, was an excuse for not taking a message for herself.”
No one ever said Marilyn wasn’t complicated.
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She made $27 million last year, gobs more than she ever earned in life. She was the poster girl at Cannes, a festival she never attended. And her time in England making “The Prince and the Showgirl” was the subject of a movie that got two Oscar nominations, even though the golden girl never won a gold statuette herself.
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While making her last movie, “Something’s Got to Give,” Marilyn posed nude for a young photographer, Larry Schiller, hoping to ratchet up her $100,000 salary to Elizabeth Taylor’s million-dollar territory for “Cleopatra.”
Schiller wrote in Vanity Fair that he saw the confidence that spurred Marilyn to become one of the first stars to create her own production company. “There isn’t anybody that looks like me without clothes on,” she laughed.
He also saw her dark companion, insecurity. “Is that all I’m good for?” she keened about nudity.
Yet Schiller told The Associated Press that “it’s women that have kept Marilyn alive, not men.” He says teenage girls flock to see gallery shows, and that the photos selling now accentuate her humanity, not her anatomy.
“I think,” he said, “people want to see her now as a real person.”
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