A Century of Marilyn Monroe

In May of 2022, the actress, reality-TV star, and lingerie mogul Kim Kardashian arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the annual Met Gala, wearing another woman’s dress. It was sixty years old, made of delicate beige marquisette fabric embellished with more than six thousand hand-sewn rhinestones, and had been worn in public only once before: by Marilyn Monroe, in May of 1962, onstage at Madison Square Garden for a birthday gala honoring President John F. Kennedy. When Monroe put on the gown, made specifically for her by the Hollywood dressmaker Jean Louis (based on a sketch by the designer Bob Mackie, when he was just starting out), she was thirty-five, and in the last year of her short life. She wore the dress in the hope that it would be an event, but, of course, Monroe was by then so famous that she was an ongoing event, no matter what she had on; she was pursued, ceaselessly, by cameras, by journalists, by powerful men, by studio nabobs, by fans and hangers-on.

Even when she was just beginning her career, as a young contract player in the studio system, the amount of fan mail she amassed (several thousand letters a week, by 1952) startled executives to whom she was just another disposable—or, at least, interchangeable—bottle blonde. The outpouring was less shocking to Monroe, who had been aware of her ability to captivate since she was a teen-ager. “When I was eleven, the whole world was closed to me, and I just felt I was on the outside of the world,” she told the Life magazine editor Richard Meryman, in the summer of 1962, during a six-hour conversation that would come to be known as the last interview. “Suddenly, everything opened up. . . . It was just sheer pleasure. Every fellow honked his horn, you know, workers driving to work, waving, you know, and I’d wave back. The world became friendly. All the newspaper boys when they delivered the paper would come around to where I lived, and I used to hang from the limb of a tree, and I had sort of a sweatshirt on. I didn’t realize the value of a sweatshirt in those days.”

Over time, Monroe came to realize not only the value of a sweatshirt (along with a well-fitting sweater, a plunging neckline, a fluttery sundress, a halter top, a lamé gown, and a terry-cloth robe) but also exactly how to make it work for her in pictures: how to befriend the camera, even when she was lonely (and she was often very lonely). She was an uncanny beauty—the sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, the bobbed bunny-tail nose, the accentuated beauty mark, the overdrawn smile—but that wasn’t what made people rush to send pounds of fan mail. Hollywood was full of beauties. What people fell for was the way Monroe knew how to be photographed; she had the rare ability to seem, at least in still photos, both completely spontaneous and incredibly deliberate.

Take a promotional shot she posed for in 1952, to promote her role in the thriller “Niagara”: she sits on a low stone wall in front of the rushing waters of Niagara Falls, in a red blouse that accentuates her décolletage. She is leaning ever so slightly to one side, smiling as she turns her face into the sun to catch the light. Her hands are clasped in her lap, and she is leaning forward onto one heel, so that the toe of her red pump arcs ever so slightly off the ground. At first, the shot looks like a candid, slyly captured moment of a performer in repose. But look closer: her collarbone is slightly pushed forward, her neck stretched long, her feet deliberately pointed with balletic tension. In Monroe’s best portraits, she seems to be almost pushing through the frame. The photographer Burt Glinn, who shot Monroe at a variety of parties in the nineteen-fifties, said, of this strange quality, that Monroe “had no bone structure—the face was a Polish flat plate. Not photogenic in the accepted sense, the features were not memorable or special; what she had was the ability to project.”