The Last of Marilyn Monroe

Bert Stern Meets Stanley Kubrick

Bert Stern had been a highschool-dropout, and after being a photographer in the military, got a job at Look magazine working in the mailroom where he networked and found a friend in a photographer for the magazine, Stanley Kubrick, sometime following World War I. Kubrick was adapting Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov into a movie in the 1960s and had Stern take promotional pictures of the actress Sue Lyon for the movie poster. Stanley Kubrick is a big name in Hollywood producing blockbuster movies including an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining and the classic A Clockwork Orange, but his career took off starting with his film Lolita, which Stern had taken the promotional movie poster shot that brought people to the movie. Stern’s career started with capturing a forbidden pedophilic aspect of sexuality in Lolita, and being a middle-aged man like the main character, he was able to effectively produce images which portray/show the male gaze of a young,adolescent girl as through the main character’s eyes. Lolita is sexualized on the poster with red heart sunglasses and she is sucking on a red lollipop which plays on innuendo and speaks to her age in that she is still a child. Stern’s capacity for capturing sexuality on camera matured as his career gained speed which led to him to photographing Monroe for Vogue to produce this image.

Marilyn Monroe Manipulates Photos

In 1962, Marilyn Monroe posed nude for photographer Bert Stern in the Bel-Air Hotel, located in Los Angeles, to capture a set of images now collectively known as “The Last Sitting” for the fashion magazine, Vogue. After the photoshoot, Marilyn had requested that Stern send her the contact sheets of the photos he had taken of her for her personal review. When the photos were sent back, Marilyn had taken an orange marker and made crosses over her body in the photos which she felt didn’t match the image she had of herself, and the photos were kept with the orange marker, as seen in this image of Monroe. Noting this oversight is important in her story arc as an icon because over ten years prior, she was not given any. Monroe’s nude photos were advertised in the first edition of Playboy magazine in 1953, but she had never met Hugh Hefner nor consented to the use of her photos in said magazine. Photographer Tom Kelley paid Monroe fifty dollars for the photoshoot in 1949, but that was the only payment she received for them. Kelley had sold her photos, for eighteen times the amount which Monroe was paid, to be used in a pinup calendar, where Hefner bought the rights to her nudes from the company and then used the rising movie star’s popularity to draw in men to buy his magazine.

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

“The Last Sitting” would not have its iconic name without the death of Marilyn Monroe which occurred on August 5, 1962, just six weeks after her 2,500-photo photoshoot with photographer Bert Stern. This angelic photograph, edited by Marilyn herself intentionally or unintentionally with a cross, with the other thousands of photos, were published posthumously by Stern 20 years later in a book bearing the same title. On August 5, 1962, Monroe was found dead in her apartment by her maid and psychiatrist. She was found lying face down in her bed, with no clothes, and a phone in one hand along with empty prescription pill bottles were found in her room. Conspiracy surrounds the death of the sex symbol, whether it was an intentional suicide by overdosing on barbituates/sleeping pills that she was prescribed or a hit put out by the Kennedys to cover up an affair with both JFK and Robert Kennedy. There were rumors of an affair after Monroe sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President '' to JFK in Madison Square Garden in 1962. Robert Kennedy was supposedly quarreling with Monroe on August 4th in her home before she was found dead, but her maid did not disclose that information until 1983 in an interview. Monroe’s second husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio, heavily blames the Kennedys for her death. This theory is supported by the fact that individuals who worked on Monroe’s case were then given high-profile jobs within the government. The uncertainty surrounding her death can be visualized by the sheer sheet that she holds in front of her body.

The reason that I offered that background concerning those three events is because it helps me to explain what Marilyn Crucifix II was doing socially/culturally and politically when Bert Stern created it in 1962. Knowing that Bert Stern met Stanley Kubrick helps break down the components of this photograph of Monroe, because it nods to Stern’s beginnings in the industry capturing sexuality on camera. Lolita, a Kubrick film, raised controversy in the media because of its pedophilic content, which took on greater waves of censorship as the years passed, essentially making Kubrick regret making the film, for most of its true substance had to be left to the imagination or not present at all. Stern had taken the famous movie poster image of Sue Lyon for Lolita, and he found a way to capture both a young woman behaving her age and feminine sexuality, tools which he used to generate Marilyn Crucifix II . Unlike Sue Lyon, Monroe was of-age and posed nude for Stern in the Bel-Air hotel, which allowed him to experiment with various camera angles, props, and poses in order to generate this image. The image could only be produced if she were the model, but it is memorable in the fact that she “christened” herself in the contact sheet with an orange cross and the sheet she is holding, appearing to be sheer white (the color distinctions washed out by the exposure),has her arms outstretched in a christ pose or as angel wings. This specific photo would have been a fine choice to use for when she should have passed away at an older age due to natural causes, but this overly exposed contact sheet casts an ironically ghostly aura on Monroe, considering she allegedly committed suicide by overdosing on barbituates six weeks after this photoshoot, which were the last photos of the movie star/sex symbol, thus “The LAST Sitting”. The circumstances surrounding Monroe’s death lead to “conspiracies” that she was silenced by the Kennedy family after rumors about an affair with the President, JFK, and his brother Robert. The over exposure washes out Monroe’s figure, giving her a heavenly appearance, which in that present time that the original photo was taken, would have been foreshadowing her death or symbolizing being silenced or blocked in some way by the powers of the government to keep the affair of the President a secret. Marilyn Monroe made her mark on the world as an actress, left her final marks as a woman in that industry in the form of an orange marker in Marilyn Crucifix II , then left with a mysteriously tragic bang.

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