Bert Stern: Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting

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The photo shoot is the culmination of a fantasy and a love affair. Bert Stern had idolized Marilyn Monroe since he met her at a party for the Actor’s Studio in 1955. He now finally had the opportunity to photograph Monroe and so great was his infatuation with the actress, that he referred to setting up his photo shoot as, “preparing for Marilyn’s arrival like a lover, and yet I was here to take photographs. Not to take her into my arms, but to turn her into tones…” August 5, 1962: Marilyn Monroe was found dead of an “apparent barbiturate overdose." I put that in quotes because there is plenty of controversy about how she died. Was it a suicide? Was it murder? What exactly happened? He writes very candidly in this book about his great desire to have Marilyn if he could. How did this go from a Vogue fashion shoot to a nude shoot? For Stern, taking photographs was like making love — an intense, emotional experience. “I fell in love with everybody I photographed,” he says today.

This book is really two books. It is a biography, and it is also a pictorial retrospective of an actress whose greatest love affair was conceivably with the camera,” wrote Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography, Marilyn. In his brilliantly revealing images, Stern camouflages his desire behind the camera, bestowing the viewer with the same power of admiration and focus as the photographer, while bringing the viewer there with him, into that moment. The intimacy in the photographs curtails the separation between the celebrity and the person; in this penetrating and self-indulgent shoot, the viewer gets a closer, more authentic, and liberating notion of the woman behind the lens. Monroe’s playful, inviting, and gracious posture flirts with the longing gaze of the photographer, presenting the exclusive and compassionate attention of a lover. The resultant images capture a potent but fleeting imaginary love affair, this time fortuitously caught on film by Stern.

As Stern writes in The Last Sitting: “There were two Bert Sterns. One was the Bert Stern who had been accused of playing it close to the edge… Who had married his first wife with his fingers crossed…who thought his second, real marriage was over six months after it began…who had an appointment with blond destiny. That Bert Stern would gamble everything he had for a night with Marilyn Monroe. The other was Bert Stern, husband father, provider photographer who was going to get the picture, get out of there, go home to his wife and baby, and live happily ever after.” In the summer of 1962, Bert Stern was hired by Vogue to shoot a series of photos of Marilyn Monroe. The photos would become known as “The Last Sitting” and were later published in a book by that same name. In a statement considered provocative in its day, Mr. Stern told a panel of commercial artists in 1959, “I like to put my feelings into my photographs.” That same year he received an assignment that took some effort to connect with his feelings: the makers of Spam asked him to “romanticize shish kebab made from Spam,” he told The New York Times. Mr. Stern took a crew of helpers and models to the Gulf of Mexico to shoot that one — a dreamy shot of that meat product. The client was pleased.

The story of Marilyn continues to haunt me. I want to know why a beautiful life was cut short. I want to know what she was like while she was alive. I want to know why her presence still stands the test of time. For now, what I do have are these small snapshots of who she was, preserved and eternally youthful, uninhibited and completely raw, thanks to a young Brooklyn photographer who never could have imagined the ever-lasting allure his work would one day evoke. Then, now, and for many years to come. I've wanted to write this article for nearly a month now and I thought it would take no time at all to gather the details of those infamous few days in 1962 when Bert Stern and Marilyn Monroe spent intimate hours at the Bel-Air Hotel. But oh, was I wrong. I had been digging for insider information, watching every documentary and reading every article, when my mother-in-law found me a copy of The Last Sitting, written by Bert Stern himself. Only in reading that book did I find out all the juicy details. Bert Stern was born on October 3 in Brooklyn, NY. He was a whopping age of 33 when he got this break-of-a-lifetime. His photographs of Monroe, taken over three days in June 1962 in the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, were collected in a mammoth 2000 book, “Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting.” “It was a one-time-in-a-lifetime experience, to have Marilyn Monroe in a hotel room,” Mr. Stern said in the 2010 documentary “Bert Stern: Original Madman,” “even though it was turned into a studio, where I could do anything I wanted.” Ms. Laumeister directed the film. Many of the photos showed Monroe unclothed, or posing behind transparent scarves. “She was so beautiful at that time,” Mr. Stern told Newsday. “I didn’t say, ‘Pose nude.’ It was more one thing leading to another: You take clothes off and off and off and off and off. She thought for a while. I’d say something and the pose just led to itself.”By the time of the shoot, Bert Stern had already developed a name for himself as a fashion and advertisement superstar photographer. Born to a “medium-poor Brooklyn family”, he worked as a Vogue photographer, and stood out through an inventive and audacious approach towards his work; For a Smirnoff Vodka ad campaign, he traveled to Egypt and shot what would become a highly successful commercial image of the ‘The Driest of the Dry’ Martini. But by the early Seventies Stern’s exhausting, Blow-Up-like lifestyle — fueled by amphetamines and shadowed by overhead costs—had drained him. He was hospitalized; his marriage crumbled. Broke, he left New York for Spain. He had lost virtually everything.