Gail Levin is an Emmy Award-winning producer/director of both television and film. Her most recent AMERICAN MASTERS production was James Dean: Sense Memories, which won a 2005 Cine Golden Eagle award. Below, she answers some questions about her latest project, AMERICAN MASTERS Marilyn Monroe: Still Life.

Q: What makes Marilyn Monroe an American Master?

A: Not only did she master her own image, create it and ultimately control it, she was the subject of many of the great masters of photography of the 20th century. This film not only depicts Marilyn, but also the very individual artists with cameras who were involved with her and with making these remarkable and sustaining images. AMERICAN MASTERS continues in its inimitable way to showcase the brilliance of its characters by finding that moment which should be forever memorialized.

Q: Marilyn Monroe was such an iconic figure, and so much of her life has already been documented. Why did you choose the photography angle for Still Life?

A: Ever since The Misfits, it’s been in my mind to do something with the photography. I’m fascinated by photography, and there exists such an incredible photographic archive since all the greats of that era photographed her so it’s more than just publicity stills and movie star pictures. And at the end of the Dean screening last year Taki Wise from the Staley-Wise Gallery came up to me and said “Are you aware that it would be Marilyn’s 80th birthday in 2006?” I thought this would be a great way to peg this idea now. I think her image is still possibly the most potent of all of them. She could, arguably, be the most photographed person of the 20th century. There were enough photographers around who could talk, and it was a great challenge and a really wonderful task to get these very intimate recollections.

Q: You interviewed some of the great photographers of our time, including Arnold Newman, who died in June. Tell us about that interview, which may have been his last.

A: Arnold Newman was one of the great photographers of the 20th century. A great portrait photographer, the photographer of presidents, the photographer of Picasso, the photographer of Woody Allen – everybody great. Interestingly enough, he never photographed Marilyn as a portrait, even though they tried several times to set it up. He photographed her in the midst of this funny, odd grouping of people at this little party that included Carl Sandburg. It was this wonderful confluence of people: this great photographer, the great poet, the great movie star, but in a completely unexpected setting.

Newman was 88 when he died and when we interviewed him in November of last year he was very sharp, very together. I felt like we got to be friends right away. I think it was probably the last interview. The other extraordinary thing we have in this film, which is so very important to me, is the photography itself, photography itself as an idiom. The darkroom is becoming a vanishing place for photographers; the whole notion of film is going away, replaced by the digital image. And this film is framed by darkroom set ups. And one was with Newman printing a portion of this photograph that he took of Marilyn and Carl Sandburg. So I think we have Arnold Newman in his darkroom for the last time. It actually gives me a little chill, and it makes me very proud.

Q: Of the thousands of photographs you looked at for this film, which ones gave you the most insight into her true personality?

A: That one in particular, the Arnold Newman one. He says it’s the real Marilyn, you know? It really is this portrait shot of her, cut out of a two shot of her talking to Carl Sandburg. I had looked at those pictures many times, and never seen that the portrait was actually just a cropped version of this photograph. So already the eye of the photographer is present, just in being able to see what he has in his own picture. And I said to him, “God, look at that. Carl Sandburg is just listening to her,” and he said, “No, she was just pouring her heart out, she was miserable.” He did that photograph in March of ‘62 and she was dead by August of ‘62. She was already very troubled, very sad. So the whole circumstance of the photograph was one that you didn’t necessarily know when first looking at it.

Also, I think the opening photograph that we’ve used in the darkroom, which was taken by Roy Schatt at the Actors Studio, is a very beautiful, very open and very honest photograph of her in which you see both sides of her – the old Norma Jeane, completely without make up, with that completely open face – and Marilyn Monroe. I think it’s got incredible truth to it.

Another group of photographs I love that were quite deliberate are the black and white Ben Ross photographs. The story is that she just showed up late at night in his hotel room and he started shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting. By and large, we have a very honest group of photographs in this film. Overall, these are not the star pictures, not the glamour-puss stuff. And that was appealing to me.

Q: Unlike many of today’s stars, who have a combative relationship with the paparazzi, she seemed to embrace photographers and have a relationship with them.

A: I think she was very open, very approachable, very willing. My line about her is that she died trying. I don’t think she was closed off and a bitch and above that crowd. I think she felt she owed it to that crowd – that crowd being the audience and in a sense the paparazzi. I think that was a great joy for her, to sit with those guys, and to work with those guys. I think she thought of them as artists, and I think she thought of herself as a subject that was worthy of that. Douglas Kirkland said he thinks it’s because she had nothing to prepare for so she was very at ease. She didn’t have to remember lines. In some ways she didn’t have to worry about how she had to look for a scene, so a lot of the pressure was off her. It was a very genuine exchange.

Q: Why do you think she was so comfortable with the camera, starting with her first professional shots at 16?

A: I think she’s one of those people who figured out what she had, and then was very canny about using it. As she says in the film, “I started walking home, and it was such a pleasure, because all these people started to notice me, and I didn’t realize what a sweater could do.” There’s a certain disingenuousness about that, but I think it’s so great, because she suddenly caught the wind. That didn’t elude her. She saw it, she got it, and she knew exactly what to do with it. It’s that chemistry that I don’t think anybody can bottle. She wasn’t the most incredibly beautiful. When you look at some of those early shots, you wonder what possessed her to think she could become this person. She’s rather ordinary. Cute, but no Rita Hayworth. I think she was ready for the camera, and it was a real destiny for her.

Q: Tell us about the nude photos of Marilyn Monroe, some of which are included in the film.

A: They’re quite beautiful. The first nude sitting was the calendar sitting with Tom Kelley in 1949. She did it for money plain and simple. The only money she made off that sitting was $50 and the whole world has made nothing but money since. And one of them became the first Playboy centerfold in 1953. I think it was an innocent but also enjoyable session for her in the beginning. There’s nothing about it that’s sordid or lewd or tawdry or cheap. They’re very pin-uppy of that era; they’re gorgeous pictures. The Tom Kelley Studio was a very legit place. She loved it, and he is quoted as saying that she took to it like a dolphin to water.

At the time of The Misfits there’s a good story about her wanting to drop the sheets in the scene with Clark Gable in the bedroom and director John Huston said, no, I don’t need that. So she was very ready to do that. There are nude shots of her from Something’s Got to Give, which was the last film, which wasn’t completed, and she was nude in the film, in the swimming pool. There are also pictures of that. I don’t think to her it was ever a big deal. She kind of liked it, and she saw it as part of her own beauty.

Q: Do you think there are still any undiscovered photos?

A: Yes, there might be. I don’t know that this is true, but Phil Stern told us that after JFK died there was apparently sort of a tremor that went through the photographic community in L.A., that there may be some photographs of Marilyn that were taken somewhere around the Peter Lawford/Pat Lawford estate cavorting on the beach with JFK. Phil Stern said none of them ever materialized; he didn’t have them. But they may be out there.

Q: She was Playboy’s first and perhaps most famous centerfold. Do you think Hugh Hefner realized back then how keenly she’d come to be identified with the magazine and, indeed, the culture?

A: Maybe. He talks about it in the film, about the fact that when he got that photograph, she had become a starlet. So she wasn’t unknown. And when those photographs came to light she didn’t in any way deny it. She stepped right up to the plate; she laughed. It’s purported that she said “I had nothing on but the radio.” What Hefner talks about in the film is that this could have been quite scandalous as it had been for other people, and it didn’t hurt her at all. It didn’t even cause a ripple. So I think he was prescient in figuring that she was enough of a star, and could certainly be enough of a star to grace that first issue and, my God, look what he got since. She’s been an abiding presence for Playboy.

Q: What’s the most surprising thing about Marilyn Monroe that you learned from the photographers?

A: That she was really adored. She was late on movie sets, and she had a lot of trouble in the end. But there was something so intimate about her, and so sweet about her. And funny! She was unfettered by a bunch of junk. You know, she showed up herself. They all could get to her. And they all talk about how she lived in very unobtrusive places. Douglas Kirkland talks about her living in a very unimpressive little apartment in Hollywood. That last house, even in Brentwood, was a small house. There was nothing pretentious about her. There was nothing overblown about her.

I think, by and large, she was very surprised by all of it. Even though she knew that “Marilyn Monroe” was an entity that she had created and I think always thought of in the third person. Douglas Kirkland also tells the story of how that photograph with her holding the pillow was her favorite one. When she saw that photograph she said, “Now don’t you think that any man would love to be in bed with her?” So there was that disconnect – even with her – about who Marilyn Monroe was. And I think that surprised her on some level. She didn’t start believing her own press.

Q: In the film Gloria Steinem shared some very frank early assessments of Marilyn from her book. Do you think most women at that time felt the same way about her?

A: I don’t think she necessarily just saw herself as victimized and a sex object. She knew how to contend with it. I’m sure she was no fool about it. On the one hand, it was very flattering and great; on the other hand, it was probably awful and could be very lascivious and very terrible. But I think a lot of women just wanted to be like her. And that’s still true today.

Q: What about her relationships with men?

A: She was no fool about what men want, and who men are, and who they can be. She also loved men. But her heart got broken and I think she continually got taken the wrong way, and that finally had to take its toll. I think she was disappointed in her marriages. Joe DiMaggio, who was absolutely a man of his time – the great sports hero, the great baseball star, the great hitter of the 1950s – was never expected to understand women. He was expected to be the great icon. To understand a female icon alongside him was inconceivable.

A little aside to the night of the subway grate photo during filming of The Seven Year Itch was that DiMaggio walked off the street and went to Toots Shore’s restaurant. DiMaggio walked in upset, very upset, about the whole circumstance with Marilyn on the street, the dress going up, and Toots Shore, to comfort him and commiserate with him, makes an untoward remark about Marilyn. That was the end of the relationship with Toots Shore. So while DiMaggio was devastated by this, he would never have turned on her.

Arthur Miller, on the other hand, was equally unable to share the spotlight. And what’s also great about her is that she was never willing to give it up. I think Miller damaged her greatly. He seemed to belittle her, demean her. Norman Mailer, interestingly enough, would have just eaten it up. He’s never gotten over not having met her. In the film, he’s very outward about how he wanted to steal her. No question that she would have been a handful, but I think he would have done better than Miller.

Q: If she were alive today, do you think she would still be making movies?

A: One wonders what she would have done. She could sing. She wanted to be taken seriously. She also didn’t want to be forgotten as a babe. No question she would have stuck in the Strasberg ilk. She also had that great comic turn, which is no small talent. So those kinds of character roles could have continued for a long time. Who’s to know?

Q: Is there anyone alive today that has that same irresistible combination of charisma, star power, movie magic, and magnetism?

A: I don’t think there is. The insouciance of Marilyn is something modern women don’t have. The great line of Redbook editor Robert Stein was that she was in on the joke, and this is something Gloria Steinem missed, and I think was important. She was a joke to a lot of people, but she got it. She knew about it. And, boy, does she have the last laugh now. Actually, better than the last laugh – the last word. She kept it light, she had a soft touch, and I don’t think there’s a woman today who’s got that. She was a very rare creature, very delicate, very brilliant. She had this meteoric rise and then poof. And that was exactly what she was meant to do and be.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.
–From the Unfinished Biography of Marilyn Monroe

The Woman Who Will Not Die
Gloria Steinem, 1986

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since the death of a minor American actress named Marilyn Monroe. There is no reason for her to be a part of my consciousness as I walk down a midtown New York street frilled with color and action and life.

In a shop window display of white summer dresses, I see several huge photographs – a life-size cutout of Marilyn standing in a white halter dress, some close-ups of her vulnerable, please-love-me smile – but they don’t look dated. Oddly, Marilyn seems to be just as much a part of this street scene as the neighboring images of models who could now be her daughters – even her granddaughters. I walk another block and pass a record store featuring the hit albums of a rock star named Madonna. She has imitated Marilyn Monroe’s hair, style, and clothes, but subtracted her vulnerability. Instead of using seduction to offer men whatever they want, Madonna uses it to get what she wants – a 1980’s difference that has made her the idol of teenage girls. Nevertheless, her international symbols of femaleness are pure Marilyn.

A few doors away, a bookstore displays two volumes on Marilyn Monroe in its well-stocked window. The first is nothing but random photographs, one of many such collections that have been published over the years. The second is one of several recent exposes on the circumstances surrounding Monroe’s 1962 death from an accidental or purposeful overdose of sleeping pills. Could organized crime, Jimmy Hoffa in particular, have planned to use her friendship with the Kennedys and her suicide – could Hoffa and his friends even have caused that suicide – in order to embarrass or blackmail Robert Kennedy, who was definitely a mafia enemy and probably her lover? Only a few months ago, Marilyn Monroe’s name made international headlines again when a British television documentary on this conspiracy theory was shown and a network documentary made in the United States was suppressed, with potential pressure from crime-controlled unions or the late Robert Kennedy’s family as rumored reasons.

As I turn the corner into my neighborhood, I pass a newsstand where the face of one more young Marilyn Monroe look-alike stares up at me from a glossy magazine cover. She is Kate Mailer, Norman Mailer’s daughter, who was born the year that Marilyn Monroe died. Now she is starring in “Strawhead,” a “memory play” about Monroe written by Norman Mailer, who is so obsessed with this long-dead sex goddess that he had written one long biography and another work – half fact, half fiction – about her, even before casting his daughter in this part.

The next morning, I turn on the television and see a promotion for a show on film director Billy Wilder. The only clip chosen to attract viewers and represent Wilder’s entire career is one of Marilyn Monroe singing a few breathless bars in Some Like It Hot, one of two films they made together.

These are everyday signs of a unique longevity. If you add her years of movie stardom to the years since her death, Marilyn Monroe has been a part of our lives and imaginations for nearly four decades. That’s a very long time for one celebrity to survive in a throwaway culture.

In the 1930’s, when English critic Cyril Connolly proposed a definition of posterity to measure whether a writer’s work had stood the test of time, he suggested that posterity should be limited to 10 years. The form and content of popular culture were changing too fast, he explained, to make any artist accountable for more than a decade.

Since then, the pace of change has been accelerated even more. Everything from the communications revolution to multinational entertainment has altered the form of culture. Its content has been transformed by civil rights, feminism, an end to film censorship, and much more. Nonetheless, Monroe’s personal and intimate ability to inhabit our fantasies has gone right on. As I write this, she is still better known than most living movie stars, most world leaders, and most television personalities. The surprise is that she rarely has been taken seriously enough fur us to ask why that is so.

One simple reason for her life story’s endurance is the premature end of it. Personalities and narratives projected onto the screen of our imaginations are far more haunting – and far more likely to be the stuff of conspiracies and conjuncture – if they have not been allowed to play themselves out to their logical or illogical ends. James Dean’s brief life is the subject of a cult, but the completed lives of such “outsiders” as Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda are not. Each day in the brief Camelot of John Kennedy inspires as much speculation as each year in the long New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt. The few years of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s music inspire graffiti (”Bird Lives”), but the many musical years of Duke Ellington do not.

When the past dies there is mourning, but when the future dies, our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.

Would Marilyn Monroe have become the serious actress she aspired to be? Could she have survived the transition from sex goddess to mortal woman that aging would impose? Could she had stopped her disastrous marriages to men whose images she wanted to absorb (Beloved American DiMaggio, Serious Intellectual Miller), and found a partner who loved and understood her as she really was? Could she have kicked the life-wasting habits of addiction and procrastination? Would she have had or adopted children? Found support in the growing strength of women or been threatened by it? Entered the world of learning or continued to be ridiculed for trying? Survived and even enjoyed the age of 60 she now would be?

Most important, would she finally have escaped her lifetime combination of two parts talent, one part victim, and one part joke? Would she have been “taken seriously,” as she so badly wanted to be?

We will never know. Every question is as haunting as any of its possible answers.

But the poignancy of this incompleteness is not enough to explain Marilyn Monroe’s enduring power. Even among brief public lives, few become parables. Those that endure seem to hook into our deepest emotions of hope or fear, dream or nightmare, of what our own fates might be. Successful leaders also fall into one group or the other: those who invoke a threatening future and promise disaster unless we obey, and those who conjure up a hopeful future and promise reward if we will follow. It’s this power of either fear or hope that makes a personal legend survive, from the fearsome extreme of Adolph Hitler (Did he really escape? Might he have lived on in the jungles of South America?) to the hopeful myth of Zapata waiting in the hills of Mexico to rescue his people. The same is true for the enduring fictions of popular culture, from the frightening villain to the hopeful hero, each of whom is reincarnated again and again.

In an intimate way during her brief life, Marilyn Monroe hooked into both those extremes of emotion. She personified many of the secret hopes of men and many secret fears of women.

To men, wrote Norman Mailer, her image was “gorgeous, forgiving, humorous, compliant and tender… she would ask no price.” She was the child-woman who offered pleasure without adult challenge; a lover who neither judged nor asked anything in return. Both the roles she played and her own public image embodied a masculine hope for a woman who is innocent and sensuously experienced at the same time. “In fact,” as Marilyn said toward the end of her career, “my popularity seems almost entirely a masculine phenomenon.”

Since most men have experienced female power only in their childhoods, they associate it with a time when they themselves were powerless. This will continue as long as children are raised almost totally by women, and rarely see women in authority outside the home. That’s why male adults, and some females too, experience the presence of a strong woman as a dangerous regression to a time of their own vulnerability and dependence. For men, especially, who are trained to measure manhood and maturity by their distance from the world of women, being forced back to that world for female companionship may be very threatening indeed. A compliant child-woman like Monroe solves this dilemma by offering sex WITHOUT the power of an adult woman, much less of an equal. As a child herself, she allows men to feel both conquering and protective; to be both dominating and admirable at the same time.

For women, Monroe embodies kinds of fear that were just as basic as the hope she offered men: the fear of a sexual competitor who could take away men on whom women’s identities and even livelihoods might depend; the fear of having to meet her impossible standard of always giving – and asking nothing in return; the nagging fear that we might share her feminine fate of being vulnerable, unserious, constantly in danger of becoming a victim.

Aside from her beautiful face, which women envied, she was nothing like the female stars that women moviegoers have made popular. Those stars offered at the least the illusion of being in control of their fates – and perhaps having an effect on the world. Stars of the classic “women’s movies” were actresses like Bette Davis, who made her impact by sheer force of emotion; or Katherine Hepburn, who was always intelligent and never victimized for long; or even Doris Day, who charmed the world into conforming to her own virginal standards. Their figures were admirable and neat, but without the vulnerability of the big-breasted woman in a society that regresses men and keeps them obsessed with the maternal symbols of breasts and hips. Watching Monroe was quite different: women were forced to worry for her vulnerability – and thus their own. They might feel like a black moviegoer watching a black actor play a role that was too passive, too obedient, or a Jew watching a Jewish character who was selfish and avaricious. In spite of some extra magic, some face-saving sincerity and humor, Marilyn Monroe was still close to the humiliating stereotype of a dumb blonde: depersonalized, sexual, even a joke. Yet few women yet had the self-respect to object on behalf of their sex, as one would object on behalf of a race or religion, they still might be left feeling a little humiliated – or threatened – without knowing why.

“I have always had a talent for irritating women since I was fourteen,” Marilyn wrote in her unfinished auto-biography. “Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.”

But all that was before her death and the revelations surrounding it. The moment she was gone, Monroe’s vulnerability was no longer just a turn-on for many men and an embarrassment for many women. It was a tragedy. Whether that final overdose was suicide or not, both men and women were forced to recognize the insecurity and private terrors that had caused her to attempt suicide several times before.

Men who had never known her wondered if their love and protection might have saved her. Women who had never known her wondered if their empathy and friendship might have done the same. For both women and men, the ghost of Marilyn came to embody a particularly powerful form of hope: the rescue fantasy. Not only did we imagine a happier ending for the parable of Marilyn Monroe’s life, but we also fantasized ourselves as saviors who could have brought it about.

Still, women didn’t seem quite as comfortable about going public with their rescue fantasies as men did. It meant admitting an identity with a woman who always had been a little embarrassing, and who had now turned out to be doomed as well. Nearly all of the journalistic eulogies that followed Monroe’s death were written by men. So are almost all of the nearly 40 books that have been published about Monroe.

Bias in the minds of editors played a role, too. Consciously or not, they seemed to assume that only male journalists should write about a sex goddess. Margaret Parton, a reporter from the Ladies’ Home Journal and one of the few women assigned to profile Marilyn during her lifetime, wrote an article that was rejected because it was too favorable. She had reported Marilyn’s ambitious hope of playing Sadie Thompson, under the guidance of Lee Strasberg, in a television version of RAIN, based on a short story by Somerset Maugham. (Sadie Thompson was “a girl who knew how to be gay, even when she was sad,” a fragile Marilyn had explained, “and that’s important – you know?”) Parton also reported her own “sense of having met a sick little canary instead of a peacock. Only when you pick it up in your hand to comfort it … beneath the sickness, the weakness and the innocence, you find a strong bone structure, and a heart beating. You RECOGNIZE sickness, and you FIND strength.”

Bruce and Beatrice Gould, editors of the Ladies’ Home Journal, told Parton she must have been “mesmerized” to write something so uncritical. “If you were a man,” Mr. Gould told her, “I’d wonder what went on that afternoon in Marilyn’s apartment.” Fred Guiles, one of Marilyn Monroe’s more fair-minded biographers, counted the suppression of this sensitive article as one proof that many editors were interested in portraying Monroe, at least in those later years, as “crazy, a home wrecker.”

Just after Monroe’s death, one of the few women to write with empathy was Diana Trilling, an author confident enough not to worry about being trivialized by association – and respected enough to get published. Trilling regretted the public’s “mockery of [Marilyn's] wish to be educated,” and her dependence on sexual artifice that must have left “a great emptiness where a true sexuality would have supplied her with a sense of herself as a person.” She mourned Marilyn’s lack of friends, “especially women, to whose protectiveness her extreme vulnerability spoke so directly.”

“But we were the friends,” as Trilling said sadly, “of whom she knew nothing.”

In fact, the contagion of feminism that followed Monroe’s death by less than a decade may be the newest and most powerful reason for the continuing strength of her legend. As women began to be honest in public, and to discover that many of our experiences were more societal than individual, we also realized that we could benefit more by acting together than by deserting each other. We were less likely to blame or be the victim, whether Marilyn or ourselves, and more likely to rescue ourselves and each other.

In 1972, the tenth anniversary of her death and the birth year of MS., the first magazine to be published by and for women, Harriet Lyons, one of its early editors, suggested that MS. do a cover story on Marilyn called “the woman who died too soon.” As the writer of this brief essay about women’s new hope of reclaiming Marilyn, I was astounded by the response to the article. It was like tapping an underground river of interest. For instance:

Marilyn had talked about being sexually assaulted as a child, though many of her biographers had not believed her. Women wrote in to tell their similar stories. It was my first intimation of what since has become a documented statistic: one in six adult women has been sexually assaulted in childhood by a family member. The long-lasting effects – for instance, feeling one has no value except a sexual one – seemed shared by these women and Marilyn. Yet most were made to feel guilty and alone, and many were as disbelieved by the grown-ups around them as Marilyn had been.

Physicians had been more likely to prescribe sleeping pills and tranquilizers than to look for the cause of Monroe’s sleeplessness and anxiety. They had continued to do so even after she attempted suicide several times. Women responded with their own stories of being over-medicated, and of doctors who assumed women’s physical symptoms were all in their “minds.” It was my first understanding that women are more likely to be given chemical and other arm’s-length treatment, and to suffer from the assumption that they can be chemically calmed or sedated with less penalty because they are doing only “women’s work.” Then, ads in medical journals blatantly recommended tranquilizers for depressed housewives, and even now the majority of all tranquilizer prescriptions are written for women. Acting, modeling, making a living more from external appearance than from internal identity – these had been Marilyn’s lifelines out of poverty and obscurity. Other women who had suppressed their internal selves to become interchangeable “pretty girls” – and as a result were struggling with both lack of identity and terror of aging – wrote to tell their stories.

To gain the seriousness and respect that was largely denied her, and to gain the fatherly protection she had been completely denied, Marilyn married a beloved American folk hero and then a respected intellectual. Other women who had tried to marry for protection or for identity, as women are often encouraged to do, wrote to say how impossible and childlike this had been for them, and how impossible for their husbands who were expected to provide their wives’ identities. But Marilyn did not live long enough to see a time in which women sought their own identities, not just derived ones.

During her marriage to Arthur Miller, Marilyn had tried to have a child – but suffered an ectopic pregnancy, a miscarriage – and could not. Letters poured in from women who also suffered from this inability and from a definition of womanhood so tied to the accident of the physical ability to bear a child – preferably a son, as Marilyn often said, though later she also talked of a daughter – that their whole sense of self had been undermined. “Manhood means many things,” as one reader explained, “but womanhood means only one.” And where is the self-respect of a woman who wants to give birth only to a male child, someone different from herself?

Most of all, women readers mourned that Marilyn had lived in an era when there were so few ways for her to know that these experiences were shared with other women, that she was not alone.

Now women and men bring the last quarter century of change and understanding to these poignant photographs taken in the days just before her death. It makes them all the more haunting. [Editor's Note: this chapter originally appeared with photographs, which are not present here.]

I still see the self-consciousness with which she posed for a camera. It makes me remember my own teenage discomfort at seeing her on the screen, mincing and whispering and simply hoping her way into love and approval. By holding a mirror to the exaggerated ways in which female human beings are trained to act, she could be as embarrassing – and as sad and revealing – as a female impersonator. Yet now I also see the why of it, and the woman behind the mask that her self-consciousness creates.

I still feel worried about her, just as I did then. There is something especially vulnerable about big-breasted women in this world concerned with such bodies, but unconcerned with the real person within. We may envy these women a little, yet we feel protective of them, too.

But in these photographs, the body emphasis seems more the habit of some former self. It’s her face we look at. Now that we know the end of the story, it’s the real woman we hope to find – looking out of the eyes of Marilyn.

In the last interview before her death, close to the time of these photographs, Patricia Newcomb, her friend and press secretary, remembers that Marilyn pleaded unsuccessfully with the reporter to end his article like this:

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.

Please don’t make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe.