The last sitting

Stern escorted Monroe up to the room. She saw the scarves, the white paper tacked on the walls. She knew what Bert wanted. She probably wasn't aware that Bert wanted to photograph her naked with pure light, thus the white backdrop  the antithesis of the red velvet of her calendar nudes. Monroe asked George what he thought about the setup. Bert knew George could queer the deal, but he just purred, "Oh ... what a divine idea."

She took her sweater off. "Women like to take their cloths off," Stern observes. "I noticed that. Especially in front of a camera. Or a mirror. Women are connected to their bodies and to the effect it has on other people."

He then looked at his subject and was surprised. Monroe had a scar. She'd had a gall bladder operation six weeks before. He remembered Liz Taylor had been marked as well  a long tracheotomy scar along her throat. He recalled Diana Vreeland telling him, "I think there's nothing duller than a smooth, perfect-skinned woman. A woman is beautiful by her scars." He didn't buy it when Vreeland said those words, but here he was with a half-naked Marilyn Monroe. How could argue with that opinion now?

Stern picked up his camera and photographed Monroe cavorting with the scarves. Drinking champagne. Holding cloth roses over each breast. Feeling herself up. Stern remembered being a kid in Brooklyn peeping on a neighbor named Mary playing with her own breasts beneath a pink sweater.

Stern had a little record player spinning the Everly Brothers. "Don't you have any Frank Sinatra?" Monroe pouted.

"Only Richard Avedon plays that stuff," Stern retorted. Hours went by. He coaxed her into taking her pants off  keep playing with the scarves. Finally, Stern realized it was 7 in morning. He let Monroe get dressed. She left. "I thought my love affair with Marilyn Monroe was over," Stern remembers. "I was very happy. The pictures were worth more to me than some kind of personal experience. I was already married. I never thought I'd meet her again."

Stern flew back to New York where he found out that Vogue loved his photos so much that they wanted more. There was to be a second act to this story. Only this time, a Vogue editor named Babs traveled to L.A. with Stern. At the Bel-Air shoot there were wardrobe and makeup people. And a case of Château Lafite-Rothschild along with bottles of Dom Perignon. Monroe arrived and drank and posed in a chinchilla. Posed again in an elegant black cocktail gown. A white veil. She posed in suburbanite clothes that 40 years later make her looked like a sophisticated Avon lady.

After a day of shooting fashion Monroe got cranky, but Stern had taken part of a "little heart-shaped pill" and was still going strong. "All the craziness of the '60s really began for me at that moment," he remembers. He'd popped a Dexedrine and its chemical enthusiasm allowed him to persuade Monroe to get naked before him in a locked bedroom. Soon she was cavorting under white sheets while he fired away with his camera. As he shot he pictured himself as a prowling Picasso Minotaur. Whether or not Stern was possessed by that old Spaniard  or just the upper  the photos he was taking were erotic masterpieces. Sure, they only showed a woman naked in bed, not such a radical place for a woman to be. But each shot would have a devastating innocence about it.

Forty years later, if you pop over to any 7-Eleven that stocks girlie magazines you'll find hundreds of similar photos, all taken by a photographer standing above the subject as if he is about to mount her himself. Stern's photos are different. "Monroe had the magic of the child," Stern says. He shot Monroe from a child's-eye view. It was as if a little boy had just wandered into a bedroom where this crazy blond was monkeying around on the bed.

Next Page: "I want to get you into the sack"

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