The last sitting

There was a third act to Bert Stern's sessions with Monroe. Several days after the bed shots, he took a series of photos that he hoped would include his "one black and white [photo] that was going to last forever like Steichen's [photos of Greta] Garbo." He stood above Monroe and photographed her face lying among jewels and glitter. But these would not be Stern's Garbos. Monroe looked too ragged and burnt. No wonder Babs whispered to Stern, "What's going to happen to that poor girl?"

What happened, of course, is that six weeks later Marilyn Monroe was dead. "I heard it on the car radio in Sag Harbor driving to East Hampton to a breakfast," Stern remembers. "I didn't have a big reaction. I thought it was surprising, but I didn't cry or anything. I did hear from a writer that she had called me the night before she died because he has the phone records. I didn't get the call. We didn't have answering machines in those days. I certainly would have called her back. I probably would have flown out there to be with her if she wanted me to."

I ask him, "You mean you'd have left your wife for Monroe?"

"Maybe," he answers, after a pause. "My marriage would have been over, but I would have ran off with Marilyn Monroe. That's a story. I would have been the next sucker."

Vogue freaked about Monroe's death. They stopped the presses. Then Babs realized they were only printing black and white fashion shots of Monroe, the woman herself mostly dressed in black. These would be Monroe's obituary shots. The issue ran, as it had been planned.

We all know that many others besides Marilyn Monroe died or crashed to make the 1960s be the 1960s. Bert Stern, himself, just barely made it through that decade alive. He'd go on to become the 1960s fashion photographer of New York. His style of camera-as-phallus inspired the first photographer-standing-over-the-model scene in "Blow Up." Stern was responsible for Twiggy's brief reign as fashion's pop starvation princess. After Andy Warhol had lunch with Stern for the first time, the former returned to his office and was gunned down.

As for Stern's fate, "Speed was one of the major reasons my marriage ended. I got locked up for a while  trying to get me away from [a doctor who was giving him Dexadrine]. I had to leave the county and live with a friend in Spain. Then I came back to the U.S. and regrouped my life."

Today he sits, a regrouped grandfather, in a Manhattan office lined with photo boxes marked with the names of beautiful woman. Looking through them he remarks, "Bardot is another one I was interested in. She was beautiful. I had a problem with Julie Christie. She was little tough for me ... Barbra Streisand was tough, but I persevered with her. She refused to cover her shoulders ... Kate Moss  she's the hottest thing since Monroe ... Catherine Deneuve, when she first came to New York she was 18. She was a beautiful girl ... Madonna is gorgeous, the most beautiful eyes you ever saw. A little rough around the edges. She's a tough chick. She spits it out. She has her own agenda. It manifests in the pictures."

Forget those other femmes. The Monroe shots are what Stern will be remembered for, especially the ones Monroe mutilated with a hairpin. Just days before her death, Stern mailed color transparencies out to L.A. as a courtesy for Monroe. The woman went ahead and scratched up the ones she didn't like. Or else X-ed them with red magic marker. "Years later a wonderful art director from Harrod's [magazine] thought those particular photos were fabulous," Stern remembers. "He asked if they could publish them." Monroe's estate protested. Stern was unmoved. "Just because she scratched them out, doesn't mean she is the ultimate purveyor of my work. I hadn't signed any deal that she could destroy pictures she didn't like. They are my pictures."

Worse than Marilyn's hairpin commentary, other photos were stolen, then recovered. Recently, lost shots that Stern took of Marilyn in a black wig (à la Jackie Kennedy) were found in a flea market. Just last week, a dealer announced he was going to sell some "last sitting" photos that Stern had given as a gift to Joe DiMaggio. "I never met DiMaggio," Stern told the newspapers.

The story of Marilyn Monroe's last sitting needs a coda. After looking through the hundreds of photos, you realize how silent the images are. Did Monroe talk with Stern while he shot his Nikon? "Sure," he says. But then he can't remember what she said. Did they make small talk about Hollywood? "No." Talk about the weather? "No."

Then what? "I was trying to get one picture of her looking sexy," Stern recalls. "I had to get up high. We had to get her P.R. agent to taunt her a bit about her boyfriends to get her laughing. One was JFK and the other was some guy in Mexico. A Mexican person. I don't know his name. That was the only prompting that went on."

Then Stern finally remembers that "Marilyn was curious about why I was a photographer and why I wasn't directing movies. She had a sense of something about me. I was on my knees shooting up and she said, 'What's your premise?' I didn't know quite what she meant. 'All I want to do is take photographs of you.' I think she meant, 'Don't you want to be a director? Don't you have ambitions to do anything more?' I said, 'Yeah, I want to get you into the sack.'"

And Stern did. Almost. The night that Stern finished photographing Monroe in that bed, she lay drunk and exhausted and wanted him to make love with her. He didn't. "Why not? I've asked myself that question many times, and I've come up with many answers: marriage ... prudence ... cowardice ... destiny ... Dexedrine. But at that moment I think the truest one was that I cared too much for her. My desire for Marilyn was pure, it bordered on awe. To make love to her would have been too much ... and not enough."

It's a good thing that Stern did not become the date-rape Picassoesque Minotaur he had imagined himself to be. Instead he remained a great photographer. "There are no photographs of Cleopatra," he wrote (forgetting perhaps his photos of Liz Taylor). "No prints of what Paris saw and felt when he gazed at Helen of Troy. They're like dead stars; the light from them no longer reaches us. But there are photographs of Marilyn Monroe."

And in most of the photos inside "The Last Sitting," Monroe is the epitome of beauty  even in the silly self-portrait Stern took in a mirror of him sitting beside her in bed. On the floor are a couple of wine bottles, a half-empty glass, and a single, white, high-heeled pump. Stern sits beside Monroe, camera to his face, with his right hand forming a halo over Marilyn's head. They look like two naughty kids.

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