Marilyn and Eve Arnold 1959

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Another round of interviews followed. Eve’s photographs of this eccentric junket are touching and funny. A demure, elegant Marilyn greeted each well-wisher, young and old, rich and poor, with unaffected warmth.

“She would watch the person photographing her – even if it was just a small-town newsman,” Eve observed. “She had learned that frequently the national press picks up from local wire services and she would perform at her best for all. With me she started to let down just to get a break, but if she sensed that I wanted more from her, she gave it in good measure.”

Ulysses at Long Island

Eve arranged to meet Marilyn again shortly after the jaunt to Bement, but on the appointed day, she left her camera at home. However, informal snapshots exist from that day, when Marilyn and her poet friend, Norman Rosten, walked along the beach near Eve’ s home in Miller Place, Long Island. (Arnold dated this event back to 1952, but Marilyn didn’t meet Rosten until 1955.)

The vision of MM in a bathing suit soon drew onlookers. She played softball with Eve’s young son, Francis, and went for a swim with Rosten. “As she started to swim, her crowd of admirers followed suit and surrounded her,” Eve wrote later. “For a moment it looked as though they would drown her, they were so tightly packed around her.”

Happily, Marilyn was rescued. They met again soon after, as MM was visiting the Rostens over Labor Day weekend (traditionally the first in September.) To avoid another circus, Eve took Monroe to an abandoned children’s playground near Mount Sinai, Long Island.

Marilyn brought along three bathing suits, and a copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. “I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time),” Eve remembered. “She kept ‘Ulysses’ in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it–but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her.”

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The resulting pictures have graced endless book and magazine covers (especially if the topic is summer reading.)

It was almost 5 pm – ‘the magic hour’, when the day is at its most golden. They drove on to deserted marshland. “The timing for the marshes was just right,” Eve noted, “the light soft and shadowless and ranging from pale yellow through deep saffron.”

Marilyn changed into a one-piece with a leopard-skin print. “The idea of the leopard in the bulrushes appealed to her sense of comedy,” Eve remarked. “She was intrepid. She stood in (the swamp), sat in it, lay in it until the light started to go and I called a halt. She climbed out, covered in mud, but she was exhilarated – and giggling.”

Back to Work, 1956

In February 1956, Lois Smith – Marilyn’s New York publicist – invited Eve to a press conference at the Plaza Hotel. Marilyn was to announce her latest film project, ‘The Sleeping Prince’. Her co-star, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Sir Terence Rattigan, author of the original script, had flown in from London to meet her.

At Smith’s request, Eve arrived early and visited a nervous Marilyn in her dressing room. “Marilyn had always had difficulty before actually tackling a problem,” Eve commented. “Once she started something, she would be totally committed: it was the business of propelling herself into the actual situation that she had to grapple with...So she would vacillate, the minutes passing...”

For Olivier and Rattigan, sitting outside the dressing room, this was the first of many long waits for Marilyn. “At eleven in the morning she wore a black velvet gown with straps the width of spaghetti strips,” Eve wrote. “She looked lovely, her white flesh and blonde hair contrasting with the darkness of her clothes. When I complimented her on the way she looked, she winked at me in the mirror and said, ‘Just watch me.’”