Marilyn and Eve Arnold 1959

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Eve didn’t usually enjoy press conferences. The hotel was “so jammed as to make it almost impossible to work.” But her unusual status as one of the few women in her profession had some advantages. “The newsmen were unfailingly courteous,” she explained. “Invariably a path would be made for me.”

The meeting got off to a slow start, with a stiff, awkward Olivier taking most of the reporters’ questions. But when Marilyn removed her coat, the strap of her dress snapped – and all hell broke loose, with photographers scrambling for pictures of the star ‘en deshabilée’.

Though Marilyn denied it, Eve believed the ‘accident’ was, in fact, deliberate. “Suddenly the atmosphere changed,” she wrote. “(Monroe) had made it fun: laughter was heard, a safety pin was offered and the press conference was hers. It had gone from a ponderous, humdrum, expected situation to an event – with a little help from her.”

Between Engagements

During the late 1950s, Eve chronicled the lives of working-class Italians in New Jersey. A particularly charming shot of some children in a truck was used in an advertisement for Standard Oil.

In 1959, Arnold worked on a film set for the first time, photographing Joan Crawford, who had criticised Monroe’s scanty attire at an awards ceremony just a few years before. Nobody was more surprised than Eve when Crawford stripped off for the camera.

I just want to be wonderful. Read more Marilyn Monroe quotes

As the Sixties began, Eve photographed the new First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, reading to her young daughter. She travelled to Virginia to document the emerging Civil Rights movement.

Back in Hollywood, a new Monroe movie was in the works. ‘The Misfits’ had been written by husband Arthur Miller as a ‘valentine’ to Marilyn. John Huston was to direct, and her co-stars would include Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.

The Misfits, 1960

“I’m thirty-four years old. I’ve been dancing for six months (on ‘Let’s Make Love’), I’ve had no rest, I’m exhausted. Where do I go from here?”

These words evoke Marilyn’s mood when Eve Arnold arrived in Nevada. It was midway through the shoot, and Monroe had just returned from a week’s rest in a Los Angeles hospital, during which time filming had been halted.

Exclusive rights to all still photos on and off the set were granted to Magnum. Inge Morath, Elliott Erwitt and others had already visited the set. Eve intended to spend just two weeks on location, but because of her rapport with Marilyn, she stayed for two months.

“Being a woman helped me to understand her moods and responses,’ Eve said. ‘Also, my being another woman avoided the male- female byplay that my male colleagues tell me is necessary in their sessions to produce intimate pictures.”

“As always where close contact was essential to the personal kind of pictures I wanted to make, I worked without an assistant,” Eve recounted. “Lugging gear, loading film, reading exposures were tasks I could have been relieved of, but an extra person might have unbalanced the precarious equilibrium between us.”

Of all the on-set photographers, Eve was the only one admitted to Marilyn’s inner circle. Towards the end of filming, Eve arranged a party for Marilyn and her entourage, whom she described as her ‘family’.

“Every once in a while she would realise that it was a relationship based on a weekly paycheck and would be concerned lest they became paid courtiers,” Eve wrote. “But they never did. They were fierce in their dedication to her.”