Portrait Photos of Marilyn Monroe Taken by Cecil Beaton in 1956

Cecil Beaton had only one shoot with Marilyn Monroe, which took place at the Ambassador Hotel in New York in February 1956. The actress turned up at his suite 90 minutes late and in his diary Beaton admitted that he was: “startled, then disarmed, by her lack of inhibition”.
The photographer compared the actress to ‘an over-excited child asked downstairs after tea’ and added: “The initial shyness over, excitement has now got the better of her. She romps, she squeals with delight, she leaps on to the sofa. She puts a flower stem in her mouth, puffing on a daisy as though it were a cigarette. It is an artless, impromptu, high-spirited, infectiously gay performance”.
Beaton continued in his diary -
"The real marvel lies in the paradox – somehow we know that this extraordinary performance is pure charade, a little girl’s caricature of Mae West… There is an unworldly, a winsome naiveté about the child’s eyes that, quick as a flash, will screw up into a pair of sexy, smouldering slits and give you a synthetic ‘come-hither’ look."
Prophetically, his diary entry ends, ‘It will probably end in tears’. Six years later Marilyn Monroe was found dead of an overdose in her Hollywood home. She was 36 years old.
Comments