Marilyn Monroe: The Metamorphosis
In My Week with Marilyn, Michelle Williams captures Marilyn Monroe’s struggle to reconcile her two identities: Norma Jean, the apple-cheeked girl next door, and Marilyn Monroe, the droopy-eyed Aphrodite. Norma Jean didn’t stand a chance. Marilyn: Intimate Exposures, by Susan Bernard, is a stunning collection of images that track Norma Jean’s transformation into Marilyn. In early, rarely seen glamour photographs by Bruno Bernard, known as Bernard of Hollywood, you see a 20-year-old Norma Jean with an eager smile and wide eyes, doing pinup poses with a very un-pinup expression. It’s hard to believe it’s the same woman who seduced a nation just by whispering through a verse of “Happy Birthday.” Bernard’s photos were used as the covers of the pre-teen pulp series “Teen-age Diary Secrets” (in one, Marilyn wears a snug orange sweater, with the photo caption “I played Kiss and Run”) and Laff magazine (a mix between Mad and Playboy), as well as in print advertisements for pharmaceutical companies. Later he photographed her on movie sets, snapping the immortal subway-grate photo from The Seven Year Itch. In addition to hoping to show “the metamorphosis from Norma Jean in 1946 to the famous flying skirt, Marilyn Monroe the star,” book author and Bernard’s daughter Susan told Vanity Fair she wanted to “take the reader on a journey through the osmosis between photographer and his subject.”
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