“Clothes are the enemy!” a waitress tells Tom Ewell’s hapless and lusty Richard Sherman in The Seven Year Itch. “Without clothes, there’d be no sickness and no war!” There also would be no 52-foot-tall billboard above Loew’s State Theatre picturing Marilyn Monroe and her wind-blown white dress—which seared the image into the collective consciousness of passersby on 45th and Broadway, and transformed it into a lasting piece of American iconography.
That “shot seen around the world,” as The Hollywood Reporter columnist Irving Hoffman described it at the time, was the brainchild of one of Monroe’s favorite photographers, Sam Shaw. Though Shaw died in 1999, his daughters Edie and Meta Shaw and his granddaughter Melissa Stevens have gathered his posthumous collection of Monroe photographs, memories, and ephemera for Dear Marilyn: The Unseen Letters and Photographs, publishing this month from ACC Art Books.
‘Dear Marilyn’ by Sam Shaw
Simon & Schuster
Shaw grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and spent his early career working as a courtroom artist and political cartoonist. He moved on to photojournalism and eventually set photography, meeting Monroe for the first time while shooting postproduction stills for Panic in the Streets, directed by Elia Kazan, in 1950. Monroe, Shaw writes, was Kazan’s “sweetheart” during the filming of Kazan’s 1952 Viva Zapata!, and Shaw took her photo as a favor for the director. In the book, he remembers her wearing his own sports shirt, knotted at the waist, with a pair of the signature jeans she picked up at an Army Navy store on Western Avenue in Los Angeles. Monroe told him she’d wear her jeans into the ocean and let them dry in the sun so they’d fit her body.
While those photographs are lost to the maw of time (or possibly, as Shaw posits, to the personal collection of Edward Steichen, who was then MoMA’s curator of photography), the encounter kicked off a decade-long friendship and creative partnership. Shaw would capture Monroe during some of her most pivotal moments both on and off the clock: “lovely, joyous moments in the prime of her life,” he writes in the introduction to his images. We see Monroe beaming while on the phone with Arthur Miller, before he became her third husband; the pair of them at their Connecticut home (images that served as source imagery for corresponding scenes in Netflix’s 2022 Blonde, starring Ana de Armas); Monroe in Richard Avedon’s studio; Monroe at the premiere of The Prince and the Showgirl at Radio City Music Hall, giddily emerging from a bubble bath on set, and applying false eyelashes backstage.
But most famously, there was Monroe standing on the subway grate.
When Seven Year Itch producer Charles K. Feldman needed to find a catchy image to serve as the movie’s main promotional still, he asked Shaw. The men had worked together on the film version of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Kazan; Shaw had shot the now iconic image of Kim Hunter and Marlon Brando in a torn shirt embracing on the stairs. When Shaw reached the scene in the Seven Year Itch script in which Monroe and Ewell mosey down 51st Street, it made him think of a photo he’d taken more than a decade earlier of a model and a sailor standing on a subway grate on the Coney Island boardwalk. The image had run on the cover of Friday magazine. “I knew that someday I would repeat the same composition on a bigger scale when the opportunity arose,” he writes.
And did it. “Thousands showed up. It was chaos time,” Shaw writes of the day they shot the scene and its accompanying stills. “The police were completely off guard, more fascinated watching Marilyn, forgetting the mob.”
“[Director Billy] Wilder and Feldman were both anxious to see how far one could go against censorship,” Shaw writes. “It was the early 1950s and the National Legion of Decency, the puritanical group we called the ‘Bluenoses,’ reigned. But Marilyn’s elegance and clean sense of fun, under Wilder’s sensitive and witty direction, controlled the scene—very daring for its time.”
As the film cameras rolled, Shaw ducked underground to catch Paul Wurtzel, the wind machine operator who was stationed under the grate. Then Shaw reemerged when the scene wrapped. “Hi, Sam Spade,” Monroe cooed to Shaw, her pet name for him.
The crowd of onlookers included Gina Lollobrigida, escorted by her representative Jonas Rosenfield III, who formerly headed public relations and advertising at 20th Century Fox. Shaw captured her with his camera too—but not Joe DiMaggio, whom Monroe had married at the beginning of the year in a small ceremony in San Francisco. The Yankee reportedly stormed off the shoot. Three weeks later, Monroe announced to the press that she and DiMaggio would divorce, a scene that Shaw described as something out of Madame X or Witness for the Prosecution: “I never saw her cry except on television the morning she left Joe.” Monroe would go on to say that DiMaggio told her that “exposing my legs and thighs, even my crotch—that was the last straw.”
“Unfortunately, her husbands never really understood her individuality,” Shaw writes. “Like many men, they wanted to fashion her and remake her to their own standards.”
After shooting on location in New York, Wilder reshot the subway grate scene’s close-ups in a Los Angeles studio. “Again, I was in charge of the still photos in the studio with precise studio conditions,” Shaw writes. “I adjusted the cigarette butt on the street set and the wind-swept scrap paper to match the New York shoot.” Shaw also chronicled the film’s aftermath, from its wrap party at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills—“Marilyn didn’t have money for a gown for the party,” Shaw writes, so “she picked up a flaming red dress from the 20th Century Fox wardrobe department”—to its opening night, when Shaw had to collect Monroe from her dressing room, where she was leisurely applying her makeup long after she was due on the red carpet. “Her legendary lateness was not the butterflies that afflict many stars,” he writes, “but her weapon against the specific time clock of the establishment.”
Shaw would go on to produce films of his own, including Paris Blues (1961), starring Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier, as well as various John Cassavetes movies, from A Woman Under the Influence (1974) to Opening Night (1977). Monroe died seven years after her Seven Year Itch performance—and Shaw’s photo—catapulted her into superstardom. The book presents poignant letters from the photographer to Monroe written throughout their friendship; in those later years, he suggests she come stay with him and his wife and family to get out of the fray, and gently asks that she call. But there are none from Monroe herself. Instead, we see just a few artifacts from her: some photographs she took of “family and friends” and one self-portrait. It’s a leggy ink sketch in the manner of Hokusai, Shaw writes, and she gave it to Shaw the last time he saw her. “What the Hell…” Monroe captioned it. “That’s Life.”
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