When a person’s image becomes larger than life, to think of her as a living, breathing, feeling human becomes nearly impossible. So it is with Marilyn Monroe, born on June 1, 1926and now celebrating her centenary. Those of us who love her can’t help attaching all sorts of feelings to her face, her body, her way of speaking, moving, and singing. But to see Marilyn through the eyes of photographer Bruno Bernard—the man who would come to be known as Bernard of Hollywood—is to see her anew. The young woman Bernard met and photographed in the mid-1940s wasn’t yet Marilyn Monroe: She was still Norma Jeane Mortensen, a woman on her way out of one life and speeding toward an as yet uncharted one.
Joshua John Miller and Mark A. Fortin’s book The Marilyn Monroe Century: From Norma Jeane to Icon—A Story in Photographs charts Marilyn’s life and career through Bernard’s eyes. Bernard had come to the United States in 1937 to escape Nazi Germany. When he met Marilyn, she was still an aspiring, and struggling, star. Miller, who is Bernard’s grandson, explains that Bernard, an orphan who’d had to leave his home country behind, and Marilyn, who’d survived abuse and hardship in various foster homes while growing up, felt an instant kinship—a “feeling of belonging to one another,” he says.
You can see that in Bernard’s pictures of Marilyn, three of which are included here. There’s Marilyn in 1953, appearing at the Hollywood Bowl, resplendent and joyous in a tangerine-colored draped dress. The dress wasn’t her own: she had no money at the time and had borrowed it from the wardrobe of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. As The Seven Year Itchwas being filmed, Bernard had shot what is possibly the most famous photograph of Marilyn—the one in which she laughs with joy as she tries to control the skirt of her billowing white halter dress—though he and Marilyn had grown apart by that time. Another shot included here shows a more pensive Marilyn on set, waiting to spring to life. Bernard had felt stung that by this time, his old friend had nearly forgotten him—but he noted in his diaries from the time that Marilyn had spotted him in the crowd of photographers and said, “Remember, Bruno, it all started with you.”
The third photograph, which Bernard took at the famous Racquet Club of Palm Springs, in 1949, gives a sense of that beginning. Here, Marilyn is a superstar-to-be who’s flirtatious and relaxed, greeting a close friend who happens to be behind the camera lens. She had already adopted Marilyn Monroe as her stage name. But until his death, in 1987, Bernard would always think of her as Norma Jeane.
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