Marilyn & Me by Lawrence Schiller Read Free Book Online Page A

knocked it back, handed it back again, and zip, cut another shot in half.
    “Larry, you’re not drinking,” she said.
    “No, I’m not. I’m just scared that I may wind up with no color shots,” I replied. With nothing more intelligent to say, I blurted out, “What kind of scissors are those?”
    “They’re pinking shears,” she said.
    “What are pinking shears?”
    “You don’t know anything about women’s dresses, do you? When you hem a dress, you use these to cut the fabric.”
    Now I decided to take a drink, but it didn’t go down smoothly, not while she had those pinking shears in her hand. I was lost—it was almost dark. I couldn’t see the pictures she was looking at. I wasn’t being consulted. On a few pictures, she
zip-zipped
twice! I was trying to figure out how many strips of color I could keep inside my envelope without showing her.
    She held up a strip where her rear end was highly defined. “Johnny Hyde used to say my behind was like a colored woman’s,” she said. “Only he didn’t say ‘colored.’ Colored blood turns a lot of men on.”
Zip!
    I was at a loss over what to say. Again, I just blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “You know what Yousuf Karsh said to Anna Magnani when he showed her his proofs from one of his shoots?” I said. “He apologized for all the wrinkles in her face that his lighting had produced and said he’d retouch the photos. And you know what Magnani said? She said, ‘Don’t you dare take them out. I worked too hard for those wrinkles.’ ”
    I had caught her attention. Marilyn looked at me for a couple of seconds, and then she said, “Maybe if I had those types of wrinkles, Fox would take me more seriously.”
    “She does have an extraordinary face,” I said. I was hoping to divert her attention away from those pinking shears.
    “I met her once when I won the Donatello Award for
The Prince and the Showgirl
. She hugged me for the cameras,and she called me a
putana
when she thought I wasn’t listening.”
    “What’s a
putana
?”
    “Look it up. It’s Italian.”
Zip! Zip! Zip!
    By the time Marilyn was through with her editing, she had cut about 70 of the approximately 108 color images. Seventy sounds like a lot, but 38 approved sounded even better. The next day I would throw away all the cut-up images, oblivious to their historical value. I was living in the present and not the future.
    It was dark when we finished the champagne, and as we drove back to her house, she reminded me of our deal: she didn’t want to see Elizabeth Taylor in any of the magazines that her pictures were going to appear in.
    The Dom had loosened her tongue, and she started talking about how badly Fox had treated her, how the executives had no respect for her or her talent, and how she’d really like to stick it to them. She was rambling on, and my mind was wandering. I was beginning to calculate the projected number of magazine covers we could generate from the strips of approved color images in my lap. As she drove along Sunset, I was wondering how Billy and I were going to let the world know about what we had. There was no Internet in those days. No faxes. It was one thing to have the pictures and quite another thing to contact every editor in the world, and it was still another thing to sell them. I wasn’t worried about
Paris Match
, and with Tom Blau arriving the next day, I felt I was on the right road. I kept thinking about
Life
magazine. It was my dream to land a cover, and I was sure that one of the pictures could make that happen.
Life
was a deal I would make myself.
    “Are you here, Larry?” Marilyn asked.
    “I’m not a champagne person,” I replied.
    “How can anybody not like champagne?” she asked, laughing a little sarcastically.
    Not responding to her question, I asked one of my own. “When did you start liking champagne?”
    “Let’s see, I think when Norma Jeane got married, she had a little,” Marilyn replied, referring to her