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

given name.
    After a pause Marilyn continued as she drove toward her home. “I never wanted to be Marilyn—it just happened. Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane.”
    When we got back to her house, she dropped me off at my car, said good night, and pulled away without looking back. I stood there wondering how she was going to spend the rest of the night.

    When I got home, I found Billy there, having coffee and chatting with Judi. He was waiting impatiently to find out how it had gone. He also said that he’d figured out how to publicize the photos and get the world’s attention.
    “Let’s give the story to Joe Hyams,” he suggested.
    I knew Joe, who sometimes wrote for
Time
magazine, and I realized immediately that Billy was onto something.
Time
wasn’t only huge in America. It also had a European edition and an Asian edition. More important, every editor of every foreign publication read
Time
.
    “We give
Time
one of the lesser pictures, make sure our names are in the photo credit, and the world will come knocking on our door,” Billy said. And that was what we did that Saturday night, just in time to make the issue that would be published worldwide thirty-six hours later.

    The next day, Sunday, Tom Blau arrived from London, and when he came to my studio, he was still bleary-eyed. Billy and I showed him the eleven-by-fourteen-inch black-and-white prints that I already had made. They got his attention immediately.
    I followed up with my concerns. We had to have a worldwide release date, I said. We couldn’t take the chance of the pictures appearing in
Paris Match
and, say, some Italian magazine copying them out of
Paris Match
and publishing them five days later. We had to impose a condition of sale: the first magazine in each country purchasing publication rights had to publish on a certain date, not before. I told Blau I didn’t have a date, because I knew I needed timeto see the picture editor of
Life
in New York. In my mind nobody would be allowed to publish before
Life
.
    “That’s impossible,” Blau protested. “Nobody will agree. We’ll lose sales that way.”
    “We will set our clock around
Life
,” I said. “When
Life
publishes the pictures, that will be the release date. Everyone else will have to publish after
Life
does, not before. That’s it,” I said. “This will make our pictures more exclusive, and we can raise the price, make publications bid against each other.”
    Billy chimed in, adding, “Any sales lost will be recouped by the exclusivity.” We were ganging up on Blau.
    “There’s no choice,” I half lied. “This is one of Marilyn’s two conditions. The other is that no magazine can include anything about Elizabeth Taylor in the same issue.”
    Blau was used to representing seasoned, internationally known photographers who trusted him to make their business deals. I think he was surprised to find a twenty-five-year-old brash enough to insist that he fly to L.A., bold enough to insist on imposing conditions of sale, and daring in his belief that he was the bigger expert on how to handle these photos. I was actually just learning on the job, but it was a good plan.
    Blau really had no choice. He even agreed to Globe’s selling the set of pictures in a few countries. The next step was to let Marilyn know that Billy and I had decided tocombine our pictures. I called Pat Newcomb and explained what we were up to and how it would work to Marilyn’s benefit. She understood, she said. She had one request: Marilyn had asked to see the color shots again.
    I went about ordering enough sets of prints and duplicate transparencies for each of the countries we’d be selling to, and I prepared for my meeting the next day in Fox’s publicity department.
    By the time Billy and I arrived at Perry Lieber’s office at Fox,
Time
magazine’s advance copies, with Joe’s story and a small image of Marilyn and the director poolside, were out. We told Perry that we’d decided to go