Lawrence Schiller recalls Marilyn Monroe’s final shoot for ‘Something’s Got to Give’

May 30, 2020


Marilyn Monroe would’ve been 94 on Monday, and the photographer behind her final shoot spoke to Page Six for the occasion.

Lawrence Schiller was photographing the star on the set of what would be her last project, “Something’s Got to Give,” in 1962. Monroe hatched a plan for some jaw-dropping photos. “She said one day in her home, looking at the script… ‘What if I jumped in the swimming pool in this scene and came out with nothing on?” Schiller recalled. But one condition of the shoot was that when Schiller sold the pics, they couldn’t appear in any magazines that also featured Taylor.

“What I came to discover was that she didn’t feel that she was respected and reimbursed for her talent,” he told us. “Marilyn was being paid $125,000 by Fox under her contract, while at the same time, [Taylor] was being paid a million and 10-percent of the box office gross for ‘Cleopatra.’”

Around the same time, he photographed Monroe’s last-ever birthday party. “Nobody knew she was going to get fired three weeks later,” for slipping out of town to infamously sing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. Either way, the pool pics were at major hit. A number of the iconic images are currently being sold by antiques dealer M.S. Rau. Months later, “I saw her the morning she died,” Schiller said.

He went on to become an accomplished producer, director and author.

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