A white dress. A subway grate. A billowing skirt. Put them together and you’ve got Marilyn Monroe. Impersonators in Las Vegas follow the formula. In Blonde, the actress Ana de Armas does, too. But there’s a fourth element: the man with the camera who captured what The Hollywood Reporter’s Irving Hoffman once called “the shot seen ’round the world.” Sam Shaw.
Born in New York’s Little Italy in 1912, and raised there, Shaw befriended Monroe on the set of director Elia Kazan’s 1952 Western, Viva Zapata!, starring Marlon Brando. Shaw was on assignment shooting an in-depth photo essay on the making of the film for the men’s magazine Argosy. Monroe was Kazan’s sweetheart. “I too thought she was a beautiful, dumb blonde,” he said of his first impression. He quickly stood corrected.
During their 10-year friendship—which ended in 1962, when Monroe, just 36, died from a barbiturate overdose—Shaw’s photographs pushed past the surface to the woman’s deeper self: from the kittenish bombshell façade to the neglected foster child at her core, barefaced after-hours. “There were many sides to Marilyn,” Shaw explains. “[She] started opening up to me. Never fully, but bits here and there.”
Monroe first came into Shaw’s frame at Kazan’s request. “She’s a good kid,” he said. “Take some photos of her and get her some photo publicity breaks.” Soon, however, she became a lifelong source of inspiration. A high point of the relationship took place in 1954 on the set of Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, when Monroe stood over that subway grate. The rest is, well, the subject of the recently published Dear Marilyn: The Unseen Letters and Photographs.
Assembled by Shaw’s daughters, Meta and Edie, the book gathers their father’s photographs of and letters to Monroe. Dear Marilyn is an ode to friendship, stardom, and the actress’s enduring legacy, 63 years after her death. Shaw put it simply: “She was so photogenic that her photos still keep her alive.” —Carolina de Armas
Carolina de Armas is a Junior Editor at AIR MAIL
