Marilyn Monroe in Banff – A Zero Shot Story

This story is for all the great photos we miss when we don’t have our cameras with us…

Marilyn Monroe had an outsize presence in my childhood growing up in Pittsburgh, PA because she was such an important person in my mother’s life.  It all started in Van Nuys High School, where my mother went to high school during WW2, and a girl named Norma Jean Baker moved there as a sophomore in 1941.  My mother said that she wrote a blurb about the pretty new girl for the high school paper.  While I didn’t get the impression they were particularly close at the time, as Marilyn became a mega star she loomed larger and larger – each tiny interaction in the high school corridor became a major event in my mom’s personal history, and she did her best to emulate Marilyn in her appearance and style.

I had two other brushes with people who were close to Marilyn.  One was at the 1993 Four Freedom Awards at the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park where I was seated at Arthur Miller’s table.  That was one of the rare occasions in my adult life when I was truly starstruck; I only had one brief interaction with the great man; a nice Dutch woman who was sat between me and Mr. Miller (and didn’t know who he was) asked me what I thought of the issue of violence in film and television, which was a hot button issue in the Culture War of the moment early in the Clinton Administration.  As she asked, there was a moment of silence around the table and Arthur Miller turned, folded his arms and settled down to hear what I had to say.  I felt myself wilting under the heat of his gaze, and experienced actual sweat breaking out on my upper lip the way Nixon allegedly did under pressure.  I stammered something completely inane and saw him turn away, never to return.  I had been weighed, measured and found wanting.  The evening was still good fun, as I was also sat next to Mr. Miller’s current wife, the distinguished photographer Inge Morath, who was hilarious and very sweet.  She asked me if I was famous before we started to talk, explaining, “I hate these things because you never know if someone is famous.  You can’t talk to anyone because they’ll be offended if you don’t know what they are famous for.”  Satisfying herself that I wasn’t famous, we proceeded to have a great time for the rest of the night, not quite keeping up with a tableful of Kennedys who were raising the roof as Sargent and Eunice Shriver were also being honored for founding the Peace Corps.

However, my favorite Marilyn stories were from a movie I helped make early in my career when I was just out of grad school, James Mangold’s feature directing debut, “Heavy” which had Shelley Winters as one of the leads.  Jim has gone on to have a very successful career as a writer/director and I’ve managed to cobble together a producing career, but we were definitely starting out on the scrappy end of the waterfront.  The movie was so low budget that the producers (I didn’t produce it, but came in to work pro bono to help my dear friend Jim in any way I could) had volunteer interns assigned as cast drivers.  On day 1, Shelley’s driver intern got lost on the way to set.  On day 2 a different driver intern ran out of gas.  On day 3, I was Shelley’s driver, and continued in that capacity for the rest of the show.  Before picking her up for the first time, I stopped by a WalMart that was next to the hotel and picked up some big band cassettes, like Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller, the songs my mother listened to growing up.  As I reflect, while my mother dreamed of being like Marilyn, she succeeded in being much more like Shelley. This was a little trippy for me, but at least I knew what I was dealing with.  That music put Shelley in such a good mood that she always arrived on set happy and ready to go.  And one of my biggest rewards of the show were the morning and evening drives where she told an endless stream of unbelievable Hollywood “war stories” from the golden era, including many from when she was Marilyn Monroe’s roommate.  One of my favorites was about a night on the town when Shelley and Marilyn were introduced to Dylan Thomas, who was described to them as a kind of “cartoonist with words.”  The evening started with Shelley and Marilyn asking Dylan Thomas what he wanted to do in Los Angeles, and him replying, “I’d like to get drunk at a Hollywood party, touch the titties of a starlet, and meet Charlie Chaplin.”  They looked at each other and said, “We can help you with all three.”  The evening ended with them crashing their car into the bushes at William Randolph Hearst’s house where Charlie Chaplin was the guest of honor.

But maybe my favorite story of all was about a day that Shelley and Marilyn were on a golf course in Banff, Alberta, where Marilyn was shooting a film.  The landscape was beautiful, and it was one of the most gorgeous sunsets that Shelley had ever seen.  She said to Marilyn, “Oh, I wish we had our cameras to take a picture!”  And Marilyn said, “Let’s just photograph it in our heads.”  And they stood there for a moment taking the image in.  And forty years later, when Shelley told me that story, she said that she remembered that moment what it looked like better than any other image or moment in her life…

Here’s a couple of favorite Banff sunset photos I took last summer, not far from the Banff Springs golf course.

While doing some research about Marilyn & Shelley’s time in Alberta for this post, I came across a very interesting collection of photographs from that time taken on assignment for Look Magazine by the photographer John Vachon.  It was exciting to see images that were very close in time and location to that memorable moment that Shelley had told me about 30 years ago.  There are even some shots of Marilyn on the Banff Springs Golf Course.  And in another ‘degrees of separation’ from Marilyn, it turns out that John Vachon, who was a photographer for the Farm Security Administration during the New Deal and a longtime staff photographer for Look Magazine, is the father of a friend, Christine Vachon, who has produced some of the best and most important films of the current era.

John Vachon’s photographs have been used here with permission of the estate. Inquiries regarding John Vachon’s photography, including reproduction rights, should be directed to the Library of Congress.

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