Marilyn Monroe’s Nudes Made Her Notorious. “Surprisingly Good” Acting Made Her a Star. (original) (raw)

“My grandfather’s diaries mostly offer a kind of analysis of Marilyn after the Racquet Club [photographs]," says Joshua John Miller while poring over the pages, “and I suppose that indicates the distance he felt from her in the transition to the 1950s.” By 1951, if Bruno Bernard wanted to see Marilyn Monroe, he had to wait in line to buy a ticket—not that he had much time to spare. The turn of the decade found him working incessantly, meshing so comfortably with an American live-to-work ethic that, as Miller puts it, “my grandmother [Ruth] had suspicions that the impulse wasn’t based solely on his love of photography.

His ambition not just to succeed but to win was so immense. And regarding Marilyn during this period, well, Bernard was happy for her the way you’re happy for anyone you love when you see them succeeding, even if some part of him felt sidelined and [on] the outside.” The Norma Jeane–shaped hole left in Bernard’s life was widened by the reality that Monroe was visible just about everywhere else. For a place all too keen to forget the old in favor of new stars, new mandates, and new trends, Hollywood had a peculiar way of never letting Bernard forget her.

Marilyn Monroe poolside at the Palm Springs Racquet Club, 1949.Photographer Bruno Bernard

The shift in American attitudes regarding sex had been a long time coming. 1948 saw the scandalous publication of Alfred Kinsey’s study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which blew open the conceit that homosexual activity was rare or aberrant. Five years later, a counterpart dedicated to female sexual behavior would prove just as eye-popping. (Lesbians exist and always have!) The growing apathy toward big-screen entertainment was also owed to the patina of all-American wholesomeness that studios imposed on their stables of stars, and the nothing-to-see-here style of movie journalism was wearing thin. In a Variety article, actress Joanne Dru of All the King’s Men (1949) diagnosed the problem bluntly. “People like to think of stars as from some other planet,” Dru mused, “[and] the minute [audiences] know there are a lot of kiddies around the house and that [stars] are wiping their noses, the glamour is gone.”

If Dru’s words were correct and ticket buyers were starved for extraterrestrial glamour, then Monroe fit the bill and then some. Her brief appearance in The Asphalt Jungle had made moviegoers sit up and take notice of not only her looks but the dynamite she smuggled into her line delivery. First seen curled up like a child on Louis Calhern’s couch, she’s luminous, the first truly beautiful sight in John Huston’s hard-as-nails crime drama. She sits up and calls Louis Calhern’s character “Uncle”—a man who, even the film remarks, is old enough to be her grandfather—and kisses him for a rather long time. In short order, audiences discover she’s not exactly his niece, and the scene’s kinkiness remains shocking even today. Angela is slinky, pliable, and hungry to please, all but tearing up the Hays Code without lifting a finger. The Asphalt Jungle introduced Monroe as a true bombshell, an object that men desired even if it could kill them.

Monroe raised eyebrows on the Fox lot for the ways she played into the hype. As press agent Roy Croft once related to Bernard:

Handling Marilyn’s publicity is about as easy as guarding a bag of fleas. At photo sessions[,] I can never let her out of my sight for fear of her striptease inclinations. The minute she spies a press photographer on our lot, she lifts her skirt and falls into a cheesecake pose. I anticipate with some trepidation the appearance of the first bottomless photo.

Monroe went from notable to notorious when, in 1952, journalist Aline Mosby first reported that a pinup calendar—featuring a ravishing blonde nude spread across red velvet—was in fact a photograph of the burgeoning star. The “Golden Dreams” calendar, a mainstay at autobody shops and dive bars across the country, was suddenly in high demand. A panicked Fox brass demanded that Monroe deny she was in fact the calendar’s subject, but she refused to adhere to a narrative that made her a victim or fallen woman. She declared that she’d posed nude at a time she was “broke and hungry” and that it wasn’t something she’d do again, given the option.

Monroe posing against life-size sheet music for Anthony’s song “Marilyn,” 1952.Photographer Bruno Bernard

“According to my mother, Ruth initially asked Bruno if he had taken the picture,” Miller says with a laugh. “Which he didn’t, of course, and he was shocked that she’d even suspect it! He never did nudes at that time. He was so concerned with protecting Marilyn’s image early on.”

Monroe handled the PR fracas with grace: Photographer Tom Kelley had been a gentleman; his wife, Natalie, had been present the entire time; and the whole shoot had taken about three hours. The unspoken obscenity of the incident was that fifty dollars was all Monroe ever profited from a calendar that, thanks to reprints, moved several million copies by 1955. Her regret-nothing stance simultaneously gained her fans and made her a bête noire for the Catholic Legion of Decency.

From afar, Bernard loved how Marilyn navigated the whole affair, marveling at the photo no doubt orchestrated by the young woman with the canniest modeling instincts he’d ever encountered. “In Marilyn’s case, the fluke of her posing in the nude for a calendar at a time when nudity was a strict taboo in Hollywood triggered her meteoric rise from the valley of the no-name players to the peak of a universally popular sex symbol. Marilyn’s nude, however, was a horse of a different color. And beautiful color at that: The pink complexion of her translucent skin harmoniously set off against a bright red velvet backdrop. The bold diagonal composition achieved an instantaneous visual impact. It was an erotic incarnation of joie de vivre in its barest form,” said Bernard.

Monroe posing with navy man and Ray Anthony, 1952.Photographer Bruno Bernard

She may have seemed dewy soft in that calendar, but in 1952 her range expanded thanks to her turn as a deranged babysitter wreaking havoc in Don’t Bother to Knock, a performance one critic called “surprisingly good”—the critic’s opinion betraying a misogynist precept that someone so, well, sexy couldn’t possibly have talent. Still, it was Monroe’s appearance in the Technicolor noir Niagara in 1953 that upped the ante on the peculiar frenzy she aroused in the human male. In Rose Loomis, the wife of an impotent war veteran who schemes his murder with her hunky lover, Monroe’s sweetness is weaponized to great advantage: _Niagara_’s power resides in the dissonance conjured from the relish Monroe displays in playing a conniving hussy. Even Fox chief Darryl Zanuck (never a true fan of Monroe’s) agreed, though an interoffice casting memo found him using less-than-charitable wording:

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation Interoffice Correspondence—Jan. 22[,] 1952

From: Darryl Zanuck

To: Lew Schreiber (CC: C. Brackett, H.Hathaway, R. Klune)

For [the role of] Rose, I definitely want to use Marilyn Monroe. Her performance in DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK with [actor Richard] Widmark brands her, curiously enough, as one of the best young dramatic actresses to have come up recently and she is just ideal for the role of this slut.

Tasteless language aside, Zanuck’s memo signified a newfound confidence in Monroe’s value to Fox that he’d denied her only years before; Don’t Bother to Knock had brought in 1.5millioningrossreceipts(1.5 million in gross receipts (1.5millioningrossreceipts(18 million in today’s dollars), and Niagara would go on to make nearly twice as much.

Monroe, flanked by press and musicians, 1952.Photographer Bruno Bernard

A cursory sampling of correspondence following _Niagara_’s release hints at the erotic guilt the movie and Monroe elicited from viewers. Even fans of Niagara wrote letters that somehow confessed their own repression while insisting they had nothing to be ashamed of, either. Dr. Theodore Sauer, a chiropodist from Celina, Ohio, wrote:

By profession I am a specialist of the lower extremities, and I . . . feel qualified to comment on Miss Monroe’s gait [in _Niagara_]. If her gait, as such, is being foisted on the audience for its box office appeal, permit me to suggest a reconsideration toward something more within the realm of natural. As seen in the film, such a gait borders on the pathological, and as such would almost be calssified [sic] among the many abnormal gaits, such as those seen in our mental and neurological institutions.”

Dr. Sauer would know: He’d seen Niagara three times (for purely medical reasons, no doubt). Bernard watched with a mixture of pride and astonishment as his friend achieved a stardom stranger than either of them had dreamed, writing, “Marilyn had turned into a sex symbol of unparalleled dimensions, a myth which everyone interpreted according to his own tender or torrid thoughts. MM became the number one dream girl of the American male, the sort of sex symbol that made the lonely GI Joe swoon and gave him something very concrete worth fighting for instead of “making the world safe for democracy.” When MM was flown to the boys in Korea, she generated more heat there than an atomic bomb explosion on the Bikini Atoll islands. In the solid citiizen type of husband on the home front, she evoked often suppressed unproper thoughts that made him want to beat up his wife. And in the sweethearts and wives who became “displaced persons,” she aroused thoughts which are not communicable even in a free press.”

Monroe’s feelings regarding her sudden ubiquity were more muted, if telling; Adam Victor, in his book The Encyclopedia of Marilyn Monroe, quotes her as saying, “I’m thrilled of course. Everything’s so wonderful—people are so kind—but I feel that it’s all happening to someone right next to me. I’m close—I can feel it—I can hear it—but it isn’t really me.”

In an act of synergy, on August 3, 1952 the musician Ray Anthony’s threw an event for his new single, “Marilyn,” featuring Monroe in person, photographed by Bruno Bernard. If Bernard was looking for clues as to whether his friend’s life had become a circus, Anthony’s party—which included a band, navy men, a chopper, and, for some reason, famed canine star Lassie—provided solid evidence. The press event, loosely titled “Meet Marilyn,” found the actress at the center of a tornado of photographers. Bernard had made a point of seeing his friend’s films, but when he first saw Norma Jeane descending the staircase to Anthony’s backyard spread, it occurred to him that this was the first time he was seeing Marilyn Monroe—this Marilyn, resplendent with notoriety—in the flesh. “He was surrounded by other photographers jockeying for eye contact,” Miller says, “and they were shouting her name like an incantation. Obviously, he’d watched her star rise, but it was another thing to be in the middle of it.” As Bernard wrote, “Marilyn seemed to enjoy the controversy which brought reams of new publicity. On one occasion . . . Her Majesty paraded in a low-cut body clinging outfit which was held up by sheer willpower. When the photographs later revealed the “look Ma, no bra” feature, Marilyn chirped with wide-eyed innocence and hurt dignity, “How could I know that some low brows would shoot me from high-camera angles?”

Monroe’s methodology—make their heads explode, then claim astonishment at the carnage in your wake—was well in place but not yet perfected by the time she spotted Bernard in the crowd of photographers as she descended the stairs to the bandstand on the lawn. Whether the relative innocence she displays in these images is owed to her seeing Bernard or to the event itself is impossible to tell. With Mickey Rooney at her side, she sings along to Anthony’s tune “Marilyn” (which did not prove as lasting as Niagara); she smiles with servicemen; she signs autographs and mingles politely with studio types.

Monroe, seated for interview, 1952.Photographer Bruno Bernard

The most telling shots Bernard took that day are a trio of close-ups where the switch on the Marilyn Monroe “setting” is briefly turned off. Seated at a patio table, she seems relatively unencumbered by onlookers for a moment and gazes directly into Bernard’s camera lens. It’s tempting to think of her expressions of bemusement, fatigue, and astonishment as a reflection of her photographer’s. “My mother [Susan] did ask [Bernard] about these shots because they’re so unusual,” Miller says, “and apparently, he said something like ‘Hello, Norma Jeane,’ and she replied, ‘Who’s she?’ in a kind of winking way.” The dialogue accompanies the three snaps fittingly. Monroe drops the sex bomb look, one hand pulling her facial expression into rueful normality. It’s the face of a woman coming to terms with her newfound status as a receptacle for men’s desire and fear alike. “These photos overall communicate that while her life had gotten kind of wild, things were still okay,” says Miller.

When it came to ambition, Monroe and Bernard were indeed a kindred kind, and for a moment in 1952, their personal agendas hummed in perfect sync. “He never tried to sell these [more intimate Monroe] images to any magazine,” Miller says, looking over the unpublished photos, “and of course they wouldn’t have worked for the kind of [bombshell-focused] press she was getting anyway.”

In these images, Monroe swaps hyper-glam for vulnerability. The party at Ray Anthony’s home would be the last time she would consciously allow Norma Jeane to shine through to Bernard; by their next session the following year, the sex bomb had assumed full charge of Mission Control. Whatever incipient worries Norma Jeane held about what was happening to Marilyn, that person “right next” to her—and worry there was, Bernard would spot it only later, in a quiet darkroom.

Excerpt from the new book THE MARILYN MONROE CENTURY: From Norma Jeane to Icon—A Story in Photographs (Abrams) by Dr. Bruno Bernard with Joshua John Miller and Mark Fortin, on-sale May 19. © 2026 Joshua John Miller

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