Posted: 18.02.2008 at 12.17
The article to go with the pictures;
In 1962, photographer Bert Stern shot a series of photos of Marilyn Monroe that have collectively come to be known as The Last Sitting. Taken during several boozy sessions at the Hotel Bel-Air, the photographs are arguably the most famous images ever captured of Americas most famous actress: Monroe, sleepy-eyed and naked, sips from a Champagne glass, enacts a fan dance of sorts with various diaphanous scarves, romps with erotic playfulness on a bed of white linens. Six weeks after she had posed, Monroe was found dead of an apparent barbiturate overdose.
The photos endure partly as artifactsas the last visible evidence of the living woman (a legacy reinforced by Sterns decision to publish the contact sheets Monroe herself had crossed out in red marker). But the pictures are also remarkable for the raw truths they seem to reveal. In them, we see an actress whose comedic talents were overshadowed by her sex appeal, a woman who is cannily aware of her pinup status, yet is also beginning to show her 36 years. In many shots, she is obviously drunk. This was an unhappy time for Monroe. Notorious for her on-set antics, she had been publicly lambasted by Billy Wilder after Some Like It Hot, then fired from the production of Somethings Got to Give; shed endured two recent divorces and, in 1961, a brief stint in a psychiatric ward.
Stern excavated and preserved the poignant humanity of the real womanbeautiful, but also fragile, needy, flawedfrom the monumental sex symbol. In our armored, airbrushed age, his achievement feels almost revolutionary.
Forty-six years later, Stern has revisited his classic shots with Lindsay Lohan, another actress whose prodigious fame is not quite commensurate with her professional achievements. Stern, who shot the photos on film rather than digitally, told me he was interested in Lohan because he suspected she had a lot more depth to her than one might assume from those teenage movies. Indeed, many in the film industry believe that Lohan has yet to pursue projects equal to her gifts. Without putting too fine a point on it, you might say Lohan has, like Monroe, a knack for courting the tabloids and tripping up her career. (Readers will remember that Lohan had her own Billy Wilder moment two summers ago on the set of Georgia Rule.) Stern said the project also grew out of his interest in controversial women, or bad girls, like Britney, Paris, and Lindsay. Monroe was, in a sense, the original tabloid queen.
Though Lohans willingness to reprise the photos might seem a sly nod to her scandalous past, the actress offered a straightforward explanation. I didnt have to put much thought into it. I mean, Bert Stern? Doing a Marilyn shoot? When is that ever going to come up? Its really an honor. During a break in the daylong shoot, Lohan sat cross-legged on a bed in the four-room suite and spoke to me, in that familiar throaty voice with its staccato rhythms, about her abiding obsession with Monroe. Her interest took root a decade ago with multiple viewings of Niagara during the London filming of The Parent Trap. She has even purchased an apartment where Marilyn once lived. If you saw my house I have a lot of Marilyn stuff, she told me, including a huge painting of Monroe.
Its eerie, Lohan said of the painting, a Christmas gift, because its this picture of her, and its kind of cartoony, and theres a big bottle of pills next to her, and theyve fallen over. Lohan called Monroes suicide tragic, and then added, elliptically, You know, its also tragic what just recently happened to someone else. I asked whether she was referring to Heath Ledger. She nodded: They are both prime examples of what this industry can do to someone. Why some and not others, I asked, since it has often seemed that the thrice-rehabbed Lohan might meet a similar fate. Lohan replied with a flicker of annoyance: I dont know. Im not them. But I sure as hell wouldnt let it happen to me. Still, one wonders whether Lohans participation in this project, given all the spooky parallels, isnt the photographic equivalent of moving into a haunted house. (Which, in fact, she may have already done.)
Lohan viewed the shoot as a theatrical performance, as a chance to inhabit the role of an idol. I wanted to portray the book and get it point-on as much as I could, to bring it back to life, she said. Hence the strict mimesis: scarves, nudity, and all. Not more than fifteen minutes had passed since shed arrived, and already she had agreed to take her clothes off! Stern writes of Monroe in his swaggering introduction to The Complete Last Sitting, the book in which all 2,571 photos have been collected. He might have said the same about Lohan. I was comfortable with it, the actress remarked of the nudity (though she did confess to doing 250 crunches the previous night). All made up, in winged eyeliner and shellacked blonde wig, Lohan, who has returned to her former voluptuousness, at times appeared more Marilyn than the thin, somewhat diminished woman of the original Marilyn photos. It was very similar, déjà vu you might say, like revisiting an old street, said Stern.
The original photos, however, were distinguished by an almost claustrophobic intimacy between photographer and muse. In the first session, Stern persuaded the entourage of stylists to leave him alone with Monroe. The shoot thus took on the symbolic (if not the actual) contours of a liaison. The rise of the celebrity industrial complex has rendered this sort of tense pas de deux all but impossible. At the Lohan shoot, the crowd included Lohans manager, her security guard, and her younger sister, Ali; a makeup artist and assistant, a hairstylist and assistant, a stylist, a manicurist, a sentry to watch the borrowed diamonds; Stern, his manager, and two photo assistants. Lohan and Stern worked in an adjoining room, while the rest of us hovered outside like groupies at a backstage entrance.
Here is a woman who is giving herself to the public, Lohan said, about the Monroe photos, when we spoke the next day by phone. Shes saying, Look, youve taken a lot from me, so why dont I give it to you myself. Shes taking control back. Like any tabloid veteran, Lohan understands the potency of a photograph, and that the best way to respond to a society that views you only as an image might just be on its own terms.
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