Marilyn Monroe posed for her last photo shoot just weeks before her death at age 36.
An explosive book by author and DailyMail.com columnist Maureen Callahan details how the photo shoot, shot by world-famous photographer Bert Stern, was Marilyn’s “most daring” yet.
In ‘Don’t ask: The Kennedys and the women they destroyed’Callahan writes that Marilyn was “at the peak of her beauty” when Stern captured the photographs for Vogue in June 1962.
Marilyn suffered from intense depression and her use of alcohol and pills was “staggering,” Callahan writes. Eventually, her “persistent inability to get out of bed” caused her to be fired from the set of her latest film, “Something’s Got to Give.”
She “took the public humiliation as a challenge,” says Callahan, “(posing for Stern) naked in bed, with her breasts wrapped in pink tulle.” The focus was on a long, deep scar… the result of recent gallbladder surgery.
Marilyn was “at the peak of her beauty” when Bert Stern captured her last photo shoot (pictured) for Vogue in June 1962.
Marilyn reportedly told Stern that she felt self-conscious about the brand, but he assured her that “a woman is beautiful because of her scars,” a quote she borrowed from famed fashion editor Diana Vreeland.
Marilyn died weeks later after an overdose of barbiturates at her home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. Her body was found by her housekeeper in the early morning of August 5, 1962.
“She was face down on her bed, naked, with her phone still in her hand,” Callahan writes.
As such, Stern’s iconic session was later titled “The Last Session.”
On Sunday, an exclusive extract from Callahan’s new biography, which is published in a major new Mail series, revealed claims that could alter the story about Marilyn’s death.
In particular, Callahan unearthed explosive comments made by Marilyn’s second husband, Joe DiMaggio, years after her death.
DiMaggio banned both President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, who was having simultaneous affairs with Marilyn, from attending his funeral, and later reportedly said, “I always knew who killed her, but I didn’t want to start a revolution.” in this country”. . She told me that someone would kill her, but I stayed silent.
All the Kennedys were conquerors and always got their way. In a hundred years they will have their way.
Bobby visited Marilyn at her Los Angeles home the night she died.
In ‘Don’t Ask: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed’, Callahan writes that the photographs Stern took of Marilyn were the ‘most daring’ of her career, posing naked in bed.
President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby (right) had simultaneous affairs with Marilyn.
“Bobby and Jack discovered that the FBI and CIA had bugged Marilyn’s home and phone line without her knowledge… Bobby wouldn’t leave without the recordings,” Callahan writes.
‘Where the hell is he?’ Bobby is said to have demanded. But Marilyn “had no idea” what she was talking about. Bobby left empty-handed and she died hours later.
After his death, “the FBI was ordered to delete certain phone records (from his home),” Callahan writes. ‘Recovered in the 1980s, Marilyn’s records showed that she had called Bobby’s workplace eight times between June 25 and June 30 (1962)… Reports suggest that she had had an abortion on July 20 and that the baby could have been Bobby’s.’
Callahan also reveals that, in 1985, ABC News had planned to air a television special about the Kennedy brothers’ possible involvement in Marilyn’s death, but, just hours before it was scheduled to air, ABC suddenly pulled the plug. .
Then-ABC News president Roone Arledge, responsible for the documentary’s cancellation, was “an old friend of Ethel Kennedy (Bobby’s wife),” Callahan writes.