“Clothes are the enemy!” a waitress tells Tom Ewell’s hapless and lusty Richard Sherman in The Seven Year Itch. “Without clothes, there’d be no sickness and no war!” There also would be no 52-foot-tall billboard above Loew’s State Theatre picturing Marilyn Monroe and her wind-blown white dress—which seared the image into the collective consciousness of passersby on 45th and Broadway, and transformed it into a lasting piece of American iconography.
That “shot seen around the world,” as The Hollywood Reporter columnist Irving Hoffman described it at the time, was the brainchild of one of Monroe’s favorite photographers, Sam Shaw. Though Shaw died in 1999, his daughters Edie and Meta Shaw and his granddaughter Melissa Stevens have gathered his posthumous collection of Monroe photographs, memories, and ephemera for Dear Marilyn: The Unseen Letters and Photographs, publishing this month from ACC Art Books.
Shaw grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and spent his early career working as a courtroom artist and political cartoonist. He moved on to photojournalism and eventually set photography, meeting Monroe for the first time while shooting postproduction stills for Panic in the Streets, directed by Elia Kazan, in 1950. Monroe, Shaw writes, was Kazan’s “sweetheart” during the filming of Kazan’s 1952 Viva Zapata!, and Shaw took her photo as a favor for the director. In the book, he remembers her wearing his own sports shirt, knotted at the waist, with a pair of the signature jeans she picked up at an Army Navy store on Western Avenue in Los Angeles. Monroe told him she’d wear her jeans into the ocean and let them dry in the sun so they’d fit her body.
While those photographs are lost to the maw of time (or possibly, as Shaw posits, to the personal collection of Edward Steichen, who was then MoMA’s curator of photography), the encounter kicked off a decade-long friendship and creative partnership. Shaw would capture Monroe during some of her most pivotal moments both on and off the clock: “lovely, joyous moments in the prime of her life,” he writes in the introduction to his images. We see Monroe beaming while on the phone with Arthur Miller, before he became her third husband; the pair of them at their Connecticut home (images that served as source imagery for corresponding scenes in Netflix’s 2022 Blonde, starring Ana de Armas); Monroe in Richard Avedon’s studio; Monroe at the premiere of The Prince and the Showgirl at Radio City Music Hall, giddily emerging from a bubble bath on set, and applying false eyelashes backstage.
