MARILYN BEFORE: The Brown-Haired Girl Who Lived Over a Garage

William Carroll with photos he took of 19-year-old Norma Jeane Dougherty in 1945, hiring her to pose for $20 a day. She soon went on to become Marilyn Monroe, film’s greatest sex symbol and a cultural icon who defined an era.

“I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.” — Marilyn Monroe

(The core article was published in May 1988. William Carroll died in 2014 at the age of 98.)

By Gregory N. Joseph

“Please don’t make me a joke,” Marilyn Monroe reportedly pleaded with an interviewer toward the end of her life, signaling a tragic self awareness of how she had spiraled downward from the heights in the early 1950s when she was described as “the atomic blonde of the screen” to a point a short decade later when she was looked upon as the quintessential example of all that is wrong with Hollywood and fame, fired from film projects, derisively imitated, avoided by celebrities who had once raced to tap into her glamourous popularity, and shunned by a public and press who had once blindly venerated her screen image without taking the time to learn — or care — about who she really was.

Cinematographer Leon Shamroy, who filmed her first screen test in 1946, said she was like “sex on a piece of film.” Her friend, the “In Cold Blood” author Truman Capote, described her as a “platinum sex-explosion.” And so it went. The breathy delivery, the lustrous ruby-red lips, the alluring wide eyes and extended arms that were inevitably interpreted as an overt attempt at seduction, and hovering above it all, platinum blonde hair so outrageously stunning that it seemed to punctuate and validate our perception not only of who she was, but how she deserved to be regarded. It was deemed an unholy trade-off between a young woman who sought and achieved fame and those who could say anything they wanted about her, and did.

Books have been written about her and movie “biographies” and documentaries have been produced purporting to tell her real story. It’s nothing new. In the early 1990s, while attending an event for television critics in Los Angeles, I skipped a press conference featuring her first husband intended to promote yet another film about her life. It’s exhausting. And in so many ways, wrong. But it will continue.

But perhaps my thinking was, and is, shaped by an interview with someone who met her very early on in her life, before she even had a Hollywood career. He claimed not to have followed her rise to fame, or for that matter, if he could be believed, even to have noticed it.

IN 1967, WILLIAM CARROLL FOUND in his desk old slides and photographs that he had not looked at since 1945 — the year he shot them for camera-store counter displays.

For the first time, he realized who the fledgling, doe-eyed, caramel-brown-haired, 19-year-old model who posed for him in the pictures was: Norma Jeane Dougherty, still several years away from metamorphosing into the platinum-blonde screen legend Marilyn Monroe (“Marilyn” came from the late Broadway star Marilyn Miller, and “Monroe” was her mother’s maiden name), the quintessential sex siren of her day and a defining symbol of post-World War II America in all its optimism, abundance and kitschy excess, a sweet-and-sour cocktail of contradiction that conspired to deny her of the recognition she deserved as an actress of deceptive depth whose talent would finally be celebrated years after her passing at a tragically young age (she died at the age of 36 in 1962 from a barbiturate overdose — whether it was accidental or suicide remains a topic of debate). In short, she was a one-of-a-kind with many failed imitators then and now, a true original whose uniqueness has withstood the test of time.

Even upon making the discovery, Carroll — a 73-year-old San Marcos resident who, incredibly, had never seen a Monroe film — didn’t fathom the value of the shots, and misplaced them for another four years.

It was not until reading of the sale of other Monroe photos at Christie’s auction house in London last summer that Carroll thought perhaps his pictures might be worth something.

Indeed.

On June 21, Christie’s East in New York will auction all of his Norma Jeane work at a price starting at $500 per picture, according to Carroll. That’s 96 color slides and seven black-and-white photos and negatives (all of that group he could find). Purchasers also will get copyrights.

Except for the few pictures used to advertise the auction, none ever has been published and only one was used briefly in the camera-store display.

“For the last 15 years,” Carroll said, almost proudly, hooking a thumb toward the desk in his study, “they’ve been in my drawer.”

Carroll, a former West Coast editor of Automotive News and a one-time free-lance photographer whose work appeared in Look and other magazines, claims he isn’t selling the pictures to make money. He won’t say how much he’s making on the auction, only that Christie’s will receive “less than 20 percent” of the sale price.

“I’m not starving,” said Carroll, who runs his own small publishing company and most recently was the publisher of three community papers in North County (The San Marcos Outlook, The Lake San Marcos Outlook, and Business & Industrial Outlook, all of which he sold).

“I just had no need for the shots, and thought somebody else might like to have them,” he said. “I thought Marilyn Monroe enthusiasts might have more interest in them. They make no difference to me.”

Back in 1945, Carroll owned an Ansco-Color film processing and printing laboratory in Los Angeles and was searching for a model to appear in a color-print card when Monroe was recommended by two of his photographer customers, Potter Hewith and David Conover. Conover’s early Monroe shots were published in a 1981 book, “Finding Marilyn,” and some were sold at the Christie’s auction in London last year, attracting Carroll’s attention.

“As far as I know, mine was only her third shoot (after those of Conover and Hewith),” Carroll said. “And all three took place the same month — August of 1945. It was not a rarity those days to recommend a new model. It was really nothing out of the ordinary.”

He phoned Monroe to discuss the photo session. After she questioned him carefully to make sure he was a genuine photographer, Carroll, who lived in Manhattan Beach at the time, arranged to pick up Monroe at her West Los Angeles apartment.

He found the apartment, over a garage. As he turned into the driveway, he saw a door open above and “a pleasantly well-built girl” — Monroe — waving her hand at him, ready to go. “She was on time,” Carroll recalled, “contrary to what you may have read in later years about her.”

Monroe scrutinized him as they drove in Carroll’s 1941 Mercury “woodie” station wagon, and discussed the photos to be taken. She advised Carroll that the shots should not concentrate on swimsuits, because that might offend his “mom-and-pop” customers.

He noticed her wedding ring and they began talking about their private lives. She was still married to James E. Dougherty; she had quit school at 16 to marry him. The union would be over by the following year.

Carroll, who had just gone through a painful divorce, was very sympathetic. But what was said between him and Monroe will never be known — he won’t divulge the content of their chat, even today, just that it related to their respective marital problems.

“What I remember about her problems are her personal affairs,” Carroll said in an uncharacteristic surge of irritation. “What she said to me was private, and will stay that way.”

Shooting took place three miles north of Santa Monica at Castle Rock, about 20 feet above Pacific Coast Highway (the rock is no longer there). Monroe, at her own suggestion, changed clothes on the beach in a tiny opening in the face of the bluff.

She was a natural in front of the camera, Carroll said, as she moved into fresh poses so quickly that she seemed to be reading his mind.

At one point, his camera jammed. Monroe handed him a pair of her woolen slacks, which he put together with his jacket to fashion an improvised “dark room.” Under that, he was able to open the camera and fix the film while protecting most of it from the sunlight (some rays bled through, which is evident by the yellow cast on a few slides).

By the end of the day — after time out for a lunch of a couple of hamburgers, fries and malts — Carroll and Monroe were friendly and relaxed with each other.

He paid her $20 for the day and drove her home.

He never saw her again. He sent her copies of some of the pictures, but never received a response.

“Nothing I’ve seen or read about her in the years since is close to what I remember of that girl on the beach 43 years ago,” Carroll said of Monroe. “She was just a delightful young woman.”

Carroll — who said he doesn’t plan to go to the auction because “I don’t think my presence would help anyone buy a Marilyn Monroe picture” — confided that he may have other early pictures of stars that he doesn’t remember.

“My brother asked me what I ever did with my Jayne Mansfield photographs,” Carroll said, “but I don’t recall ever taking any Jayne Mansfield pictures. Maybe I did.”

Some of the photos that William Carroll took of a young Norma Jeane Doughterty as she frolicked on the beach near Santa Monica, Calif., in August of 1945. He paid her $20 for the day’s work. Seventeen years later to the month, as the iconic blonde movie star Marilyn Monroe, she died at the age of 36 of a barbiturate overdose. Whether it was accidental or suicide is still the subject of much debate.

Marilyn Monroe with her first husband, James Dougherty. He had been a big man on campus in high school, impressing her, and they began dating when she was 15. He was five years older. They married just after her 16th birthday in 1942. They divorced in 1946.

On June 26, 1953, to publicize the upcoming release of their film “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Marilyn Monroe and co-star Jane Russell set their handprints, footprints and signatures in cement for Hollywood posterity in the famous courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.

Marilyn Monroe in a celebrated scene from the film “The Seven Year Itch” (1955), 10 years after she was photographed by William Carroll. Monroe was then at the pinnacle of her popularity and the image transcended film, emblematic of post-World War II American culture. The film’s director and co-screenwriter, Billy Wilder, told me that Monroe’s husband at the time, former New York Yankees baseball star Joe DiMaggio, was standing off-camera when this scene was filmed and was furious. “He slapped her around at home that night,” Wilder said. The couple divorced soon thereafter, less than a year after they were married.

Caricature of Marilyn Monroe in “The Seven Year Itch” by Al Hirschfeld (1903–2003).

“Bus Stop” (1956) finally brought Marilyn Monroe respect as more than a sex symbol. Handpicked by her after studying at New York’s Actors Studio and directed by Joshua Logan from William Inge’s play, the film boasted a first-class cast that included Don Murray, Arthur O’Connell, Betty Field, Eileen Heckart, Robert Bray, Hope Lange and Hans Conried. A comedy-drama, it was a marked departure for her and brought her a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress in a musical or comedy. Murray was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. The film, which many regard as her best screen work, was a box office success.

Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe in Billy Wilder’s classic gender-bending screwball comedy “Some Like it Hot” (1959). Monroe received top billing (see the poster below).

Billy Wilder directing Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like it Hot.” Stories about her tardiness, insecurities, stage fright, and need for numerous takes on the film have become part of Hollywood legend, as have tales about struggles between her and Wilder regarding his direction and her interpretation of the role. Despite the many travails, in the end it was what ended up on the screen that counted: She earned a Golden Globe Award as Best Actress in a Leading Role-Musical or Comedy for her performance as Sugar Kane, the vocalist and ukulele player in an all-female band that musicians Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) have joined in drag to flee gangsters after witnessing the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre, and the film has been named one of the best of all time in polls.

I profiled Billy Wilder, interviewing him at his office in Beverly Hills, and then served as host of “An Afternoon With” him during festivities in San Diego to mark the 25th anniversary of “Some Like It Hot,” which was partially shot at nearby Coronado. Although he had been critical of Monroe in other interviews, he was suprisingly muted and protective of her in our conversations.

Marilyn Monroe, her career and personal life by then in tatters, performed at a Democratic fundraiser for President John F. Kennedy at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962, famously singing “Happy Birthday” to him so seductively that it served to amplify rumors of an affair between the two. She died less than three months later, on Aug. 4, at the age of 36, inside her home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angleles, the victim of a barbiturate overdose.

Marilyn Monroe’s last screen work was the unfinished movie “Something’s Got to Give,” co-starring Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. A remake of the 1940 screwball comedy “My Favorite Wife” starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, the production was beset by her personal problems that led to her firing. Other actresses including Kim Novak, Shirley MacLaine and Lee Remick were being discussed as a replacement, but Martin, who had final approval of the casting, refused to continue without Monroe, which resulted in her being rehired. Filming was set to continue in October of 1962, but she died that August. The entire production subsequently was redone with new leads — Doris Day, James Garner and Polly Bergen — and released in 1963 under the title “Move Over, Darling.” The remade film was one of the largest hits of the year for 20th Century Fox.

Marilyn Monroe’s crypt at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles on the 60th anniversary of her death. Over the course of 20 years, her former husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio, had over 18,000 fresh, long-stemmed roses sent to her burial site. The roses came from Parisian Florist, a flower shop on Sunset Boulevard that Monroe liked.

Marilyn Monroe’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, located at 6774 Hollywood Boulevard. It was unveiled at a ceremony on Feb. 8, 1960.

Marilyn Monroe with her second husband, Joe DiMaggio. The couple married in 1954 and separated nine months later.

Love letter to Monroe from then-husband DiMaggio. It fetched $78,125 at auction in 2014.

Marilyn Monroe with her third and last husband, playwright (“Death of a Salesman”), screenwriter and essayist Arthur Miller. He wrote the screenplay for her final completed film, “The Misfits” (1961), in which she starred with Clark Gable (whose last film it also was), Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach and Thelma Ritter. Despite the excellent cast, fine performances by all, a great director in John Huston, and Miller’s script, which was based on one of his short stories, the film was not a commercial success. Monroe and Miller, who married in 1956, divorced in early 1961 after filming wrapped.