MARILYN BEFORE: The Brown-Haired Girl Who Lived Over a Garage
“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
(Published in May 1988. William Carroll died in 2014 at the age of 98.)
By Gregory N. Joseph
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, brown-haired, 19-year-old model in the pictures was: Norma Jeane Dougherty, still several years away from metamorphosing into the platinum legend Marilyn Monroe, the screen’s greatest sex symbol.
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, who died in 1962 at the age of 36 of a barbiturate overdoes, still the topic of debate as to whether it was accidental or suicide. “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.”
