After a one-year hiatus, Intersect Palm Springs is returning to the Palm Springs Convention Center from Thursday, Feb. 12, through Monday, Feb. 16—and one of the most interesting events involves Marilyn Monroe, who would be turning 100 this year.
Renowned photographer, film director and writer Lawrence Schiller will engage in a conversation with Palm Springs Life editorial director Steven Biller, titled “Marilyn and America in the ’60s,” at 3 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 15.
The Independent recently spoke with Schiller, who turned 89 in December, before his return to the desert, where Melissa Morgan Fine Art staged his Marilyn Turns 100 photography exhibit last November. The interview began with a question about Schiller’s remembrances of working with Monroe when he was on assignment from Paris Match magazine to cover the making of the never-finished 1962 film Something’s Got to Give, co-starring Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. A selection of the photographs he created on this assignment will be on display at Intersect Palm Springs.
“With Marilyn, I met her first on a movie called Let’s Make Love, with Yves Montand, which I photographed for Look magazine,” Schiller said. “And then several years later, I received an assignment from Paris Match, the French magazine, to photograph her on the movie Something’s Got to Give.
“You know, I sat once in a T-Bird with her looking at pictures, opposite Schwab’s drugstore, and she held the pictures up to the streetlights. She was somebody who was looking for a certain type of public image to knock Liz Taylor off the cover of the magazines with Richard Burton, because Liz was getting from Fox, at that time in ’62, over a million dollars for a film called Cleopatra, and Marilyn, for the same studio doing Let’s Make Love (back in 1960, had only gotten) $125,000. So she tried to re-negotiate her contract with Fox, and Fox wouldn’t re-negotiate—a deal is a deal. So, she sought other ways of showing the studio that she had as much popularity, and could gain as much publicity as Elizabeth did. That’s what sold movies in those days. We didn’t have the internet; it was ads in magazines, and magazine stories that made movies theater-worthy.”
Monroe died of a drug overdose just a few months later, on Aug. 4, 1962.
“There’s another part to the nice story,” Schiller recalled, “because I told you why Marilyn Monroe wanted to do the pictures. So when she sat and told me that in her home one day … I said to Marilyn, ‘You know, you’ve got a very big problem, if you do this.’ To paraphrase, she says, ‘What’s the problem? You’re not going to get me on the cover of Life magazine?’ And I said, ‘No, the problem is you’re already very famous, Marilyn. If you do this, you’re gonna make me famous.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Don’t be so cocky, Larry; I can fire you in two seconds.’ Of course, she didn’t fire me, and the pictures speak for themselves.”
Schiller was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in December 1936, before moving with his family to the San Diego area in 1943. Larry, as he refers to himself, started garnering awards and professional photography assignments even before the age of 20.
“I was in college in … the late ’50s. I went to a very small school in L.A., only 800 students at that time, out at 79th (Street) and Vermont (Avenue), two buildings,” he said. “The name was called Pepperdine in those days. It’s still Pepperdine, but not the big campus out in Malibu.”
He majored in accounting and business. “My mother and my father pounded into my head that, ‘No matter what your profession is going to be, Larry, you have to understand business,’” Schiller said. “And my mother pounded into my head that I should take accounting and business, and of course, that’s been the foundation, I think, of my entire professional life.”
Schiller said he didn’t take any creative courses at Pepperdine—because the school didn’t offer any.
“But the very first semester, they made me the photo editor of the school newspaper,” he said. “And I became the editor of the Annual at Pepperdine. But you go in as a freshman, and like six weeks after you go in, they’ve got a school election for school president, vice president … and if you’re a freshman, who knows who these people are, if you just look at their names? So (one of) the first things I did at Pepperdine was convince the school to do a photo ballot. It was a full page in the school newspaper where all the candidates were photographed with their name under it, and that was the ballot. … It was a very, very unique thing. Nobody had ever done anything like a photographic ballot at any university or school—and for a while, that became something that a lot of schools picked up.”
After college, he said his work was determined not by what he wanted to do, but the desires of the editors of the magazines who hired him.
“I wanted to do a lot of things, but in those days, you had to have photographic assignments, and the editors of the national magazines, if they decided to use you, they determined where you went,” Schiller said. “I was always wanting to go to Vietnam, and no magazine would give me an assignment and send me to Vietnam. I wanted to go to Chicago and Washington and photograph the upheaval (around) social justice, and I had to wait until the Watts riots to do it, because no magazine would send me.
“I lived in Los Angeles, coming out of Pepperdine, and therefore I lived in a celebrity-based community, so the magazines around the world—whether it was Paris Match in France, Der Stern in Germany, Life magazine in New York, or whatever—they thought of me as somebody who would cover celebrities more than Vietnam.”
His work started attracting the attention of the big movie studios.
“I started getting hired by the studios themselves, with me still owning my photographs, to photograph movies, because the stories appeared in magazines which publicized the movies,” Schiller said. “I did five movies with Paul Newman, and … on the fourth movie, he looked at me, and he said, ‘You know? I’m going to fire you, Larry.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean you’re going to fire me?’ He says, ‘Well, you said to me yesterday that you were tired of photographing different heads on the same bodies … so you’re fired now.’ I said, ‘Well, why are you doing that?’ He says, ‘Because you’re going to start directing films.’”
Newman handed Schiller the script to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
“He says, ‘Find something in here that you would like to direct, and I’ll tell George Roy Hill (the director) you’re going to direct (that portion).’ I came up with something for Butch Cassidy, which I directed.”
“I’ve got five kids and six grandkids, and I don’t even think about which is my favorite. In my photography, I don’t think about which is my favorite, either. They reflect a small part of history.”
Lawrence Schiller
The portion directed by Schiller was a still photo montage of sepia-toned images.
“When the film was released,” Schiller said, “it got me another job at Paramount, on Lady Sings the Blues. And then I got another job. Then I started to direct films based on stories that I had covered. The first (non-documentary feature) film I directed was Hey, I’m Alive (starring Ed Asner and Sally Struthers), where a Mormon pilot-preacher saves a Jewish girl in the Yukon, and it’s about the relationship between that Mormon and a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. It was a story I had done for Life magazine.”
When asked if he had a favorite among his many thousands of photographs, Schiller said he did not.
“I’ve got five kids and six grandkids, and I don’t even think about which is my favorite,” Schiller said. “In my photography, I don’t think about which is my favorite, either. They reflect a small part of history. Yes, there are some pictures out of certain events that I think are extremely well done, storytelling pictures, and ones that other photographers didn’t really understand how to do. The famous picture I have in the Dallas police station of (Lee Harvey) Oswald’s gun being held up, silhouetted, and I’m behind the guy (holding the gun), and you see all the photographers taking the picture of the gun—well, that’s a storytelling picture. It tells the whole story in one image. It’s not like everybody else who is doing a picture of the gun. What I tried in my life when it came to pictures is (to figure out): How does a single picture do its best to tell the entire story? Sometimes, it’s impossible, but sometimes, it just happens. You know, with Marilyn, I think any one of the (Something’s Got to Give) pictures tells the great story that, at that age of 36, after the traumas in her life and everything, she was in pretty good shape to get into the boxing ring of life again.”
Schiller said he’s grateful that his photography continues to help him make a living today.
“I can never rest on my laurels,” Schiller said. “I’m just a child. I’m still growing up. I’m a teenager. I’ll be 90 this year. I’ve got a long way to go. … I’m working on a little biography, which is told in a very interesting voice, and I’m working on the exhibits and galleries like this nice one that Melissa Morgan has supported and asked me to contribute to. Quite honestly, it’s to keep my brand alive. I don’t have a pension plan, because I never worked for anybody—so you know that my photographs are my pension plan.”
“Marilyn and America in the ’60s,” featuring Lawrence Schiller, takes place at 3 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 15, at Intersect Palm Springs. The festival takes place Thursday, Feb. 12, through Monday, Feb. 16, at the Palm Springs Convention Center, at 277 N. Avenida Caballeros. Single-day admission tickets are $35, with discounts; multi-day passes are $70; an all-access pass, including admission to the opening preview and VIP program, is $100. For tickets and more information, visit www.intersectpalmsprings.com.