Marilyn Monroe as the Fabulous Enchantresses: When Monroe Recreated Photos of Five Famous Actresses From the Past, 1958

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In 1958 Marilyn Monroe was probably the most photographed woman on the planet, and she spent a good chunk of that year pretending to be somebody else. Five somebodies, actually. For Life magazine and the photographer Richard Avedon, she dressed up as the great screen sirens who'd come before her: Lillian Russell, Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich and Jean Harlow.

The pictures ran in Life's Christmas issue that December, and they're some of the cleverest images she ever made. They also took far longer to shoot than anyone planned, came with a tribute from her husband Arthur Miller and left Avedon himself not entirely happy. Here's the story behind them.

Quick Answers

What were the Fabulous Enchantresses photos? A 1958 Life magazine series by Richard Avedon in which Marilyn Monroe recreated famous looks of five earlier screen stars.
Which actresses did Monroe play? Lillian Russell, Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich and Jean Harlow.
When were they published? In Life's 22 December 1958 entertainment special, alongside an essay by Arthur Miller called "My Wife Marilyn".

How the Shoot Came About

Life wanted to honour the biggest female stars of the previous fifty years. Rather than dig out a pile of old studio stills, the magazine had a better idea: get the biggest star of the day to play all of them. Life brought in Avedon and Monroe for the job, and the series went out under the title "Fabled Enchantresses". These days it's mostly remembered as the Fabulous Enchantresses, so you'll see both names knocking about.

Avedon and Monroe already knew each other. He'd photographed her at his Madison Avenue studio on 6 May 1957, when he was chief photographer at Harper's Bazaar, and that session produced the melancholy portrait people now call "Sad Marilyn". It was meant to publicise The Prince and the Showgirl, the first film from her own production company, but it never got used for that at all.

By then she'd also sat for Cecil Beaton in New York in 1956, and she was a long way from the days of posing for Earl Moran at $10 an hour. She understood the camera better than almost anyone in Hollywood, and this project let her show off exactly how well.

Three Months of Shooting Whenever Marilyn Felt Like It

This was never going to be a one-afternoon job. Avedon rang Marie Irvine, a New York make-up artist he used, and she later recalled the first session taking place on 25 May 1958. The whole project then dragged on for roughly three months, with sessions happening only when Monroe was up for it, sometimes late at night and at very short notice.

Irvine didn't sugar-coat it. In a 2014 interview she said, "We could shoot it only when Marilyn felt like it."

Part of her job was curling Monroe's false eyelashes before every session, a fiddly bit of prep that tells you how much detail went into each look. Irvine also brought her baby daughter, Jane, who was nine months old at the time, along to the studio. Monroe posed with the little girl and talked to Irvine about how badly she wanted a baby of her own.

That detail lands harder with hindsight. Later that year Monroe fell pregnant while making Some Like It Hot, and she suffered a miscarriage in December 1958, the same month these photos hit the newsstands.

The Five Enchantresses

Each portrait was captioned simply as Marilyn Monroe as whichever star she was playing. Here's who she became and what she did with them.

Lillian Russell

Russell was the great beauty of the Gilded Age, a singer and stage actress born around 1860 who died in 1922. She was famous for her curves, her voice and her gold-plated bicycle, supposedly a gift from her friend Diamond Jim Brady. Monroe perched on a gold bike of her own and wobbled on it just enough to look like a proper lady who'd never had to pedal anywhere. Irvine styled her as a candy-box pin-up, all soft curls and rosy cheeks.

Theda Bara

Bara was the original Vamp, the silent era's first real sex symbol. Fox's publicity people invented a whole exotic backstory for her, complete with hints of Egyptian mysticism, even though she was actually Theodosia Goodman from Cincinnati. Monroe recreated Bara's Cleopatra in an orange harem costume, and that outfit went on to have a life of its own. In 2014 it was put up at Christie's Pop Culture sale in London with an estimate of £500,000.

Clara Bow

Bow was the It Girl, the flapper who defined the late 1920s after starring in It in 1927. She was one of the few silent stars to make the jump to talkies in 1929, though her career didn't last long after that. Monroe went for the full flapper treatment, complete with a fan, from the same era of glamour that Alfred Cheney Johnston was capturing with the Ziegfeld girls.

Marlene Dietrich

For Dietrich, Monroe played Lola Lola, the cabaret singer from The Blue Angel, the 1930 film that made Dietrich an international star. Irvine did the make-up for this one too. It's the most knowing picture of the five, because Dietrich's whole persona was about being in control of the gaze, which is exactly what Monroe was doing throughout this shoot.

Jean Harlow

Harlow was the one that mattered most to Monroe. The original Platinum Blonde and Blonde Bombshell, Harlow was a pre-Code bad girl who died in 1937 at just 26. Monroe had idolised her since childhood, and the comparison between them followed her around her entire career.

Arthur Miller found the Harlow picture especially eerie. In a typed draft of his essay, he read it as an act of defiance on behalf of a woman Monroe never met, giving her the line "I will die, but you will never kill me."

What Arthur Miller Wrote

Life asked Miller, who'd been married to Monroe since 1956, to write a companion piece. He called it "My Wife Marilyn", and his big point was that she wasn't simply copying these women. She was interpreting them, playing the real woman and the male fantasy of that woman at the same time, and finding the joke in the gap between the two. As he put it, she "salutes fantasy from the shore of the real."

That draft mentioned above is a story in itself. It's seven typed pages with Miller's pencil corrections, and it came with its original envelope, addressed to Mrs Arthur Miller at the Bel Air Hotel. So Miller actually posted his tribute to his own wife. The whole lot sold at auction in Los Angeles in 2008 for $4,500.

Avedon Wasn't Happy, but Everyone Else Was

Here's the odd bit. Avedon, who'd spent months chasing these pictures, wasn't fully satisfied with how they turned out. That probably says more about Avedon's standards than about the photos, because he never had a bad word to say about Monroe herself. He said she was "more patient with me and more demanding of herself than others."

The feature ran from page 137 of Life's 22 December 1958 issue, as part of the magazine's Christmas package in a special edition devoted to American entertainment. Monroe shared the issue with Dean Martin, the rise of rock 'n' roll, George Balanchine and Disney's Sleeping Beauty, which gives you a decent idea of how big a deal she was. The issue's contents also included a slapstick piece called "Saved at the Altar" performed by young Hollywood stars.

Monroe was 32 when the pictures came out. She was playing women whose fame had faded or who'd died young, and within four years she'd be gone too, not long after her final photo shoot with Bert Stern. Look at the Fabulous Enchantresses now and it's hard not to see a sixth enchantress hiding in every frame.