The Last Sitting: Marilyn Monroe's Final Photo Shoot With Bert Stern
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In June 1962, Bert Stern booked a suite at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, ordered a case of 1953 Dom Pérignon, and waited for Marilyn Monroe. She arrived alone, several hours late. Six weeks later, she was dead. What happened across two separate shoots that month became one of the most famous photography sessions in history: nearly 2,700 images, a handful of crossed-out negatives, and a Vogue spread that ran as a memorial.
Who Was Bert Stern?
In 1962, Bert Stern was one of the most sought-after photographers in the world. He'd built his reputation on advertising work: including a now-legendary 1955 Smirnoff campaign shot in front of the Egyptian pyramids: and had gone on to photograph some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, and Marlon Brando. A Vogue contract gave him 10 pages per issue of his own choosing. When he finally got the assignment to shoot Marilyn Monroe, it was arguably the last major star he hadn't yet photographed.
He wasn't coy about his intentions going in. In his 1982 book about the shoot, he wrote: "I was preparing for Marilyn's arrival like a lover, and yet I was here to take photographs. Not to take her in my arms, but to turn her into tones, and planes and shapes and ultimately into an image for the printed page." Making love and making photographs were, in his own words, closely connected in his mind when it came to women.
The First Shoot: Early June 1962
The first session took place in Suite 261 at the Bel-Air, just the two of them, along with Monroe's hairstylist. Stern had brought diaphanous scarves and beads from the Vogue accessories closet. When Monroe arrived, he reportedly said simply: "You're beautiful." She replied: "What a nice thing to say."
What followed was a 12-hour session fuelled by champagne. Stern later said he didn't ask her to pose nude: it was, in his telling, "more one thing leading to another: you take clothes off and off and off and off and off." The resulting photographs showed Monroe draped in sheer scarves, pearls, and silk sheets, or nothing at all. She was 35 years old, recently out of gallbladder surgery, and the scar was still fresh and clearly visible in many of the unretouched images. Stern airbrushed it out of the final prints.
Vogue's picture editor Alexander Liberman loved what he saw: but wanted more black-and-white work to better suit the magazine's format. So Stern went back.
The Second Shoot: Late June, Three Days
The second round of sessions took place over three full days, this time in Bungalow 96, a larger space at the same hotel. This sitting had more of a production around it: a full team rather than just the two of them: which Monroe reportedly found less comfortable. The shoot produced a second series, more formally shot than the first, including a memorable sequence in which Monroe dressed more conservatively, in what many took as a playful nod to Jackie Kennedy.
Across both sessions, Stern shot close to 2,700 frames in total. The images spanned fashion portraits, nudes, and everything in between. It was Monroe's first collaboration with Vogue: extraordinary for a woman who had been one of the most photographed people on the planet for over a decade.
Marilyn's Crossed-Out Negatives
After the shoot, Stern sent contact sheets and negatives to both Vogue and Monroe for review. Vogue made their selections. Monroe made hers differently. She went through the images she didn't like and marked or scratched out the ones she didn't want published.
Stern's response to this, once published, became one of the most quoted lines associated with the shoot: "She hadn't just scratched out my pictures, she scratched out herself."
Vogue proceeded to publish their original selection anyway, ignoring Monroe's objections. The spread ran in the September 1962 issue: eight pages, all black and white, Monroe fully clothed. By the time the issue hit newsstands, she had been dead for weeks. The editors added a note: "The word of Marilyn Monroe's death came just as this issue of Vogue went to press."
The Legacy of the Last Sitting
Technically, The Last Sitting wasn't the absolute last professional shoot Monroe did. That distinction belongs to photographer George Barris, who shot her on a Santa Monica beach and in the Hollywood Hills for Cosmopolitan between June and July 18, 1962, just two and a half weeks before her death. The Stern sessions had taken place about six weeks earlier. But the Bert Stern work has always carried the "Last Sitting" name, partly because of the intimacy of what he captured, and partly because Vogue published it as a posthumous memorial.
Monroe died on August 4, 1962, of a barbiturate overdose. She was 36. The cause and circumstances have been debated ever since.
Stern published a book of the images in 1982 under the title The Last Sitting, including many of the contact sheets with Monroe's crossed-out photos intact: scratches, X marks and all. In 2000, the complete archive of 2,571 images was published under the title The Complete Last Sitting, making all of the surviving photographs available for the first time. The images with Monroe's hairpin scratches through them have become some of the most recognised of the entire collection: there's something about seeing her try to erase herself that keeps people coming back to them.
The photographs sell at auction for tens of thousands of dollars. In 2008, Stern recreated several of the images with a new subject for comparison. He died in 2013. The Last Sitting remains what it's always been: the last proper look at someone the camera had been chasing for twenty years, taken six weeks before she disappeared entirely.
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