My dad, George Barris, born and raised in New York has been working with cameras all his life.  As a kid on the east Side, photography was his hobby.  In the Army during World War II, he took pictures for the Army’s public relations office, including many of General Eisenhower.

After the war, my father became a free-lance photojournalist for magazines, with Hollywood personalities as his specialty.

He was in Italy during the filming of  “Cleopatra,” on  a Elizabeth Taylor assignment, when he heard that Marilyn Monroe was going to star in a new film he immediately left for Hollywood.  He had last worked on a Monroe assignment in New York, when she was filming “The Seven Year Itch.”

Shortly after my dad arrived in Hollywood and set up the assignment with Marilyn at the movie studio, she was fired.  As a result, they had much more time to shoot pictures and to talk.

With no long working hours on the set, Marilyn relaxed, finding in my dad a sympathetic and understanding friend.  The idea of a book developed and he took his pictures and his notes in and around her home, completing his work with her just before she died.

Together with a text for which he had completed long interviews, they were to become a book, an illustrated biography that would, in Marilyn’s words, “set the record straight”; but this collaboration that they began on June 1, her thirty-sixth birthday, was never finished.  Some of the photographs and quotes were used in newspaper reports after her death, but the book had been a joint project.  My father lost heart for it.  In order to put some distance between himself and the sad sensationalism that followed her death, he moved to Paris. My dad, living in Paris for more than twenty years, finally decided to publish the many photographs he had taken of Marilyn Monroe in 1954 in New York, and in June, July 1962 in California.  They were probably the last ever taken of her alive.

            There, he met and married my mother, a French actress, Sylvie Constantine, became the father of two daughters, Stephanie and I, where we grew up, and he simply didn’t come back.  Over the years, some individual photos from those sessions were published, but most were not.  Not until the approach of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death did he revisit the original idea of a book.  The following photographs are from that day in 1962 and prior encounters with Marilyn Monroe.  I hope you enjoy those photographs as much as I have over the years.  They really show the “real” Marilyn; the beautiful and yet so vulnerable, a little girl inside who we will never forget.  Marilyn, you will live in our hearts forever.  We love you…

© 2000 All copyrights are reserved by the photographer, George Barris.

 
No part of this site may be reproduced or stored in any retrieval system

 or transmitted in any form, or by any means.

David Scott Goddard

Web Site Designer