Monroe and co-star Yves Montand discuss the opening scene of “Let’s Make Love” on set, 1960. (Courtesy Taschen and Holden Luntz Gallery)
In May 1962, Lawrence Schiller arrived on the set of Something’s Got to Give, the film that would be Marilyn Monroe’s last. The 25-year-old photographer was there on assignment for Paris Match magazine and, though he’d already met Monroe two years earlier on the set of Let’s Make Love, he believed that shooting her this time could lead to his breakthrough. “You’re already famous,” he told the iconic actor, “now you’re going to make me famous.” Monroe teasingly replied: “Don’t be so cocky. Photographers can be easily replaced.”
Yet Schiller remained on set with Monroe, intimately chronicling the last few months of her life without realizing it. In the early morning hours of August 5, 1962, she was discovered unresponsive in her bed, having overdosed on barbiturates the night before. “I just didn’t understand it. Marilyn Monroe was dead at 36,” Schiller wrote. He had just visited her in Brentwood the day before, on August 4. Still, even in the wake of her probable suicide, he had something to remember her by: a treasure trove of photographs.
As Monroe’s 100th birthday approaches on June 1, 2026, Taschen is preparing to reissue Schiller’s photographic memoir Marilyn & Me, originally published in 2012. The volume gathers more than 100 images from the photographer’s archive, including rare outtakes from Something’s Got to Give and behind-the-scenes glimpses—literally—into Monroe’s life. In that sense, we are afforded a privileged view of Monroe, not just as an actor, but as a person in her own right. Across each page of the book, she commands our attention, her presence radiant, magnetic, and, perhaps above all, unexpected. We witness moments that may seem incongruous with the public persona that Monroe cultivated, seeing her in at once casual and deeply personal scenes.
One particularly compelling chapter, for instance, catalogs Monroe’s 36th birthday, which was celebrated on set on June 1, 1962. The images seem jovial if not tender, with Monroe smiling behind a birthday cake filled with sparklers and laughing while perched on actor Wally Cox’s lap. She’s beaming and drinking—it “didn’t take long for the champagne to have its effect,” according to Schiller—but there’s a melancholy underlying the photographs. “The atmosphere wasn’t festive,” Schiller admits in the book. “She got no presents. There was more a feeling of gloom than of happiness. And what I noticed was how few people from the studio and among her personal friends were there.”
Schiller’s recollection casts Monroe in a different light, one far removed from the glitz and glamor she otherwise embodied for the sake of others. It hints at the eventual fate that she faced just two months later and, by extension, the pain that flowed beneath the surface. That sensation is only heightened later in the book, where we encounter a color portrait that Schiller had taken of Monroe on the set of Something’s Got to Give. On August 17, 1962, about two weeks after her death, Life magazine ran the photograph as its cover.
“I was stunned,” Schiller writes. “[It was] the picture where she looked like she was breathing in a little more air, the ethereal shot where she looked like an angel. It’s the Marilyn I most remember.”
As an exercise in memory and remembering, Marilyn & Me is an evocative tribute to a photographer’s muse, however short-lived. But, as a portrait of an actor’s tragic downfall, of the anticipation of it, the memoir is almost haunting. We know, each and every time we flip a page, that any given photograph may be Schiller’s last of Monroe. But that’s precisely what makes the book so successful. Because what is a photograph if not an attempt to capture something fleeting?
Marilyn & Me is currently available for pre-order via Taschen’s website. The book will officially be published on June 1, 2026, the 100th anniversary of Monroe’s birth.
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth, Taschen is reissuing Lawrence Schiller’s photographic memoir Marilyn & Me on June 1, 2026.
Monroe celebrates her 36th birthday on the set of “Something’s Got to Give” with co-stars Wally Cox (l.), Dean Martin (r.), and Martin’s driver (standing). (Courtesy Taschen and Holden Luntz Gallery)
Monroe on the set of her last film, “Something’s Got to Give,” in May 1962. (Courtesy Taschen and Holden Luntz Gallery)
Monroe celebrates her 36th birthday on set, June 1, 1962. (Courtesy Taschen and Holden Luntz Gallery)
Monroe in her dressing room, on the set of “Let’s Make Love,” 1960. (Courtesy Taschen and Holden Luntz Gallery)
A spread from “Marilyn & Me” by Lawrence Schiller, published by Taschen. ($80 via the publisher’s website)
The book gathers more than 100 images from Schiller’s archive, including outtakes from the set of Something’s Got to Give, Monroe’s last-ever film.
Monroe with acting coach and confidant Paula Strasberg, 1962. (Courtesy Taschen and Holden Luntz Gallery)
Monroe in “Something’s Got to Give,” May 1962. (Courtesy Taschen and Holden Luntz Gallery)
Schiller’s May 1962 portrait of Monroe appeared on the August 17th cover of Life Magazine that same year. She had died only two weeks earlier, on August 4, 1962. (Courtesy Taschen and Holden Luntz Gallery)
Monroe on the set of her last film, “Something’s Got to Give,” in May 1962. (Courtesy Taschen and Holden Luntz Gallery)
The cover of “Marilyn & Me” by Lawrence Schiller, published by Taschen. ($80 via the publisher’s website)
My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Taschen.
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