The original photograph was taken by André de Dienes, a fashion photographer who, in 1945, met a young aspiring model named Norma Jean Dougherty. He fell in love and the two were briefly engaged.
de Dienes’s secret memoirs, which were discovered when Marilyn fans ravaged his house upon his death in 1985, tell the story of love and friendship between the photographer and Norma Jean. It took him a long time to get used to calling her Marilyn. The following is an excerpt from those memoirs.
Soon after that day in the cemetery, I entered a second-hand bookshop I passed by. I supposed I reacted to Marilyn's suggestion that I ought to bring an unsual kind of book! I was browsing from shelf to shelf, having absolutely no fixed idea of what I wanted. I was about to leave when my eyes fell on an old leather-bound volume. I pulled it out. The cover looked worn and torn, and handwritten pages were loose and about to fall out. There were small, very old engravings pasted on the pages here and there of famous people, like Pascal, Boccaccio, Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, and small engravings of landscapes from Italy and Germany and Scotland. The book dealer, with a gesture of nonchalance and lack of concern, said that I could have the book for fifteen dollars. I paid and hurriedly left, fearing he might change his mind, declaring he had made a mistake; the book was worth far more!
I went to a restaurant to sit and study what I had bought. I read the beautiful, handwritten poems and studied the pictures. It was an album by a lady in Scotland around 1830. In it, she wrote her thoughts, her own poems, and poems she'd copied of famous people. I called Marilyn to tell her I'd found something very unusual, a book I must show her, share with her, so we can read it together. That agreement we had made in the cemetery that we would go out to the seashore and read some more could come through, due to the book I'd found. A few days later, Marilyn and I were far out at the seashore, north of Malibu on a deserted beach, where we read the pages of the book with a magnifier to decipher the small but beautiful handwriting.
