“I paid no attention to the whistles and whoops. In fact, I didn’t hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody. The other was someone whose name I didn’t know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.”
Eve Arnold didn’t know it at the time, but what she photographed on the set of 1961’s The Misfits was to be the last movie completed by Marilyn Monroe and her co-star Clark Gable. The film, an elegiac tale of divorce and aging cowboys, is tainted with sadness as Monroe’s swansong. She died of an overdose just a year after the film’s release.
Here, some photographs by Magnum photographer Eve Arnold, while Marilyn filming The Misfits at Nevada Desert in 1960.
