TASCHEN COLLECTOR'S EDITION : Lawrence Schiller. Marilyn & Me

Youre already famous, now youre going to make me famous, photographer Lawrence Schiller said to Marilyn Monroe as they discussed the photos he was about to shoot of her. Dont be so cocky, Marilyn teased, photographers can be easily replaced. The year was 1962, and Schiller, 24, was on assignment for Paris Match. He knew Marilyn already - they had formed a bond two years earlier when they met on the set of Lets Make Love - but nothing could have prepared him for the day she agreed to appear in the nude for his camera during the swimming pool scene in Somethings Got to Give. Her chronic lateness and absence soon got her fired from the film, but the worldwide publicity the photographs garnered - her first nudes since the calendar she posed for as a young starlet - guaranteed she would be hired back. But this victory was truly a pyrrhic one: two weeks later, she was dead. Marilyn & Me is an intimate tale of a legend before her fall and a young photographer on his way to the top. Via words and pictures, Schiller takes us back to that time, and to the surprising connection that allowed a star of her stature to open up to a kid from Brooklyn with a lot of ambition but very little experience. Onset, backstage, in her dressing room, at her house, in her car, they made pictures, made deals, and talked and talked, quite intimately at times. When Schiller asked her if she always wanted to be Marilyn Monroe, she answered candidly, I never wanted to be her - it just happened. Marilyns like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane. Fifty years later, TASCHEN releases this limited Collectors edition of Lawrence Schillers Marilyn & Me, signed by the photographer and individually numbered. A unique addition to the lore of Marilyn Monroe, Schillers is a story that has never been told before, and he tells it with tact, humor, and compassion. It is a story brought to life by the photographs he took - from those headline-grabbing nudes to the almost surrea