Barris told numerous interviewers over the years that he did not believe that Monroe’s death was a suicide. Her body was found by her housekeeper early Sunday morning. But he had plans to see his family that weekend, so he begged off and promised to visit her on Monday instead. “She called me on Friday, and I was in New York, and she wanted to know if I could come to see her that weekend and that it was urgent,” he recalled. Monroe telephoned him two days before her death, he told The Los Angeles Daily News in 2012. When she caught him, she cheerfully said, “I’ll take a dozen of those.” The story he always told was that he was discreetly photographing her derrière while she was leaning out a window. Barris had been friends for almost a decade, having met in New York in 1954 on the set of “ The Seven Year Itch,” in which she starred with Tom Ewell. But this project, too, was not completed.”

Barris took many soft, gentle pictures of her, in bathing suit, towels, beach robe, sweater. “Through June and July, Marilyn talked and posed - and drank Champagne. Barris was obviously a sympathetic coadjutant,” Diana Trilling observed in The New York Times in her 1986 review of “Marilyn,” written by Gloria Steinem, with photographs by Mr. She wanted to write a book, she said, and Mr. She had been fired the month before from the film “Something’s Got to Give,” reportedly because of her chronic lateness and absenteeism.Īt 36, she was only a year past her divorce from her third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller. Barris shot those last pictures, on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif., on July 13, Monroe had reason to be troubled. The death was confirmed by his daughter Caroline Barris. George Barris, who took the last professional photographs of Marilyn Monroe, just weeks before her death in 1962, died on Friday at his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

Marilyn monroe george barris 1962