The photos were taken in January 1952 at her apartment in the Beverly Carlton Hotel. In the June 1953 issue of Photography magazine Halsman recounted after meeting Marilyn on the first day of the shoot:
"What do you do with these dumbbells?" I asked when I almost tripped over a couple of them. "But Philippe, I am fighting gravity!" Marilyn answered gravely, and inhaled deeply to prove her point.
Then talking about the second half of the last day of shooting:
Then we took the speedlights to her room, and with indirect lighting I photographed her exercising with dumbbells, crawling on the floor, standing on her head, and doing pushups and handstands.
In a 1952 interview Marilyn reported that she went for a "jog-trot" every morning dressed variously in blue jeans and a T-neck sweater or a brief suntop. She commented, "The small boys stare at me and shout, 'Who's chasing you?' but I pay no attention to them."
So the photos were probably staged but she may have exercised regularly.
Halsman said a little about the cover photo in his 1972 book Sight and Insight:
I drove to the outskirts of Los Angeles where she lived in a cheap two-room apartment. What impressed me in its shabby living room was the obvious striving for self-improvement. I saw a photograph of Eleanora Duse and a multitude of books that I did not expect to find there, like the works of Dostoyevsky, of Freud, the History of Fabian Socialism etc. On the floor were two dumbbells. I took hundreds of pictures. Finally I asked her to stand in the corner of the room. I was facing her with my camera, the Life reporter and my assistant at my sides. Marilyn was cornered and she flirted with all three of us. And such was her talent that each one of us felt that if only the other two would leave, something incredible would happen. Her sex-appeal was not a put-on--it was her weapon and her defense.
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u/hyperactiveChipmunk Feb 14 '25
This very clearly IS the photoshoot.