It’s 1961, Douglas Kirkland has only recently started working for Look Magazine and is assigned to photograph Marilyn Monroe for the magazine’s special 25th anniversary issue. Outside the photo studio it’s a dark November night, inside the lights are on, Kirkland’s Hasselblad is ready to shoot, and “The Blonde Bombshell” decides to take charge of the situation.
She makes three requests: a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne, Frank Sinatra records, and white sheets. Left in the room are her, Kirkland, and the camera.

“I knew the pictures I wanted to take of her but in my shy Canadian way I didn’t know quite how to get them.
It was Marilyn who took charge: she said that we needed a bed and some white silk sheets, some Frank Sinatra records and a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne.
She had a robe on and eventually she slipped out of that and under the sheets, and that was how she wanted to be photographed.”
– Douglas Kirkland

Picture the scene that follows. The first shots capture her dressed, but something isn’t working: Marilyn doesn’t feel at ease, and steps away to the dressing room. When she comes back, she’s wearing only a robe. She slips it off, gets under the silk sheets, and from that moment the evening shifts register. Kirkland climbs above the bed to shoot her from overhead, Sinatra’s music loops in the background, the champagne keeps flowing. What comes out of it isn’t the usual glossy magazine pose, but something truer: a woman playing with the lens, who appears to be completely in control of her own image, not merely the object of someone else’s.

The photographs from that evening, later collected under the title “An Evening with Marilyn,” instantly became legend, and launched the then-unknown Kirkland into the small circle of great celebrity photographers. It’s not hard to see why: those images showed, for the first time, a Marilyn Monroe who was funny, vulnerable, and capable of rewriting the rules of celebrity portraiture for decades to come.

Less than a year after those portraits, on 4 August 1962, Marilyn would die. That November evening, with the champagne and Sinatra on the record player, remains one of the last times the world got to see her — truly see her — through the lens of someone who, for one night, managed to make her let her guard down.

To mark what would have been Marilyn’s 100th birthday, Damiani Books is publishing Douglas Kirkland: Marilyn. A Magical Dance, an elegant new Leporello edition revisiting the complete 1961 session, accompanied by Douglas’s handwritten reflections on that evening.