The Man Who Invented Marilyn

Norma Jeane Dougherty (before she changed her name to Marilyn Monroe), photographed by Bruno Bernard in 1945. Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

In the spring of 2025, my co-author, Mark A. Fortin, and I began work on The Marilyn Monroe Century, a book that would detail the friendship and collaboration between my German immigrant grandfather, Bruno Bernard, one of Hollywood’s premier golden age photographers, and the woman the world would come to know as Marilyn Monroe. Digging through Bruno’s archives, we found endless handwritten transcripts of my grandfather’s conversations with Monroe. What we learned was that the duo conspired, together, to create the bombshell image that would eventually secure her fame. At the start of his entries on Monroe in September 1945, the paint on his “Bernard of Hollywood” sign for his Sunset Boulevard photo studio was still fresh; his years trying to break into the industry as an actor or director had led to his becoming a photographer for the families of studio heads, then hopeful actors. He had only just opened his storefront when he first saw the woman who would capture his imagination before she captured ours. Toward the end of his life, in the 1980s, Bruno would draw from those diary entries to recollect the fateful encounter:

Marilyn, On the Block

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The Marilyn Monroe Century Book by Bruno Bernard Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

My first photographic session with Marilyn Monroe took place four decades ago, but I still recall it as vividly as if it were yesterday. The events leading up to our first meeting and our many subsequent sessions were so unusual as to set them apart from any normal studio sittings.

It was a morning in late September 1945. The Indian summer temperature had made the thermometer’s mercury climb up over 90 degrees. A 10 o’clock appointment with my dentist, Leon Lazar, for some root canal treatment put me in a somewhat depressed mood. The voluble Leon, an old acquaintance of mine, sought to distract me from his bloody plumbing with a constant stream of glib conversation about the latest crop of glamour girls who had passed through the door of my Sunset Strip studio.

Rolf, his big, beautiful German shepherd and only companion in the Mexican-style bungalow, came bounding into the front room and corroborated his master’s statement by licking my hands. Rolf and I had become good pals since I occasionally had used him as a model for the fee of a few pounds of horse meat.

After this reassuring farewell from the two lonely bachelors, I groggily left the office and began to slowly make my way up to my studio located a few blocks west.

A dazzling vision instantly sidetracked me: A teenager with a voluptuous figure and all the curves in the right places wriggled by with the kind of undulating movements I had previously seen practiced only by [burlesque dancer] Tempest Storm on the stage apron of the Burbank Theater on Main Street.

The innocent, childlike face with the translucent peaches-and-cream complexion definitely contradicted my first impression … yet the provocative juxtaposition of this angelic countenance with one helluva figure aroused my professional hunter’s instinct, which was always on the lookout for fresh material for my cover work and photography books.

I found [my] arm waving and my mouth whistling the lovely vision to a halt. This unconventional and rather rude method of discovering new photogenic talent was for me, I am sorry to admit, very much like the conditioned reflexes of the famous Pavlovian dogs. To my pleasant surprise, Little Red Riding Hood didn’t seem to mind. She instantly turned around, radiating a warm and friendly smile in my direction as if she were accustomed to this type of attention.

Color transparency in paper bracket of Monroe in white bikini, 1946. Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

Norma Jeane bandages Rolf, Bernard’s dentist’s dog, in 1945. “After she had become Marilyn Monroe,” Bernard recalled, “she saw to it that nobody stole a scene from her again.” Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

As I was about to introduce myself by giving her my calling card as a professional excuse for my puerile behavior, I was overtaken by Rolf, who, losing no time with verbal foreplay, put his paws on her shoulders and licked her face. In my bedraggled state of mind, I had forgotten my golf cap, and Leon, opening his front door to call me, had inadvertently let Rolf out, giving him his chance to outdo me. From the girl’s tender reaction to Rolf, it was obvious she must be an animal lover. Though I found myself relegated to second place, I used this deus ex machina for a now more diplomatic approach by introducing the two of us: “Pardon me, Miss, for so rudely interrupting your walk, but Rolf and I are equally fascinated by you. I don’t know what his excuse is, but my interest is strictly professional. I happen to be a commercial photographer here on the strip, and I’m always on the lookout for new, fresh faces for modeling.”

The attractive stranger seemed to ignore me, focusing all her attention on my canine teammate, whom she petted lovingly. Her complexion made her a walking advertisement for Ivory soap, and her schoolgirl face was framed by naturally curly, shoulder-length tresses like Jeanie with the light brown hair [from the Stephen Foster song]. I decided to intensify my pitch: “You would definitely be good cover material, and I’d enjoy making a few test shots of you. My studio is just a few blocks from here.” With these words, the photographer in me took charge, and I offered her my card. The mention of a cover proved to be the code word, triggering the attention of the girl who introduced herself in a childlike whisper as Norma Jeane Dougherty.

Bernard and the young model-to-be took their chat over to the lunch counter at the Thrifty drugstore to discuss Norma Jeane’s life as a married factory girl — and their shared histories of desperate childhoods spent in orphanages.

Monroe and Bernard in 1953. Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

Like a volcano slowly erupting, she began to communicate to me her life story in a low whisper. She was an orphan and had never known her father. Her mother had been institutionalized in Norwalk, California, and had passed away there. Norma Jeane was reared in a number of unfriendly foster homes until she was sent at the age of 9 to a Los Angeles orphanage. There, she had to wash dishes and clean toilets to earn a few nickels of pocket money. A friend of her mother, Grace McKee, who later became Mrs. Goddard, rescued her from the orphanage when she was 11 years old [Bruno is mistaken in his text; Norma Jeane’s actual age at the time was 9] and took her into her home, then later sent her to live with her aunt, Miss Ana Lower, in Brentwood. At the ripe old age of 16, Norma Jeane had married Jim Dougherty, the handsome son of the Goddards’ neighbors, but had moved back with Miss Lower after Jimmy enlisted in the Merchant Marines.

“If it makes you feel any more at ease, I was brought up in an orphanage, too, after I was 12. And that, although I was not an orphan. My father came home from World War I with a serious case of asthma affecting his lungs, from which he did not recover. And my mother was ailing herself and had neither the strength nor means to provide for a family of seven. So, a social agency referred me and my brother Heinz to the Baruch-Auerbach Orphanage in Berlin, and this proved to be a blessing in disguise for both of us, though the word ‘orphanage’ had a traumatic effect on me for a long time.”

This bit of information from my own past was received with a silence more eloquent than words. Her eyes filled. We were on the same spiritual wavelength. From that moment on, I became her big brother and father confessor.

Norma Jeane, screen test images (tiles), 1946. Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

Magazine covers of Monroe shot by Bernard in the 1940s. By the end of the decade, Monroe had appeared on the cover of or inside more than 30 magazines. Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive (2)

The fast friends — who shared not only similar pasts but also a burning determination to succeed — devised a plan to meet the following Tuesday for an introductory photo shoot where each would see what the other was bringing to the table. Neither expected just how smooth their collaboration would be.

At 6 o’clock sharp the following Tuesday morning, a dilapidated black Ford ground to a halt in front of my studio at 9055 Sunset Blvd. This was still the pure Norma Jeane period — all the psychological garbage dug up by her analysts concerning her compulsive tardiness was in the future.

Twenty minutes later, we were in Griffith Park, and I began unpacking my camera equipment in front of the iron girders of the Observatory.

“Let’s start with your multicolored, two-piece swimsuit,” I suggested.

Before I had finished putting my unwieldy 5×7 Eastman camera on its tripod, Norma Jeane emerged from her large beach towel, ready for action. I started giving directions: “Would you please climb up on the front girder so I can get a better angle on your legs, Angel?”

“Oh, you want to make a Varga girl out of me,” Norma Jeane commented knowingly. “All legs and a shrunken head. I know what you’re up to, Mr. Bernard!”

Slowly I began to notice how she took the direction away from me by contorting her body, urging me to press the shutter before she would lose a strenuous pose. Her enthusiasm and tenacity were infectious, but when, after three hours of almost continuous shooting, I was ready to call it a day, she was still fresh as a daisy and pleaded for a few more shots because she had “just gotten an idea.”

This is why I christened her the original “one-more girl,” in harmony with us cameramen who always needed “one more for protection.” Her instinct for the requirements of the camera, when coupled with an almost acrobatic body flexibility and lightning-like change of facial expression, made her a textbook example of what is photographic beauty as compared to natural beauty.

Norma Jeane poses for Don Lee Television in the late 1940s. Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

Workmen hanging the sign for Bernard’s studio, Bernard of Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard, where the Jewish German immigrant shot pinups, movie stars and other Hollywood royalty. Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

Over many a lunch at Barney’s Beanery or Hamburger Hamlet, Bruno and Norma Jeane grew closer. Of one such meeting, Bruno wrote:

“What sign were you born under?” she asked me with childlike curiosity.

“Don’t tell me you’re an astrology freak! Do you really believe all that stuff in the newspaper columns, along with millions of other deluded people?” I asked kiddingly.

“Come on,” she pleaded, looking irresistible. “I don’t believe in it hook, line and sinker, but there must be something to it if people have believed in it for thousands of years, like the old Egyptians.”

“Okay, whiz kid, have it your way. I was born on the second of February, which makes me an Aquarius.”

“I had a hunch you would be!” Norma Jeane was jubilant. “You’re a humanitarian, like President Roosevelt!”

“But I found out recently that my rising star is Scorpio. Does that go well together with your stellar constellation? But all kidding aside, what’s your birthday?”

“June 1st, 1926.” She drew out each number of the date as if basking in her youth. “In any case,” she continued earnestly, “your ascendant is Scorpio, and Scorpio goes very well with Gemini.”

I couldn’t keep the irony out of my voice as I asked: “Does that mean you need a detailed chart on me before you’ll let me take some test shots?”

“No, seriously, Mr. Bernard. Don’t you know that Aquarians can be really helpful to Gemini people?”

“That means the stars seem to bless our chance meeting …”

I wanted to conclude this part of our conversation but was interrupted.

“There’s no such thing as chance; it’s all preordained,” she replied. “Like kismet.”

Monroe with The Seven Year Itch director Billy Wilder. Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

Bruno’s role in Monroe’s ascent went largely unnoticed thanks to his refusal to participate in the tornado of gossip and tell-alls that followed her death; when he finally began to speak about Monroe on talk shows such as San Francisco’s People Are Talking in the mid-1980s, he was loath to join the “kiss and tell” club, stating that “most of those who insisted they made her” —”made” meaning slept with — were pretenders to some imagined throne. His diaries, by turn affectionate and clinical, make plain how the coaching and encouragement he gave the young starlet proved invaluable in her early days.

I drove Norma Jeane to Aunt Ana’s home on Nebraska Avenue in West Los Angeles. After some minutes of silence in which she seemed to be reassembling her thoughts, she picked up where we had left off at the Beanery: “This divorce thing — the sooner I get it over with, the better for both of us. Naturally, I’ll lose my allowance from him, and that’s why I asked you before whether you think I can cut the mustard as a model.”

She became tongue-tied, her eyes pleading. After another short silence I told her, “As far as your ability as a model is concerned, I haven’t the slightest doubt that you’ll make it.”

A spontaneous smack on my cheeks was my reward. “Careful not to distract the driver,” I exhorted her in mock irritation. “The life you take may be your own.”

We had arrived in front of Aunt Ana’s nice old two-story home.

“Are you religious, Bernie?” she asked.

“Not by your standards, I’m afraid. I’m an avowed agnostic.”

“You’re a …? Does that mean you don’t believe in God?”

She looked visibly concerned about the salvation of my soul.

“I can’t discuss such an important question in just a few minutes, but I’ll try to clarify my position for any future conversation on this subject with a short verse by Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet:

If I knew the road of the Lord

I would love to follow it

Were someone to lead me to the House of Truth

By God, I’d never leave it again.“

A post-metamorphosis Marilyn Monroe, after Bernard’s photos led to her getting a contract with 20th Century Fox. Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

Norma Jeane had listened attentively. Then she muttered, half to herself, “I wish I could speak foreign languages. But I had such poor schooling because of transferring all the time. Besides, I might be plain stupid.” She giggled girlishly, fluttering her eyelashes like a kewpie doll.

“How did you like my answer?” I asked, joining her laughter with a tongue-in-cheek grin. I deliberately didn’t verbalize the contradiction she so obviously expected.

I found Norma Jeane to be a girl of high natural intelligence, and her sense of humor made her a wonderful sparring partner. She was painfully aware of her lack of formal education, and she became engaged in a lifelong attempt at filling in the gaps. Her simultaneous drive for excellence in the intellectual realm and for perfection in her profession were soon to become the overriding forces in her existence.

Before kissing me goodbye, she concluded our conversation pensively: “I guess there is some point to being an ag — an agon — what did you call yourself again?”

“Agnostic!”

“Ag-nos-tic,” she repeated, drawing out the syllables of the new word, which she apparently wanted to include in her vocabulary from then on.

About six months later, I received a postcard postmarked Las Vegas, with the brief message:

Dear Bernie,

In one week, I shall be a free woman.

See you then in Hollywood.

Love, Norma Jeane

Makeup artist Allan “Whitey” Snyder touches up Monroe on the set of The Seven Year Itch. Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

Monroe, shot by Bernard in 1954 on the L.A. set of The Seven Year Itch. Bernard of Hollywood Foundation Archive

A side benefit of the Nevada detour was that Norma Jeane was able to study the performances of Vegas burlesque queen Lili St. Cyr. Attending them religiously at Bernard’s insistence, she began to model her walk after “Miss Swivelhips” herself, this physical shift the first sign of Norma Jeane’s determination to mold herself into a bombshell. She was so successful at it, in fact, that when she next appeared in his Sunset studio doorway, Bernard hardly recognized her.

The next time Norma Jeane came to my studio, her appearance and voice had changed noticeably. Gone was the “Jeannie [sic] with the light brown hair” and with it her childlike innocence. The new Norma Jeane had lightened her hair at the advice of her modeling agent, she explained somewhat apologetically when I looked at her in amused amazement. But my smile was not caused by her hair tint. As a glamour photographer, I knew that hair color was mostly a seasonal affair with my clients. My smile was caused by the phony tone of voice with which she opened our conversation. It reeked of voice and elocution lessons and threatened to throw an element of strangeness into our hitherto perfect personal relationship.

“Anything wrong with your throat?” I couldn’t help teasing her.

“No, not a thing,” she replied, apparently not noticing that I was kidding her. “Don’t you feel my voice has improved since the last time you saw me, Bernie?” She proceeded to answer her own question. “It [had] better. It sets me back one dollar per lesson, you know, and with modeling at a low ebb right now, that’s a lot of do-re-mi. I want to quit the modeling game, anyway; it’s starting to bore me. It’s only shadow boxing instead of the real McCoy, don’t you think?”

“The real McCoy being mooo’m pitchers …?”

Intentionally ignoring my sarcasm, she said with a seriousness that brooked no contradiction, “I want to become a star. It’s been my dream since childhood, and you’ve got to help me, Bernie. Didn’t I read recently that ‘professional photography has as its prime purpose selling the actor or professional performer to producers, directors and of course to the public’?”

She was reciting out of my own advertising brochure, which the theatrical agency N.C.A.C. (National Concert and Artists Corporation) had given her. “You’ve got to take a few more sexy photos of me,” she insisted, “that will be my ‘open sesame’ to the studios.” Then she mimicked the headline of my brochure by imitating her idea of Miss Glamourpuss: with parted lips, her tongue teasing her teeth lasciviously, while half-closed eyes reinforced the irresistible come-hither look that later became her trademark.

The man in me did not get turned on by this performance, but the frustrated director in me cautioned her: “Darling, whatever you do, never put hot on hot. That looks vulgar and would turn a real man off. Let your curves tell it all and counteract the body language with a complete look of innocence. Your eyes should be asking, ‘Why do men look at me?’ Blend waif into Venus and you’ll create combustion in photos.”

My direction sunk in, at least for this sitting, and she changed into a variety of irresistible expressions that drove casting directors and producers wild. Without losing any time, I submitted the results of our teamwork to my next-door neighbors on the strip, the clever agents of the N.C.A.C. The western director of this national agency, Helen Ainsworth, [whose office] submitted them to Ben Lyon, head of the New Talent Department at 20th Century Fox.

These tests had the optical impact of a natural phenomenon. After the first few feet of film, the veteran cameraman whispered to his friend Ben: “Next time you bring me a dame like this, better give me advance warning so I can line my lens with asbestos.”

And that is how it happened that in August of 1946, Norma Jeane obtained her first seven-year contract at a starting salary of $125 per week with half-yearly raises of $25 — provided the studio would pick up its one-sided options.