Marilyn Monroe & David C. Nolan Part 2 (May's Research)

Marilyn Monroe by Frank Powolny, 1952

Yesterday I discovered the source of every Marilyn photograph in Nolan's collection and in some cases, even the photographer. My family thought that Nolan may have been the cameraman but that is not the case. James suggested he may be the publicist (or an archivist of some form) which is more convincing. I am still certain he was a (fill in the blank with words equivalent to lonely, lustful, etc.) man living in an apartment in Haight-Ashbury. I also like Drew's assessment that he was a baseball fan because of some of the material written on back of the photographs reads and is written like sports statistics.

I went back to IMDB and looked up all 600 photographs of Marilyn Monroe starting with movies she starred in prior to 1955 (thinking David C. wouldn't have stamped the photographs "1955" if they were released after that date). There were several groups that were easy to find. These are the images (taken in a fluorescent lit room with the i-Phone) from his collection from The Seven Year Itch as discussed in the previous post:



Another Seven Year Itch original publicity photo:



... and the cropped one from David C. Nolan's collection:



Here is a publicity still from Asphalt Jungle, 1950, and Nolan's photographs of the same:





Early Theisen's photographs of Marilyn in front of a plain studio backdrop were also easy to pinpoint. Here are two versions of the USS Henley t-shirt from Google and the one in Nolan's collection:







Incidentally Theisen was also the photographer of this image of Marilyn that my father had a reproduction of (hello Idaho potatoes). It appears as if it was taken during the same photo shoot (same hair style, same background):



From here on, it was a lot harder to find the original sources. I went through every single page (hundreds) of Google images until I found Marilyn wearing the same sweater that I recognized in one of the photographs in Nolan's collection. It was photographed in Canada so back to IMDB to find that The River of No Return was also filmed there.



I also discovered this book published last fall by John Vachon of little known Marilyn Monroe photographs taken during the filming of The River of No Return so I put it on interlibrary loan.



Here's to hoping there are more images like this inside the book:



After perusing Nolan's collection, the mountains were a common denominator as were Marilyn's striped shoes that she wore in both the sweater and short sleeved shirt photo shoots.



These are also common publicity photographs for The River of No Return though I never would have associated them with the outdoor photographs. Frank Powolny took these photographs (as he did the famous image at the top of this post).





My powers of photographic description were tested in the next three groups. What color
was this outfit from Nolan's collection?



At least the decorations were helpful in recognizing that it could be related to Bert Riesfeld's promo image for How to Marry a Millionaire from 1953.



The swimsuit ended up being red. I wonder where the image from Nolan's collection was photographed with the curtains in the background. I found nothing like this with any of the publicity photographs taken for that film.



I spent the longest amount of time trying to deduce where this group of images came from. I have long thought they are the worst in Nolan's collection - they are distant photographs and Marilyn is a secondary subject. After typing in "Marilyn Monroe Fur Coat," "Marilyn Monroe Fur Wrap," "Marilyn Monroe White Dress" and coming up with nothing, I plugged in the sign in the background of the image on the top row, third from left, and discovered it was a TWA slogan. "Marilyn Monroe Airport" proved to be the winner and brought up a trove of images of her flying in from LA to Idlewild Airport in NYC for the filming of The Seven Year Itch.



Sam Schulman took the photograph that answered the question of where Marilyn was surrounded by all these men:



The angle is slightly different from the one in Nolan's collection (and I couldn't tell that she was sitting next to an airplane due to the crop):



Weegee was even there (again)!



This photo was the most difficult to find out of them all! It's hard to guess whether that is a black dress and "Marilyn Monroe V-neck black dress and sash" and "Marilyn Monroe singing" was not pulling up anything. Then I typed in "Marilyn Monroe Hoop Earrings" and ...


... this appeared.


"Marilyn Monroe" in quotes actually pulled up this photograph around page 87 under my Google search which finally resulted in a match.... There's No Business Like Show Business from 1954.



That sash was blue.



I am positive that any Marilyn Monroe connoisseur would not have taken 3 hours to discover where these photographs came from (and in a lot of cases who took them). I'm so happy a tiny mystery was solved. David C. Nolan was NOT the photographer!