1955 was a year of change for Marilyn Monroe. After leaving Hollywood for New York, and abandoning her contract with Twentieth Century Fox, Marilyn was no longer ‘just a dumb blonde’, but a true renegade. In January, Marilyn formed a production company with photographer Milton Greene, and moved into a suite at the Ambassador Hotel.

Despite frenzied speculation, Marilyn largely evaded publicity. Dressed down in casual clothes and no make-up, she wandered the city unnoticed, and learned about ‘the Method’, a deeper, more challenging approach to drama, with Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio. And Marilyn also began the long, difficult journey of psychoanalysis at this time.

By March of 1955, however, both Greene and Marilyn agreed that her image needed a boost. Her wish to prove herself a ‘serious actress’ had been roundly mocked by the press, many of whom predicted that the erstwhile sex goddess was destroying her own career.

In his introduction to the 1990 book, Marilyn 55, Bob LaBrasca stated that it was Milton Greene who arranged for a cover spread in Redbook. But Robert Stein, magazine editor at the time, has claimed that it was another of  Marilyn’s photographers, Sam Shaw, who arranged the initial contact, and one of Shaw’s portraits of Marilyn graces the resulting July 1955 cover story, ‘The Marilyn Monroe You’ve Never Seen’.

However, neither Shaw nor Greene worked on the story directly. Over a hectic week, photojournalist Ed Feingersh followed Marilyn, along with Stein, and Marilyn’s small coterie of business associates. Whether shopping, dining, or dressing up, Marilyn’s daily life was captured on film.

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