Incredibly rare photos of a young, makeup-free Norma Jeane Dougherty, a.k.a. Marilyn Monroe, show a radiant 20-year-old unaware of the tragic way her life would unfold.
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Taken by Marilyn’s then-lover, photographer Andre de Dienes, on Malibu beach for a poetry and philosophy book, the photos show a windswept Marilyn smiling and laughing.
![](https://pulptastic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marilyn-Monroe-1946-9.jpg)
![](https://pulptastic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marilyn-Monroe-1946-10.jpg)
And practising looking sultry, of course.
![](https://pulptastic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marilyn-Monroe-1946-8.jpg)
The photoset came with text written by Andre himself describing the shoot, saying, “[Marilyn] was twenty and had never experienced the intoxication of success, yet already there was a shadow over her radiance.”
![](https://pulptastic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marilyn-Monroe-1946-4.jpg)
“I asked her to react instinctively to the words happiness, surprise, reflection, doubt, peace of mind, sadness, self-torment, and death.”
![](https://pulptastic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marilyn-Monroe-1946-11.jpg)
“When I said ‘death’ she took hold of the folded dark-cloth and covered her head with it. Death to her was blackness, nothingness.”
![](https://pulptastic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marilyn-Monroe-1946-21.jpg)
“I tried to coax another reaction from her. Death might be a beginning, the hope of an everlasting light.”
“She shook her head: ‘That’s what death is for me.'”
![](https://pulptastic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marilyn-Monroe-1946-19.jpg)
“She turned towards me, her face set and despairing, eyes dulled, her mouth suddenly bereft of color. To her, death was the end of everything.”
![](https://pulptastic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marilyn-Monroe-1946-20.jpg)
Andre’s heartbreaking story behind the photos offers a glimpse of an already troubled woman, who, just 16 years after this shoot, would take her own life.
![](https://pulptastic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marilyn-Monroe-1946-22.jpg)
In 1946, when these photos were taken, “Jean Norman” was appearing on magazine covers as her “pin-up” figure and was deemed unsuitable for acting.
![](https://pulptastic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marilyn-Monroe-1946-23.jpg)
Within a few months of these photos, she took the stage name Marilyn Monroe and, after four years of failed film roles, would finally hit the big time in 1950.
![](https://pulptastic.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Marilyn-Monroe-1946-18.jpg)
Andre’s photography helped catapult Marilyn into stardom; if these pictures never existed, her life may have been a different story.