Iza Olak & David Guerre | Esther Haase | Vanity Fair Italia Dec 7 2011 | Arthur & Marilyn

Photographer Esther Hasse does a splendid job of capturing the early magic of American playwright Henry Miller’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe, his second wife in an often tumultuous relationship that lasted 12 years. Iza Olak and David Guerre play the famous couple, with styling by Anna Brambilla for the December 7th issue of Vanity Fair Italia.

In his book ‘Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography’, by Christopher Bigsby, the author narrates the first time Miller met Monroe:

Miller first met Marilyn Monroe on the Fox lot. He and Kazan watched her at work on the set of As Young as You Feel. It was a nightclub scene and she was required to walk across the floor in a black open-work lace dress, swaying her hips in a way that Miller would later insist was natural to her (her footprints on a beach, he explained, ‘would be in a straight line, the heel descending exactly before the last toe print, throwing her pelvis into motion’). Others, less emotionally committed, spoke of her lowering the heel on one shoe to create the effect.

When the shot was over, she crossed to Kazan, who had met her once before with the agent Johnny Hyde, tears in her eyes, still upset by Hyde’s death. ‘From where I stood, yards away,’ Miller wrote in Timebends, ‘I saw her in profile against a white light, with her hair coiled atop her head; she was weeping under a veil of black lace that she lifted now and then to dab her eyes. When we shook hands, the shock of her body’s motion sped through me.’

via VO