Palm Springs International Film Festival focus: Our week with Marilyn Monroe

One of the great Palm Springs legends is that Marilyn Monroe's career was launched at the swimming pool of the fabled, and now dilapidated, Racquet Club.

Actually, the former Norma Jeane Baker had several small film roles before visiting the Racquet Club in 1949, including a famous scene in Love Happy in which Groucho Marx leered at her.

But the late Bruno Bernard's photos of Monroe at the Racquet Club in 1949 and '50 are among the most famous taken of the icon.

They definitively show Johnny Hyde, the West Coast vice president of the William Morris Agency, becoming smitten with Monroe at the Racquet Club pool and on its dance floor.

Hyde signed Monroe to a contract and had her get facial cosmetic surgery to become the screen legend we know today. He got her a seven- year deal to 20th Century-Fox just before his death in December 1950.

Bernard, who first photographed Monroe at his Hollywood studio in 1946, published four books of original photographs under his professional name, Bernard of Hollywood. His daughter, Susan Bernard, has published six more books of his photos.

And now, with Monroe back in the news with the release of My Week With Marilyn, starring Palm Springs International Film Festival honoree Michelle Williams, Susan Bernard has returned to Palm Springs for her first exhibition of her father's Marilyn Monroe photos since his death in 1989.

The Palm Springs International Film Festival will screen the movie on which My Week With Marilyn is based, 1957's The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, at 1 p.m. Saturday at Palm Canyon Theatre.

That will be followed by a Q&A with Bernard in which her father's photos from her latest book, Marilyn: Intimate Exposure, will be projected on the screen behind her.

Then at 4 p.m., Bernard will sign copies of her book at a reception at Just Fabulous in Palm Springs.

Fans can also quench their appetite for Monroe merchandise all week. Bernard has selected 40 of her father's photo! graphs t o exhibit in stores on both sides of North Palm Canyon Drive in the Uptown Design District north of Alejo Road as part of a Marilyn Walk.

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Festival executive director Darryl Macdonald said the goal is to bring attention both to the work of Bruno Bernard, who had a home in Palm Springs for many years, and to the Uptown Design District, a vibrant and vital new creative area of the city.

Susan Bernard says even she is surprised at all the interest in Monroe almost 50 years after her death.

It's phenomenal, isn't it? she said. I'm sometimes amazed, too. But yet, now I live with it joyously.

The book contains several new behind- the-scenes-type photos, such as the back of photos containing Bruno Bernard's notes.

You actually see his handwriting on the back of a photo, said Bernard. It's never been done that way. Or the photograph of an actual famous negative of his famous flying skirt (shot over a subway grate in New York). I actually scan the actual negative. It's a book about evidence. It's a book about accuracy, not just hearsay. His actual handwriting.

Asked if her father ever would have dreamed that the notes he wrote on the back of a photograph would one day be considered significant, Bernard said, Absolutely not.

I'm sure my father, when he used to go to his agency and dropped off photos of Marilyn or whoever, he'd just leave the original negatives, never really thinking, I should keep some of them because who knows if they'll get lost or where they'll end up.'

In the '50s, there was a different psychology about photography. One didn't think about copyright as important, like they do now. Finally in the last decade it's serious fine art, whether it be at museums or auction houses and to collectors.

Bruce Fessier can be reached at (760) 778-4522 or bruce.fessier@thedesertsun.com.