LOS ANGELES — Playboy is miffed over the “lost” Marilyn Monroe photos being hyped on the June edition of Vanity Fair magazine.
Vanity Fair’s cover trumpets, “Marilyn: “Inside The Lost Nudes.” But Playboy says those photos have already appeared in its magazine — not once but twice.
Website Gawker reported that Vanity Fair’s website described the photos in question as outtakes from her last photo shoot that landed on photographer Lawrence Schiller’s desk with a note from Monroe that read, “Send this to Playboy, they might like it."
Playboy shot back on its website, “And, indeed, we did like it. So much that we ran them 48 years ago, in our January 1964 issue, or again in January 2005. Sorry, Vanity Fair. Sometimes when something is too good to be true, it really is too good to be true.”
Although Schiller, whose memoir accompanies the Vanity Fair photos, admitted that they did originally appear in Playboy in 1964, two years after Monroe's death (due to Hugh Hefner not wanting to exploit the tragedy), the revelation didn’t show up until the last paragraph of the article.
Playboy then said in an email that the fact checker probably buried the real deal in the back of the magazine so Vanity Fair could make it appear as though they had the lost and exclusive pictures.
A Vanity Fair spokesperson however told Gawker by email that 12 of their images (mostly black-and-white proofs) had indeed never been published before — some of which were outtakes similar to the original Playboy photos.
So, both magazines are right— sort of — and the legend of Marilyn Monroe lives on.
