The film was Let’s Make Love… and lost ‘baby bump’ snaps make it seem married Marilyn Monroe and co-star Yves Montand did just that
The actress worked with heart-throb Yves Montand on film Let's Make Love... and apparently they did
SHE was famous for her voluptuous figure but new pictures of Marilyn Monroe with a “baby bump” have put her legendary curves in a whole new light.
This week, never-before-seen photos emerged of the “blonde bombshell” with a rounded belly, taken on July 8, 1960.
The owner of the images — dubbed The Pregnancy Slides — insists Marilyn was expecting a baby at the time and that, scandalously, the father was not third husband Arthur Miller but Italian-French actor Yves Montand.
The colour pictures were taken in New York by Marilyn’s close friend, the photographer Frieda Hull, who kept them secret until her death aged 83 in June 2014.
They were bought by Frieda’s neighbour Tony Michaels when items from her estate were auctioned in November last year.
Mr Michaels said: “Frieda was very proud of those slides and she was very proud to keep them a secret until the day she died. But she told me the story behind them, that Marilyn got pregnant by Yves Montand.
“It wasn’t a guess or a presumption, it was something she knew for sure, she was very close to Marilyn.”
Marilyn was certainly close to the dashing Montand when they co-starred in the musical comedy Let’s Make Love.
Ironically, Miller rewrote the film’s script.
Some of the top American actors of the time — Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, Yul Brynner, Charlton Heston — had refused to work with the notoriously unprofessional Marilyn.
So it fell to 39-year-old Montand, who was known to Miller after appearing in the French version of his play The Crucible, alongside his wife Simone Signoret.
Montand had just completed a singing tour of the US and was keen to keep his profile high, even though he spoke little English.
Marilyn, then 34, gushed: “Next to my husband and Marlon Brando, I think Yves Montand is the most attractive man I’ve ever met.”
At the time her marriage was crumbling. She reportedly read in Miller’s diary that she “disappointed” him as a wife, while she poured her loneliness into the pages of her journal.
Her days were a blur of drugs, alcohol, insomnia and visits to a psychiatrist.
Yearning for affection, it is little wonder she fell into the arms of the charming Montand, a former lover of singer Edith Piaf.
During filming in Los Angeles in 1960, Marilyn and her husband and Montand and his wife had neighbouring bungalows at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
In April, when work took Miller and Signoret away, Marilyn and Montand had a brief but torrid affair.
Monroe historian Scott Fortner said: “Some say she visited him in his room, others say he visited her.
"Montand himself says he visited Marilyn because she wasn’t feeling well. A simple goodnight kiss started it all.”
Years later, in an interview with David Letterman, Montand explained it was their mutual fear of filming that drove them together.
He said: “It was a very good relationship. She was afraid of shooting. I was also afraid because I didn’t speak English, so we were drawn together. But maybe that made our relationship become more tender.
“What the newspapers were putting in, I think they made a mistake because nobody knew what happened between us.”
Marilyn’s press aide, Rupert Allan, believed she found common ground with Montand’s poor upbringing.
He said: “It was true that sex was a pretty big part of it but Yves offered her something more. They were both from unhappy childhoods.
"He didn’t have enough food when he was a kid in Italy. Marilyn thought she was in love with the guy.”
And gossip columnist Hedda Hopper wrote: “I think Marilyn fell for him pretty hard.”
The affair was a stinging betrayal of Marilyn’s friendship with Signoret. They had formed a close bond in LA, often having dinner.
Signoret had everything Marilyn wanted — not just a daughter from her first marriage and Montand, but she had just won a Best Actress Oscar for Room At The Top.
For Marilyn, who had a Golden Globe but was mostly known for being late on set and playing dumb blondes, it was a bitter pill.
Sue Glover, whose play Marilyn was based on that period of her life, said: “Marilyn was one of these very damaged people who found reassurance in seduction.
“Miller was already making her feel inferior and Simone would make anyone feel inferior.”
Is it any wonder Marilyn fell for Montand? But, just like her alleged flings with Brando, Frank Sinatra, John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, it also turned to dust.
When filming wrapped in July, so did the fling. Marilyn and Montand were seen in a Cadillac at Idlewild airport (now JFK) in July, drinking Dom Perignon and eating caviar.
Far from being a cosy date, this was reportedly when he told her he would not be leaving his wife.
Montand, who died in 1991, said: “Perhaps she had a schoolgirl crush. If she did, I’m sorry. But nothing will break up my marriage.”
Soon afterwards, and just a month after the “pregnancy slides” were taken, the baby rumours surfaced.
Marilyn had embarked on her next film, The Misfits, and was reportedly admitted to hospital. Frieda Hull told Mr Michaels it was due to a nervous breakdown and a possible miscarriage.
Hedda Hopper revealed: “She was in hospital for a week and he (Montand) wouldn’t even talk to her on the phone.”
If true, it would have been a devastating blow to the star, who already had three miscarriages and, say friends, yearned for a baby.
In 1952, when she had her appendix removed, Marilyn taped a letter to her stomach. It read: “Cut as little as possible. I know it seems vain but that doesn’t really come into it. The fact I’m a woman is important.
"You have children and you must know what it means. For God’s sakes Dear Doctor, no ovaries removed.”
Sadly, Marilyn suffered from the painful condition endometriosis, in which the tissue that forms the lining of the womb grows elsewhere in the body and makes it more difficult to get pregnant — and increases the risk of miscarriage.
The condition led to her taking the barbiturates she would become dependent on, and that would ultimately kill her in 1962.
One documented miscarriage was in the summer of 1957.
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Newly pregnant with Miller’s child, the screen goddess “embraced domesticity”. Her focus turned to “hanging home-made pasta over the backs of chairs and drying it with a hairdryer”, according to author Christopher Bigsby.
“She was transformed by the possibility of a child,” wrote Bigsby in Arthur Miller: The Definitive Biography.
But in the garden on August 1, Marilyn doubled over with pain and was taken to hospital. It was an ectopic pregnancy and had to be terminated.
Another tragedy is said to have followed a fling with her Some Like It Hot co-star Tony Curtis. He claimed in his memoir that she was expecting his child but miscarried.
Despite this welter of evidence that Marilyn was broody, experts remain unconvinced that the “pregnancy pictures” are anything more than just evidence of the star’s yo-yo dieting.
Scott Fortner, who runs The Marilyn Monroe Collection of memorabilia, said: “Marilyn Monroe was very concerned about her public image.
“If she was pregnant at this time, she’d never have allowed these photos to be taken if the baby’s father was Yves Montand.”