Revealed: Why Marilyn Posed Nude

A new memoir reveals that it was simple jealousy of Elizabeth Taylor that spurred Marilyn Monroe to pose nude. Monroe agreed to be naked while exiting a swimming pool during a photo shoot, as long as Taylor did not appear in any magazines running the images, reports Vanity Fair, which is publishing the images in this month's edition. (While Monroe made just $100,000 for her final film role in Something's Gotta Give, Taylor pulled down $1 million in Cleopatra.) But the nude pictures weren't the only place Monroe bared all. A smattering of her conversations with photographer Lawrence Schiller, as per his memoir Marilyn & Me:

• On posing naked: "Larry, if I do come out of the pool with nothing on, I want your guarantee that when your pictures appear on the covers of magazines Elizabeth Taylor is not anywhere in the same issue."

• On having children: “I’ve always wanted a baby. Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child. Whenever it came close, my body said no and I lost the baby.”
• On Marilyn: “I never wanted to be Marilyn—it just happened. Marilyn’s like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane."
• On being a sex symbol: Schiller claims that Monroe once told him, "There isn't anybody that looks like me without clothes on," but also complained in their final conversation before her death, "It's still about nudity. Is that all I'm good for? I’d like to show that I can get publicity without using my ass or getting fired from a picture."

Click for more from Vanity Fair's outtakes. (More Marilyn Monroe stories.)