A rare photo of Marilyn is among many hidden gems found among the archives of amateur photographer John Verzi, as Elias Chavez reports for Business Insider.
“John Verzi spent decades photographing everyone from A-list Hollywood celebrities to lesser-known niche stars. His private collection is now being prepared for the public to view at the Los Angeles Public Library.
After his death in 2018, Verzi’s exclusive photos bounced among collectors and auction houses before it found its permanent home at the central branch of the LAPL in Downtown Los Angeles. The library bid over $140,000 for the collection.
Verzi was born in Santa Clara County, California, and spent much of his adult years in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He was not a paparazzi and was not, by any official accounts, a professional photographer, but he was taken with the world of Hollywood.
Christina Rice, the senior librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library associated with the photo collection, said that Verzi had a friend at a film publication in the 1960s who helped him gain the necessary credentials … Verzi also had a penchant for finding stars attending dinner parties throughout Hollywood and Beverly Hills.
All of the photographs in the Verzi collection are in colour, which is one of the unique factors that sets his collection apart from others taken around the same time.
A glimpse of Marilyn Monroe is captured by the photographer as she leaves a dinner party honouring Billy Wilder at the Beverly Hills restaurant Romanoff’s. The handwritten date on the slide is September 10, 1961.
This photo of Marilyn Monroe getting in her car after attending a dinner party at Romanoff’s is the only one that exists. ‘There’s no other known photos of her at this event. It’s known she went to this event, but nobody else photographed her,’ Rice said. ‘So it is not only is it one-of-a-kind Marilyn image, but it’s truly one-of-a-kind that nobody else photographed her at this event as far as we know.'”
It’s interesting that Marilyn went to a party for Billy Wilder after he publicly called out her behaviour on the set of Some Like It Hot (1959). However, Marilyn had attended a preview of The Apartment in 1960, and it’s rumoured that Wilder was considering her for either Irma La Douce (1963), starring Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon; or Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), with Kim Novak and Dean Martin.
As with Some Like It Hot, both films were produced by the Mirisch Brothers and distributed through United Artists. In 1962, Marilyn was winding up her old contract at Twentieth Century-Fox, and so – regrettably – the timing was not right for either project. After her death that year, Wilder often remarked she could be very difficult to work with – but always insisted that her talent were charisma were irreplaceable.
While John Verzi’s image is previously unseen, Marilyn’s appearance is similar to these other rare photos, which have puzzled fans for years. It was previously suggested that they were taken on the night of Marilyn’s photo session with Douglas Kirkland in November 1961, but this latest discovery may open new lines of enquiry (although it was not out of character for Marilyn to wear the same outfit twice …)
The Marilyn Report 
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