This week's print edition of PEOPLE includes an exclusive interview with James Haspiel, 88, a fan who became a trusted friend of the star
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The issue also features an exclusive excerpt from Marilyn: The Lost Photographs, the Last Interview, which features Monroe's interview with Richard Meryman and exclusive photos from her last shoot with Allan Grant
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Haspiel remembers Monroe as someone who was "decent" who "always took the high road"
Starting at about 1 a.m. on Feb. 15, 1954, James Haspiel stood outside in midtown Manhattan for five hours shivering in the frigid cold as he watchedMarilyn Monroeshoot one of the most iconic scenes in movie history.
On this particular night, Monroe and Tom Ewell, her co-star in the 1955 comedy,The Seven Year Itch, were filmed leaving a movie theater on Lexington Ave. between 52nd and 53rd streets.
During their stroll, Monroe stands over a subway grate as the whoosh of a passing train blows the skirt of her white halter dress up, a welcome respite from the sweltering heatwave that has gripped the city.
“Ooh, do you feel the breeze from the subway?” she coos in her famous baby’s breath of a voice. “Isn’t it delicious?”
The radiant, platinum blonde bombshell Haspiel saw that night smiling for the cameras was nothing less than a true Hollywood movie star.
The 16-year-old Haspiel didn’t know it yet, but he would come to learn that the “Marilyn Monroe” he, the crowd that night and legions of filmgoers had come to know was nothing more than “a costume” she would don, Haspiel, now 88, tells PEOPLE. “It was her invention. It gave her success, but in real life, she was Norma Jeane.”
Born Norma Jeane Baker on June 1, 1926, she began using Marilyn Monroe as her stage name when she first signed with 20th Century Fox in 1946. With her talent, incandescence and an underlying vulnerability, Monroe went on to become one of the most enduring stars of all time — with all kinds of stories attached to her legacy.
But to Haspiel, the Monroe the world knows from such films asGentlemen Prefer Blondes,Some Like It HotandThe Misfits, who died at 36 on Aug. 4, 1962, from an apparent drug overdose, was a down-to-earth, “decent” human being.
“She was a gentle soul,” says Haspiel, a dedicated fan who became a beloved, trusted friend.
The teenage Haspiel met Monroe in person in Sept. 1954, when she was heading into the St. Regis hotel, just days before he watched her filmThe Seven Year Itch.Smitten, Haspiel became a fixture in Marilyn’s life whenever she came to New York City, photographing and filming her every move, chatting with her all the while and in the process, getting to know her.
She came to trust him as well. As a result, Haspiel became one of the lucky few she allowed to peek behind her glamorous Hollywood persona and get to know “the real person” she was.
He recalls her going to the Bowery in lower Manhattan handing out money anonymously to the unhoused when she lived there in the 1950s.
“She went to that area, not as Marilyn Monroe,” he says. “She went as Norma Jeane. No makeup. Slacks, no heels.”
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With her longtime hairdresser Peter Leonardi accompanying her, Monroe “would walk along the streets, and when she found somebody lying in a doorway, she would get some money from Peter and give it to that person,” he says. “Knowing they didn't know who she was, that didn't matter. And she would do this when she could.”
He also remembers her trying to save pigeons that boys were catching in a park near her E. 57th St. apartment to sell to a butcher for 25 cents each.
Watching them as they put the pigeons in a cage, “she said, ‘Okay. If I sit down on the bench there and wait until you're done, will you sell me the pigeons and free them?’” he recalls.
“So she waited until the end of the evening. They counted up the pigeons. She gave them a quarter per pigeon, and they opened the cage and freed the pigeons. The pigeons flew away. This is who she was.”
After her 1962 death, Haspiel also became one of the faithful protectors of her legacy.
When he learned that she had died, “I cried for two years,” he says.
And for more than two decades, he declined offers to write about his experiences with her.
“For 25 years after she died, every now and then, a publisher would come to me about doing a book,” he says. “I said, ‘No, we're not going to talk about her. Let her rest in peace.'"
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But after he says “lies upon lies” were written about her in numerous articles and books — “I got so sick of the Marilyn that was being invented to make money” — he decided to write about his eight-year friendship with her in several books, including his first one in 1991,Marilyn: The Ultimate Look at the Legend.
“And of the thousands of books that were written about her worldwide, the only book other than mine where I can recognize her, is a book calledMimosa: Memories of Marilyn & the Making of The Misfitsa 2021 memoir by the late Ralph Roberts,” he says about the actor who was her close friend. “It was written by his brother from Ralph's notes.”
Now, as what would have been Marilyn’s 100th birthday approaches, Haspiel is not surprised that fans around the world still adore her. “There is a child being born today that 15 years from now will fall in love with her,” he says. Judging from the books, movies and documentaries about her today and adulation she still receives, he says, “Marilyn is very much alive.”
Marilyn: The Lost Photographs, the Last Interview, by Richard Meryman with photos by Allan Grant goes on sale May 12 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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