Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg, Beverly Hills,

1962

In this intimate portrait of an unlikely friendship, Newman captured the iconic actress Marilyn Monroe affectionately nuzzling the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Carl Sandburg, who stoically looks straight ahead. For the last two years of her life, while she was struggling with mental illness and addiction, Monroe found solace in her friendship with Sandburg. In Newman’s photograph, Monroe appears distinct from her image as a naive sex symbol and instead suggests an emotionally engaged human being. That complexity may be one of the reasons that Sandburg would choose this image for his memorial tribute to the actress in Look magazine’s September 11, 1962, issue, published just months after the photograph was taken.