Photographer’s Work Cut Through Glitz

“I was photographing Marilyn Monroe when she was still Norma Jean,” says Murray Garrett, hardly able to believe it himself.

Once one of Hollywood’s most sought-after shooters, Garrett, 74, and a longtime resident of Sherman Oaks, has just published “Hollywood Candid: A Photographer Remembers.” New this month from Abrams, the book includes 150 black-and-white pictures of Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant and other stars taken between 1947 and 1973.

Although the photos speak for themselves--including the haunting cover shot of Monroe, looking both glamorous and heartbreakingly hopeful--the book also includes Garrett’s reminiscences about his famous subjects.

As a young man, he says, he didn’t realize the import of what he was doing. When he got $200 to photograph test pilot Chuck Yeager the day after he broke the sound barrier, Garrett recalls: “All that meant to me was, ‘Oh, boy, I’ve got enough to pay the obstetrician.’ ” At 22, he says, “I had no sense of history.”

The photographer credits Sinatra with making him aware of how curious the public was, and continues to be, about the people he captured on film. Garrett photographed Sinatra many times, always an interesting experience, he says, “because you never got the same guy twice.”

On one occasion, when Sinatra was his cordial, voluble self, not the man in what Garrett calls “the steel mask,” Sinatra asked him what he had been up to lately.

Garrett told him he had just photographed Marlon Brando. What’s he like, Sinatra inquired--in more pungent language--as curious as any ordinary fan. From then on, Garrett began jotting down the particulars of his photo shoots. “Mind floggers,” he called the brief notes he tossed into his camera bag.

As to the shoot of Brando that piqued Sinatra’s interest, it was indeed memorable. Brando was naked when he opened the door of his Benedict Canyon home to Garrett and his assistant, Peggy Irwin. Unfazed, Brando went off in search of a towel. “I knew I was going to see Marlon Brando, but this is crazy,” Irwin observed.

After Brando got dressed, Garrett shot the exquisite young actor smoking as he listened to records, and playing with his cat. Garrett recalls that Brando told him, “This isn’t my house. When you have a cat, it’s the cat’s house.”

Forty of Garrett’s photographs--many of which also appear in the book--are on display through Nov. 25 at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. Asked why he chose to showcase Garrett’s work, curator Jan-Christopher Horak says, “He’s representative of a sea change in Hollywood publicity photography.”

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From the 1920s to the 1940s, Horak says, most publicity shots were done in the studio with artificial light. The resulting portraits were orchestrated fantasies, not candid representations of their subjects.

But Garrett, Horak points out, was a photojournalist who shot his subjects where and how he found them. And he was able to establish a relationship with his subjects, Horak says, “that allows him to capture the essences of people you don’t usually see.” Horak cites a Garrett photo of Joan Crawford, sans makeup, taken on a radio sound stage.

Horak was surprised such a photo of Crawford existed: “I thought she didn’t leave her bathroom without makeup.”

Born in Brooklyn, Garrett studied photography at New York’s Metropolitan Vocational High School, where fellow student Eartha Kitt, known as Kitty, sometimes posed for the class. After school, he worked in the darkroom at Graphic House for famed theatrical photographer Eileen Darby.

He got his first professional break at 16, when he was asked to take pictures of labor leader Phillip Murray and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. To this day, Garrett gets goose bumps thinking about Roosevelt, who passed most of the time during a long limousine ride querying Garrett about himself and his family and giving the boy a pep talk about the brightness of his future.

But Garrett almost missed his appointment with destiny. The Secret Service men assigned to the first lady asked to see his I.D. At 16, he didn’t even have a driver’s license. They howled when he showed them his library card.

Six months later, he again had an opportunity to take pictures of Eleanor Roosevelt and to introduce her to his girlfriend, Phyllis Cooper, now his wife.

A few years later, when he was a newcomer in Hollywood, Garrett had yet another encounter with the most admired--and despised--woman in the world. He was at Ciro’s one night, with a group of old Hollywood hands, when he learned that Eleanor Roosevelt was there for a benefit. Don’t bother to approach her, the veterans warned him, the Secret Service will keep you away.

Garrett assured his older colleagues that he knew the former first lady and approached her party. “Oh, it’s my friend from New York,” she said when she saw him. “Did you ever marry that pretty little girl?” Garrett not only got his pictures, his reputation soared.

“I didn’t shave much in those days. I was a kid,” he recalls. “But suddenly I had status.”

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Garrett shot for Life and other major magazines, and celebrities often asked to have him take their pictures. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton asked him to document a visit to Disneyland they took with two of their respective children. Sinatra had him cover the surprise birthday party he threw for Natalie Wood when she turned 21. And Garrett took pictures of Bob Hope for 25 years.

“I love Murray because he always made me look good,” Hope told his publicist, Ward Grant. In Hope’s introduction to “Hollywood Candid,” written last year, he jokes that Garrett was able to do so because he first photographed the comedian in the 1940s--”before I had to hire Earl Scheib as my makeup man.”

In praise of Garrett, Hope (or one of his writers) speculates that “he has a magic eye or secret device in his camera that captures something different, something special that is missed by other photographers.”

In placing Garrett in the history of Hollywood photography, Horak notes that “he’s very different from the paparazzi you have today who are literally harassing celebrities to get a photograph.”

Garrett jokes that when he first heard the term paparazzi he thought it was a kind of pasta. This relentless, sometimes menacing class of celebrity photographers has emerged because “There are rags who are willing to pay $100,000 for a picture,” he says.

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In his heyday, no editor ever urged him to chase after Sinatra or JFK. In the past, he says, “photographers, and the press in general, had much higher respect for people’s privacy. Nobody was trying to take pictures in people’s bedrooms.”

Asked about Marilyn Monroe, Garrett remembers her as a “very vulnerable, frightened woman” who communicated best with the camera. He was not at all surprised by her early death.

Recently, Garrett’s agent reported that one of his Monroe photos sold in England for $1,000. He remembers how often she smiled into his camera.

“If I had one of those rolls of film, I don’t know what it would be worth today.”

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Spotlight appears every Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.