Marilyn Monroe posed for her last-ever photoshoot just weeks before her death aged 36.
A bombshell now book by author and DailyMail.com columnist Maureen Callahan
?details how the photoshoot ? by world-famous photographer Bert Stern ? was Marilyn's 'most daring' yet.
In
'Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed'
, Callahan writes that Marilyn was 'at the height of her beauty' when Stern captured the pictures for Vogue in June 1962.
Marilyn was suffering intense
depression
, and her consumption of
alcohol
and pills was 'staggering', Callahan writes. Eventually, her 'persistent inability to get out of bed' caused her to be fired from the set of her latest film, 'Something's Got to Give'.
She 'took the public humiliation as a challenge', Callahan says, '[posing for Stern]?nude in bed, her breasts swathed in pink tulle. The eye was drawn to a long, deep scar... the result of recent gallbladder surgery.'
Marilyn was 'at the height of her beauty' when Bert Stern captured her last-ever photoshoot (pictured) for Vogue in June 1962.
Marilyn reportedly told Stern she felt self-conscious about the mark, but he assured her that 'a woman is beautiful by her scars' ? a quote he borrowed from famed fashion editor Diana Vreeland.
Marilyn died weeks later after a barbiturate overdose at her home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. Her body was found by her housekeeper in the early hours of August 5, 1962.
'She was face-down on her bed, nude, with her phone still in her hand,' Callahan writes.
As such, Stern's iconic shoot was later titled 'The Last Sitting'.
On Sunday, an exclusive extract of Callahan's new biography ?
which is being published in a major new Mail series
?? revealed potentially history-altering claims about Marilyn's death.?
In particular, Callahan unearthed explosive remarks made by Marilyn's second husband Joe DiMaggio, years after her death.?
DiMaggio banned both President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby??
who had simultaneous affairs with Marilyn
? from her funeral, and later reportedly said: 'I always knew who killed her, but I didn't want to start a revolution in this country. She told me someone would do her in, but I kept quiet.
'The whole lot of Kennedys were lady-killers, and they always got away with it. They'll be getting away with it a hundred years from now.'
Bobby visited Marilyn at her LA home on the night she died.
In 'Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed', Callahan writes that Stern's photos of Marilyn were the 'most daring' of her career, posing naked in bed.
President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, right, both had simultaneous affairs with Marilyn.
'The FBI and the CIA, Bobby and Jack discovered, had bugged Marilyn's house and phone line without her knowledge... Bobby wasn't leaving without the tape recordings,' Callahan writes.
'Where the f*** is it?' Bobby is said to have demanded. But Marilyn had 'no idea' what he was talking about.?Bobby left empty-handed, and she died hours later.
After her death, the FBI were 'ordered to remove certain phone records [from her home]', Callahan writes.?'Recovered in the 1980s, Marilyn's logs showed she'd called Bobby's workplace eight times between June 25 and 30 [1962]... Reports suggest she'd had an abortion on July 20, and that the baby may have been Bobby's.'
Callahan also reveals that, in the 1985,
ABC News had planned to air a TV special about the Kennedy brothers' potential involvement in Marilyn's death
? but, just hours before the broadcast was due, ABC suddenly pulled the plug.
The ABC News then-president Roone Arledge, who was responsible for cancelling the documentary, was 'a longtime friend of Ethel Kennedy [Bobby's wife]', Callahan writes.