My Grandfather Escaped Nazi Germany. Then He Found Marilyn Monroe.

Town & Country ^ | May 19, 2026 | Joshua John Miller

[nickcarraway]

A new book reveals never-before-seen photographs of the actress taken by Bruno Bernard throughout her life. In T&C, the photographer’s grandson reveals why he decided to open Bernard of Hollywood’s archives.

My grandfather escaped Germany in 1937 on a student visa, fleeing the tyrannical ideology of “failed painter by the name of Adolf,” as he always referred to Hitler. His mother, Sophia Sommerfeld, had given him a small Brownie camera before he left. It was the last time he would ever see her. That camera became his way of seeing the United States, his translator in a new world.

When Bruno’s aspirations to become an actor were dashed by his insurmountable dialect, he tried to become a director. Lacking the proper introductions within the studio system, he was viewed as a displaced person, a Jew from a past the studio heads themselves were trying to outrun. They had built their own kingdoms and were now Americans. The Eastern European countries they’d escaped had become distant snapshots, and Bruno was a reminder of what they had left behind.

Until late into the Third Reich, every major studio, though headed by Jews, was still doing business with Germany. Afraid to lose the European market, people like MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer were reluctant to sever ties. Only Warner Brothers, led by the socially conscious Harry Warner and brother Jack, closed its Berlin offices.

Smarting from his failed attempts to break through the gates of Babylon, my grandfather picked up the Brownie his mother had given him and began photographing the children of studio executives, which led to photographing their wives as well. These caged birds fell under the spell of this witty and dashing Berliner, a man who made them feel seen while their husbands were distracted by starlets. Their gossip traveled fast and cemented his reputation.

Soon enough, it was suggested that if he really wanted to make money, my grandfather should start photographing actors. So, the struggling immigrant who couldn’t break into the studio system opened his own photo studio on Sunset Boulevard, one that would become synonymous with the golden era of Hollywood.

Bruno Bernard Marilyn Monroe (then Norma Jeane Dougherty), The Discovery Series, 1946. In the strange netherworld after World War II, when my grandfather was hustling to build his business, he left a dentist’s office, his mouth shot full of Novocain, and beheld a young woman crossing the street. Unable to articulate anything, he did something in opposition to his very polished old world manners: He whistled to get her attention. He saw a comet descending; her name: Norma Jeane Dougherty. What began as serendipity became legend.

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Norma and my grandfather had both been raised in orphanages. When he was young, he and his siblings were taken to one because their parents were too sick to care for them after World War I. This was a source of great shame for him. Norma Jeane, though not technically an orphan, had a mother whose mental illness placed her into the foster care. Bruno and Norma Jeane, on opposite ends of the world, were living parallel lives.

Having fled Nazi Germany, my ­grandfather was searching for a motherland, a place to call home. In some ways, he found one in his complex relationship with Norma Jeane. At the same time, she was also running from something: a past, an unhappy marriage. Their meeting would alter the narrative arcs of both their lives.

We arrived at Marilyn’s crypt. An off-beige wall of marble, a partition between life and death. My feelings were so overwhelming that I can’t quite remember what they were: I only remember that my grandfather instructed me to get behind the camera. What did I see in the viewfinder? I saw the radiation coursing through and rearranging the cellular structure of my grandfather’s body as it tried to shrink the tumors that beset him. His skin had been tanned dark from all the treatments.

Standing in front of the crypt, my grandfather adjusted the button on his suit, then got into profile position. He must have planned this shot while he was tying up loose ends for a memoir he wanted to publish but never would.

My grandfather did not instruct me how to frame the shot. Maybe, in his grief, he trusted me. I focused on his reverent movements, how he quickly used his hand to dust off the pollen-caked bronze plaque inscribed with Marilyn’s name.

I looked for the right frame.

I remembered that my grandfather always had a dialogue going with his subjects, and how he would use humor to disarm them.

“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” I started to sing.

“Get serious,” he said.

“Diamonds, ­diamonds—I don’t mean rhinestones.”

“She’s rolling around upstairs, hearing your terrible singing.”

My grandfather and I shared a macabre sense of humor.

After a few moments, he grew still. He bowed his head, his chin inclined toward the maroon handkerchief flowering from his breast pocket—the one he always used to wipe away his emotions. “My darling, we will never know what happened to you that night, will we?” he whispered to the crypt. He wasn’t referring to conspiracy theories about Monroe’s death; he was making an apology, some act of contrition for not having been there for her at the end.

As I looked through the viewfinder, I wondered if he also saw Marilyn’s crypt as the tomb of Ruth, the sister he lost in Berlin in the late 1930s, or of his brother Martin, or of his mother Sophia, who died shortly after escaping a Nazi work camp. My great- grandmother had made it to Quito, Ecuador, but perished soon after from the toil of torture. I pressed my finger against the shutter release and took the shot.

For many years, my mother did not want to share certain parts of her father’s writings. But time has softened those wounds enough that the artifacts can now be examined with the necessary distance. The centenary of her birth in 2026 has provided me with a portal through which to understand Marilyn, my family, and my place in these mythologies.

Inheritance is not only about land, bank accounts, or stocks. One can also inherit emotion. Inheritance can be a life you absorb, misunderstand, and metabolize. I’ve been bequeathed five lives: mine, and those of my grandfather, grandmother, mother, and now, Marilyn.

The following chapters of this book are an archive of the images my grandfather took of Monroe, images that charted her rise and culminated in the iconic Seven Year Itch shoot. But more than that, they are filled with diaries that trace the spine of his relationship with himself and his lifelong attempt to belong in America.

Since 2019, M.A. [Fortin] and I have been restoring his extensive archives, which fill more than seven rooms of files, writings, negatives, contact sheets, and prints. During this excavation, we uncovered more of Bruno’s diaries and the manuscript of his unpublished memoir, which document, with a stenographer’s precision, many of the conversations he had with Marilyn Monroe.

M.A. has compiled and curated the journal entries in the following chapters while also interviewing me about the legend that touched my family. We’ve also included a conversation I had with filmmaker and colleague Sean Baker about Norma Jeane’s salad days.

My grandfather occupies a unique place in the Marilyn Monroe canon. He was one of the few photographers whose camera witnessed the metamorphosis of Norma Jeane into Marilyn Monroe. He deeply understood both sides of her persona. Yet he always feared she would never reconcile herself with a childhood of Dickensian horrors, that there would be a split between her two selves, leaving no room for Norma to live inside Marilyn. There’s a French saying: On ne fait rien avec impunité. We do nothing without having to pay for it, or perhaps more precisely, without being punished for it.

When I look at the picture I took of my grandfather standing at Monroe’s crypt, I hope in that moment he was remembering the beginning and not the end: when he first came to America and met Norma Jeane, when he thought he might find home again, when anything was possible.

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TOPICS: Arts/Photography; TV/Movies
KEYWORDS:

[nickcarraway]

[bankwalker]

who’s the girl at the end of those legs?

[TalBlack]

He could whistle with a moth shot full of novacain?

[Tommy Revolts]

who’s the girl at the end of those legs?

Norma Jeane