Marilyn Monroe….’Person To Person’ April 8, 1955
Marilyn Monroe….’Person To Person’ April 8, 1955
At the clip above, we start with photographer Milton Green walking through the living room we see in the photos. While he’s walking toward the kitchen where Marilyn is waiting, he is talking live with Edward R. Murrow via the new Shur “Vagabond” wireless microphone.
The Vagabond was the first broadcast quality wireless mic and you can see Marilyn holding the unit in her hand before the CBS technician helps her put hide it under her clothes. What a great gig!
In the second photo, we see a truly rare sight. As she poses with the ‘Person To Person’ crew, there are two new RCA TK11/31s behind them. The rarity is the striped banding around the top. Usually, this was only done with the TK10 and TK30.
In case you don’t know, the banding is actually a very clever grayscale camera chart. Early on, the settings on the black and white cameras tended to drift and some “on the fly” adjustments were needed, but that required a test pattern or grayscale chart. As a quick fix, the CBS NY engineering department came up with these grey and white alternating bands and put them on all their cameras so that all you had to do for a quick alignment was shoot the camera next to you.
This worked well on the TK10s and TK30s because they didn’t have handles like the TK11/31. With the handles in the way, the shot was blocked and effectiveness of this arrangement was diminished. When the new TK11s arrived, they put the banding on but after a few months, stopped adding it, so only a few of the new TK11s were banded and actually, with the new updates onboard, drifting was not as much of a problem as it had been with the older TK10s and 30s.
Enjoy and share! – Bobby Ellerbee
I’m unsure that’s a Vagabond wireless. The Vagabond receiver required a loop antenna strung around the set. Operating at 2 mHz, the range was about 15 feet. All the Vagabond documentation I’ve seen shows a form factor of a large, wand-like handheld wireless mic. Shure could have build a custom version for “Person to Person. There was a small comany in LA called Stephens Tru-Sonic that was producing a wireless mic in the early 50’s. I own one of them, and it resembles one in the photo.
No Don. Thank YOU. Have to share. You are the BEST ! AWESOME !
I had a conversation once with Fred Friendly of CBS and he told me about the time Marilyn Monroe wore her live wireless mic into the bathroom while the crew listened in horror. Was this the production? Or just an apocryphal story?
what studio was this in?
Here’s a 1954 ad for the Shure Vagabond