Milwaukee’s John Ahlhauser not only photographed Marilyn Monroe before she was famous, he photographed her before, legally speaking, she was Marilyn Monroe.
With the centennial of Monroe’s birthday coming up on June 1, 2026, it’s a good time to revisit a young Milwaukee Journal photographer’s experience with the legendary movie star.
Ahlhauser joined The Milwaukee Journal staff in 1948 shortly after his graduation from Marquette University.
One day in 1949, he was working in the Journal photo studio, “where his first job was mixing chemicals,” Journal Sentinel reporter Meg Jones wrote in her 2016 obituary of Ahlhauser.
A publicity manager brought a young and then unknown actor to the newspaper for an interview. An editor told Ahlhauser to “make a glamour shot of this starlet. There was no mention of her name because she was a nobody,” Ahlhauser told Jones in a 2012 interview.
According to Jones, Ahlhauser spent about half an hour on the shoot, setting up klieg-like lights and posing the young woman on a gray box with a roll of newsprint. Using a 4 by 5 Speed Graphic camera, he made seven black-and-white negatives.
“I don’t remember any conversation. But, boy, any time I was ready to shoot, she was ready to be shot,” Ahlhauser told Jones in 2012.
“He had never done a studio shot before,” Ahlhauser’s daughter, Mame O’Meara, said in a phone interview. But he brought a curiosity to his photography, and “he particularly loved taking pictures of people,” O’Meara said.
Born in 1926 under the name Norma Jeane Mortenson and later called Norma Jeane Baker, the actor began using Marilyn Monroe as her stage name in 1946, but did not legally change it until 1956, a few months before she married playwright Arthur Miller.
One photograph from Ahlhauser’s session with Monroe was published in the July 17, 1949, edition of The Milwaukee Journal. It appeared in print as a tightly cropped head-and-shoulders image, accompanied by this caption: “MARILYN MONROE, a starlet who paid us a visit.” It ran with a three-paragraph item about Monroe visiting town to promote the forthcoming Marx Brothers movie comedy, “Love Happy,” in which she had a small role. (It also refers to her as 21 years old at the time, which means someone shaved two years off her age.)
Ahlhauser, Marilyn Monroe and Gloria Steinem
Ahlhauser went on to have a distinguished career as a Milwaukee Journal photographer until 1972. Among many other subjects, he photographed the civil rights movement. During a dangerous time in Mississippi, he wrote his last will and testament in his small photographer’s notebook in case he did not make it home alive, O’Meara said.
Fascinated by the embryonic development of electronic news media, Ahlhauser then moved his family to Indiana. where he earned a doctorate and became an influential professor of photojournalism at Indiana University until his retirement in 1990. That same year, he and his wife Lois founded the Kalish Workshop, an intensive photojournalism and visual editing workshop that continues today.
Ahlhauser hung on to the Marilyn Monroe negatives, just as he hung on to nearly everything connected with his work at The Milwaukee Journal, O’Meara said.
One evening Ahlhauser and Lois were watching TV’s Larry King interview Gloria Steinem. When Steinem said she was writing a book about young Monroe (eventually published as “Monroe: Norma Jean”), the Ahlhausers sprang to their typewriter to write her a letter. Steinem replied shortly thereafter. Ahlhauser sent her a contact sheet with images of the seven negatives. She chose one, which appeared in the book published in 1988.
The Ahlhauser family is now selling the five unpublished negatives through an auction house. The family is retaining the two previously published images.
Otherwise, the bulk of Ahlhauser’s enormous archive of his Journal photography is eventually going to the Milwaukee Public Library, O’Meara said. There’s at least one Ph.d in there for some future scholar, she said.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Rare Marilyn Monroe photos taken for Milwaukee Journal to be auctioned
Reporting by Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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