10 Rare Photos From the ‘How to Marry a Millionaire’ Set Show Marilyn and Costars at Their Most Glam

In this candid, Marilyn Monroe, clad in a matching red ensemble and diamonds, is caught in a moment of laughter while relaxing in her dressing room. We can’t help but wonder what was so funny!

Monroe, 26, and Betty Grable, 36, look like they’re having fun in this set photo, and their chemistry was real. Contemporary viewers assumed that because Grable was a sex symbol of an earlier era, she’d view Monroe as a rival, but this was hardly the case. In fact, she reportedly told the star 10 years her junior, “Honey, I've had mine—go get yours,” and the blondes became offscreen friends.

Monroe and Lauren Bacall are stylishly spectacled during a break in filming. The two stars were friendly, but in a 1994 NPR interview, Bacall quipped, “My only complaint about her was that she was late all the time, but she was late out of fear as much as anything else, but it was hard to sit around and wait. She was usually an hour or two late every morning.” Bacall also acknowledged that she and Monroe were very different, and spoke candidly of her impressions of her, telling radio listeners, “I wish I had been as photogenic as she was, but she was very sweet, kind of far away, very self-involved, but no meanness. She was not bitchy, she was not strident in any way, she just always seemed a little lost to me—wistful, kind of, just kind of not quite there.”

Here, Bacall listens intently as the film’s director, Jean Negulesco, tells her what to do. Negulesco said that Bacall had “poise and experience beyond her years,” while Grable was “genuine... unpretentious... with such a sense of humor,” and Monroe was “one of the most atomic personalities ever to come out of Hollywood… But I was surprised to find how hard she worked and how much she wanted to give a good performance.”

Bacall gives the camera her signature seductive stare in this beautifully pastel-toned shot.

Grable, Bacall and Monroe are absolutely charming in an off-the-cuff black-and-white-turned-color portrait from the set. Look at those perfect pearly whites!

Monroe looks stunning in this promotional pin-up. There’s that red diamond get-up again!

Given the loneliness and sadness Monroe notoriously felt for much of her short life, there’s something poignant about seeing her smiling with a gaggle of adoring fans, as seen in this photo from the film’s premiere.

Bacall and her husband, Humphrey Bogart, get maybe a little too cozy with Monroe at the film’s premiere. (Where are those eyes going, Bogie?) Bogart and Monroe never acted together, but he and his wife famously met during the making of To Have and Have Not (1944) and went on to costar in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948). In a cute meta moment, Bacall refers to Bogart in How to Marry a Millionaire when she says, “I've always liked older men... Look at that old fellow, what's-his-name, in The African Queen. Absolutely crazy about him!”

Though fur can now sometimes be considered a fashion faux pas, we have to admit that Monroe and Grable looked ultra glam in their furs and evening gowns at the premiere of How to Marry a Millionaire. You can almost feel how soft those stoles must have been!