People

By Martha Smilgis

"There was something special about her, a luminous quality to her face, a fragileness combined with astonishing vibrancy. This girl was going places." So mused a young photographer about the girl he found working in a factory near the end of World War II. Credit David Conover with an unerring eye, because his discovery was to become Marilyn Monroe. In June 1945, Conover, then an Army photographer stationed at the Hal Roach Studio in California, was sent by his commanding officer, Captain Ronald Reagan, to take promotional shots of women doing war work. The allure of Norma Jean Dougherty, 19, attaching propellers to model aircraft at the Radioplane Corp., prompted Conover to request a two-week leave, which he spent touring the Mojave Desert with the young beauty and teaching her some modeling techniques. Conover returned late from his leave and was shipped out to the Philippines. The film, sent to a friend to be developed, was lost, except for ten photos that appeared in Conover's 1981 book Finding Marilyn. Conover died last year, and the negatives of the original pictures from his book, along with 15 unpublished transparencies, are expected to fetch up to $32,000 when they are auctioned at Christie's in London on Aug. 28. Monroe's kind of vibrancy still astonishes.

With reporting by David E. Thigpen/New York