Marilyn Monroe’s memorable moments on Long Island

June 1 marks what would have been the birthday of Marilyn Monroe, the iconic actor whose indelible image and immutable screen performances continue to inspire and endure 64 years after her death at age 36.

And Long Island, where she spent some of her most idyllic and terrible times, remembers and honors her well.

On May 30, the Fire Island Pines Arts Project (FIPAP) celebrates her centennial with a three-hour party at Whyte Hall, with hors d’oeuvres, drinks, a Marilyn cutout for photos and a continuous screening of her 1953 musical comedy “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” And the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington on June 8 offers a Sky Room talk by Kings Park film historian and documentary filmmaker Glenn Andreiev, exploring her rare early film and TV appearances and screen tests.

“It’s her body of work” that keeps interest alive, said FIPAP president Steven Alan Black, in movies ranging from comedies to dramas and encompassing such classics as “All About Eve” (1950), “How to Marry a Millionaire” (1954), “The Seven Year Itch,” (1955), “Some Like It Hot” (1959) and “The Misfits” (1961). “I think the other thing is just her early death,” Black said. “What could she have done had she lived? What would her life have been?”

Monroe’s first foray to Long Island was likely Tobay Beach, where Andre de Dienes snapped famous pinup pictures of her while she was in New York to promote her 1949 movie “Love Happy.” Then in 1955, famed photojournalist Eve Arnold shot a series with Monroe in the hamlet of Mount Sinai — capturing the iconic image of her in a playground, engrossed in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

“We worked on a beach on Long Island,” Arnold wrote in a letter years later. “I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up … She kept ‘Ulysses’ in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it — but she found it hard going … When we stopped at a local playground to photograph, she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her.”

After Monroe became involved with married playwright Arthur Miller in 1955, the two would rendezvous at locales including playwright and poet Norman Rosten’s summer cottage in Port Jefferson and at the Fire Island home of her acting teacher Lee Strasberg and his actor wife Paula.

Monroe personally shot down a rumor about one visit there, telling Hollywood biographer Maurice Zolotow in 1956, “I once read an item that I was on Fire Island visiting the Strasbergs and a photographer asked me to pose on the beach. The story said I turned to Mr. Strasberg, asked him for permission to pose and that he forbade me to do so. I didn’t do that, because I don’t ask anyone’s permission to pose. Also, I have never been on a beach with Mr. Strasberg.”

But her most lasting presence here came in the summer of 1957, after she was the new Mrs. Miller and the couple rented Jeffrey Potter’s Stony Hill Farm in Amagansett. They stayed in what Jeffrey’s son, Job, later explained was “the caretaker’s house,” called Hill House.

“Marilyn was outside in a polo shirt and shorts,” Newsday reported that long-ago summer, “and there was very little that was typical about her. She did something for the polo shirt and shorts.”

Monroe “was lovely, feminine and sweet,” Job Potter told The New York Times in 1996 of that summer when he was 6. “I was gaga. … When you were a movie star you were it,” he said. He recalled that, “I sold her some Girl Scout Cookies,” as a way to visit her. “My sister had some left over.”

But at 11 a.m. on Aug. 1, the star was rushed to the since-demolished Doctors Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, suffering symptoms of a miscarriage; it turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy. “The baby was unsavable,” a hospital spokesperson said. Monroe’s physician, Dr. Hilliard Dubrow, reported that the 31-year-old had been “five or six weeks pregnant.”

After recovering in the hospital, Monroe returned by limousine to Amagansett on Aug. 10. Her Pulitzer Prize-winner husband had written something for her: A heartfelt sign on the front door reading, “Welcome home, Marilyn.”

Because that long summer, Long Island was home.