For the star’s 100th anniversary, Lawrence Schiller relives the nude photoshoot that showed, far from being a ‘messy’ blond bombshell, Monroe was a shrewd controller of her image

A few days after doing a nude swimming pool shoot on the set of the 1962 comedy Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn Monroe jumped into her raven black T-Bird and drove her photographer, Lawrence Schiller, to Schwab’s Pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard. Schiller had brought his negatives, now ready to be turned into prints. And in her purse Monroe had brought her scissors, which she now reached for – and, under the glow of the now legendary Hollywood hangout’s streetlights, began to cut the colour film into pieces.

“Ziiiiiip – the ones she didn’t like,” says Schiller, animating the sound. “Ziiiiiip.” She destroyed them? “Oh yeah, but that came with the territory,” laughs the now 89-year-old, the last living photographer of Monroe, as he recalls his 25-year-old self bending down to pick up the debris and thinking: “Well, I would’ve killed that one, too.” In fact, he speaks of her editing with nothing but admiration: “There wasn’t a picture she destroyed that I would’ve published.”

In HBO docuseries Bring Me the Beauties, a lesser-known, image-obsessed cult from the 80s is put under the spotlight

Documentary film-maker Chris Smith made the seminal 1999 film American Movie, about an indie director’s struggle to complete a horror film, which he hopes will then finance the completion of his dream project. More recently, he’s profiled well-known subjects in projects for Netflix about Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman, the bands Devo and Wham!, and the disastrous Fyre festival, among others. His new HBO miniseries Bring Me the Beauties is similarly connected to popular culture, but through a story with far less immediately available background material: the rise and fall of Eternal Values, a cult started in the 80s by the eccentric Frederick von Mierers, consisting largely of models.

“What was odd about this story,” Smith said, “is that there was very little about it online.” He met Hoyt Richards, sometimes referred to as the first male supermodel and a former Eternal Values member, on another project, “and as we started talking, hours went by”, Smith said. “It was one of those situations where I just became more and more curious about his life.” Richards became the backbone of the series, sitting for many hours of interviews, but wasn’t sure if Smith and his collaborators would be able to coax anyone else into participation. As seen in the series, not everyone’s account of their experience with Von Mierers is the same; not everyone is even convinced they were involved with a cult in the first place.

The acronym ‘FOH’ for ‘Fuck off home’ was used beside the names of expectant mothers. Senior midwives advised others not to be ‘too kind’. But as this and other shocking evidence is brought to light, sexism is only one part of the story

It’s said to be mother nature’s stunning con trick, the single most helpful move in the propagation of the species – that childbirth might be the worst thing ever to happen to anyone, but once you are through it, you instantly forget how painful it was. And that is true, up to a point, although you can often remember enough of the surrounding detail – swearing at strangers, wishing you were dead – that you can infer the rest.

What you don’t forget, however, is what the midwives were like, and nor, even in moments of extremis, do you fail to notice if they’re treating you scornfully. Panorama tonight is about the maternity unit run by Nottingham university hospitals NHS trust, the subject of the largest maternity inquiry in NHS history, spanning 13 years from 2012, and covering 2,500 families. The details are hair-raising: “FOH” written next to women’s names on a whiteboard, which stood for “fuck off home”; accounts of senior midwives advising others not to be “too kind”; gut-wrenching individual cases of women being warned off coming in to hospital for so long that, when one finally arrived, her baby was dead and her perineum and vaginal wall had collapsed. And every one of those women will have known, on some level, even if she was in no state to ask for her notes or read them, that someone wanted her to “fuck off”. You get a superpower in a life-and-death situation, though it’s unclear how helpful it is: you can tell pretty fast who’s on your side and who isn’t.

Letting nature take over at a former dairy farm has resulted in a surge of species in just three years

Three years of rewilding on a former dairy farm in east Somerset have led to the number of recorded bird species soaring from 67 to 94, butterfly species rising from 11 to 24 and small mammals growing in number.

Heal Somerset, the first site acquired by the charity Heal Rewilding, has produced a state of nature report mirroring a national survey by environmental charities that has tracked the decline in nature.

‘Brash, disingenuous, lethal’: that’s how the 67-year-old actor describes his younger self. He lied to his partners, disrespected his audiences, betrayed his friends. Has this indiscreet, unreliable heartbreaker finally grown up and settled down?

Rupert Everett is struggling with the heatwave. It reminds him of the summer of 1976, when he was 17, basking in the sun, serene as a sloth, his future spread out ahead of him. It’s so different now. “When you were young, hot weather was nice. But when you’re chubby like me now, it’s not so nice,” he says.

“You’re not chubby,” says his publicist, with reassuring brio.

Endless swiping has left a generation of singles burned out. But get real: dating assistants and AI-aided chats will never recreate the friction of real romance

After years of shrinking usage and tumbling stock prices, the dating app Bumble is teasing a major change to its product. But in solving one problem, it might be walking right into another. The company told Axios this month that it’s getting rid of a dating app mainstay: the swipe. The feature made it easy for people to carelessly flick through photos, said CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, leading to a user experience with too many dead-end conversations. Going forward, Bumble will focus on features that make for deeper, more meaningful connections, she said. Namely, an AI assistant named “Bee”.

While it’s still unclear exactly what Bee will do, its responsibilities will include punching up users’ profiles by suggesting better options for their photos and personal blurbs. Bumble says it will also use AI to chat with people about their dating preferences and help them find others with similar “values”.

Tatum Hunter is a technology journalist based in Brooklyn. She writes on Substack at Bytatumhunter

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Peter Mandelson’s unfiltered remarks to cabinet officials are made public in hundreds of pages of documents relating to his appointment as US ambassador

• Mandelson files show no mitigation of security concerns

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson said the release of the Mandelson files today would be “an unprecedented piece of government transparency”.

He said that party political material would be included, despite precedent suggesting it should be included, and that some material had to be declassified to allow it to be published.

The broad scope of the [humble address motion – see 9.26am] has required the discovery, assessment, analysis and preparation of thousands of individual documents and messages.

This is a task that has involved every government department.

Yeah, I have changed what I would say. I wouldn’t say that phrase any more.

And I think that, you know, over the last few years, I think a lot of us, myself included, have thought about this question in quite some detail.

Criticisms revealed in major release of files relating to Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to US

• UK politics live – latest updates

Peter Mandelson exchanged WhatsApp messages with a senior cabinet minister criticising Keir Starmer’s lack of “verve” and tendency to buckle under pressure, suggesting the prime minister should behave in a more “Trumpian” fashion.

The former US ambassador said Number 10 was “beleaguered and bereft” and that the public were “crying out for leadership”.

Cabinet Office is expected to publish more than 1,000 pages related to former US ambassador’s appointment to role

• Mandelson files show no mitigation of security concerns over US appointment

On Monday the Cabinet Office is expected to publish the second tranche of the Mandelson files – more than 1,000 pages of documents relating to his appointment as UK ambassador to Washington.

The document dump will be the second-largest to the House of Commons after the Chilcot inquiry report into the Iraq war, and its disclosures threaten to again raise awkward questions over Keir Starmer’s judgment in giving Peter Mandelson the UK’s most important diplomatic job.

Report from the IRGC-linked Tasnim news agency says talks on hold until Israel stops operations in Lebanon and Gaza

• Netanyahu orders Israeli bombing of southern Lebanon

• Iran targets American bases in region

The exchange of strikes between the US and Iran reflects the fragility of the current ceasefire, which has seen repeated violations even as American and Iranian officials try to negotiate a deal to extend it.

Iran has maintained its chokehold on the strait of Hormuz, disrupting global energy supplies as a fifth of all oil and natural gas traded once passed through the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf. The US continues to enforce its own blockade on the strait, as it pressures Tehran to reach an agreement.