Marilyn

Unless you live under a rock, you know who Marilyn Monroe is. She was “discovered” as a photogenic face during a media session at her job at an airplane part manufacturer in 1945. At that point, she was just Norma Jeane Dougherty. For the next seventeen years, though, she would become a symbol of American sexual appeal with the name Marilyn Monroe. She had a part in 33 movies, for which she won three different Golden Globes. But not many people know her full story. Gloria Steinem, in Marilyn, tries not only to give us a full telling of her life but also sheds some light on the enduring character traits of this iconic blonde bombshell.

To start, she was born after her father divorced her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker. Unfortunately, show more Gladys was mentally ill and young Norma was placed with foster parents, but after a few run-ins with her birth mother, she was made a formal ward of the state. From there, she bounced between family friends, foster homes, and other relatives until she married family friend James Dougherty. Everyone knows the story after this. She became a Hollywood model and starlet, married and divorced Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, and was connected romantically with Frank Sinatra and the brothers Kennedy.

During all this, she dealt with numerous physical and psychological ailments. She tried many, many times to get pregnant during her marriages, but they all ended badly. When she did get pregnant, it was unintentional and out of wedlock and so had to get illegal abortions. She tried desperately to build the family she never had. Her social anxiety and continually bifurcated existence (between Norma Jeane and Marilyn Monroe) left her addled and unable to sleep properly. Her medicine cabinet was a testament to just how damaged she became over time.

Steinem’s narrative is both sad and illuminating. I had never really given Monroe any respectful thought, but its looks neither did anyone else. Actors, writers, and reporters dismissed her as the stereotypical “dumb blonde” when all she wanted to be was a decent actress. She tried to read heady novels to improve herself only to be met with derision and scorn. Even though this text was originally written 26 years ago, it reminds one of many current starlets, each trying to simultaneously appeal to the audience with their physicality and hoping they don’t get too close. It seems that the more things changes, the more they stay the same. This was indeed an eye-opening book. show less

I had just finished my second year of high school in August of 1962, the year that Marilyn Monroe died. To me she was just a beautiful actress, but to many she was also larger than life, a sex symbol, and someone who would be remembered long after her image had faded from the big screen.

Steinem pulled from several sources to write this book of essays written more than 25 years ago. In it, she tries to uncover who was the real Marilyn Monroe. She uses a lot of detail that had been gathered in interviews that Monroe had with photographer George Barris not long before her death. She also uses Marilyn's own words culled from an autobiography that Monroe was in the process of writing.

Marilyn Monroe started life as Norma Jean. Her mother was show more institutionalized from the time she was a little girl, and she was moved from one family friend to foster families to an orphanage, and back to friends, until at the age of sixteen her mother's friend arranged for Marilyn to marry a neighbor's son, Jim Dougherty. Jim enlisted in the merchant marines in 1944. During his absence, Norma Jean was discovered, and the rest is history. Monroe never got over her fear of being alone. She craved love and friendship. She wanted to educate herself as she was embarrassed at her lack of education. But when she tried to improve herself, she was often laughed at. She didn't want to be known as a dumb blonde, and disliked that most of the acting parts she was offered depicted her that way. In the movie "Some Like It Hot", she "resisted playing a blonde so out of it that she couldn't tell Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag from real women....."I've been dumb, but not that dumb." " She did the movie, however, and it had more success than her previous movies.

When she found friendship, she was loyal and she was protective of those she liked. Steinem relates a story, "When the Mocambo, an important Los Angeles nightclub, was reluctant to hire a black singer named Ella Fitzgerald, Marilyn "personally called the owner," as Ella Fitzgerald remembers gratefully, "and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him.... that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night.... And after that, I never had to play a small jazz club again.""

She had many affairs, and her marriages and divorces with Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller are well known, as are speculations about affairs with the Kennedy brothers. Her reliance on pills to help her sleep, help her wake up, help her stay awake, all led to her untimely suicide, the last of many attempts. Steinem has handled Marilyn's story with delicacy, and through it all portrays the story of this sad woman who loved children, and wanted love and stability more than anything. show less

Although there are books with better pictures of Monroe, Steinem's essay with a critical but sympathetic perspective makes this the one to own.

I haven't read this since I was in high school when I did a book report on it. But I remember being pleasantly surprised at how good it was.