Marilyn: A Biography

by Norman Mailer

An extraordinary biography of the legendary screen star Marilyn Monroe (originally published in 1973) by Norman Mailer, one of America's most important writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Mailer, the winner of two Pullitzer Prizes, was the first writer to explore the relationship between Monroe and Bobby Kennedy.
When first published, this book was the subject of Time and Life Magazine cover stories, was on the New York Times Bestseller List and became a full selection of the Book of the Month Club .

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Film, Photography, Biography Memoir, History, Art

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.

Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 2 out of 5]

There must be a Chinese curse that runs, ‘May your biography be written by Norman Mailer’, and when it comes to Marilyn Monroe the patented Mailer brand of bluff, aggressive, insistently hetero horniness seems especially inapposite.

Not that he doesn't write a good, muscular sentence. His prose is often quite interesting, if you take a detached view of it. But we make out Marilyn Monroe only with difficulty, trying to catch glimpses of her over Norman Mailer's shoulder.

Did I say shoulder? I meant erection. I have to confess that I've never entirely understood the appeal of Monroe as a sex symbol, but that's all right, because Mailer has more than enough prurience to go round. ‘She was our angel, the sweet angel of sex,’ is how he describes his subject, ‘and the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin.’ ‘Sex was, yes, ice cream to her,’ he says later; and later again, returning to the subject for the umpteenth time, ‘She emanated sex’. She was ‘a sex queen’, and in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she looked – a particularly infelicitous coinage – ‘fucky’.



I'm just getting started! He describes her body in extraordinary terms, right down to ‘a womb fairly salivating in seed’ and breasts which ‘popped buds and burgeons of flesh over many a questing sweating moviegoer's face’, which I have to say is a slightly confusing mental image. The most innocuous details of her life can lead Mailer into these baffling and insalubrious reveries. When she goes for a walk in the woods, Mailer pictures her looking at mushrooms and wonders, ‘was she comparing them to differences she had now discovered in the penis of her husband and the lover?’ Um…probably not? Elsewhere, he tells us that she took ‘lessons every week in weight lifting with little dumbbells’. Okay; but then immediately comes his description of how he imagines her doing it: ‘Her plumped breasts bounce like manifests of the great here! and now! and when she bends over, our view is into the Vale!’

What is going on here!? This isn't a biography, it's some kind of horrible therapy session, where we have to listen to a perspiring Norman Mailer reel off his erotic nightmares about Movie Stars He Didn't Fuck. As Angela Carter once said of a different writer, there are whole pages off which one can feel the acne rise. And the openly speculative nature of Mailer's comments somehow make their unpleasantness even more pronounced. ‘It is simpler to make the novelistic assumption that she probably had a sex life of some promiscuity in this period,’ he says breezily, and that's all the authority he needs.



Often, there are distinct overtones of disgust. ‘She looks in these years,’ he judges at one point, ‘like the most popular blonde in the most expensive brothel in Acapulco,’ and later, considering the different aspects of her as brought out by two photographs, we get something that feels even closer to home:

double Monroe, one hard and calculating computer of a cold and ambitious cunt (no other English word is near) and that other tender animal, an angel, a doe at large in blonde and lovely human form.

We are learning nothing about Marilyn Monroe, but a tremendous amount about Norman Mailer, and most of it fairly unedifying. Still, the question has to be asked, is this a valid and even essential view of her? Are we getting at something vital about Monroe in these fervid reactions which we wouldn't get from more polite, sympathetic or considered accounts? I'd have to concede that we probably are. No one interested in Monroe can completely ignore Norman Mailer, since the misogynistic dichotomy of his response, lurching from arousal to revulsion, is such a big part of how America reacted to Marilyn Monroe and which did so much to shape the nightmare of her final months. If you don't quite understand it, and I don't, you can find it all laid out on the page here.



This particular edition (which, like many Taschen books, is a beautiful object) pairs an abbreviated version of Mailer's text (mercifully cutting about twenty percent) with photographs from Bert Stern's famous nude photoshoot with her which was done just a few weeks before her death. Like the words, the pictures show a curious mix of technical skill and voyeuristic curiosity. But there are moments in the photographs where we do seem to get a brief connection with something genuine. Marilyn in a black dress, her face in her hand, suddenly dropping the smile and looking directly through the camera. Just now and again – a sudden glimpse of the real Norma Jean buried beneath all of Norman Mailer's overexcited verbiage.

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In India, we respect the astrologer. I know relatives of mine who would consult an astrologer first, before going to a doctor or a lawyer. An astrologer is not someone who simply predicts the future, but when you visit him/her, he/she also tries to win your confidence with tales from your past. While I was reading Marilyn, I felt like Norman Mailer was a bit like an Indian astrologer. He imagines Marilyn Monroe's life for us in this book. Monroe was dead when Mailer wrote this book. I felt like Mailer was playing the role of an Indian astrologer, trying to conjure tall tales from Marilyn's past.

So we think of Marilyn who was every Man’s love affair with America, Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards. She was our angel, the sweet angel of sex, and the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin. Across five continents the men who knew the most about love would covet her, and the classical pimples of the adolescent working his first gas pump would also pump for her, since Marilyn was deliverance .....

Norman Mailer projects all his well known obsessions onto Marilyn Monroe's life. It works for the most part. Atleast a third of this book is glorious. But then the dull Mailer takes over and it falls apart completely. The book is a triumph when Mailer describes Marilyn's early life and her unstable mother and grandmother in Hawthorne.

Madness ran in Marilyn's family. Both her mother and grandmother were institutionalized. Marilyn harbors vague memories of being strangled as a baby by her grandmother. Mailer connects this to the wider American tendency for violence:

It is the classic American small town comedy. People are going mad on quiet shabby end-of-town streets while envy is generated, proprieties are abused, and proprieties are maintained. Yet the fundamental sense of the American madness, that violence which lives like an electronic hum behind the silence of even the sleepiest Sunday afternoon, is incubating in the balmy smog-free subtropical evenings of Hollywood: the vision of the American frontier has gone into a light-box and come out as ten-foot ghosts upon a screen.

Mailer connects Marilyn's stint at an orphanage before the age of ten to her inability to maintain relationships:

We need look no longer for an explanation to any void in her portrayal of sex (which void paradoxically has made her more sexual, since it suggested she is available to all), no, that hollow was shaping in all the tolerance for apathy and torpor she would develop during the twenty-one months when she was nine, then ten and now eleven and still in the orphanage — the dreadful spread of the habit to be bored, which is equal to saying that a rootless resentment would occupy central positions of power in her psyche. The explanation for her future inability to be on time, memorize lines or bring her concentration to focus quickly — all these professional vices which will bring her into murderous wars with the studios — all have their beginnings in the drabness of these orphanage hours over twenty-one months. The itch to kill love in many a life around her will form in these years, and all the future wastes of her life, all collecting.

Mailer was never one to shy away from the howling sexual desires of men. Read Tough Guys Don't Dance for a more thorough display of Mailer's sexual fantasies. Marilyn's first husband feels the impact of other men's hunger for Marilyn during their time together on a training base which does not have too many women on it:

Uneasy at being out of uniform, however, Jim Dougherty joined the Maritime Service and they moved to a training base on Catalina Island where he became a physical instructor. It is like early adolescence all over again. She is one of the few women on the base. When she goes out for a walk, it is a theatrical happening. Men are on their knees along these service streets pretending to talk to Muggsie. The tight sweaters come back on her and the tight skirts, the shorts and the small bathing suits. She takes lessons once a week in weight lifting with little dumbbells. Her plumped breasts bounce like manifests of the great here! and now! and when she bends over, our view is into the Vale! She is still that classic American girl who will attract all men and yet have all her close relations with older women: Della, Ida, Gladys, Grace, the Directress of the Home, Ana Lower — it is the beginning of a long line. Dougherty does not begin to know where his real trouble exists. He is tempted to scold her — this dress too short, that lipstick too bright — but keeps silent. Of course, their sex, as he will hint later, is at its peak on Catalina — it could not fail to be when she comes back from every walk with the sexual waves of a hundred men still washing in on her, but Jim is feeling the natural discomfort of any man when his prize is capable of getting him into murderous fights if she persists in scattering moonlight every time she walks the midday streets. At the open-air training-base dances on Saturday night she is a sensation in a white dress as she does the Lindy, her hips bobbing under each man’s nose, and a hint of a hard look she does not often show (that hard look which doubles the ante of sex) is in her eyes and her mouth. She may not know it, but her unconscious is ready to take on the biggest bidder — a survivor triumphant is standing in that face.

Mailer always had a thing for the supernatural. In The Executioners Song he wrote quite a bit about how Gary Gilmour's mother told him that an early haunted house they occupied might have had some sort of entity working on Gary. Of course, in The Castle in the Forest Mailer creates a demon called Dieter who is directly responsible for working on the young Adolph Hitler. Mailer digs up a haunted house that Marilyn might have inhabited:

In this period before her affair with [her former singing coach Fred] Karger, she rents a little haunted house against the warnings of friends and leaves it soon after — it is interesting to suppose that promiscuity helps to summon a few ghosts, some spirits in her, and she has an experience or two in the house we will not soon hear about.

Pretty good so far. But the rest of the novel, starting from Marilyn's early days as a model leading up to her making it big in Hollywood are all quite boring. His account of Marilyn's marriage with Joe Di Maggio was mildly engaging in an otherwise continued downward trajectory:

Women are an emotional luxury. Of course, like all luxuries they can be alternately ignored and coveted, but it is false to the whole notion of that world, and impossible to understand DiMaggio, if it is not seen that the highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you. Sexual prowess is more revered than any athletic ability but a good straight right.

He really bloodies poor Arthur Miller, going on and on about his lack of literary output and his failures as a playwright. I felt like Mailer was letting lose some sexual jealousy because Mailer and Miller were neighbors and Mailer complains at one point in the book that he lived less than five miles from Miller-Marilyn's farmhouse in Connecticut but was never invited.

In later years, when Miller was married to Monroe, the playwright and the movie star lived in a farmhouse in Connecticut not five miles away from the younger author, who, not yet aware of what his final relation to Marilyn Monroe would be, waited for the call to visit, which of course never came. The playwright and the novelist in conscience condemn the playwright for such avoidance of drama. The secret ambition, after all had been to steal Marilyn; in all his vanity he thought no one was so well suited to bring out the best in her as himself, a conceit which fifty million other men may also have held – he was still too untested to recognize that the foundation of her art might be able to speak to each man as if he were all of male existence available to her. It was only a few marriages (which is to say a few failures) later that he could recognize how he would have done no better than Miller and probably have been damaged further in the process. In retrospect, it might be conceded that Miller had been made of the toughest middle-class stuff – which, existentially speaking, is tough as hard synthetic material.

Mailer brings a geopolitical perspective towards the end of the novel, after Marilyn's death:

Let us not hope for heaven so quickly. Let her be rather in one place and not scattered in pieces across the firmament; let us hope her mighty soul and the mouse of her little one are both recovering their proportions in some fair and gracious home, and she will soon return to us from retirement. It is the devil of her humor and the curse of our land that she will come back speaking Chinese. Goodbye, Norma Jean. Au revoir, Marilyn. When you happen on Bobby and Jack, give the wink. And if there’s a wish, pay your visit to Mr. Dickens. For he, like many another literary man, is bound to adore you, fatherless child.

I am sure Mailer pulled most of this book out of his ass. He later admitted that the conspiratorial tone he took about Marilyn's death was to sell books. But Marilyn is a daring book. Maybe it should have been a 100-150 page character sketch about Marilyn's early life without the accounts of the making of some of her films. What Bukowski wrote about Mailer is proven right yet again - "God, he just writes on and on. There's no force, no humor. I don't understand it. Just a pushing out of the word, any word, anything ....." I don't mean to be disparaging. I love Mailer's obsessions and his guts to make a complete ass of himself. Bravo Mailer!

My personal relationship with Marilyn Monroe - I recently watched The Misfts and liked it a lot. I could not get into Gentlemen Prefer Blondes but loved River of No Return which Mailer hated in this book. I had read about her in Norman Mailer's Harlots Ghost in which he says America offered her to Sukarno. Also, Sam Giancana and Robert Kennedy shared her at one point, according to that book. I am not a big fan of hers. She is attractive. Mailer made her interesting for me.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to an audiobook version borrowed from my local library. On balance I wouldn’t say that audio was the best format for this book, mainly because you miss out on the photographs. Photos are always going to be integral to any biography of Marilyn Monroe, and Mailer also frequently alludes to particular photos in his text, which clearly doesn’t work on audio.

The other thing I found is that Mailer goes for a very extravagant style of prose in this book, and there were a number of sentences where, had I been reading, I would have stopped to think about what I’d just read. That’s less easy to do with audio, especially if like me you generally listen in the car. From time to time I did discern some sharp observations from Mailer, poking out from underneath the verbiage. One thing that really dates the book is that Mailer keeps making odd references to Richard Nixon - it was, after all, written in the early 70s.

I tend to read memoirs more than biographies, but from my limited knowledge of the latter category, I’d say this was an unusual example. Early on Mailer himself refers to it as “a species of novel, following the rules of biography”, a statement that allows him to indulge in a great deal of speculation around Marilyn’s thoughts and motives during her troubled life. He leans a lot on the work of earlier biographers, but like them finds it nearly impossible to disentangle truth from myth in Marilyn’s early life. The circumstances of her death will of course forever be shrouded in speculation.

For all that, I do feel I learned a fair bit about MM. I had been aware of her life in outline, her three marriages and her better-known films. I hadn’t appreciated though, how determined she was in the early part of her career. Emmeline Snively, the owner of the small modelling agency that first signed her, spoke of how she worked harder than any other model she ever met, pouring over her photos for hours and questioning the photographers about why one photo had worked and another hadn’t. I also really liked Mailer’s observation that Snively’s discovery of Marilyn was akin to one of those Hollywood boxing movies where the small-town coach finds he has a potential world champion in his gym.

There are some great quotes in this book. Some of my favourites were from Monroe herself, from John Huston, and from Simone Signoret, whose husband Yves Montand had an affair with Monroe. I’d like to repeat them, but my review would go on too long.

Marilyn seemed to throw herself into both professional and personal relationships with enormous passion, only to later sour on them just as fiercely. If this book is to be believed she was capable of being quite cruel to others. In later years she famously drove her co-stars crazy with her unreliability. I suppose we all have those aspects to us, but she more than most. She seems to have been a hard person to understand, and ultimately that’s as true for Mailer as for the rest of us.

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I am glad I read the book. There are so many books written about Marilyn, so picking one is quite difficult. What I like about this one is that Mailer doesn't go in with a particular bias. He relies heavily on two earlier biographies, one by Fred Guiles entitled Norma Jean and one by Maurice Zolotow entitled Marilyn Monroe, which was the first published during her lifetime. These two often do not agree, as is true of the many other books that now exist. The entire feel of the book is to place before the reader divergent views. The author explains why he favors one or the other or a third. This approach is what I was looking for. I feel it does not go deeper than the known facts warrant. He doesn’t build upon unreliable information that has been reported and repeated so often that it has become accepted as fact. The book does not offer a deep psychological analysis of Marilyn. Why? Because that is impossible. He gives only what is reasonable without too much supposition. My one reservation is that at some points the clarity of what is being said is fuzzy – a bit too many innuendos rather than straightforward statements. This is the best I can do in describing the style of writing employed.

On completion of the book I feel I have been given an adequate understanding of the woman and the events of her life. What a sad life! All thirty-six years. She lived from 1926-1962. Her parentage, her youth, her career, her marriages, her lifestyle, her personality and her death are all covered. I am satisfied. I don’t need more.

I am giving the audiobook narration by Jeff Harding three stars too. He is easy to understand, and that is what is most important as far as I am concerned. He uses a honey sweet baby doll voice for Marilyn which I could have done without, but I bet most people love it. I must admit, he did make me laugh off and on. He lays accents on thick. He has a peculiar lilt where he goes up in tone. For me his intonations exaggerate the author's lines. It would have been worse if he misconstrued the author's written words; that he doesn't do. I seem to be the only audiobook listener who just wants a narrator to read the lines in a straightforward manner!

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stormin' Norman was on a British radio show called Desert Island Discs once. That's a show where you choose 8 "gramophone records" (as they quaintly say) to take with you to a notional desert island on which you have been abandoned. Norman stated up front that he didn't really like music so he just picked 8 tunes which reminded him of his six wives and two significant others. What a tosser!

Anyway, Norman's unabashed drool of a book makes it clear that he would have liked to slot Marilyn in somewhere between Wife No. 4 and Wife No. 5. But some little fishies just didn't swim into his big craw.

Contemplating Marilyn's life & character is guaranteed to make me pontificate tediously about the common yet weird disjunction between outer aspect and inner reality with which we so often are jarringly confronted in this life. The very Marilynity of Marilyn on screen and in photos gives even the casual observer the idea that it just doesn't get any better than this. But of course, behind the effortless cartoony-sexy fun were 63 takes, ten nervous breakdowns, not much love, and enough antidepressants to trade for a 1953 tan and cream Studebaker saloon.

**

Always thought of myself as a bit of a failure
For never reading anything else by Norman Mailure
Except the Executioner's Song
Which was really long.

[Isabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mailer was obsessed with Marilyn. Unfortunately for him, he was refused a meeting with her on one occasion, and missed his opportunity on the second. This book is like stream of consciousness elevating a woman to a Goddess. He is bitter, he is sweet, he is not quite right in the head.

[Xanthi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have heard of Norman Mailer but have never read anything by him until now. His style of writing (at least for this book) can be described as such: Why say something in a few words, when a few hundred could do? The writing in this book is very flowery, to the point of being down right annoying. He even, on occasion, refers to himself in the third person.
All in all, if you (like me) don't know much about Marilyn Monroe, I would suggest starting with a different biography. This one will just frustrate you.

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Norman Mailer was part of the group that changed the style of writing non fiction to make it read more like a novel.

In that respect, he does a great job. His writing is brilliant, if cynical and a little superior. It's also geared, I think, toward the "hip and groovy" set who think reading books like this puts them in a certain "cool" category.

Having said that, I still like the book. The photographs, if nothing else are worth the price of the book alone (which in my case was a used book in mint condition for five dollars, heh heh).

Mailer admits that his book is largely a compilation of previous biographies and speculation based on her movies and photographs. This is evident when he writes out the thoughts that Marilyn and others involved in her life could be thinking at any given time.

But much of what he writes can be verified. He certainly is successful in conveying what a complicated, tragic and fascinating person she was, and he also gives a thorough biographical time line of her life.

The only thing I found surprising was that he makes no mention of Marilyn having an affair with President Kennedy and barely hints at an involvement with Bobby Kennedy. Other sources I read declare that she was so involved with JFK she thought she was going to be the next Mrs. Kennedy.

But this was written back in the early seventies and maybe it was still too sacrosanct a subject to touch upon.

He explores all the possible reasons Marilyn could have died, overdose, either accidental or intentional...suicide or murder...who knows what really happened. Accidental overdose is the most likely cause based on her history of barbiturate addiction and previous close calls. Arthur Miller even wrote a play about it (After the Fall) and was censured for it. Listening to him talk about "the need to sacrifice others in order to save yourself-a justification for letting someone go ahead and kill herself- revealed a cold-hearted man.

Although Mailer actually portrays Miller as the victim of Marilyn's contempt and verbal abuse. Maybe he was, she was no angel. It is speculated that she had a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Her making everyone else wait hours for her on movies sets is one indication.

But ultimately she is a portrait of tragedy. Her persona was so powerful that it completely possessed her and when you act intimate with everyone, you can be close to no one.

Aficionados of Marilyn will enjoy this book.

[P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of surprising inside info about Marilyn. More substance to her than I thought.

[Graham Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The great Mr. Mailer - 1923 to 2007. Novelist, essayist, journalist (co-founder of the Village Voice), columnist, poet and playwright; innovator of New Journalism. He also acted and directed in films. He won two Pulitzer prizes. My favourite novels would have to be his blockbuster debut 'The Naked & The Dead' (1948) and 'The Executioner's Song' (1979). He published how many books? I have on my shelf 27, and am saddened that he wont publish again. For christmas my wife gave me 'Marilyn', a book of his I had never bothered with... apparently it is amongst one of his highest selling works. These days I think Mailer is considered unfashionable, a 'great pity' as the great man might say... but I think he could care less. However I'll focus on 'Marilyn'.

Arthur Miller (her third husband), was scathing of the work, but in the biography Mailer more or less states that Miller's reputation rests on 'Death Of A Salesman' and describes him as having 'a workmanlike style, limited lyrical gifts (and) no capacity for intellectual shock'... Miller might have felt wounded! Published in 1973, Monroe (1926-1962, 36 when she died) was not a prolific actress, and as a lover of film I would only count as her best films Billy Wilder's ' The Seven Year Itch' (1955) and 'Some Like It Hot' (1959) - although the John Huston directed Arthur Miller scripted 'The Misfits' (1961) isn't without interest. I found the book a real page turner, easy to read, and more interesting because of Mailer; he doesn't just regurgitate details from interviews, he tries to get into her possible state of mind in key points of her life. My only criticism would be that it feels a bit 'thrown together', lacks the usual Mailer polish. I recommend it as I was not thinking I would find the book particularly interesting, as I've come across most details about Monroe before. I find the sarcastic criticism of the book, mainly the comments along the lines of Mailer wanting to bed her, bone her, salivating after her hilarious, because I love the way Mailer talks about sex in all his books... and I think it is this aspect of his writing that momentarily has labelled him 'unfashionable'... but times will change again.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each of the last three books I read in 2022 was a study of creative women, their trials and triumphs.

I read this one because Joyce Carol Oates mentioned it as one of the Marilyn biographies she studied when she wrote Blonde.

It is the size of a coffee table book. Interspersed with Norman Mailer's prose are over 100 color photographs of Marilyn taken by some of the top photographers of the day. These photos are stunning!

There was so much more to the woman than her tragic childhood, her movies, her fame, and her death than can probably be captured. That is possibly why so many accounts of her life have been written. Mailer takes a psychological approach combined with the mores of the 1950s.

The mystery of her death is most likely the best movie she never made. Mailer goes pretty deeply into the investigations, the theories, and makes clear how much obfuscation ensued, making it a mystery forever.

Marilyn came to fame in the 1950s, a bad decade for women if there ever was one. Her compulsions got her through until they didn't. Such an American tale. This was a good read but for the deepest understanding of Marilyn Monroe, I still think Blonde by JCO, even with its fictional approach, is the best.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first book about Marilyn Monroe. My fascination started with my favorite movie of hers which is Bus Stop. I always felt a bit of envy over her beauty but after learning and reading about her, I know that her private life was tortured and being beautiful was a far cry from being happy. Beauty is skin deep but happiness and who you are as a person hopefully runs deeper and is more important. Marilyn's intense insecurity and need for love struck a cord in me because I have dealt with the same issues, hence the fascination perhaps.

[Mike (the Paladin) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I "read" this book when it came out in 1973....and I must be honest. I bought it for the photos of Marilyn... Hey, I was 21 years old.

The book itself is called "A Novel Biography" and that sort of sums it up. You get fantasy, facts, wishes, and maybes all in one, with the book concluding that Marilyn was assassinated by shadowy government forces.

The story of Marilyn was (and is)actually an incredibly sad one. A type of success that still makes it possible to say Marilyn with no other other name attached and everyone knows who you mean. This and she died in 1962 almost 40 years (so far as I can think right now only Elvis and she had that kind of impact). The very success and the beauty it was founded on seem to also have destroyed her. She should be remembered and her story is one worth noting, sadly this particular book/novel is a sort of mixed bag. I'd say read it as fiction or possibly a fictionalized story. It's interesting (anything about Marilyn tends to be) but maybe check your facts in a couple of places???

[Guilherme Lopes · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was, quite possibly, the most disgusting little piece of literature I’ve ever read.

What bad could happen when an author is only condescending with himself, but shows no actual empathy for their object of research?

More than once I felt like I was reading the journals of a horny teenager, not a biography written by a grown, middle aged man, who says truly awful things about a (sometimes) young girl.

There’s very little to unfold here. This book will serve you nothing if you’re interested in Marilyn’s life. It’s an outdated stream of consciousness of a pesky, pretentious writer, who never really forgave himself for not being enough for Marilyn to be interested in him. End of discussion and do not recommend this book at all.

[Emily Finch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book is full of shit, it's all lies and conspiracy theories. Only have it because a family friend gave it to me, only looked at it for the pictures. I tried to read it but I was baffled by the stupidity and nonsense coming off the page. I would give it zero stars, but, the pictures were beautiful. That's it. Why he was published I have no idea. He even admitted on television that he lied in this book because he was desperate for money. Why people use this as a source for information I never know.

[Eyehavenofilter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being an avid MM fan I had to gobble this up but it was a very critical view, an such a sad look at such a sad lady. It is tragic that Marilyn really had no one to protect her, from herself, or from those who would manipulate her in her weakest hours. This was a time when stars were used up like Kleenex and thrown away.

[Terry Cornell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first Norman Mailer book I've managed to read all the way through. I'm being generous giving it three stars, but understand more of what he was attempting to do after reading his acknowledgements. Mailer tends to have a rambling style, but when he stays with the subject matter he has the ability to be a cohesive writer. The publisher intended this to be a coffee table size collection of Marilyn Monroe photographs taken throughout her life. Mailer was at first contracted to write a short preface for the book. After he read a biography of Monroe he realized he wanted to write more, and the publisher agreed to a novelized biography. Mailer includes several brief sections from other authors' biographies because his tight timeline prevented him from doing original research.

The edition I read was a beat-up paperback picked up at a used bookstore in my college days. The quality of photos is amazing, including several in color. The book includes an index of the photos crediting the photographer, location, and date taken. Marilyn's filmography finishes up the book. For the paperback edition Mailer has included what is called "The Murder File". This chapter is his personal investigation of her death. He hired a private investigator, conducted interviews of some key people involved, summarizes other authors on the subject, and includes copies of Marilyn's autopsy report. His take seems to be she was murdered, or possibly overdosed at another location and moved back to her house. The latter would have required a fairly large cover-up. Certainly doesn't appear to me to be a typical overdose death.

A great book for the photos alone, but if the reader is interested in a Marilyn Monroe biography there are many better sources out there. If you're in the Los Angeles area I recommend checking out the Hollywood Museum's display on Marilyn Monroe. I believed it was a temporary exhibit when I saw it, but apparently it is still there according to the museum's website.

[Mary Karpel-Jergic · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think that this is really a proper biography. Instead it is a collection of titbits about Marilyn's life taken from a range of biographies and what Mailer terms 'factoids' - a bizarre mixture of tabloid fancy and fact. He admits to most of the facts of the book as based upon Fred Guiles book; Norma Jean. However, Mailer makes the reader well aware of the smoke and mirrors effects of putting together someone's life, especially someone as complicated as Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, the book does two things simultaneously; firstly it portrays her complexities, her contradictions, hopes and fears whilst at the same time it keeps you guessing as to what really happened and leaves you to come to your own conclusions.

What makes this book a sumptuous experience is the pictures and interestingly, these were to be the main feature of the book (following an exhibition of them 'MARILYN MONROE - The Legend and the Truth;)with a commentary written by Mailer. This commentary appears to have expanded in the process of being written and the book offers two chronologies of her life, one in pictures and one in words.

I do feel I know more about the woman now, especially her difficult childhood but I found Mailer's style of writing somewhat pretentious. In places, hugely grand with a psychoanalytic bent, in others a little cruel in the depictions of her lack of education and cultural awareness. However, I wouldn't want to read a sanitised saccharine version of her life and it is apparent by the facts we do have that she was a deeply disturbed individual. Mailer's analysis of her being someone without a core identity does fit.

[Ted Burke · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was controversial indeed when first published in 1973; charges of plagiarism and an attendant lawsuit from the authors of biographies used in his research put a pall over Mailer's interpretative accomplishment, and feminists and progressives were particularly at arms by the fact that Norman Mailer, of all people, had written anything at length about Monroe. Mailer had, shall we say, a problematic relationship with women, personally and philosophically, during his public life and it was easy enough to accuse the late author of indulging in an kind of literary onanism , projecting his ego on the public perception of Monro, the actress and superstar, and inflicting those results on to us. I think it took courage on Mailer's part who, fully aware of his infamy regarding women's rights , birth control and his insistence on a cult of masculinity, to take on the subject of Monroe anyway (even ,as Mailer has admitted, for the money) and to investigate his own conflicted perceptions of Monroe. Mailer is an arch romantic , and allows his prose to soar and swerve and swoop from great heights in an attempt to capture something about Monroe the cultural force that film criticism, fashion commentary and sociological analysis couldn't get near. This book contains Mailer's Private Marylin Monroe, and at the time it was published it was a florid, beautifully written , occasionally interpretation of the dry facts about Monroe's life and career.

[RM · Rating 2 out of 5]

How to write a biography of a subject about which very little could be known for certain? And how to deal with the mountains of celebrity-press gossip and innuendo - most of which, including the factoids Monroe supplied herself, was unlikely to be true? Mailer settled on what he called a kind of "novel" biography, which was innovative in the early 1970s. The problem with the final product has nothing to do with Mailer's approach, but with his propensity to mistake supposition and pontification for insight. This is much more a book about Mailer's (often giddy) thoughts about Monroe than Monroe herself. Which would be fine, except that Mailer seems unaware of this. What we end up with is a horny Mailer masturbating for his readers, who are, I think, supposed to be awestruck about his tremendous insight into the human condition. Typical of Mailer's delivery: "Never again in her career will she look so sexually perfect as in 1953 making Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, no, never—if we are to examine a verb through its adverb—will she appear so fucky again."

[Nikita Jesso · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a biography about the one the only Marilyn Monroe. The most important person to me. I absolutely love this book for many reasons. This book is the period of June 1st, 1926 to August 5th, 1962. June 1st, 1926 being the best day in time, the day Marilyn was born. August 5th, 1962 being the worse day ever, the day she died. :( Marilyn Monroe was a actress, singer, and model. Most people just think of her as sex symbol. That's not her. She was loving,and caring. Marilyn was my light in my darkness. She is my sun to my shine. I think this book was made because it was just about her and everything that happened to her. Good or bad. I have no dislikes to this book only likes, but that's just me. (Anything to do with Marilyn Monroe I'll like it)

[Linda · Rating 1 out of 5]

The guy who wrote this clearly hates women, and Marilyn in particular. Everything she does is wrong, and I'm not even 1/3 into the book.

According to Norman Mailer her laugh and smile was ugly (that's why she didn't do any comedy films!), she lied about being raped, her time in foster care made her a great liar, she wasnt culturally educated and I quote; "she loved movies as much as mentally handicapped loves their life".

The only "positive" thing he had to say was some disgusting, detailed and extremely misogynistic comments about her body.

If it weren't for the rare pictures I would burn this book.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reporter: "Did you have anything on when you posed nude for PLAYBOY?" Marilyn: "Yeah, the radio."
Norman Mailer's essay on the queen of stardust probes questions that still plague us today in the age of third-wave feminism: Did she use her body or did her body use her? Was she a product of the media or its manipulator? Did she choose to die or did she have nothing to live for once Hollywood had used her up? What does it say about America that she was as famous as her then-secret lover, JFK? A small confession: MM and I attended the same high school, Van Nuys High, in Southern California.

[Victoria Frow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good. Hard to get into at first as it's a biography done in the style of a novel i.e fiction so somethings are emphasised for dramatic purposes. This book is good for a foundation to build your reading of Marilyn's life on but if like me you have read and studied her extensively then you can spot how the author has used myths associated with her to drive the story along. Recommend.

[Gabby Capili · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fucking gross book. Relates everything to Marilyn's sex, even when describing her as a child.

[Neşet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everest Yayınları'nı bir kez daha bu aciz goodreads köşesinden tebrik etmek isterim. Kıyıda köşede kalmış minik, muhteşem yapıtları Türkçeye kazandırdığı için.

Devrik cümleleri okumaya başlayınca kötü bir çeviri mi acaba diye düşünmüştüm ama daha sonra Işılar Kür'ün aslında elinden gelenin en iyisini yaptığını anladım. Norman Mailer'in Amerikan üslubu bu. Manifesto gibi yazıyor. Büyük tespitler yaptığını düşünüyor(ki çoğu tespitler harika)

Norman Mailer gerçekten bir stalker gibi izlemiş Marilyn'i. Filmlerini, evliliklerini, insanlarla ilişkilerini detaylandırmış. İngiltere'ye yaptığı yolculuğunda kaç bavulun Arthur Miller'a kaç bavulun Marilyn'e ait olduğunu yazıyor. Yazar, Marilyn'le iletişime geçmek , belki de daha fazlasını yaşamak istemiş ama reddedilmiş aktris tarafından. Şöyle anıyor: ''Onu tanımamış olmak, biliyordu ki, yazısında ha bire tekrarlanan bir yara olacaktı, diyelim ki gençken hiç Paris'te yalnız kalmamış ve aşık olmamış olmaya benzer bir pişmanlık''

İyi bir biyografi ya da iyi bir roman gibi de okunabilir.

[Fatma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Renkli hayatlarin bilmedigimiz hazinli hikayeleri

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Update from Previous Review: The pictures in this book are so beautiful that one can't help flipping through the pages and seeing Marilyn in all her many moods. Some of these pictures are hard to look at, they are so sad. So, I read the rest of Mailer's writings: and I was right the first time: Mailer is writing to himself, showing off with ridiculous nonsensical words/phrases/passages. I have to give 5-stars to the glorious photographs, one star to Mailer's writing, for a three star review.
Previous Review:
When this author writes of DiMaggio and Monroe's attendance at the premiere of "The Seven Year Itch", we learn that by the end of the evening, the couple fought. Mailer's interpretation? "It is like a calculus of partial derivatives." So that's when I closed the book: Mailer is writing only for himself, certainly he isn't writing for any marketing niche of which I'm familiar. The pictures here are awesome though, definitely worth a view, so just skip Mailer's weird and sometimes nonsensical writing.

[Julian · Rating 2 out of 5]

meh - I felt I was reading something written for 1970s Playboy magazine - clearly aimed at 70s man. Norman Mailer aims to get out of jail on this one by calling it a Biographical Novel which gives him flexibility to make up stuff whilst drawing on existing biographical work - so I don't think he is really adding anything of worth to the mix. Also takes a bit of an underhand swipe at fellow writer Arthur Miller particularly when Miller was going through a dry phase.

There are probably better biographies out there.

[Andrew Rothstein · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was in an apartment in New York with nothing to read. I looke for something on the bookshelf and saw this book by Norman Mailer. I had heard of it, but never read it. Figured it might be interesting.

Wrong.

Mailer wrote a biography so he could describe his sexual fascination with Marilyn Monroe. Obstensibly, it is a biography. But there is nothing but speculation that drifts all over the place, including the Silent Majority of the Nixon years. Huh?

Weird.