A Marilyn Monroe Biography Committed to Facts, Not Myths

‘I Wanna Be Loved by You: Marilyn Monroe: A Life in 100 Takes’ By Andrew WilsonGrand Central Publishing, 512 pagesBiographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, asked why he had published another biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, replied: “more facts.” So it is with Andrew Wilson’s nuanced and multi-layered biography that draws extensively on the private archive of recorded interviews created by Monroe biographer Anthony Summers as well as on other unpublished material by Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, Monroe herself, and others close to her, like psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson.For those already familiar with Monroe biographies, Mr. Wilson’s first pages may seem jejune, but stick with it. What you get is a fascinating assessment of Monroe memoirs, many of them unreliable and yet containing nuggets of verifiable information that Mr. Wilson builds into a complex portrayal of a gifted, complicated woman, often a victim of her own insecurities and paranoia. With the Monroe minefield of bogus eyewitness accounts disarmed, in its place is a much more reliable and edifying account of how to read the literature on the actress. Sometimes Mr. Wilson’s mine detector is simply a documented calendar of events, showing why Robert F. Kennedy could not have been at Monroe’s home on the day of her death, or that trysts with President Kennedy could not have occurred at the Carlyle Hotel.As Mr. Wilson’s title suggests, Monroe craved the love of powerful women and men such as her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, her publicist Patricia Newcomb, husbands Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, and acting coaches Natasha Lytess and Paul Strasberg. So strong was Monroe’s need for a stalwart partner that she built up those close to her into ideal champions of her person and talent, only to be deeply disappointed — in the case of husbands, especially — when those figures could not deliver, in her view, the unqualified love she sought.This is biography as psychology — not psychoanalysis but rather a reading of Monroe’s behavior as described by herself and others. Except for an eloquent parting tribute to her film roles, this biography is not is an account of her as an actress. How good Monroe was — other than some tributes to her talent from the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Henry Hathaway who directed her in 1953’s “Niagara” — is never established but taken as a given. This approach enables the biographer to present an extraordinary character, as in a novel, but also never assays how her talent arose from and manifested itself in roles that are actually quite different in films such as “Bus Stop” and “The Prince and the Showgirl.”Unlike biographers with a mission to discredit their predecessors, Mr. Wilson gives due credit to indefatigable researchers like Anthony Summers, although Mr. Wilson does not understand the value of Norman Mailer’s work — seeing only the misogyny and murder conspiracy mongering — and not the Mailer who treated Monroe as an artist with a Napoleonic ambition as great as his own. “Put an artist on an artist,” Mailer said by way of revolutionizing the way subsequent biographers wrote about her.For anyone who has never read a Monroe biography, who wonders what the fuss is all about, or even thinks she is not worth the time otherwise spent on more important subjects, this is the book for you. It shows you how misinformation or downright fabrications become “facts”— or rather factoids, the word Mailer coined, if they are incessantly repeated.Other aspects of the Monroe legend, like a brief liaison with President Kennedy, remain a possibility, given what a few people close to Monroe observed and to whom she confided, somewhat opaquely, a few comments about her connection to a very important man. In other words, Mr. Wilson does not dismiss evidence that remains open to yet more analysis and investigation.Mr. Wilson ends his book with a meticulous examination of what happened on Monroe’s last day, rendering not merely a service by showing how she could not have been murdered, but also how the fraught psychological drama between her and her publicist Patricia Newcomb may have contributed to the actress’s death, which now seems, in Mr. Wilson’s account, a suicide that was perhaps only half-meant to be, which is to say an accident of the actress’s own making.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress,” “Marilyn Monroe Day by Day,” and “Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag.”

A Marilyn Monroe Biography Committed to Facts, Not Myths

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