An Absorbing Biographical Novel of Marilyn Monroe Taking Charge of ‘Herself’

‘Herself (A Novel of Summer 1962)’By M. J. Moore Heliotrope, 222 pagesIn the Foreword to his new book, M. J. Moore writes about how well Marilyn Monroe stood up to powerful male directors and producers, preparing in the early summer of 1962 to take full charge of “Herself.” This iconoclastic biographical novel is narrated by Eddie Leo Shaughnessy in the form of a memoir about how Marilyn Monroe hired him as a research assistant in June 1962 to write the story of her life. Eddie Leo, a fictional character, is a young NYU graduate, a film and jazz buff, who is surprised by how little the actress resembles press accounts of her as a has-been, fired from the making of “Something’s Got to Give.”Eddie Leo admires Monroe’s resilience and shrewd comeback campaign, collaborating with photographers Bert Stern and George Barris to present a new version of herself, shorn of the simpering sex goddess persona and vibrant as a mature woman in full control of performances and of the negotiations that force her studio to return to her, not only to resume production of the film but to extend to her much better terms as well the offer of starring in another comedy, “What A Way to Go!”She is constantly referred to as “Herself,” an effective distancing from her previous public image. She understands perfectly how the studio has manipulated her, enforcing sexually exploitative roles that became entrenched in 1953 after the great success of “Niagara,” “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” and “How to Marry a Millionaire” which netted Twentieth Century Fox $25 million and Monroe not even $1 million for her work. She is angry about her complicity in the corporate manipulation of her image and determined to take control her career by reviving her own company, Marilyn Monroe Productions.A bitter Monroe is also set on resisting her minders: psychiatrist Ralph Greenson, acting more like one of her movie producers than her therapist, and his former nurse, Eunice Murray, now the actress’s busybody housekeeper. The circumspect Eddie Leo avoids Greenson and Murray even as Monroe draws him into deeper conversations about her life. Mr. Moore’s novel, like the best biographies of Monroe, portrays an alert, canny woman coming into her own, occasionally disrupted by sedatives and stimulants.In fascinating conversations Monroe and Eddie Leo discuss song lyrics, showing off her grasp of musical structure. In retrospect, he explains how Hollywood ruined not only her efforts at originality but the work of writers like Truman Capote by making his story, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” an anodyne if attractive vehicle for Audrey Hepburn that destroyed the more complex, gritty nature of Capote’s writing as well his wish that Monroe play the lead role.This story of missed opportunities suggests Monroe’s final days could have turned out quite differently. Then work on her memoir halts in July of 1962. Monroe stops communicating with Eddie. Shut off from her he has no idea what happened next, except that Monroe’s handlers reasserted their power over her.This abrupt ending to a relationship preserves the culminating events of Monroe’s life as a mystery as she went into a kind of lockdown. All along, Mrs. Murray has been suspicious of Eddie and has collaborated with Greenson in sequestering the actress, so that she never manages to re-organize her life.I’m familiar with this kind of outcome when an outsider becomes privy to intimate details of an inner circle that closes around a famous person to protect their privileged access and their stake in what has become their valuable property. This sudden exclusion happened twice to me while doing biographies of Susan Sontag and Michael Foot, literary and political icons. It is not a matter of a biographer or researcher disclosing to the world some secret so much as it is about power and how to hold onto it.Absent from this absorbing novel are the Kennedys and any whiff of conspiracy theories about Monroe’s death. Instead, “Herself” is about what happens when an interloper is shut out by a consortium of forces that coalesce to keep in place their investment in a movie star who is about to break their hold on her.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress” and “Confessions of a Serial Biographer.”

An Absorbing Biographical Novel of Marilyn Monroe Taking Charge of ‘Herself’

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