‘Hello, Norma Jeane: The Marilyn Monroe You Didn’t Know’By Elisa JordanApplause, 438 pages‘Life Among the Cannibals: The Life and Times of Marilyn Monroe 1962-2003’By David MarshallI Universe, 472 pages‘The Enchanters: A Novel’By James EllroyKnopf, 448 pagesWhen I was writing my biography of Marilyn Monroe, several editors deemed her a shopworn subject. This was in the 1980s. They, of course, misunderstood Monroe’s perennial place in the American imagination, as writers as different as Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates have reckoned with her, and biographers conceive of new ways to convey her significance.Although Elisa Jordan’s approach is broadly chronological, with sections titled “Norma Jeane Mortensen,” “The Making of An Icon,” “The Spotlight,” “Household Name,” and “The End,” within those sections are thematic chapters such as “Marilyn’s Los Angeles,” “School Days,” “Cooking,” “Diet and Exercise,” “The Coaches,” “The Method,” “On the Town: Restaurants, Bars, and Nightclubs,” “Animal Companions,” and of course “Death Myths.”In this refreshing approach, it is as if the biographer re-ran Monroe’s life through a motion picture projector at different speeds, capturing her in closeups and in fleeting glimpses as she walks away from us, the facts of her life landing in legend and rumor.David Marshall’s mock biography is fun. It begins with an amusing epigraph in which Monroe is asked about what she would say at the pearly gates: “‘Hmm,’ she considers: ‘How about, “I’m one of your biggest fans!” At least I hope so!’”In this novel, Monroe does not die until October 2003, as if she had fulfilled Arthur Miller’s conceit that with a little luck she might have lived much longer. Mr. Marshall concocts the “jotted notes” for the second volume of her autobiography, which she was never able to finish and which she entrusted to him. The ersatz biographer observes that “most readers were looking forward to the period of Marilyn’s life in which she changes from sex symbol to her initially underrated crusade for simple human dignity.” A long list of thank yous includes words from Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sir Elton John, and Oprah Winfrey.“Life Among the Cannibals” reminds me of E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” in which he puts together scenes with historical figures who never met — like Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit — later commenting that his novel had given them an opportunity not afforded in history. So it is that in Mr. Marshall’s novel Marilyn Monroe encounters Mikhail Gorbachev.For the grittier side of the Marilyn Monroe beat, James Ellroy investigates the Los Angeles of August 4, 1962, when the star dies. On the case is Freddy O, ex-cop, private dick, and unreliable narrator, who does not simply track down the seamy side of Hollywood but is an active purveyor of such.Freddy O. (Fred Otash) will be familiar to Marilyn Monroe biography buffs for his alleged bugging of her and of the resulting tapes that supposedly implicated the high and mighty in her murder — at least that is one version of the conspiratorial stories about the last occluded days of Marilyn Monroe.Mr. Ellroy cannot be paraphrased because the language of his novel is the point: The words are not about a world “out there” that biographies purport to represent, but a world in the prose that provides its own warrant:“A B-film actress named Gwen Perloff got strongarm snatched. It was late a.m. today [August 4, 1962]. She lived in a cheese-luxe building up from the Strip. Three men grabbed her on the sidewalk. They wore Fidel Castro masks. Multiple eyewits saw them. They shoved her into a double-packed vehicle and jammed south. Said vehicle might have been a ’58 Dodge or a ’56 Chevy Nomad. Miss Perloff plays second leads in horror and dance-craze films. She’s a 20th Century-Fox contract slave. The Strip is county turf. The L. A. Sheriff caught the squawk….”Freddy O. knows all this because the Fox studio head, Darryl Zanuck, has tipped off L. A.’s police chief, Bill Parker, who puts the off-beat detective on the case. Readers get to ride along with Freddy, featuring thrills that biographers cannot rival but that they can nonetheless put to use, since novelists like Ellroy make Monroe’s world, out of which biographies emerge, so palpable.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.”
