MARILYN MONROE: A Photographic Life, a tabloid star's life and legacy...in beautiful photos

MARILYN MONROE: A Photographic Life
JENNA GLATZER
Chartwell Books
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The camera loved Marilyn, and she loved it right back. In this luxurious volume, get to know the enigmatic star through iconic and rare photos, intimate stories, and removable memorabilia.

Everyone knows the classic photographs of Marilyn Monroe: in the dress she wore to John F. Kennedy’s birthday, or leaning out of a balcony over the streets of New York City, or famously standing over the subway grates while shooting The Seven Year Itch. Behind the glamour, we’ve also heard the sad stories: her mother’s institutionalization, her three failed marriages, her own struggles with mental health, her surprising death that still leaves us with questions.

Marilyn Monroe: A Photographic Life delves into the life of the star—before, during, and after she became a “Blonde Bombshell.” Born Norma Jeane Mortenson (the Baker came later), she had a troubled childhood that culminated in her self-described “inferiority complex.” But all the while, she dreamed of something more.

Read the stories behind her first marriage (and why she kept it secret when she started modeling), her early roles with the studios (and the one exec who thought she didn’t have “it”), and her life as a budding actress that include humble anecdotes (at one point, she was so poor that she and a roommate shared one pair of high heels—and whoever had a date that night got to wear them).

Along with the stories are fabulous rare photographs and reproductions of frameable memorabilia, such as:

Birth and marriage certificates

Handwritten letters

Certificate of conversion to Judaism before her marriage to Arthur Miller

Screen Actors Guild membership card

Picture of Marilyn sketched by Jane Russell

Watercolor Marilyn painted for JFK

Childhood photos

Shots and ads from her earliest modeling days

Wedding photos

Images of those who knew her, including Groucho Marx, Ella Fitzgerald, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and so many more Marilyn’s favorite image of herself, taken in 1956

Further chapters cover Marilyn’s marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, her time in England and New York, and her rise as one of Hollywood’s most sought after starlets. Through it all—the self doubts, the illnesses, the isolation—we see Marilyn triumph with the help of friends and confidantes and her own tenacious will of knowing what she wanted.

We see time and again the depths of Marilyn’s heart and her capacity to care for others. “I want to love and be loved more than anything else in the world,” she once said, and with Marilyn Monroe: A Photographic Life, you can’t help but oblige.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I suppose the day will come that Marilyn Monroe is forgotten.

Standards of beauty have changed several times since these were taken, printed, and lusted over by young hormone factories of all genders. The zaftig lady here was out of step with 1980s and 1990s heroin chic, the bleached blonde bouffant out of step with the 1960s Cher-hair...string-straight, natural color...and the kittenish coy look makes modern feminists furious.

Yet we ALL know who this is.

Not so this kid:

...more so this young woman, but not with great confidence:

...which all goes to show you that the thing we see in photos of "Movie Star Marilyn Monroe" is a curated, designed image to project a fantasy of a person that did not...could not...exist outside a studio camera.

It took a lot of effort, and a lot of energy, to maintain this avatar in place of a real person with real needs. The book is careful and respectful of the star's actual personhood and doesn't ignore her enormous price paid in service of the stardom that ate her from the inside.

Whatever standard of beauty one uses, the person Marilyn Monroe was commands the respect of us all for her diligence and her great stregth in building and maintaining a career out of an unpromising start in life. Tragic endings have a way of burnishing a halo on someone. I think this photo essay both shines that halo up a bit for the twenty-first century, and shows the costs of celebrity sought as a career to new audiences.

Plus it's a great way to have a nostalgia-fest! Right, fellow Boomers?