Marilyn Monroe – Book Review

Title: Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox

Author: Lois Banner

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2012

Pages: 515

The worst tragedy is when you become your own enemy. Marily Monroe was her own enemy and so she ended killing herself at the age of 36. She had become an icon of Hollywood. She had many lovers, all of whom were highly eminent personalities. Yet she chose to flee from life altogether. This book tells her story in all its glory and tragedy.

Lois Banner is a historian by profession and hence the book reads more like history than literature. However, it is written in a simple style that any reader will find easy to read. There is absolutely no jargon or academic verbosity. Banner divides Marilyn’s story into five parts: (1) Childhood, (2) Hollywood, (3) Meaning of Marilyn, (4) Departure from Hollywood and life in New York, and (5) Return to Hollywood.

As the subtitle of the book indicates, Marilyn was a passion and a paradox. In Marilyn’s own words, “A lot of people like to think of me as innocent, so that’s the way I behave to them. If they saw the demon in me, they would hate me… I’m more than one person, and I act differently each time. Most of the time I’m not the person I’d like to be – certainly not a dumb blonde like they say I am; a sex freak with big boobs.”

Marilyn was seldom what she presented herself as. Her demeanour carried the innocence of a child which made her so very appealing to men. She could look like an angel. But her soul teemed with demons. The demons were real and Marilyn was an illusion. Marilyn Monroe, the heroine of Hollywood, was an appearance. When you live your whole life as a projected image, one day your very reality will emerge with vengeance and demand your attention. “Hey, I am the real you,” it will scream at you. How long can you put that reality to sleep with the help of barbiturates as Marilyn did? The more you suppress that reality, the bigger your inner monster becomes. That is what happened to Marilyn. Finally she was swallowed by her own inner monster. “A massive overdose of Nembutal and a toxic dose of chloral hydrate” put an end to the life of the “sex kitten” of Hollywood.

Marilyn was a kitten that refused to grow up.

She had a pathetic childhood. By the age of 16, she had lived in eleven foster homes and an orphanage. She had many mothers and no father. Many mothers because her own mother, Gladys, was never quite well. So Marilyn was looked after by foster mothers. Gladys was so promiscuous that Marilyn’s father was a conjecture rather than a fact. Marilyn’s original name was Norma Jeane Mortensen. Mortensen was her mother’s husband when she was conceived. But Gladys said that Marilyn’s father was Stan Gifford. Marilyn thought of herself as a “mistake,” an unwanted child that happened to be born. Her miserable childhood gave her many disabilities: dyslexia, stutter, nightmares populated with monsters and witches, insomnia, bipolar disorder, and paranoid schizophrenia. In addition to all these psychological problems was a physical problem: endometriosis.

Marilyn suffered much. Too much suffering can make you a fraud.

It will give you terrible insecurity feelings, at least. Marilyn was so insecure about herself that she looked for a father-figure instead of a husband. She married many men and had affairs with more. Some affairs were too casual. For example, “Marilyn saw Marlon Brando. They went to dinner and sometimes wound up in bed.” As simple as that. Sex was as casual an affair as a dinner for her. Did she really enjoy all that sex? She had plenty of it. Was she a nymphomaniac? The author of this biography doesn’t think so. Marilyn had certain psychological disorders which made her look for long for attention and sex was one of the easiest ways of getting attention from men who mattered, men such as John F Kennedy and his brother Robert, Frank Sinatra, and baseball star Joe DiMaggio. When Arthur Miller married her, Marilyn thought she was getting the ideal husband, a man who would be a father to her. This book informs us that Marilyn called her husbands Papa or Daddy.

One of the few colour pages of the book

Marilyn loved to expose her naked body whenever she could. Was she trying to lay bare her soul in fact?

“She is the child in all of us,” Lois Banner tells us towards the end of the book, “the child we want to forget but can’t dismiss.” Marilyn forgot to grow up. Rather, her terrible childhood left her wanting simple affection, hugs, tenderness, security. When you hanker after these things in your adulthood, you are in for serious troubles. Marilyn’s life shows us how.

Read this book if only to learn the price that people like Marilyn Monroe paid for being a heroine.