Skip to main content

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.

 

 

Comments

  1. Nice review Tom. Marilyn Monroe was definitely an enigma. After reading the review, I feel really sorry for her as I did not know her childhood was so pathetic. I intend to read the book myself.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Probably it is the misery of the childhood that made Marilyn the enigma that she was. More than enigma, she was a paradox, I think.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...