Marilyn and Her Books has a tantalising premise: it is dedicated to examining the actor’s 430-volume library in time for what would have been her 100th birthday, on June 1st. Its author, Gail Crowther, is acclaimed for her work on Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker and Anne Sexton, who, like Marilyn Monroe, were glamorous, tragic and misunderstood.
That Monroe was a voracious reader is an aspect that Crowther claims has been historically overlooked, promising to amaze us with the bookworm behind the bottle blonde.
What a pity, then, that the book is so silly, brimming with anodyne observations (“One of the many beautiful things about books is the way in which they help us understand what we want our beliefs and values to be”) and saccharine psychology (“If someone tells you you are stupid and dumb enough times, chances are you will start to believe it”). Monroe’s duality is oversimplified (“Persona: Dumb; Real Life: Sharp Wit and Intelligence”), while two pages of misogynist internet responses to a photo of the actor reading Ulysses, although awful, labour an obvious point.
An anecdote about a drunken dinner party with Dylan Thomas gets its best beats – such as Monroe scrubbing salad leaves with a Brillo pad – from the salty autobiography of her fellow actor Shelley Winters. Personally, I wish Crowther had given more credit and space to Winters, Monroe’s roommate and another buxom blonde with a brain, who remembered her as always carrying a heavy book and fantasising about men such as Zero Mostel, Charles Laughton and Albert Einstein.
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Monroe’s ardour for Russian writers and Russia – she once discussed Dostoevsky with Khrushchev – is given a cursory gloss, as are her socialist spirit and commitment to civil rights. “What the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship,” she pleaded in her final interview with Time magazine. “Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.”
As a fledgling actor, she hid the autobiography of the 19th-century journalist Lincoln Steffens – “the first book I’d read that seemed to tell the truth about people and life ... It didn’t just echo the half lies I’d always heard” – under her bed because the studio feared she might be called a communist. That story from Monroe’s memoir is not in Crowther’s book.
One takeaway is Monroe’s connection to Irish writers – her grandmother Delia was from Dublin – which extended beyond Joyce to Yeats, Brendan Behan and Seán O’Casey. Most intriguingly, Greta Garbo wanted to play Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray opposite Monroe as the singer he seduces.
Perhaps as a grab bag of facts – some interesting – for those new to the topic, Crowther’s book can provide some service. But most readers drawn to this book that promises insight into the “literary life of Marilyn Monroe” will want, I imagine, original and closely considered scholarship. Instead, Crowther’s speculations include whether Monroe, if she had lived, could have starred in Valley of the Dolls.
[ ‘Marilyn Monroe was never respected. Not in her lifetime. She was consumed’Opens in new window ]
Feminist readings of Monroe aren’t exactly radical. Forty years ago Gloria Steinem argued in Marilyn: Norma Jeane that the movement was partly responsible for the actor’s enduring legacy, which is why Crowther’s book feels so bizarrely outdated. In making her subject a victim of “patriarchy, industry decisions, cultural stereotypes”, Crowther has squashed her. It’s a quibble, but even calling her “Marilyn” has a belittling effect.
In contrast, Jacqueline Rose’s recent work on Monroe, in her book Women in Dark Times, offers an elegant, eye-opening synthesis of Monroe the reader with her other aspects as activist, actor and wife who was furious at her husband Arthur Miller for miswriting her in her final movie, The Misfits. “She could not bear that her character was not allowed to be mentally equal to the ethical task she is allowed, only screaming, to perform.”
Fragments, a posthumous collection of Monroe’s notes, letters and poems, offers a glimpse of what Rose describes as “a mind at work, at once creative and in pieces”, and a woman who “never stops educating” herself.
One detail in which Crowther is painstaking is the financial value of Monroe’s books. The actor’s relationship with money was complicated. As per Crowther: “Persona: Liked Wealth/fancy things; Real Life: Modest home and life.” “Of course Monroe wanted money,” Rose argues, “She wanted some money to stop bigger money from controlling her fate.”
At the Christie’s auction of her belongings in 1999, Monroe’s Last Temptation of Christ sold for $3,220; her Bible for $37,950. If you “own a copy of one of her books”, Crowther coos, “you also own a shimmering piece of Marilyn dust”.
While it is entertaining to wonder whether Monroe would be tickled by the high prices her library commanded, such language of commodity is still ironic in a book about a woman who struggled with the people who always wanted to price and own a piece of her.
Mei Chin is a writer from New York living in Dublin
