Norma Jean: The Life of Marilyn Monroe

What you may have known about Marilyn Monroe before was only the tip of the iceberg. For twenty years, the men and women who knew Marilyn best saw what they knew suppressed because certain important people were still living and the tenor of the times prohibited frankness. Instead, rumors ballooned. This book finally sets the record straight. Fred Lawrence Guiles―whom Norman Mailer acknowledges as the chief source of facts about Marilyn Monroe―has written about the life behind the legend. He reveals what really happened in the careening career of the pretty waif named Norma Jean Mortensen, who married the boy next door, became a model, an actress, and a movie star, married an incompatible legend named Joe DiMaggio, sought to improve the mind that came with her near-perfect body, married playwright Arthur Miller, lent herself to the Svengali-like ministrations of Paula and Lee Strasberg, became the mistress of John and then Robert Kennedy when they ran the country, and kept camera crews and studios waiting―but couldn’t keep death waiting, for it took her under the most unusual circumstances at the age of thirty-six. A legend, by definition, is unaltered by fact, but enthralled listeners will find the revelations in this book— coming to understand at last what happened to the Queen of Need—no deterrent to loving Marilyn Monroe. A supplemental PDF that includes artistic depictions of nudity is included with this audiobook.