To be read: Marilyn, The Passion and the Paradox

 

    Marilyn Monroe died fifty years ago today, and a new, sympathetic, scholarly biography which looks at the paradoxical aspects of her life and character and attempts to analyse the contrary aspects of her personality has been published to coincide with that anniversary.

"Marilyn was a powerful star and a childlike waif; a joyful, irreverent party girl with a deeply spiritual side; a superb friend and a narcissist; a dumb blonde and an intellectual," and in Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox academic Lois Banner uses previously unseen, private material to show the many facets of her subject.

    Celebrity biographies are not typical reading for me, but I'd like to know more about the person behind the iconic image, and in particular her marriage to her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, for besides being, in his words, "gorgeous, glamorous, incandescent" - and not that the two things are mutually exclusive, of course - she was often to be found (as in this picture from Women Who Read Are Dangerous) with her head in a book.