Of the three books under review, easily the most accessible is MM—Personal. Marilyn Monroe, particularly during the decades of the 1940s and 1950s, was arguably the most famous woman on earth. In Korea during the Korean War—of which she was the dominant pin-up—she drew ten thousand soldiers at her appearances. She wrote and received many letters. Here’s a response to one she wrote Somerset Maugham:I've never heard of the TV version of "Rain". In 1953 Rita Hayworth did a remake of the 1932 cult classic movie with Joan Crawford (which I have ordered from Netflix).Dear Miss Monroe,...
Thank you for your charming telegram of good wishes on my birthday. It was extremely kind of you to think of me; I was touched and much pleased.
I am so glad to hear that you are going to play Sadie in the T.V. production of “Rain.” I am sure you will be splendid. I wish you the best of luck.
Yours very sincerely, W. Somerset Maugham
Two years before she died, Frank Sinatra gave Marilyn a Maltese terrier that she named Maf. Andrew O’Hagan knows a great deal about Marilyn Monroe, and he has chosen to write about her from the point of view of her canine companion Maf the dog—certainly a daring, even a cheeky thing to do. He has made Maf into a very well-read dog. On each of the 277 pages we are likely to find a number of literary references.
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To say that the dog Maf has come up with a truly dizzying number of literary references would be to understate. O’Hagan has combed world literature for references to writers and their dogs, and picked up scores. Here, for example, is Vita Sackville-West, who “once spoke of her admiration for a certain French tapestry showing Ulysses being met on the doorstep by his dog, Argos.”
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Curiously, MM—Personal includes a charming series of letters Marilyn wrote to Arthur Miller’s children from the point of view of their basset hound:Some terrible insects by the name of ticks have been getting on me lately and Janie it’s just terrible but I am managing the problem pretty well because when I get one on me I just run to Daddy or Marilyn and they get them off me in a hurry....
Marilyn’s favorite photograph of herself was made by the British photographer Cecil Beaton in New York on February 22, 1956. She liked it so much that Josh Logan, who had just directed Bus Stop, had it framed for her, between two notes from Beaton. Marilyn had dozens of prints of it made. What struck Beaton was her ability to endlessly transform herself—without inhibition but with a real uncertainty and vulnerability:She had rocketed from obscurity to become our post-war sex symbol, the pin-up girl of an age. And whatever press agentry or manufactured illusion may have lit the fuse, it is her own weird genius that has sustained her flight. Transfigured by the garish marvel of Technicolor cinemascope, she walks like an undulating basilisk, scorching everything in her path…. Perhaps she was born just the post-war day we had need of her. Certainly she had no knowledge of the past. Like Giraudoux’s Ondine, she is only fifteen years old, and she will never die.The photograph—like many of her photographs—is stunning, but she doesn’t look fifteen and, six years later, she did die, after saying this to a reporter:It might be kind of a relief to be finished. It’s sort of like you don’t know what kind of a yard dash you’re running, but then you’re at the finish line and you sort of sigh—you’ve made it! But you never have—you have to start all over again.
If you're an MM fan, the rest of the review is worth reading.
MM's favorite photo of herself by Cecil Beaton:
MM with Edith Sitwell:
