Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe by Gail Crowther; Gallery, 304 pp., $30
Ever since Marilyn Monroe first appeared on film, audiences have been mesmerized. The man who took her screen test at Twentieth Century-Fox in summer 1946, when she was 20 years old, commented, “Every frame of the test radiated sex”—and all she did was walk, sit down, and light a cigarette. Filmmaker Billy Wilder, who worked with Monroe on two of her best-known features, The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), spoke of a “flesh impact” she had on viewers: “You feel you can reach out and touch it.”
Monroe quickly became known as a blond bombshell, a Hollywood-manufactured image of a sexpot, whose life and career titillated viewers across the globe throughout the 1950s and early ’60s. Monroe, who died in 1962 at age 36, would have turned 100 this June. Even today, the image of her standing above a New York City subway grate, white skirt aflutter, remains iconic.
Her sex appeal proved inescapable, but Monroe was far more than just a pin-up; she was fiercely intelligent, ambitious, and savvy in her professional life. Author Gail Crowther, whose previous subjects include Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, shifts the focus to this formerly neglected terrain in her highly illuminating, jauntily-paced Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe.
Monroe had very little formal education, having dropped out of high school in 10th grade. She was raised by a single mother, Gladys Baker, who worked as a film cutter at Columbia and RKO studios and spent much of her time in and out of mental institutions. This meant that young Norma Jeane, as Monroe was then still known, was mostly left to the care of surrogate and foster parents. Frequently on her own, she would spend long hours at the movies in her native Los Angeles. “I’d sit all day and way into the night,” she recalled in 1962.
Her interest in books came after she’d entered the motion picture industry and reinvented herself as Marilyn Monroe. One of her favorite stops on the way home from Fox studio was Pickwick Book Shop on Hollywood Boulevard, where she’d browse for hours and leave with several new acquisitions. Crowther writes that for Monroe, reading provided “a safe space, not only somewhere she could be alone, but more importantly somewhere away from the judgments and assumptions,” providing a sense of calm and stability in an otherwise unstable life. Throughout her career, Monroe was frequently a target of ridicule, teased as dumb. Occasionally she leaned into it. “If you are ignorant,” she once quipped, “books won’t laugh at you.”
On set, Monroe was known to carry her prized possessions with her—when making All About Eve (1950), she brought with her to the set a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. She was especially fond of verse and owned numerous volumes by various poets from Shakespeare, Milton, and García Lorca to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marjorie Tilden, and Heinrich Heine. “I read poetry to save time,” she once remarked with the kind of playful, witty nonchalance she often exhibited on screen.
In a similar spirit, she insisted “no one ever told me what to read.” Her reading habits were those of an autodidact with expansive and eclectic taste. The personal library she kept—the contents of which Crowther includes in a revealing appendix—included a first edition of Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love; a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital; a sizable collection of Russian novels and works by Freud; an inscribed copy of The Holy Scriptures, which she received as a wedding gift from acting coach Paula Strasberg; and several plays by one of her favorite writers, Tennessee Williams. In 1951, she enrolled in a 10-week extension class at UCLA in world literature. When talking to the press, she was known on occasion to quote Goethe and even to discussed the theme of guilt in Kafka’s Trial with a Hollywood columnist. When a journalist asked Monroe what she would save if her house were on fire, she replied, “books.”
She didn’t like everything she read. Although she owned copies of A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, she didn’t much care for Hemingway’s macho protagonists. “Those big tough guys are so sick,” she told interviewer W. J. Weatherby. “They aren’t even tough! They’re afraid of kindness and gentleness and beauty. They always want to kill something to prove themselves!” She harbored a similar antipathy toward the entertainment industry in which she often felt exploited and under-appreciated. “Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss,” she wrote in a posthumously published autobiography, “and fifty cents for your soul.”
Over the course of her short life, she mingled with numerous writers, including but not limited to her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, and his circle. “I have yet to see anything in Marilyn that isn’t genuine,” remarked Saul Bellow upon meeting her. “Surrounded by thousands, she conducts herself like a philosopher.” When the British actress Constance Collier was introduced to Monroe by their mutual friend Truman Capote in 1955, she keenly observed “this luminosity, this flickering intelligence. … It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight: only a camera can freeze the poetry of it.”
Crowther makes abundantly clear that Monroe was far more than the “dumb blonde” or Hollywood sexpot she was all too often made out to be. Marilyn and Her Books offers a more nuanced, complex narrative and is a powerful corrective to received wisdom—arguing convincingly, on the eve of Monroe’s centennial, that she must be “recast and reimagined: not the late, not the ditzy, not the bombshell, not the difficult, but the intelligent Marilyn Monroe.”
