Marilyn Monroe.
BIO 360
Miguel Muñoz
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160
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About this ebook
She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital, and she died as Marilyn Monroe on August 5, 1962, in a bungalow in Brentwood. Between those two dates lies one of the most remarkable, most scrutinized, and most misunderstood lives in American history. This book is an attempt to see through sixty years of myth-making to the actual person: the child who survived eleven foster placements and two years in an orphanage; the teenager who married at sixteen to escape the foster care system; the model who reinvented herself with intelligence and deliberateness; the actress who studied her craft at the Actors Studio with the seriousness her industry refused to acknowledge; the woman who founded her own production company, negotiated creative control from a studio that owned her, and won.Marilyn Monroe was not what the legend says she was. She was not the passive object of the male gaze who stumbled from one powerful man's arms to the next. She was a person of formidable intelligence, genuine comedic genius, and serious dramatic range who happened to exist in a body that the culture found overwhelming and in a decade that had no adequate framework for what she was. She read Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. She asked serious questions about Hegel. She converted to Judaism with genuine conviction. She sat at the front table of a Hollywood club to ensure that Ella Fitzgerald was given the audience she deserved. She held out for a year against the most powerful studio in Hollywood and emerged with a contract that gave her approval rights that no one of her commercial stature had previously negotiated.She was also, and this is not a contradiction, genuinely fragile — wounded by a childhood of abandonment and assault, dependent by the end of her life on quantities of medications that the medical culture of the 1950s had prescribed and that the medical culture of any subsequent decade would have recognized as dangerous, surrounded by people who needed things from her that their relationship with her was organized to extract rather than to give. The gap between what she needed and what she received is the wound at the center of her story. The gap does not close.BIO 360 presents the complete story of Marilyn Monroe with the attention and the honesty that the story has always deserved: the childhood, the marriages, the films, the politics, the intelligence, the health crises, the Kennedy connection, the death, and the ongoing transformation of a woman into an icon. It is a book about talent and survival, about the cost of visibility and the loneliness of fame, about what America does with the women it cannot stop looking at. It is also, above all, a book about a specific person who was extraordinary and who deserved better than she got. Her name was Norma Jeane. She became Marilyn Monroe. Both women deserve to be known.
She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital, and she died as Marilyn Monroe on August 5, 1962, in a bungalow in Brentwood. Between those two dates lies one of the most remarkable, most scrutinized, and most misunderstood lives in America...
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