March 1961
Biographies of living persons present one set of difficulties; biographies of film stars also have their problems, and I don’t mean to be condescending when I say that Mr. Zolotow seems to have made a surprisingly good job at this one. It is an intelligent, painstaking, only a shade over-serious work about as exceptional, possibly unique, creature who has achieved a position in cinema which puts her in a category containing only half a dozen other artists of that medium.
The book traces her from birth in 1926 as Norma Jean Baker up to the present time - The Misfits made and her marriage with Miller at an end - putting some flesh, so to speak, upon the bones of that now famous legend of the illegitimate child, brought up in foster homes and an institution, raped when she was nine, who thereafter stammered, was plain and shy and utterly withdrawn, but all the time privately obsessed with the desire to become a film actress. Her marriage, at sixteen, was dissolved four years later without making much mark: after it she began the slow, gruelling climb from modelling to being a starlet - under contract to Twentieth Century but with nothing to do, on to Columbia and one B picture and the nude calendar posing that she did for fifty dollars in order to redeem her broken-down old car. Her first real part was for Huston in The Asphalt Jungle, but it was not until 1953 that she emerged into stardom in How to Marry a Millionaire (Mr. Zolotow has made a fascinating description of her Cinderella-like preparations for the première of this film).
One of the best aspects of this book is that in the course of his six years’ research, the author has taken the trouble to find out exactly how various directors have managed to work with Miss Monroe, as from them, one begins to appreciate her extremely rare and desirable talent in different ways. Some of them found her impossible - Preminger and Olivier, for instance, went nearly mad, but others, such as Logan and Wilder, who were able to withstand her pathological lateness, the constant presence of her acting coaches, the time she took to prepare for each shot and her passion for retakes, etc., still found her uniquely rewarding. Altogether Mr. Zolotow pieces together the jagged life and temperamental extremes so that they make a coherent and extraordinary portrait of somebody who at thirty-five has been described as ‘one of the greatest actresses on the screen’ and ‘the most powerful commercial attraction in the world’. The book has illustrations and seems to me very good value.