by Moe Zilla

Created on: January 25, 2009

In 1973 Norman Mailer wrote a book about Marilyn Monroe. And then in 1980, he wrote another one. That same year he won his second Pulitzer Prize for a biography of Gary Gilmore. But it was seven years earlier when he'd first explored the art of the biography - and the complicated life of Marilyn Monroe.

"Pictures by the world's foremost photographers," the book promises - and that's not an exaggeration. The 24 photographers listed include Richard Avedon, and Bert Stern (who contributed the famous "last sitting" photos - taken six weeks before Marilyn's death and including some sad nude photographs). Mailer begins the book by describing the enduring interest of Lawrence Shiller, a man who had seen Marilyn on the morning of the day she died. "Years later, still convinced she was the most exciting film personality ever to pose for a still camera, it occurred to [Shiller] that there had been no retrospective presentation of her superb if less heralded skill as a photographer's model..." Shiller's idea led to a definitive exhibition - over 16,000 photos were examined - and inevitably they were collected into a book.

At that point Mailer was invited to write the accompanying text about Marilyn's life - and his contribution eventually grew to over 90,000 words. It had been just 11 years since Monroe's death from a barbiturate overdose - ending a life that was rich with symbolism. (Mailer once described its culmination as "Baby goes boom.") He approaches his subject with a novelist's enthusiasm, describing her foster parents as "poor, pious, stern, kindly, decent, hard-working, and absolutely terrified of the lividity of the American air in the street outside."

There's poignant details in every era of her life, and Mailer rushes to give them context and significance. Describing her first marriage, he writes that "...like ambitious newlyweds, they will move from a one-room studio apartment in Sherman Oaks to a furnished bungalow in Van Nuys, and in both places she will darn his socks, sew buttons, prove impeccably neat..." But he adds a remarkable tidbit from a biography by Maurice Zolotow - that one day Marilyn brought a cow home because it looked forlorn in the rain on a rainy day. "Only a particularly crazy young housewife will wish to take in a cow when she is also very neat... She has that displacement of the senses which others take drugs to find."

Mailer follows her from her days in an orphanage, through Hollywood stardom, and to the set of her final film, the Misfits. ("...in a few days word is out that Marilyn is taking a high count of Nembutals every night.") It was also in the early 1960s that Mailer gained some extra notoriety for his essays about John F. Kennedy, but he also had a unapologetic interest in America's sexuality. He'd spend the next decade he'd completed his transformation from novelist to journalist.

And when asked to apply his new skills to the life of Marilyn Monroe, Mailer probably found it irresistible.

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