Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon

Based on new interviews and research, Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon (2018) reveals how Marilyn Monroe's childhood contributed to her struggle with bi-polar disorder, and impacted her career and personal life. Marilyn was a complex woman, bewitching and maddening, brilliant yet flawed. Charles Casillo studies Monroe’s life through the context of her times―in the days before feminism. This biography exposes how―in spite of her fractured psyche―Marilyn managed to transform each celebrated love affair and each tragedy into another step in her journey towards immortality. Just a few of Casillo's revelations: *Despite reports of their bitter rivalry, Elizabeth Taylor secretly called Marilyn when she was fired from her last film to offer moral and financial support. *Film of a rumored nude love scene with Clark Gable was said to have been destroyed―but an exclusive interview reveals that it still exists. *A meticulously detailed account of the events of her last day, revealing how a series of miscommunications and misjudgments contributed to her death. Source: www.amazon.com

A collection of rare pictures of Marilyn Monroe has emerged, including this never-before-seen photograph she sent to Arthur Miller along with the caption 'I know when I'm not there for you.' Margaret Barrett, Director of Entertainment Memorabilia, said: 'It's not the classic, sexy movie star look she's known for, she is in a white shirt with a collar, you can't see any skin but her face. She's completely covered up with a regular dress shirt with buttons and long sleeve with subtle make-up and an odd expression. It's the picture of a regular woman - you rarely see Marilyn like that. You see her as the famous movie star. Maybe it's telling of what Arthur wanted, the regular woman on his desk, not the public perception. She wrote a message on the glass frame to Arthur where she knew he would see it. Who knows what that means? Maybe he felt she wasn't there for him, maybe was he that needy, who can guess?' The auction, which will take place in Dallas next week, also features images of Marilyn entertaining the troops during the Korean War. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Marilyn Monroe’s struggle was to reconcile her two identities: Norma Jean, the apple-cheeked girl next door, and Marilyn Monroe, the droopy-eyed Aphrodite. Marilyn: Intimate Exposures (2011) by Susan Bernard, is a stunning collection of images that track Norma Jean’s transformation into Marilyn. In early, rarely seen glamour photographs by Bruno Bernard, you see a 20-year-old Norma Jean with an eager smile and wide eyes, doing pin-up poses with a very un-pinup expression. Bernard’s photos were used as the covers of the pre-teen pulp series “Teenage Diary Secrets” and Laff magazine (a mix between Mad magazine and Playboy), as well as in print advertisements for pharmaceutical companies. Later Bernard photographed her on movie sets, snapping the immortal subway-grate photo from The Seven Year Itch. Voluptuous and soft-voiced, the Marilyn we know exemplified 1950s femininity. Yet she mocked it with her wiggling walk, jiggling breasts, and puckered mouth. There were many Marilyns, not just one. “Marilyn Monroe,” her most famous alter ego, was one among many. As a pin-up model early in her career she posed for her era’s most famous pin-up photo—a nude that became the centerfold for the first issue of Playboy in December 1953. By mid-career she created a new glamour look that combined the allure of the pin-up with the aloof, mature sensuality of a glamour star. —"Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox" (2012) by Lois Banner

In 1954 and 1955, the number one identified health problem in the United States was ‘emotional disease.’ In 1954, 150,000 adults entered mental hospitals and 700,000 mental patients received hospital care (in comparison, physical disorders accounted for only 600,000 patients). That same year, over a billion dollars was spent for the care of people diagnosed as mentally ill. In 1955, the year minor tranquillizers first became available outside of hospitals, 75 per cent of patients were being treated in hospital settings, over half a million people, compared to 150,000 in 1980. And although the wide availability of tranquillizers meant that hospital stays decreased by the late 1950s, there were still over a quarter of a million people employed in the industry, and hospitals continued into the late 1950s to report staff shortages. Over half of the patients in these hospitals were women, the majority married. —"Small Screen, Big Ideas" (2002) by Janet Thumim

As Robert D Putnam identified in his seminal essay, Bowling Alone, lower participation rates in organisations such as unions had reduced person to person contacts and civil interaction. World War II occasioned a massive outpouring of patriotism and collective solidarity. At war’s end those energies were redirected into community life. The two decades following 1945 witnessed one of the most vital periods of community involvement in American history. By the late 1950s, however, this burst of community involvement began to tail off. The Clinton-era was a period of financial deregulation, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the landmark reform passed during the Depression, as well as legislation exempting credit default swaps from regulation. Economically, this period saw the continuation of what's been called the "Great Divergence" which produced stark inequalities in wealth and income. Between 1979 and 2007, household income in the top 1% grew by 275% compared to just 18% growth in the bottom fifth of households. Disruptive technologies changed the workplace and upended the labour market. Between 1990 and 2007, automation and globalisation killed off up to 670,000 US manufacturing jobs alone. The internet and social media, trumpeted initially as the ultimate tool for bringing people together, actually became a forum for cynicism, division and various outlandish conspiracy theories. America became more atomised. The opioid crisis can be traced back to the early 1990s with the over-prescription of powerful painkillers. 

Between 1991 and 2011, painkiller prescriptions tripled. Rather than the compulsive togetherness ascribed to the classic suburbs of the 1950s, when ethnographer M. P. Baumgartner lived in a suburban New Jersey community in the 1980s, she found a culture of atomized isolation and “moral minimalism.” Far from seeking small-town connectedness, suburbanites kept to themselves, asking little of their neighbors and expecting little in return. “The suburb is the last word in privatization, perhaps even its lethal consummation,” argue urbanist architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, “and it spells the end of authentic civic life.” As sociologist Robert Sampson states: “Lack of social capital is one of the primary features of socially disorganized communities.” The best evidence available on changing levels of neighborhood connectedness suggests that most Americans are less embedded in their neighborhood than they were a generation ago. Indeed, the decline in neighborhood social capital—community monitoring, socializing, mentoring, and organizing—is one important feature of the inner-city crisis, in addition to purely economic factors. Elijah Anderson, an urban ethnographer who studied the inner-city of Philadelphia, has documented a steady erosion in the “moral cohesion” of low-income neighborhoods. —"Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" (2001) by Robert D. Putnam