Marilyn Revealed

"What made Norma Jean special was the quality she discovered when, bored with being a teenage bride with a husband in the Merchant Marine during World War II, she took her first and most enduring lover-the camera." So posits author Ted Schwarz in the first comprehensive look at the life of Marilyn Monroe to appear in years, a biography that benefits from interviews with many of the actress's friends and acquaintances who have remained silent until now. Putting together the pieces of Marilyn's final days, spent in the company of Peter Lawford and his brother-in-law Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Schwarz also speculates on the causes of her death, which he describes as a "Hollywood version of natural causes." An unwanted child who had been passed around among her mother, her mother's friends, foster homes, and orphanages, the long record of rejection prompted Marilyn to lie about her childhood in her autobiography and become pathologically insecure in her relationships with men. Married five times, there was often no line of distinction as she moved from one affair to another: as Schwarz notes almost matter-of-factly, for example, Marilyn celebrated her engagement to baseball great Joe DiMaggio by going to bed with film director Elia Kazan. Upon returning from her honeymoon with DiMaggio, she immediately announced to friends her intention to marry playwright Arthur Miller-much to the surprise of Miller and his wife. "Still," Schwarz writes, "it was only to the camera that she did not look ahead to the next lover…all it asked of her was to allow it to transform Norma Jean Mortenson Dougherty…into a movie star and one of the most desired women in the world."

What made Norma Jean special was the quality she discovered when, bored with being a teenage bride with a husband in the Merchant Marine during World War II, she took her first and most enduring lover, the camera. At the age of 36, Marilyn Monroe died a Hollywood movie star and an American legend. Her rise to fame, however, had very little to do with her limited talents. Monroe infiltrated Hollywood, swarming with fake names and idealized careers, and pressed herself into its mold. Monroe's personal confessions, along with interviews with friends and contemporaries, reveal the truth behind this Hollywood icon.

Publishers Weekly

Penning a Marilyn Monroe biography in 2009 is no easy task, following shelves full of books shamelessly exposing, mythologizing and complicating the iconic actress's memory. Schwarz (The Hillside Strangler) presents the first comprehensive biography in recent years, but comes up with little fans won't already know. Drawing from FBI files and interviews with Norma Jean Mortenson's friends and acquaintances, Schwarz seeks to debunk the Marilyn myths while chronicling her dysfunctional, partially fabricated family history (questioning how long she spent in an orphanage), her pathological insecurity, her infamous love affairs and marriages (most notably with Joe DiMaggio) and her controversial final days. Though Schwarz admits when he's unsure about the facts (as with Marilyn's teenage marriage), his limited use of attribution calls his own credibility into question. Ultimately, Schwarz's long-winded bio often reads like an over-confident honor student's interminable dissertation.
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Ted Schwarz is the author, co-author, or "ghost" of more than 100 books, including the bestselling The Hillside Strangler. He has been a frequent contributor to such shows as Hard Copy, E!-Entertainment's True Hollywood Mysteries, and True Hollywood Stories. He lives on Cleveland, Ohio.