Marilyn Monroe
American film actress (1926-1962). The subject of Mailer's Marilyn: A Biography (1973), his first full-length life-study, in which he treated her as a 'novel biography' and publicly speculated that her death may have been a murder.
Marilyn Monroe, the American film actress, is the subject of Mailer’s Marilyn: A Biography (73.30), the 1973 picture-biography produced by Lawrence Schiller. What had been commissioned as a 25,000-word preface to a photographic selection grew into a 95,000-word “novel biography” — Mailer’s first sustained life-study and the start of the string of biographies that ran through the rest of his career.
Mailer never met Monroe, and the book’s speculative method drew both the year’s sharpest reviews (Pauline Kael’s “A Rip-Off with Genius”) and a plagiarism dispute with the prior Monroe biographers Maurice Zolotow and Fred Lawrence Guiles (later settled). At an 18 July 1973 press conference Mailer publicly urged that Monroe’s 1962 death be investigated as a possible murder, tying it to her reported relationship with Robert Kennedy — claims he developed further in the 1980 softcover Of Women and Their Elegance apparatus and revisited for years.
Stub created during the 1973 ingest.