Andrew Wilson: I Wanna Be Loved By You. Marilyn Monroe, A Life in 100 Takes. 512 pages. Hard cover. ISBN 13: 9781398513440. Simon & Schuster UK, 26 Feb 2026.
I participate in the Marilyn Monroe centenary celebration by visiting the wonderful exhibition at La Cinémathèque française and reading a new book about her, Andrew Wilson's I Wanna Be Loved By You.
The book exceeds expectations raised by its own publicity blurb (quoted below). Wilson offers new assessments and lots of fresh detail. As a biography the book does not strive for completeness. Instead, it is structured as a montage of a hundred fragments. Neither is it a critical study of Monroe's films, talent and art. But it is a rewarding account of the life and the legend based on the best currently available sources. Because Wilson in general pursues discipline in source criticism, I would have welcome a deliberation about the controversial decision of quoting confidential notes from psychoanalytic sessions.
Wilson offers an important assessment about Monroe's early memoir My Story (1954), ghostwritten by Ben Hecht, exceptional thanks to her frankness about childhood sexual abuse and harassment in Golden Age Hollywood. He even bothers to examine her "porn movies" (all fakes featuring lookalikes).
Of the biographies I know, I find Icon: The Life, Times, & Films of Marilyn Monroe, Vol 1–2 by Gary Vitacco-Robles (2014, 2015, 712 + 884 pages) definitive. I have also enjoyed the foundational works by Maurice Zolotow (1960, 1990) and Fred Lawrence Guiles (1969, 1984). Anthony Summers (1985, 1986) excelled in research but was uncritical with sources. Donald Spoto's was the best biography when it was published in 1993 but biased in its interpretation of Monroe's final year, demonizing her psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson.
My own Monroe book (1982, 1996) was a study in the star image, and I admire Sarah Churchwell's The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004) as the authoritative achievement in a similar approach. Barbara Leaming's book (1998) is my favourite about Monroe as a professional and a performer.
Although my book was not a biography, I was fascinated by the Rashomon aspect of the investigation. The Monroe story is full of holes and unreliable witnesses, starting with the protagonist herself. Arthur Miller certainly knew Marilyn, but he did not know Hollywood and therefore seems to have misread Monroe. Other biographers spinned fairytales, but to bring credence to their fantasies they at times conducted solid research.
The most lasting feature of Andrew Wilson's book is his systematic debunking of the Marilyn fabrication industry. Central to the Monroe image is the legend, but it is necessary to understand the reality, as well.
THE BLACK BOXES
Arthur P. Jacobs, Marilyn Monroe's press agent, in charge of her public image, learned about the death of the star at 22:30 on Saturday evening, 4 August 1962. The official discovery of the body, by the housekeeper Eunice Murray and the psychoanalyst Dr. Ralph Greenson, took place five hours later, at 3:30 on Sunday morning, 5 August 1962. At 3:50 a.m. her physician Dr. Hyman Engelberg arrived, and at 4:25 a.m. the Los Angeles Police Department was alerted.
Arthur P. Jacobs managed the publicity campaign of Monroe's death in cooperation with 20th Century-Fox. In 1963, he switched into a successful career as a producer of films released by that same company.
After the funeral, Inez Melson, Monroe's business manager, spent three days burning many of her papers in the fireplace. Later, she quietly acquired her two filing cabinets and kept them until her death in 1985.
Because of disputes among beneficiaries of Monroe's will, most of her personal belongings remained inaccessible for biographers until the October 1999 auction of her property at Christie's in New York. There Anna Strasberg, Lee Strasberg's third wife, sold it with a net profit of 13.4 million dollars, and the collection was scattered into the four winds.
Marilyn Monroe died alone*. After her death, nobody protected the dignity of her reputation, personal data and privacy. She became fair game for exploitation.
The events during the six to eight hours between her death and the arrival of the police were the most closely guarded secret in the history of Hollywood. Monroe's personal papers remained inaccessible for biographers for 40 years. When they were finally made public, the medical documents confirmed the deputy coroner Thomas Noguchi's original classification of her death as a probable suicide. The suicide may have been accidental.
Yes, there was a cover-up, and yes, it was because of the Kennedys. The press release about her death was handled by Monroe's own press agent and business manager. Launching one of the greatest news stories of the year they did their best to minimize scandal. The world was different in 1962. The presence of the Kennedys in Marilyn Monroe's private life was confidential information that needed to be covered up.
THE ANTI-KENNEDY SMEAR CAMPAIGN
Monroe was a friend and admirer of the Kennedy family. When asked in 1962 about figures who inspired her, Marilyn included in her shortlist President Kennedy and his brother Robert, because "they symbolize the youth of America – in its vigor, its brilliance, and its compassion" (Wilson, p. 380). But when all three were dead, exploiters smeared them in murder fabrications.
Wilson tracks the Marilyn Monroe murder industry down to a single origin: the book The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe (1964) by Frank Capell published by the Herald of Freedom. The former private detective Capell, Sergeant Jack Clemmons (the first police officer on Monroe's death scene) and Maurice Ries (president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals) were a team of far right political activists dedicated to bring the Kennedys down. They were so successful that the sleaze they originated survives to this day. At the time, even J. Edgar Hoover (the director of the FBI) was intrigued but found no substance in Capell's campaign.
The first major biographer to take the bait was Norman Mailer in Marilyn (1973, 1975). It is a disgrace in the history of literature how luminaries like Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates (Blonde, 2000) contributed to the subject with blatant exploitation.
Entire careers were built on Marilyn Monroe fabrications. From a single photograph of him with Monroe taken by the 20th Century Fox publicity department on the set of Niagara in the summer of 1952, the journalist Robert F. Slatzer spun a fairy-tale about their "lifelong friendship" in three books (1974, 1977, 1992). Working together with the journalist Will Fowler, Slatzer made a deal with Capell to recycle his Kennedy conspiracy material.
More dubious figures followed: Tony Sciacca (Anthony Scaduto), Mike Speriglio, Ted Jordan, Lionel Grandison, Jeanne Carmen, John Miner, Deborah Gould (Peter Lawford's third wife) and Hans Jørgen Lembourn. David Conover, Marilyn's first photographer, also invented a lifelong friendship (1981). Colin Clark, the third assistant on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, wrote two books (1995, 2000) with an imagined love affair with Marilyn.
Even Seymour Hersh, the distinguished journalist, participated in The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), withdrawing at the last minute material on Marilyn Monroe based on forged documents from one Lex Cusack.
THE SACRED MONSTER
Jean Cocteau (one of the many poets devastated by Marilyn's death) coined the expression "a sacred monster" in his play about Sarah Bernhardt.
According to the journalist W. J. Weatherby, Monroe herself confessed that she was a monster during the filming of her last finished movie The Misfits (1961). She was living in hell, and she made life hell for other people. Arthur Miller witnessed his wife transported by chemicals into another dimension. He saw her becoming the victim of the fantasy she had created. "The self-destruction was terrifying". A shattering chapter is devoted to an interview made by Wilson for his book with the script supervisor of The Misfits, Angela Allen, a John Huston regular. This is truly "the dark side of Marilyn", shattering suspicions of hagiography.
The contradictions in the Marilyn Monroe image are extreme, and Richard Dyer sees in them the key to the mystery of her stardom. "The love goddess of the nuclear age" (Clare Boothe Luce) survives today as an avatar for the Me Too age. Her battle for mental health strikes a chord in an age of anxiety. Monroe was a key figure in the society of the spectacle, now more formidable than ever.
Marilyn Monroe was a master of illusion, and highly aware of what was at stake, as proven by a favourite quote of hers, from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
"True love is visible not to the eyes but to the heart, for eyes may be deceived. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
"Adieu, dit le renard. Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
SIMON & SCHUSTER PUBLICITY BLURB:
"Dreamer. Bombshell. Icon.
Featuring a wealth of unpublished material, Andrew Wilson’s biography of Marilyn Monroe presents the actress in a startling new light.
Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, she had an uncertain and unforgiving upbringing. She grew up in Los Angeles and would dream about Hollywood, believing that acting would be her one-way ticket to happiness. Her dream was so powerful that she transformed herself into the ultimate goddess of the silver screen, and her image has been branded into the collective consciousness. Men lusted after her, and women wanted to be her. All her life, she just wanted to be loved.
Told through 100 captivating snapshots, we are thrown into the glamorous but dangerous world of old Hollywood. We see a young Marilyn navigating the highs and lows of the studio system as she attempts to free herself from the constraints of Twentieth Century-Fox. We also go behind the scenes of her marriages to teenage sweetheart Jim Dougherty, baseball star Joe DiMaggio and famous playwright Arthur Miller. We hear the voices of friends, lovers – and enemies.
We hear of the friendships she formed with poets, philosophers, playwrights and political activists, and the years spent training with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.
In the concluding chapters, Andrew Wilson unpicks what happened on the night Marilyn died after a suspected drug overdose. Were the Kennedys involved, or was she just let down by those closest to her?
I Wanna Be Loved By You is a revealing and nuanced portrait of the life, death and afterlife of an icon who still fascinates us today."
* Both her mother and father were alive but not present in their daughter's life.
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