Norma Jean

Marilyn Monroe remains the most provocative female legend of the twentieth century. What you may have known about her before was only the tip of the iceberg. For twenty years, the men and women who knew Marilyn best saw what they knew suppressed because certain important people were still living, and the tenor of the times prohibited frankness. Instead, rumors ballooned. This book finally sets the record straight. Fred Guiles—whom Norman Mailer acknowledges as the chief source of fact about Marilyn—has written the life behind the legend. He reveals what really happened in the careening career of the pretty waif named Norma Jean Mortensen, who married the boy next door, became a model, an actress, movie star, married an incompatible legend named Joe DiMaggio, sought to improve the mind that came with her near-perfect body, married playwright Arthur Miller, lent herself to the Svengalilike ministrations of Paula and Lee Strasberg, became the mistress of John and then Robert