The Marilyn Monroe Mystery on Netflix: what to read and what to watch to go further?

Will humanity ever get tired of Norma Jeane Baker ? Given the enthusiasm for the new documentary netflix, The Marilyn Monroe Mystery: Untold Conversations, Nothing is less sure. Released on April 27, 2022, this filmEmma Cooper is based on the three-year-long survey carried out by Anthony Summers, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Based on hundreds of interviews with speakers ranging from director Billy Wilder to Ralph Greensonthe psychiatrist of Marilyn Monroethis documentary reveals that she died in the ambulance, and not in her house in Brentwood, which accredits the theories that her overdose was not one.

The success of this documentary bodes well for the next biopic ofAndrew Dominick on Marilyn Monroeadaptation of the novel Blonde hair (2000) by Joyce Carol Oateswhich will be broadcast on netflix later this year. Ana de Armas embodies there Norma Jeane, Bobby Cannavale cheek Joe DiMaggioher husband in the mid-1950s, and Adrian Brody portrays his third and last partner, the playwright Arthur Miller. The producer of the film? brad pitt. To spoil nothing, Joyce Carol Oates itself speaks the greatest good of it. “It’s brilliant, disturbing and feminist as hell,” she tweeted on August 11. “Not sure that a man could have achieved such a feat”.

The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroeby Anthony Summers (1985)

In many ways, this book is even more revealing than The Marilyn Monroe Mystery. As author of The Kennedy Conspiracy (1980), Summers Knows jfk and its privileges at your fingertips; he focuses here on the relationship between the former president of the United States and Marilyn Monroebut also on the vagueness surrounding the circumstances of his death.

unfinished confessionby Marilyn Monroe (1974)

Co-written by the screenwriter Ben Hecht and published twelve years after the death of the star, this book retraces the life of Marilyn Monroe from his troubled childhood to his marriage to Joe DiMaggio, through his sexual assault, at age eight, by an acquaintance of his adoptive family. If the story sometimes comes dangerously close to fiction, it is nonetheless fascinating, especially for what it reveals of the intuitions of Marilyn Monroe. “I always knew that I was apart, she writes. I was the kind of girl you end up finding dead in a hotel room, an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. »

Dead Blondes Flashback, by You Must Remember This (2015)

Who is interested in the history of cinema must know You Must Remember This, an addictive podcast about scandals from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Among the best episodes, the miniseries “Dead Blondes” dwells on the public’s morbid fascination with the tumble of various sex symbolsof John Harlow to Jayne Mansfield. The main one is of course Marilyn Monroewhose narrator Karina Longworth dissects life in three thrilling episodes.