Marilyn’s face is omnipresent more than 60 years after her death. She is one of the few who can be immediately recognized by first name only, in the ranks with Madonna and Mary. Her films are cult classics, her performances still lauded. So it’s no surprise that with the 100-year anniversary of her birth looming in June, readers are being treated to not one but two (at least) novelizations of her life and tragic death.
Other novels have come before — Joyce Carol Oates’ memorable if wildly fictionalized “Blonde,” for example — not to mention the avalanche of nonfiction that has been written since Marilyn burst onto the scene. But two new ones break new ground (or try to).
The first I picked up, “The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe,” promises readers a “true crime thriller” that explores whether Marilyn’s death was really a suicide. Written by Imogen Edwards-Jones with James Patterson, it starts like many thrillers: Marilyn Monroe’s housekeeper finds her dead body and calls her doctors. Each has a meltdown worthy of a telenovela, messes with the crime scene and hours later the police are called.
I expected, given the title and the opening scene, to read a novel that picks from the popular theories of Marilyn’s death and fictionalizes how those could have happened. Maybe the doctor was paid by the FBI to kill her? Maybe the housekeeper, a plant of the obsessed doctor’s, did it?
Instead, the book spends over 300 pages meticulously detailing abusers, lovers, film schedules, fashion fittings, trips, rivalries and acting lessons. (The source list for the novel runs to an impressive 10 pages.) Told in Patterson’s signature snappy chapters, it is an absorbing read, but I kept wondering when the villain would show up. Unfortunately, he never does.
Despite being called “The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe,” the 400-plus-page book spends less than 100 pages on the last year of Marilyn’s life and less than 10 pages on the day she died. It doesn’t follow any thriller genre formula or true crime genre format. It’s a biography. A fictionalized one that draws from real newspaper clippings, Marilyn’s own writings and interviews with her friends. As a fictional biography, what Edwards-Jones and Patterson have created is engaging and sympathetic. Edwards-Jones’ journalism background shows up — it’s well researched and presented with tact.
The cardinal sin of “The Last Days” is that it doesn’t choose a storyline. Despite promising to explore what happened to Marilyn, there is no clear crime or criminal in thriller style.
Another issue is that there is no protagonist. There’s an omniscient narrator who plops down the facts of Marilyn’s life, vignette-style. But there’s no perspective. There’s no one investigating her death or questioning the official theory. And there were options — her longtime friend and gossip journalist Sidney Skolsky makes a great possible narrator. The real assistant coroner, who claimed he was forced to sign the certificate calling her death a suicide, is another possibility that never materialized. (A book that does almost exactly this, if you’re looking for it, is J.I. Baker’s “The Empty Glass.”)
Thankfully, Lynn Cullen’s novel about Marilyn, “When We Were Brilliant,”dodges all these myriad bullets. It’s told from the point of view of Eve Arnold, the groundbreaking, famous-in-her-own-right documentary photographer — and only female photographer to have ever extensively photographed Marilyn. Throughout the novel, the two women bond and build each other up, each supporting the other as they ascend to previously unrealized heights for women.
It’s an empathetic novel, told by an author whose care for each of the figures she portrays shines through on every page. Finally, Marilyn is not presented as a cipher to be solved or quarry to be caged. She’s a woman. A dizzyingly beautiful one and a disarmingly talented one — with all the accompanying cunning, love complexity and joy it means to be human.
There’s probably an essay to be written here about the male gaze versus the female gaze in fiction (despite the female author partnering with Patterson). Where “The Last Days” is nearly toxic in its masculine telling, bullying through the facts of a woman’s life without consideration or delivery on promises made, “When We Were Brilliant” is an homage to female friendship and ambition. Eve Arnold is the perfect lens to view Marilyn through because she can show us who Marilyn might have been when there weren’t any men around. Cullen’s protagonist describes Marilyn both on stage and off, where a more personal view of her shines through. A significant part of Arnold’s astounding talent as a photographer was her ability to get her subjects to trust her and show her their true selves; that talent is convincingly resurrected by Cullen here, this time with Arnold as a narrator and arbiter of truth.
Inspired by Eve Arnold’s recollections of Marilyn later in her life especially in her photographic book, “Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation” — Cullen’s novel goes beyond exploring Marilyn. It‘s also a loving portrayal of Eve Arnold’s life and career. We celebrate with Arnold the day she’s admitted as a full member into the Magnum Photos agency — and join in her despair when her marriage begins to fall apart in response to the demands of her work. In one heartbreaking chapter, Arnold takes a two-week assignment for Magnum, during which she covers a family living on an island off the shore of Cuba. When she mentions that the family’s 8-year-old daughter, Juana, is lovely, the parents try to give her to Arnold. In slow revelations, it becomes clear that they’re worried that if Juana remains on the island, prostitution will be her only future due to their bad economy. Arnold’s relationship with her own son is imperfect and her family falling apart; still, she can’t fathom taking a child away from her mother.
Motherhood is another recurring theme — Arnold’s alleged failure at it and Marilyn’s desperate hope for it. The two characters have miscarriages around the same time; they weep together in a moving scene before the actress has to go be “Marilyn Monroe” again for the cameras. Through these shared battles, we get the picture that Arnold may have been the only person who witnessed Marilyn for who she really was. It’s also through Arnold’s eyes we get a real theory about what happened the night Marilyn died — and it’s a sympathetic one, even a logical one.
Despite the tragedy of Marilyn’s early death, I closed “When We Were Brilliant” feeling like I was walking away from a celebratory dinner with friends; even days later I’m wistful about the experience.
Castellanos Clark, a writer and historian in Los Angeles, is the author of “Unruly Figures: Twenty Tales of Rebels, Rulebreakers, and Revolutionaries You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of.”
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