Like her art, Marilyn Monroe was rooted in paradox: She was a powerful star and a childlike waif; a joyful, irreverent party girl with a deeply spiritual side; a superb friend and a narcissist; a dumb blonde and an intellectual. No previous biographer has recognized — much less attempted to analyze — most of these aspects of her personality. Lois Banner has.
Since Marilyn’s death in August of 1962, the appetite for information about her has been insatiable. Biographies of Marilyn abound, and whether these books are sensational or flawed, Marilyn’s fans have always come out in bestselling numbers. This time, with Lois Banner’s Revelations, the fans won’t be disappointed. This is no retread of recycled material. As one of the founders of the field of women’s history, Banner will reveal Marilyn Monroe in the way that only a top-notch historian and biographer could.
In researching Revelations, Banner’s credentials opened doors. She gained access to Marilyn intimates who hadn’t spoken to other biographers, and to private material unseen, ignored, or misinterpreted by her predecessors. With new details about Marilyn’s childhood foster homes, her sexual abuse, her multiple marriages, her affairs, and her untimely death at the age of thirty-six, Revelations is, at last, the nuanced biography Marilyn fans have been waiting for.
About Lois Banner
Lois Banner is a founder of the field of women’s history and cofounder of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the major academic event in the field. She was the first woman president of the American Studies Association, and in 2006 she won the ASA’s Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies. She is the author of ten books, including her acclaimed American Beauty and most recentlyMM — Personal, which reproduces and discusses items from Marilyn Monroe’s personal archive. In addition to her books on Monroe, Banner is a major collector of her artifacts. Banner is a professor of history and gender studies at USC and lives in Southern California.
Editorial Review
For Banner (History and Gender Studies/Univ. of Southern California; MM-Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe, 2011, etc.), the tangled roots of Monroe’s contradictions—shy but lurid, innocent and calculating, user and used—originated in her childhood. The product of a family with a history of mental illness, she was passed around between foster homes (both good and bad) as well as an orphanage. She experienced sexual abuse, absorbed a variety of religious influences, and discovered that her lost-lamb look attracted every man she met. Although Banner occasionally plays psychoanalyst, it’s only in an effort to see her subject from every conceivable angle. The author’s film criticism is insightful, particularly in showing how Monroe helped build (and would deliberately mock) her own public image. She examines how Monroe’s unique allure drew on popular tradition and looked forward to the Pop Art future. As for the big question—did Monroe commit suicide or was she murdered by Bobby Kennedy, or her psychoanalyst, or mobster Sam Giancana, or the FBI?—Banner offers no smoking guns. Instead, she gives reasons why all the scenarios, both official and otherwise, are as problematic as they are plausible. Though the author sometimes over explains the obvious, this flaw does not detract from the book’s forward drive or Banner’s sympathetic intelligence. – Kirkus Reviews
The Misfit - ‘Marilyn,’ by Lois Banner
The New York Times Book Review – August 3, 2012 (Excerpt)
In 1972, on the 10th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, Gloria Steinem wrote an essay for Ms. magazine titled “The Woman Who Died Too Soon.” As a teenager, Steinem had relished the celluloid darkness of the matinee: the sci-fi flicks, the serials, the stubborn charm of Doris Day. She loved them all, however improbable the plots or poor the acting. But she walked out of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” The sight of Marilyn as the diamond-obsessed showgirl Lorelei Lee, “huge as a colossus doll, mincing and whispering and simply hoping her way into total vulnerability,” enraged her.
Lorelei’s doe-eyed desire for approval felt dangerous to Steinem — an affirmation of the power of the male gaze. But she would come to see, in the star’s own sadness, in her winking innocence and complex sexuality, a woman straddling the puritanism of postwar America and its dissolution in the ’60s. Marilyn died, at 36, on the eve of the publication of “The Feminine Mystique” and the rise of second-wave feminism. What if she had lived? Who would she — who could she — have become? “When the past dies there is mourning,” Steinem later wrote, “but when the future dies, our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.”
It has been 50 years to the day since Marilyn died. There have been countless biographies, novels, plays (including Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall,” with its grotesque caricature), conspiracy-oriented chronicles of her final days, and her own ghostwritten autobiography, published posthumously. There have been almost as many versions of Marilyn: she was brazenly sexual, shy and insecure, a dumb blonde and a bookworm who read Dostoyevsky; she was gentle and free-spirited, spiteful and cannily controlling; she could barely act, vamping for the camera, or she was a brilliant comedian, playing a pinup version of Shakespeare’s fool. [Read the full article...]
We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
