“What really counts in film acting is that rare moment – just a flickering, when through the eyes you get a glimpse of the real meaning of the character. It’s not a technique or professionalism, just truth. Garbo had it, Monroe had it.” Observed John Huston following Marilyn Monroe’s death.Back in the mid-80’s Carl Rollyson Jr. was the first author to write a book that attempted to bring together Marilyn Monroe’s life through her films and work as an actress.
It took six years to complete and no one was writing this kind of biography at the time. Carl had no models to follow. It was a ground-breaking book in it’s day as no biography prior to this had placed so much emphasis on Marilyn’s work and the impact it had on her life. In her last interview, for Life magazine, Marilyn said “I now live in my work and in a few relationships with the few people I can really count on.”In his book Carl gives us an honest and critical account of Marilyn, evaluating her movies as crucial events in the shaping of her identity and the true aspect of her being, exploring her underestimated gifts as a creative artist.In his research he has conducted interviews with, among others:- Norman Rosten, John Springer, Ralph Roberts, Ellen Burstyn, Rupert Allen, Susan Strasberg, Milton Greene, Pat Newcomb and Richard Meryman, whose interview with Marilyn appears in full at the back of the book.
He also had help from Monroe biographers Fred Guiles and Maurice Zolotow.However, the book is not without it’s flaws, most notably it’s references to Robert Slatzer, who made controversial claims about not only a conspiracy, but also his alleged brief marriage to Monroe in 1952. He has since become exposed a fraud but up until then had fooled many biographers and historians including Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr. who wrote the acclaimed book on Bobby Kennedy, Robert Kennedy: His Life And Times, published in 1978, which was the only source credited for the Monroe-Kennedy involovement. When I spoke to Carl about this, he told me “I had doubts about Slatzer but gave him the benefit of the doubt.
“He is planning a revised edition of his book to be published next year and he says, “He (Slatzer) is gone from the revised edition, and so is Lena Pepitone and one reference of Hans Jorgen Lembourn.”In the new version Carl tells me that “Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress was my first biography, and it may still be my best. I waited a long time to revise it until I could incorporate more of Marilyn’s own voice. Now I have access to Monroe’s diaries and notes. I also take on the whole murder conspiracy issue in an Afterword. The Foreword deals with how different the world was in the 1980s when I wrote my book.”
By Fraser Penney
