I WANNA BE LOVED BY YOU

One hundred short chapters about Marilyn Monroe.

Six decades after her death, Monroe is still one of the most written-about celebrities in history. That doesn’t stop today’s authors from writing even more. In this work, published to coincide with the centenary of Monroe’s birth, British author Wilson purports to show Monroe in a new light. He cites journalist Anthony Summers, who “spoke to almost everyone who knew Marilyn” for a 1985 biography of her but ended up not using a lot of information he had collected. When Wilson interviewed him in 2022 for London’s Sunday Times, Summers gave him unrestricted access to a trove that included audio interviews, tape logs, magazine cuttings, and more. The result is this book, which Wilson hopes “captures the many complexities of Marilyn: her spark, her sizzle, her genius, her sense of fun, her insecurities, her pain, her beauty, her talents, her contradictions, her power.” Much of this material is well-traveled terrain, however, from the “mini-industry” that has cropped up to determine whether she appeared in an erotic film to conspiracy theories over whether the Kennedys had a role in her death. But there are revelations, too, mainly from previously unknown correspondence. These include letters exchanged with her third husband, Arthur Miller, as when he warns her about stardom: “Bewitch them with this image they ask for, but I hope and almost pray you won’t be hurt in this game.” Other disclosures are harsher. In 2021, Wilson interviewed Angela Allen, the script supervisor in charge of continuity on The Misfits (1961), Monroe’s final film, who shared this perspective: “As for the idea that every man was supposed to find her intellectual depths—the great brains that she had? Well, I think they failed perhaps because it wasn’t there.” For Monroe scholars, amateur or otherwise, Wilson’s book is unlikely to disappoint.

Mostly old, partially new details about a star whose allure is as strong as ever.