A beautiful story of friendship and love. From their trip to see her mother in a mental hospital to Marilyn's visit to his home a few days before her death, De Dienes recounts all of the emotional moments they shared. He wrote secret memoirs, which were discovered when Monroe fans ransacked his house after his death in 1988. He instantly fell in love and transformed her into Marilyn Monroe over the course of a series of road trips which they took together. In 1945, fashion photographer Andre de Dienes met an aspiring young brunette model named Norma Jeane. He quoted the following pun by the smart though unintellectual Marilyn: 'When that day will come, I would like to be delayed attending my own funeral.' 3. Truman Capote wrote several portraits of Marilyn, his close friend – a tender and cruel series of depictions of the blonde with whom he had drunk 'white angels' in Manhattan bars. Her photos are far from serving the myth of the too obvious sex symbol accompanied by a moving text, they give a tender portrait of the fading star. At the end of Marilyn's life, Arnold spent two months photographing her while she was shooting The Misfits. Marilyn Monroe by Eve ArnoldĪrnold was the only woman to have photographed Marilyn extensively, and the two became friends after a photo shoot for Esquire magazine in 1952. My interest was: why was she so intensely caught between public and private, words and images, trying to escape from the icon she became and cure herself with her own words? I was deeply moved to find her so desperate to match Polonius's advice 'To thine own self be true', and her solitary death made me rephrase this idea of the great psychoanalyst DW Winnicott: 'Sometimes, to save your true self, you have to kill your self as a whole.' The good Marilyn books – ordered here alphabetically – are those in which she appears as a person the bad ones, those that treat her as a sex idol trapped in the mess of Hollywood.' 1.

My personal reasons for writing a novel about her were probably quite different from those which had previously inspired so many biographers and authors.

'Hundreds of books have been written about Marilyn.

Marilyn monroe book my story