Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

Rating:
Summary: Well-researched, well-written
Review: Goddess is often the first book someone curious about MM's life will read. There is good reason for it: Summers does not assume that the reader is familiar with her story. He writes clearly and answers most of the questions that the newly curious about MM are asking. He also takes a close look at the circumstances surrounding her death, and documents his sources well. All in all, I recommend this book to anyone looking to start learning about MM....but I add that I don't think it should be the only bio you read! There are certainly other books out there that take a more sensitive approach to her story. Warning: Goddess contains a photo of MM after the autopsy. If you find this offensive you may want to avoid it.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, well written and believable
Review: Goddess is one of the best books ever written on Marilyn, and contains some of the most throughly researched information on her death. Summer's book stands as the definative biography about monroe (and there have been many). Summers, unlike many other authors that have attempted to write about monroe (particularly her death), backs up his information with documents and where ever possible the names of his sources. If u only ever read one book about the life and particularly the circumstances surrounding the death of Marilyn Monroe I would recommend Goddess. However for fans of the amazing, facinating and breathtakingly beautiful Monroe, Goddess is a must have, not just as a captivating and informative read but also as a reference, practically every book written on Marilyn Monroe after 1985 uses Goddess as a reference.

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the Best Marilyn Biography Ever...
Review: Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe is an excellent book! After you finish reading this, you feel as though you've been w/ her every step of the way. The author Anthony Summers goes into great detail of her childhood, struggles of becoming famous, her marriages and divorces, her mental breakdown, etc. A little less than half the book is about Marilyn's death. Summers is quick to give us possible causes of the tragic event backed up w/ testimonies, interviews, and police reports. Instead of forcing the THIS IS HOW MARILYN DIED routine on us, he lets us decide for ourselves. MANY MANY MANY people were interviewed for this book, including a lot of Marilyn's friends (and so called friends) One thing this book does prove is that Marilyn was definitely involved sexually w/ both of the Kennedy brothers (JFK and Robert) around the last months of her life. Lots of pictures are included (there is even one of her after her autopsy) and copies of police reports and even some of Marilyn's personal letters!! This book is EXCELLENT, and you will not want to put it down. Marilyn is one of the most interesting people you can read about. So beautiful and talented, but so afraid and fragile...too bad this book is Out of print ~ FIND THIS BOOK: you won't regret it!!

Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Great book : reliable, serious, honest. That brilliant journalist succeeds in giving us a correct image of the Marilyn's life.
However he shouldn't have shown a photograh of her dead : she has the right to be respected in death.
Arnaud Curgy, from France

Rating:
Summary: For hardcore Marilyn fans
Review: I read this book back in high school when it first came out in hardcover (I'm really dating myself here). Back then I was a Marilyn Monroe fanatic. Every book, movie, poster, magazine, or collectable I could find, I bought.

I must say that I'm still a huge Marilyn fan and have well over 50 books written about her. To this day, Goddess is still the best written, most profound, well meant, and indepth attempt of portraying her story. If you call yourself a Marilyn fan, then there is no question about it. You must read this book.

Witnesses, documents, and photos (including her heartbreaking autopsy photo) will add to the text and leave you breathless.

Rating:
Summary: SIZZLING!
Review: There have been many, many books about the Kennedys, both cotton candy sacchine types and warts-and-all types. There has also been a booming business over the past 37 years of JFK assassination conspiracy books. But it truly takes literary genius to try and tie the Kennedy family into a conspiracy. What better and more profitable way to do this is than to invent a tale of conspiracy by the Kennedys in the cover-up of the death of the legendary actress Marilyn Monroe?

Now Summers could have written a halfway decent book on Monroe, a fine actress who was not and still is not fully appreciated for the talent she was. He could have written a retrospective of her career, of her great love for Joe DiMaggio, and so on. Since the publication of Donald Spoto's biography of Monroe, we know her relationship with the Kennedy family merited only a line or two at best in any biography. She was close to Peter and Pat Lawford, and it's possible she had a one-night fling with JFK, but that was about it.

Unfortunately, such an admission would not sell any books, so Summers decided to concoct a wild theory about how Monroe supposedly died. This alleged elaborate conspiracy takes up the bulk of this wretched book. His theory goes something like this: Monroe supposedly had affairs with both JFK and RFK, with the last one being extremely serious. Monroe supposedly knew too much about Hoffa and other such shady characters, all of whom are now dead and couldn't sue for libel. Well, she had to be silenced, and she also had this red diary full of incriminating evidence which she showed only to her trusted ex-husband, Robert Slatzer. The Kennedys didn't actually have her offed, but when Bobby was allegedly informed in San Francisco that his poor mistress died (remember, Spoto claimed in his book Monroe was planning to remarry DiMaggio, but never mind), he somehow got out of bed in the middle of the night without Ethel knowing about it, secretly chartered a flight to L.A., went to her house, covered up the evidence of her murder, then magically flew back to S.F., went back to bed while Ethel was sound asleep, and nobody was the wiser.

Spoto, in his first edition of his book, took Summers to task for falling so totally for the old political smear of RFK and Monroe having an affair. But, of course, Summers wasn't the first to come up with the tale. Other authors before and since, particularly the financially-pressed Norman Mailer, also spread the rumors far and wide. But few had the success of Summers, and none had the ability to also have a documentary made (in England, doubtless to avoid libel laws) which purported the same idiotic theory.

Also worth noting is Summers' reliance (or gullibility) on one Robert Slatzer. Back in the early 1950s, Slatzer had a chance meeting with Marilyn Monroe when she was shooting on location at Niagara Falls and managed to have a couple of photographs taken with the legendary actress. Over the years, this chance meeting metastasized into a secret marriage and divorce to Monroe and a lifelong friendship. There was no record of a marriage, no record of a divorce, no other pictures of them together, no nothing. Yet this man was Marilyn's closest confidant, who none of her real friends knew. When Spoto asked one of Slatzer's former wives about the so-called "marriage," she laughed at the notion.

Note that virtually none of his sources for the book's sensational charges actually knew the Kennedy family or Monroe. Summers' sleaziest allegations are published only because people like Peter Lawford, Jimmy Hoffa, J. Edgar Hoover, JFK, RFK, and Monroe herself are dead and can't sue. Others, like Pat Kennedy Lawford and Frank Sinatra (who was alive when the book was published) would have hung up on Summers had he bothered to contact them.

The book, then, is another in the line of the trash-'em-when-they're-dead books. If you like awful books, you might enjoy it.

Rating:
Summary: Possibly the most complete that it can get
Review: There will never be "the definitive" Marilyn Monroe biography without the intimate contributions of husbands No. 2 and 3, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller. Even if the fabled playwright shares publicly his life with filmdom's eternal goddess, DiMaggio never did and, obviously, never will. Still, this contribution by Anthony Summers, first published in 1984, may be as close as it gets. In his acknowledgements, Summers claims a near-obsession that consumed almost two years of his life. Little wonder: he claims and minutely credits and cites more than 600 subjects who were interviewed in the course of his research. About the only criticism that can be lodged is the book's title. Implying we're about to read nothing more than the sexual conquests of the world's most famous woman of her time, we instead get a thoroughly comprehensive life history that begins even before her birth June 1, 1926, and continues well beyond her death that swelteringly hot August night in 1962. In between, thanks to Summers' prose and sources whose claims were checked and rechecked for confirmation, we get something that few other writers have achieved, much less attempted: a psycho-biograhy that explains the reasons for the legendary insecurity that Norma Jean Baker could never quite overcome even as the world's most desired woman. Even in his passages about the amazing but all-too-short film career, Summers manages to keep us focused on Norma Jean and her reality behind the facade that was Marilyn. Of course, Summers has to deal with his subject's still conroversial death, and "The Candle Burns Down," the segment of the book that centers on Monroe's final days, is so detailed that Summers' own explanation for Marilyn's death sounds as plausible as any theory posited. No, he doesn't buy into the theory that she was murdered by the mob or Kennedy operatives, but that her death was an accidental overdose of Seconals. But Summers does submit that Monroe was cruelly exploited sexually and passed sexually from one Kennedy brother to the other, one the president and the other the attorney general, and that it was Robert Kennedy who found the overdosed star in her home and arranged for the ambulance to the hospital and, after her death en route, covered up his involvement with the help of brother-in-law Peter Lawford. Summers' exhaustively researched finished product distinguishes itself from most other Monroe books in that he doesn't exploit his subject's insecurity and private demons or sexual prowess. Instead, Monroe is treated here with dignity and respect and, in the end, we are left with the feeling that we have read Norma Jean's life history, not that of a creation named Marilyn. And it is on Norma Jean's fears that prevented her alter-ego from recognizing her own worth as both a person and actress that accounts for the legend that is Marilyn Monroe. Summers' book is an important contribution to the literature that seeks to explain and understand the fragile psyche of this truly and tragically wounded soul.