Review by New York Times Review
Marilyn Monroe's private documents, Jackie Kennedy's public ones. WHAT turns a human being into a legend? Is it a question of personal excellence: exceptional charisma, intellect, strength or beauty? Or is it an other-directed gift: an unusual capacity to engage the hearts and enlarge the dreams of admirers? Two new books refresh the images of two larger-than-life American contemporaries who continue to compel the global imagination half a century after their deaths: Marilyn Monroe, who died of an overdose of sleeping drugs on Aug. 5, 1962, at the age of 36; and President John F. Kennedy, assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, at the age of 46. Unearthing long-buried letters and private documents, these books - "Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters," edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, and "Dear Mrs. Kennedy: A World Shares Its Grief," by Jay Mulvaney and Paul De Angelis - attest to the spell these figures cast, in the past and in the present. Monroe's indestructible appeal remains visible in films, photographs and books, and in homages by everyone from Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman and Madonna to any woman in a white halter dress. Yet Monroe's inner life remains mysterious, a subject of reverie for biographers and songwriters. The diary entries, poems and miscellany collected in "Fragments," reproduced in full color, do little to solve the riddle of her psyche. Her thoughts emerge on hotel stationery, or on scattered sheets of the journals she took up from time to time (the editors suggest that Monroe wrote in "free association in continuation of a kind of self-analysis"). Sentences trail across the page, then merge in clumps, like paper airplanes tossed into a net; multiple cross-outs, repetitions and misspellings make them a challenge to decipher. Nonetheless, a certain potency resides in their runic quality. In one entry, scrawled on a page of an Italian day planner, the phrase "Big Bosom women?" appears above mashed diagonal columns of text, set off by a curling arrow. "It really isn't known who the woman with big breasts was," the editors note. "Perhaps her analyst, Dr. Hohenberg?" In another jotting, Monroe notes that a certain "Peter" (most likely the actor Peter Lawford, John F. Kennedy's brother-in-law, the editors note) "wants to be a woman - and would like to be me - I think." In a poem written in 1960, about Arthur Miller, who was then her husband, she apostrophizes, "oh silence you stillness hurt my head - and pierce ears." Passionate decoders of the Monroe legacy will have a field day. The editors have glossed most entries with typed transcriptions, using arrows to guide readers through the swirls and eddies of Monroe's consciousness. One of the book's many lustrous photographs shows her reading "Ulysses," holding the book open at its final pages. The tantalizing thought blossoms: Did Monroe take Molly Bloom as a literary model? Or was she a Molly Bloom on paper (to paraphrase Stieglitz)? The texts of "Fragments" cry out to be performed at a reading - languorously, ironically - by the actor James Franco. The letters that make up "Dear Mrs. Kennedy" constitute an entirely irony-free zone. After President Kennedy was killed, mourners from around the world sent condolence letters to Jacqueline Kennedy at the rate of 30,000 to 40,000 a day. (When her staff changed offices during the transition between administrations, her press secretary, Pamela Turnure, entering the new space to find it already "stacked from the floor to the ceiling with mail," nearly "burst into tears.") The letters were written in a spirit of sincerity and humility scarcely imaginable today, with no expectation of acknowledgment. Yet Kennedy, with her faultless etiquette, saw to it that each one received a response. (On St. Patrick's Day 1964, 900,000 replies went out. Try that on "reply all.") A million and a quarter letters reached the White House before staff members stopped logging them, and 204,000 survive today in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. The correspondence gathered in this book, drawn from that collection, testifies to the impact of Kennedy's life, and also offers, as the editors correctly observe, "a glimpse into the lost art of letter-writing." Most correspondents wrote to Mrs. Kennedy in longhand; the idiosyncrasies of their script, as shown in letters reprinted in the book, reinforce the distinctness of each mourner. Winston Churchill began his letter, "Never have I been so filled with revulsion, anger and sorrow, as when I heard of your husband's death." Dr. Benjamin Spock suggested that "the sacrifices of his death will inspire people with his ideas for generations to come," while the first lady of Tunisia, Moufida Bourguiba, feelingly concluded: "Courage to you then, Madame, who have known so young how to be a Great Lady." Even the least polished letters have a powerful effect, like the note an Alabama schoolchild printed carefully on ruled paper: "I live in a Small Town in the deep South. I am a Little Colored Girl, 7 years old in The Second Grade. I Love you"; or the invitation a 12-year-old Polish boy extended, urging Mrs. Kennedy to send her children to Warsaw for Christmas, to play with him and his brothers, "so that they will be less sad." He added, "We are learning English so we will somehow understand each other." Books like "Dear Mrs. Kennedy" and "Fragments" have extraliterary value. Enticing time capsules, they can trick even the most distractible contemporary readers into absorbing a little history along with their pop culture. At my parents' house, a bookshelf holds another such curio, a book by Eleanor Roosevelt, published in 1946, called "If You Ask Me." The first lady wrote a column for Ladies' Home Journal, and this slim, modest volume holds letters she published in it up through 1945, the year her husband died. In the column, she fielded questions from luminaries (Albert Einstein, Dale Carnegie, Madame Chiang Kaishek) and ordinary citizens, on such subjects as immigration, demagoguery and partisan politics, marriage, religion and music ("I prefer classical," she wrote). Responding to a question from a popular author who omplained of her fans' intrusive interest, Roosevelt conceded that the author had a right to privacy, but added leniently, "We are a curious people." She knew that without curiosity, there is no fame - a truth that retains as much force in our own era of oversharing as it did in a more reticent age. Two books attest to the spell their subjects cast over their many admirers. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 5, 2010]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Isabel Keating is a fine mimic of the Marilyn we know from the movies-it's the same breathy, cotton-candy douceur, the voice lilting with wonderment, the same rounded consonants, the trill at the end of sentences. She sounds like a precocious child, very earnestly doing the introspective self-searching homework that the Strasberg method demanded. As seamless is Keating's channeling of Monroe; it would have been a pleasure to glimpse the voice behind the baby voice, the woman behind the mask. The content is fragmentary, but there is delight in this picture of the icon as more sincere, striving, intellectually ambitious, and perceptive than we'd ever have guessed. A Farrar, Straus, and Giroux hardcover. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Some 50 years after Marilyn Monroe's tragic death, her private life continues to fascinate. This audio exposes her innermost thoughts through recorded selections from her journal entries, poems, and occasionally rambling notes, revealing a thoughtful yet insecure and vulnerable woman. Monroe reflects on the moments of joy and turmoil in her life, including the breakup of her marriage to the late playwright Arthur Miller. Introductions provide listeners with background information. Actress Isabel -Keating does a superb job of channeling Monroe with her breathy narration. While this audio version has an intimate feel, however, audiences should not miss the numerous photos, handwritten notes, letters, and diary entries available in the Farrar hc, only some of which-via a bonus PDF-are available here. Recommended wherever the print edition is in demand.-Risa Getman, Hendrick Hudson Free Lib., Montrose, NY (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
