HOLLYWOOD -- A new biography convincingly portrays Marilyn Monroe as one of the most exploited women in history both during her lifetime and in the years after her death.
Her unparalleled status as a global sex symbol, the greatest blond screen goddess ever produced by Hollywood, and her tragic death have stirred the public imagination, not always to her benefit.
Since Monroe took a lethal overdose of prescription drugs Aug. 5, 1962, there have been some 200 books written about her, including three full biographies, most of which propound the authors' own agendas on who and what she was.
One wrote a book claiming he was secretly married to Monroe and reporting her alleged affair with Robert Kennedy. Even playwright and onetime Monroe husband Arthur Miller and other men of letters have capitalized on the actress after she was unable to deny false allegations.
Monroe is said to have carried on hundreds of affairs with Hollywood men during her rise to stardom and the peak of her career. But if it were true, she never would have had time to make a movie.
After three decades, a thoroughly researched, fully documented book has been written about the life and post-life of Monroe by biographer Donald Spoto.
Although she died nearly 31 years ago, the legendary actress still captivates. 'Marilyn Monroe: The Biography' is bound to hit the top of the New York Times best-seller list.
Spoto, author of biographies of Laurence Olivier and Marlene Dietrich among others, had access to many sources, friends and colleagues never before contacted by Monroe biographers.
His research included 35,000 personal and professional documents, interviews with such close personal friends as publicist Pat Newcomb, producer William Asher, attorney Milton Ruden and Deputy District Attorney John Milner, who was present at the autopsy.
Spoto's book could put to rest scores of rumors, misstatements, distorted facts, outright lies and other misleading concepts in the life and times of Marilyn Monroe.
Spoto, only a college boy when Monroe died, is guilty of one thing -- falling under her bewitching spell.
'My purpose was to tell the truth, even at the risk of saying something good about my subject,' Spoto said. 'Overnight Robert Kennedy went from being a civil rights hero to an unprincipled, murderous letch. I have no brief for the Kennedys but the truth is the truth.
'Most books about Marilyn have perpetuated myth, corrupted the truth and led the world to believe a fantasy.
'I had wonderful access to family archives, medical records, legal reports, national archives. Other writers had such access, but they chose not to. It was antithetical to the ethics of writing biographies. They subjected Marilyn to preconceived political agendas.'
Spoto did not attempt to contact Monroe's second husband, New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio, respecting his privacy and refusal ever to discuss his marriage.
He has little respect for Miller, writer of 'Death of a Salesman' who also scripted her last movie, 'The Misfits.' Spoto says Miller cynically exploited his personal relationship with Monroe in his plays and writings.
'I couldn't put any stock in the books about Marilyn, all of which I read,' he said. 'I had to ignore them.
'Marilyn's character was not that of a woman of easy virtue. There's something at stake here about American puritanism: the refusal of people to believe a sexy, bright, luxurious, frankly carnal woman of intelligence and wit can be anything but a tramp.
'That concept bears no relationship to Marilyn. Those who knew Marilyn loved her. She was a good and decent woman who was loyal to her friends. Her professional problems stemmed from her own personal insecurities.
'I would say Marilyn was a woman who struggled constantly to overcome appalling odds from her incomplete childhood, scarcely any relationship with her mother and never knowing who her father was.
'She had to overcome the limitations imposed on her by a studio system that required her to be only a sex symbol. In 1954 she did overcome them by studying acting in New York and forming her own film company. This from a woman before feminism.
'As a result, she gave two of the finest performances of the decade in 'Bus Stop' and 'The Prince and the Show Girl.'
'Aside from DiMaggio, almost all the men in her life exploited Marilyn, and Miller was the worst of all. When (writer) George Axelrod attended the Marilyn-Miller wedding reception he told them, 'I hope your children have Marilyn's brains and Arthur's looks.'
'Marilyn thought that was terribly funny. Miller did not, because Axelrod meant it. He then presented her in his memoirs as a pathetic child who ruined his creative life.'
Spoto's major contributions to the story of Marilyn Monroe are insight into the circumstances of her death with a carefully detailed account of her final days and hours.NEWLN:
NEWLN: ------ The Angel Maker, by Ridley Pearson (Delacorte, 294pp., $21.95)
One of the surprises of recent trends in fiction has been that the success of the movie 'Silence of the Lambs' did not spawn a rash of police procedurals about really sick killers.
There have been a few, however, of which one of the best is 'The Angel Maker,' a mystery which adds a couple of interesting twists to the usual formula for such tales.
The first twist is that 'The Angel Maker' does not think of himself as a killer. He's a trained surgeon, and he thinks he's actually saving lives by harvesting organs for transplant.
The problem is that street people who sell organs to this man are dying later on from his poor stitches. As the story begins, Seattle police investigators Daphne Matthews and Lou Boldt are pursuing malpractice more than murder.
The second twist is that the man they're after gradually comes unglued as they close in on him. By the end of the book, he's nearly as sick as Hannibal Lecter.
Howard Dicus (UPI)
