There’s apparently no limit to our collective fascination with Norma Jeane, as evidenced by the reaction to Netflix’s latest true-crime documentary, The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes. Released on April 27, Emma Cooper’s film revisits Pulitzer Prize finalist Anthony Summers’s three years of detailed research into the circumstances surrounding Monroe’s death—offering up soundbites from hundreds of recordings he made with everyone from Billy Wilder to Monroe’s psychiatrist Ralph Greenson. The biggest revelation to come out of the 101-minute documentary? The fact that Monroe passed away en route to the hospital rather than being found dead in her Brentwood home, giving credence to various theories that there’s more to Monroe’s purported drug overdose than meets the eye.
The response to the documentary bodes well for Andrew Dominik’s forthcoming Monroe biopic, an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, which will also premiere on Netflix later this year after a series of delays. Ana de Armas will step into the role of Norma Jeane, while Bobby Cannavale will appear as New York Yankee Joe DiMaggio, her husband in the mid-’50s, and Adrien Brody will star as her third and final partner, playwright Arthur Miller. Producing the film? None other than Brad Pitt. Happily, Oates’s verdict on the rough-cut is entirely positive. “It is startling, brilliant, very disturbing and perhaps most surprisingly an utterly feminist interpretation,” she tweeted on August 11. “Not sure that any male director has ever achieved anything [like] this.”
Keen for more Monroe-related content? Here’s what to read and watch while you wait for Blonde’s release.
Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Anthony Summers (1985)
To state the obvious, it’s worth actually reading Anthony Summers’s Goddess, which is more revealing than The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe in many ways. As the author of The Kennedy Conspiracy (1980), Summers is well-versed in the minutiae of JFK’s privileged world, and he homes in on the former president’s relationship with Monroe here, offering up compelling (if not entirely convincing) evidence of a major government cover-up of her death.
My Story by Marilyn Monroe (1974)
Co-written by screenwriter Ben Hecht and published 12 years after her death, Monroe’s remarkably intimate memoir traces her life from her problematic childhood through to her marriage to DiMaggio, including her sexual assault as an eight-year-old girl by her foster parents’ lodger. Yes, the narrative verges on apocryphal at moments, but it’s still deeply compelling—not to mention chilling in its self-awareness. “Yes, there was something special about me,” Monroe writes at one point. “I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.”
“Dead Blondes Flashback” by You Must Remember This (2015)
Anyone even vaguely interested in the history of cinema has likely heard of *You Must Remember This—*a wildly addictive podcast about the scandals of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Some of its greatest episodes comprise the so-called “Dead Blondes” mini-series, which considers the public’s morbid fascination with the rise and fall of blonde sex icons, from Jean Harlow to Jayne Mansfield. Chief among them, of course, is Monroe herself—whose life narrator Karina Longworth dissects over three gripping episodes.
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (2000)
Even if you’ve never been particularly interested in Monroe, it’s more than worth getting your hands on a copy of Oates’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated book. The novelist started writing it after seeing a photograph of Monroe as a girl in California in 1941. Touched by her seeming innocence, she thought she might pen a novella loosely based on her tragic downfall. Some 700 pages later, she had crafted a magnum opus that uses the The Seven Year Itch star as a prism through which to consider the history of 20th-century America.
My Week With Marilyn (2011)
It’s a bold move to agree to play Marilyn Monroe on screen. (Both Naomi Watts and Jessica Chastain were in line for the role in Dominik’s biopic before de Armas landed the part.) Michelle Williams, however, is exquisite in Simon Curtis’s *My Week With Marilyn—*a film based on third assistant director Colin Clark’s (Eddie Redmayne) alleged fling with Monroe while shooting The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). The bombshell had hoped that the film would result in her being taken more seriously as an actor. Instead, it ended in disaster, with director and co-star Laurence Olivier dismissing her as a “self-indulgent little tart.” (Stream it on Amazon, Apple TV, Tubi or YouTube.)
Marilyn: Norma Jeane by Gloria Steinem (1988)
“Nearly all of the journalistic eulogies that followed Monroe’s death were written by men,” Gloria Steinem notes at the beginning of her late ’80s biography. “So are almost all of the more than 40 books that have been published about Monroe.” Steinem aims to correct this gender bias in Marilyn: Norma Jeane, which highlights the relentless sexism Monroe faced during her years in Hollywood while simultaneously noting the ways that Monroe herself perpetuated chauvinistic ideals with her behavior.
Some Like It Hot (1959)
There are a million reasons to watch Some Like It Hot—the movie that finally got Monroe the critical acclaim she so desired. Set during Prohibition, the Billy Wilder classic opens with jazz musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) accidentally witnessing the mob’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago—forcing them to dress up in drag and join an all-female band heading to Miami. The lead singer for Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators? Sugar Kowalczyk (Monroe), who plans to seduce an elderly millionaire at the beach. With Michael Masini set to appear as Curtis in Blonde, consider it essential research. (Stream it on Amazon, Apple TV, or YouTube.)
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