Duty Now Legend Ties

The Los Angeles Times reports the deaths of singer Slim Whitman, arrestee Rena Price, valet parker Herb Citrin, television producer Gary David Goldberg, singer Bobby "Blue" Bland, writer Richard Matheson, drummer Alan Myers, fugitive Marc Rich, writer Gordon Bricken, Selective Service head Curtis Tarr, and photographer Bert Stern.

"100 Percent of Them Would Be Wrong"

"The book took her 10 years to write, which is about how long it takes to read, albeit for the best possible reason: it is rigorously, at times obsessively, well researched. More appealingly, Banner’s academic orientation did not preclude her from going native. In the course of her work, she joined a Marilyn fan club, became a major collector of the star’s artifacts, contributed to a fund that paid for a new bench outside the Westwood crypt, and published a coffee-table book devoted to items from Marilyn’s personal archive. For those of us who love Marilyn, The Passion and the Paradox constitutes an invaluable resource, a compendium of the latest discoveries, a settling of long-festering questions, and a thoughtful and thorough revisiting of the subjects we love most. For the general reader, however, the book will be overwhelming and impossible. How can a civilian be expected to care about the details of a real-estate deal that led to the 1910s development of the Whitley Heights tract in the Hollywood Hills? An introductory note is addressed, casually, to those 'familiar with the biographical tradition on Monroe'; indeed, it is this tradition itself, more than any freshly excavated facts about the life, that demands a reckoning. Serious books about Marilyn number in the high hundreds, possibly the thousands; together they describe not just the transformation of a poor California girl into an international sex symbol but also the posthumous transformation of that sex symbol into something shockingly urgent, completely contemporary, and forever bankable."

Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic reviews Lois Banner's Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox.

"Paradox, It Seems, Makes for a Very Long Afterlife"

"Nobody is one thing all the time. Yet Marilyn is steeped in paradoxes so profound that, even under the microscope, they stir and shift without ever settling into a singular picture. Such is the premise of Lois Banner’s new biography, 'Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox,' which behaves a little like its subject. Weaving together exclusive interviews, material from previous books and, most significantly, the contents of Monroe’s two long-lost personal filing cabinets (made available to the public only last year, when Banner published a selection from them in 'MM—Personal'), Banner presents a rich and often imaginative narrative of Marilyn’s life. By the end, Monroe feels at once like an earthly being—an almost-friend—and an enigma, still slightly out of focus and just beyond reach. That seems right."

Zoë Slutzky in The New York Times reviews Lois Banner's Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox.

Banner herself writes an appreciation in the Los Angeles Times.

And D. R. Haney in Salon describes Marilyn Monroe as the original California Girl and the ultimate photo model.

"Recipe for Reinvention"

In the Los Angeles Times, Adam Tschorn and Susan King discuss Marilyn Monroe's cultural and economic impact, fifty years after the star's death.

As does Maureen Dowd in The New York Times.

"The Show Only Buys In to the Notion of Attractiveness"

"The roster of shutterbugs in 'Beauty Culture' reads like a who's who of contemporary artists and photographers. Albert Watson, Herb Ritts, Man Ray, Andres Serrano, David LaChapelle, Leonard Nimoy, Mary Ellen Mark and Susan Anderson are only a few whose works are featured in the ambitious assemblage of more than 170 print photographs and 500-plus digital images. Through pictures of celebrities and models including Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Cindy Crawford and Gisele Bundchen, 'Beauty Culture' is meant to ignite a debate about today's multi-billion-dollar fashion and beauty industries. Yet the expanse of portraits and editorial photographs rarely represent anyone who's not reinforcing unrealistic ideals, and the so-called social critique winds up being just another celebration of female beauty, rather than a legitimate appraisal."

Tanya Laden in the LA Weekly reviews the latest exhibit at the Annenberg Space for Photography.

Hello, Norma Jeane

"Every letter has a story to tell, and De Marsche has his favorites. One missive was written by Marilyn to her half sister, Bernice, in 1943. He read it aloud: 'My mother brought me here for the summer when I was about seven years old. I remember going to the Casino to dance with her, of course. I didn't dance, but she let me sit on the side and watch her, and I remember it was way after my bedtime too. But anyway, what I'm getting at is that at Christmas time, the Maritime Service held a big dance at the same Casino and Jimmie and I went. It was the funniest feeling to be dancing on that same floor ten years later, I mean being old enough and everything. Oh it's hard to explain the feeling I had.'"

Louis Sahagun in the Los Angeles Times discusses a new exhibit about Marilyn Monroe's time living on Catalina Island.

"'Interesting—and Rare'"

"She was almost always photographed smiling, her lips slightly parted, her skin aglow with an aura all its own, and yet there was usually a curl of sadness in her smile: sadness that just managed to fight through; sadness that was always considerable and sometimes intense."

In The New York Review of Books, Larry McMurtry discusses three recently published books about Marilyn Monroe.

"Oneness with the Big Self"

"Soon, Marilyn Monroe was claiming that yoga improved her legs. Yehudi Menuhin wrote the foreword to Devi’s 1959 book 'Yoga for Americans.' Yoga was quietly going mainstream. Syman slightly discounts the contributions of B. K. S. Iyengar, the author of 'Light of Yoga' (1966), the most widely read book on modern yoga, and gives Devi credit 'for ridding hatha yoga of sordid associations and accumulated ill will.' Indeed, she writes, 'Indra Devi was so good at packaging hatha yoga as a defense against illness and aging' that it became 'easy to lose sight of its real purpose—spiritual liberation.'"

In The New York Times, Pankaj Mishra reviews Stefanie Syman's The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America and Robert Love's The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America.

All Available Light

Life magazine reveals previously unpublished photographs of Marilyn Monroe at an awards dinner in 1952.

"A Leap of Faith"

"We want to believe theories that contradict the idea that young, iconic people died senselessly. If a story takes away the accidental from their death, it gives them agency. After the JFK assassination, it was unbearable to many people that they could live in a country where a lone gunman could kill a president. In those circumstances, it’s not surprising that an overarching conspiracy theory emerges. It suggests that somebody is in control, rather than that we’re at the mercy of our neighbors and to some extent of ourselves (as was the case with Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana). It’s the urge to make sense of a particularly traumatic moment."

In Salon, Thomas Rogers interviews David Aaronovitch, author of Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History.

Attention Must Be Paid

"Still, it cannot be a coincidence that it was in the late 1940s and early 1950s, exactly when Miller’s Popular Front views were under the strongest pressure, that he produced his best work. Earlier, when Miller could luxuriate in the group- and Group-think of the left, his writing was too blunt and simplistic. Afterward, when he had been through the Monroe whirlwind, and when the radicalism of the 1930s was superseded by the radicalism of the 1960s, he was bewildered, and could only look inward and backward for subject matter. But from 1946 to 1955, he was energized by the difficulty of using the theater to save a country that evidently did not want saving, at least not his way."

Adam Kirsch in The New Republic reviews Christopher Bigsby's Arthur Miller.

These Rocks Don't Lose Their Shape

"The pairing could have been a hellish match. And yet these two supremely flawed people collaborated productively over six films. Their heady first result, the 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend' dance sequence from 'Gentlemen,' is a delicious confection, a piece of Hollywood perfection"

Debra Levine in the Los Angeles Times profiles Marilyn Monroe's choreographer, Jack Cole.

The M Files

Sam Kashner in Vanity Fair introduces an archive of Marilyn Monroe's personal papers, just recently made public.

But the Our Marilyn Blog calls the story a hoax.

Don't Bother to Knock

In The New York Times, Aljean Harmetz reports the death of actor Richard Widmark.

The Rat Pack and I

The New York Times runs obits for comedian Joey Bishop and actress Deborah Kerr.

Anatomy of a Director

"Preminger, who so often deployed his power against individuals, did so against the institution of Hollywood as well; the resulting legacy is profound. In 1953, he defied the Production Code Administration, premiering 'The Moon Is Blue' despite its having been condemned by the Legion of Decency and denied a Code seal. He was the first independent producer-director to emerge from the collapsing studio system and the first to break the blacklist, crediting writer Dalton Trumbo on 'Exodus' (1960)."

Liz Brown in the Los Angeles Times reviews Foster Hirsch's Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King.

The Subject of This Post Is Marilyn Monroe

New York magazine has six photographers reenvision Richard Avedon's famous 1957 photo of Marilyn Monroe.

MM at 80

Slate marks Marilyn Monroe's 80th birthday with a slide show of photos.

And adds more in 2007.

And still more in 2011.