The year Monroe called New York City home
There is overexposure, and then there is Marilyn Monroe-level overexposure. Every single aspect of the actress’s life has been parsed in hundreds of books and thousands of articles. Writers as disparate as Gloria Steinem and Norman Mailer have been drawn to her complex personality and pondered what her story tells us about fame and womanhood.
Elizabeth Winder’s contribution to the Monroe library, “Marilyn in Manhattan: Her Year of Joy,” focuses on 1955, a year the star spent in New York recalibrating her career and diving into theater, art and literature.
It’s an approach that falls squarely within the popular subgenre of micro-biography, in which a short period is held under a magnifying glass and either typifies an entire life or defies conventional wisdom about the subject.
Winder followed the same m.o. in her previous book, 2013’s “Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953,” which detailed the 20-year-old budding poet’s monthlong stint as guest editor at “Mademoiselle” magazine.
Winder offers a familiar (and slightly ahistorical) empowerment narrative: Just as Plath wasn’t a downer poet but liked partying and putting on pretty dresses, Marilyn was no dumb suicide blonde; she walked around reading Russian novels and kept a photo of Albert Einstein on her bedside table. The book attempts, Winder explains, “to show the real, flesh and blood Marilyn — a strong, savvy woman who took control of her life.”
Except that ultimately she didn’t, and even the book’s subtitle is fraught: Monroe’s “year of joy” was also marked by sustained pill-popping and a passionate but subservient relationship with then-married Arthur Miller, who constantly undermined her.
Winder is at her best when detailing Monroe’s constant search for surrogate families: with fashion photographer Milton Greene and his wife, Amy; with Lee and Paula Strasberg, gods of downtown theater and proponents of Method acting; with writer Norman Rosten and his wife, Hedda. The actress looked for stability and a sense of normalcy but could handle it only up to a point.