MARILYN MONROE

An upcoming book sheds new light on the sex symbol’s early years and inner struggles.

Marilyn Monroe spent her entire life as an enigma: She was considered the world’s most beautiful woman, but she was “one of the most terrified people on the planet,” Andrew Norman, author of Making Sense of Marilyn, tells Closer. His book takes a hard psychological look into the sex symbol’s troubled youth as well as her brilliant Hollywood career and tragic death from a drug overdose at 36, in 1962. “Why was this successful, glamorous lady so unhappy in her life?” Norman asks. “That’s the big question: How could these two people exist in one person?” As Marilyn herself once said, “I’m trying to find myself. Sometimes, that’s not easy.”

— Bruce Fretts, with reporting by Katie Bruno

“She had a very difficult childhood,” says Norman of Marilyn (circa 1936), who never knew her father. “Beauty and femininity are ageless ,” said Marilyn, here in 1947.

Making Sense of Marilyn by Andrew Norman will be available in June.