Moira Doinegan in Book Forum:
SHE WAS ALWAYS LATE. Crew members and other actors would wait around for hours, wondering when—or if—Marilyn Monroe would show up. Some days, especially toward the end of her life, she never made it to set at all.
Monroe is famous for her mix of irrepressible sexuality and childlike innocence, but those who knew her in life found her less girlishly naive than tragic and wounded. She drank, took pills, and was constantly seeking reassurance. Toward the end of her life, her frequent overdoses seemed ambivalently deliberate. Her desperation and her sickness mingled, and it is still hard to know exactly whether her death of an overdose in August 1962—naked in her bed, with the phone off the hook as she called friends in a stupor—was precisely a suicide. It was certainly not the first time that she had almost died.
That Monroe was so successful for so long is evidence that her talents were more formidable even than her suffering. Her box office draw was undeniable; so was her magnetism. There is nothing like her on-screen; every eye is drawn to her in every frame. Numerous critics have remarked that with her flawless skin and platinum blond hair, Monroe reflects light. She has a luminous quality that can be almost blinding.
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