Credit: Far Out / Bert Parry

Lucy Harbron

Mon 28 October 2024 23:00, UK

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To the world, Marilyn Monroe was the ultimate dumb blonde. But the joke was always on the viewers as the superstar’s underrated comedic genius had history falling for her career-long gag. Behind the siren eyes and pouted lips, and under the charisma she used to make the world fall for her, Monroe was an intellectual and an avid reader with a home library to envy.

It comes as a surprise, but it shouldn’t. Thankfully, the entertainment industry has, hopefully, come a long way from the two-dimensional, limiting era that Monroe lived in. Now, a woman can be smart and beautiful, making a career out of being the comedic lover on the screen while still being respected as an incredible actor. Women are valued more as performers and artists rather than solely being limited to their looks or the typecasted character they’re limited to playing.

But that wasn’t the world Marilyn Monroe, or Norma Jean Mortenson, entered. She knew that, but she also knew how to play the game incredibly well. She crafted herself into the blonde bombshell, into a kind of fantasy come to life, knowing that Hollywood would eat it up.

When they did, casting her as the sugar baby, the other woman, the damaged object of a man’s affection and all manner of stereotypical roles. But in between the lines, she was paid to say, glimmers of Monroe’s knowing genius peer through as they essentially play the industry’s expectations back at them. The perfect example is her role as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, where Monroe’s money-grabbing ditzy character is played with a meta-level, full of winks and nudges from the talented actor underneath.

Glances of Monroe’s true personality are sadly much easier to find now than they were when she was alive. During her life, she held herself like a secret. But now, her published diaries and records of her belongings reveal her true spirit.

“I restore myself when I’m alone,” she wrote in her diary, and when Monroe was alone, she liked to read. It’s recorded that in between takes on film sets, she’d find a quiet corner and read, working her way through the kinds of classic works that even literature students struggle to get into.

In 1999, Christie’s held an auction of her belongings. Previously, a Monroe auction had been all lipsticks and dresses, but this one was more personal and endlessly more revealing as it opened up the doors to her personal library. Slowly gathered over the years, by the time she passed away in her last Brentwood home, she had over 400 books in her personal collection.

She had the classics. The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, where her copy was full of handwritten notes. She owned several Ernest Hemingway novels, alongside plenty of DH Lawrence who seemed to be a first favourite of hers. She had works from Oscar Wilde and William Blake, poetry compilations from classics like Shelley and Robert Browning, and novels spanning across all eras and literary moments.

But she also had some interesting and unusual titles. Monroe was clearly paying attention to literary counterculture as she had several texts from the Beat Generation movement, like Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, or experimental poetry from Walt Whitman and Rainer Maria Rilke. She also seemed to have a real interest in psychology as she gathered texts by Sigmund Freud or dabbled in the existential, nihilistic work of Albert Camus. She even owned and read James Joyce’s Ulysses, a famously difficult text from the Irish writer that few get through and even fewer understand.

In the over 400-wide collection, there is everything from modern plays and novels addressed to Monroe from the writer to classic Russian novels, great American works of literature, victorian era poetry, French philosopher’s contemplations, biblical studies and beyond. But what makes her collection so special, and made it fetch so much at auction, was the regularity of her handwritten notes as the actor scattered her own thoughts across the pages, writing in the margins and underlining bits of interest as markers of the turned on and intelligent mind that her era never truly appreciated.

Marilyn Monroe’s book collection:

• Let’s Make Love by Matthew Andrews
• How To Travel Incognito by Ludwig Bemelmans
• To The One I Love Best by Ludwig Bemelmans
• Thurber Country by James Thurber
• The Fall by Albert Camus
• Marilyn Monroe by George Carpozi
• Camille by Alexander Dumas
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt-Farmer
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming
• The Art Of Loving by Erich Fromm
• The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Stoned Like A Statue: A Complete Survey Of Drinking Cliches, Primitive, Classical & Modern by Howard Kandel & Don Safran, with an intro by Dean Martin
• The Last Temptation Of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
• On The Road by Jack Kerouac
• Selected Poems by D.H. Lawrence
• Sons And Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
• The Portable DH Lawrence
• Etruscan Places
• DH Lawrence: A Basic Study Of His Ideas by Mary Freeman
• The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
• The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud
• Death In Venice & Seven Other Stories by Thomas Mann
• Last Essays by Thomas Mann
• The Thomas Mann Reader
• Hawaii by James Michener
• Red Roses For Me by Sean O’Casey
• I Knock At The Door by Sean O’Casey
• Selected Plays by Sean O’Casey
• The Green Crow by Sean O’Casey
• Golden Boy by Clifford Odets
• Clash By Night by Clifford Odets
• The Country Girl by Clifford Odets
• 6 Plays Of Clifford Odets
• The Cat With 2 Faces by Gordon Young
• Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill
• Part Of A Long Story: Eugene O’Neill As A Young Man In Love by Agnes Boulton
• The Little Engine That Could by Piper Watty
• The New Joy Of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer & Marion Rombauer-Becker
• Selected Plays Of George Bernard Shaw
• Ellen Terry And Bernard Shaw — A Correspondence
• Bernard Shaw & Mrs Patrick Campbell — Their Correspondence
• The Short Reigh Of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck
• Once There Was A War by John Steinbeck
• Set This House On Fire by William Styron
• Lie Down In Darkness
• The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone by Tennessee Williams
• Camino Real by Tennessee Williams
• A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
• The Flower In Drama And Glamour by Stark Young
• Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Story Of A Novel by Thomas Wolfe
• Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe
• A Stone, A Leaf, A Door (Thomas Wolfe?)
• Thomas Wolfe’s Letters To His Mother, ed. John Skally Terry
• A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
• Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
• Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
• The American Claimant & Other Stories & Sketches by Mark Twain
• In Defense of Harriet Shelley & Other Essays
• The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Roughing It by Mark Twain
• The Magic Christian by Terry Southern
• A Death In The Family by James Agee
• The War Lover by John Hersey
• Don’t Call Me By My Right Name & Other Stories by James Purdy
• Malcolm by James Purdy
• The Portable Irish Reader (pub. Viking)
• The Portable Poe — Edgar Allen Poe
• The Portable Walt Whitman
• This Week’s Short Stories (New York, 1953)
• Bedside Book Of Famous Short Stories
• Short Novels Of Colette
• Short Story Masterpieces (New York, 1960)
• The Passionate Playgoer by George Oppenheimer
• Fancies And Goodnights by John Collier
• Evergreen Review, Vol 2, No. 6
• The Medal & Other Stories by Luigi Pirandello
• Max Weber
• Renoir by Albert Skira
• Max by Giovannetti Pericle
• The Family Of Man by Carl Sandburg
• Horizon, A Magazine Of The Arts
• Jean Dubuffet by Daniel Cordier
• The Summing Up by W. Somerset Maugham
• Close To Colette by Maurice Goudeket
• This Demi-Paradise by Margaret Halsey
• God Protect Me From My Friends by Gavin Maxwell
• Minister Of Death: The Adolf Eichmann Story by Quentin Reynolds, Ephraim Katz and Zwy Aldouby
• Dance To The Piper by Agnes DeMille
• Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It by Mae West
• Act One by Moss Hart
• Science And Health With Key To The Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy
• Poems, Including Christ And Christmas by Mary Baker Eddy
• 2 Plays: Peace And Lysistrata by Aristophanes
• Of The Nature Of Things by Lucretius
• The Philosophy Of Plato
• Mythology by Edith Hamilton
• Theory Of Poetry And Fine Art by Aristotle
• Metaphysics by Aristotle
• Plutarch’s Lives, Vols 3–6 only (of 6) by William and John Langhorne
• Bound For Glory by Woody Guthrie
• The Support Of The Mysteries by Paul Breslow
• Paris Blues by Harold Flender
• The Shook-Up Generation by Harrison E. Salisbury
• An Mands Ansigt by Arthur Miller
• Independent People by Halldor Laxness
• Mujer by Lina Rolan
• The Havamal, ed. D.E. Martin Clarke
• Yuan Mei: 18th Century Chinese Poet by Arthur Waley

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