The DiMaggios: Three Brothers, a new book by Tom Clavin, explores the family dynamic of Joe, Dom, and Vince DiMaggio, all legends in the world of baseball. It’s available to order now in hardback, and published on May 14 via Kindle.

“Paul Simon famously asked: ‘Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?’ Clavin — author of bios on Roger Maris and Gil Hodges — also wonders about Joe’s older brother, Vince, and younger brother, Dominic. Vince, a two-time all-star, paved the way by going against their fisherman father’s wishes by ‘wasting time’ playing ball. He had difficulty making ends meet after baseball. Superstar Joe, who had difficulty adjusting to his ill-fated marriage to Marilyn Monroe, was famously private. Dom, a seven-time all-star center fielder for the Red Sox, became a successful businessman and family man, and was the best adjusted of the brothers — whom Sox teammate and friend Ted Williams always said belonged in the Hall of Fame.”

Comic book artist Dina Gachman has written a guest post for Indiewire, explaining the concept behind Tribute: Marilyn Monroe, just published by Bluewater.

“Like a film, you’re telling the story visually in a comic book so first I would highlight any information that I thought was especially interesting and that we haven’t all heard a million times. I loved that she and Shelley Winters were roommates and that they got drunk with the poet Dylan Thomas one night, which ended with him crashing a car into Charlie Chaplin’s tennis court. To me that’s more fun and worthwhile than rehashing the conspiracy theories about her death or talking about her affair with JFK. You can’t fit it all in, so you set the tone, find out what really moves you about this person and their life, and hope other people agree.

I think after My Week With Marilyn and all the new books about her, people understand that Marilyn Monroe wasn’t some vacant bombshell. She seemed incredibly smart, complicated, and passionate about acting and books and art in general. There’s no question she was vulnerable, but that doesn’t mean she was weak. She was also such a talented actress; her “wiggle” and her kind of air-headed persona were a creation. She didn’t just walk onto a set and act natural. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she’s as hilarious as Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig, or Tina Fey are today. Her comedic timing was pretty impressive.”

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is becoming quite the mecca for all things Marilyn. On Thursday, June 6, from 2-3pm, Michelle Morgan – author of one the best biographies, Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed - will be giving a one-off lecture, focusing on ‘a fresh perspective to the many controversies in the private life of one of Hollywood’s most famous faces.’ Tickets cost £12, including refreshments and a chance to meet the author herself.

 Joe and Marilyn, by celebrity biographer C. David Heymann, was due to be published by Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on April 30th. However, several online bookstores have now moved that date forward – some as far as 2020!

Heymann passed away in May 2012. According to his New York Times obituary, he was no stranger to controversy. Was Joe and Marilyn completed, I wonder, and will it ever see the light of day?

Butterfly in the Typewriter is Cory McLauchlin‘s new biography of John Kennedy Toole, the New Orleans-based novelist whose comic masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, was unpublished until long after his suicide in 1969, aged 31.

Fans of the author may not have known that he – like many of Louisiana’s young men – was a passionate admirer of Marilyn Monroe. In 1955, he wrote to New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, praising his favourable review of The Seven Year Itch.

An enthusiastic comic book artist during his college years, Toole later created The Hullabaloo, a three-part series partly inspired by Marilyn’s performance in Bus Stop. ‘He depicts a voluptuous Monroe leaning in ecstasy against a bus stop post,’ McLauchlin writes. ‘Two students observe her and whisper, “I don’t know who she is, but she’s been here for two days.” The next week the same frame was republished with the caption, “What? She still here?” Two weeks later, the image appears with the caption, ‘”NOoooo!” The homely ladies appear threatened by the beauty that simply will not leave.’

Toole was shocked by the news of Marilyn’s death in 1962, which he learned while teaching English as part of his military service in Puerto Rico. Toole commented, ‘Her life and death are both very sobering and even frightening. In my own way I loved Marilyn Monroe very much. Isn’t it a shame she never knew this…’

Toole, who lived with his mother, experienced great difficulties in forming relationships with women. He was devastated by the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and his depressive tendencies were certainly aggravated by repeated rejections from publishers.

A Confederacy of Dunces was finally published in 1980, and a year later, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (an honour that Marilyn’s third husband, Arthur Miller, had previously been awarded for his 1949 play, Death of a Salesman.)

Marilyn: Norma Jeane, the bestselling 1988 collaboration between feminist author Gloria Steinem and photographer George Barris, has been reissued for Kindle and other ebook formats by Open Road Publishing.

While I don’t know how many photos are featured in this edition, and Steinem’s take on Marilyn’s life has proved somewhat controversial, it remains one of the most influential texts about her and is well worth a look.

Marilyn reads Walt Whitman, 1952

A few years ago, I made a list of all the books owned or read by Marilyn Monroe (some 436 at last count) for ES Updates. At the time, I wondered if anyone else would be interested.

In recent weeks, my list has been picked up by the New Yorker, Yahoo, and many other websites, after first being spotted by Dan Colman over at Open Culture.

I’m glad to have played a small part in widening public knowledge of MM, and hope that more people will now discover that for Marilyn, reading was much more than an intellectual pose.

This article by Judith Chapman was published in Book and Magazine Collector (sadly now defunct) in March 1988. Click on the images to read in full.

Marilyn graces the cover of the latest Heritage Auctions catalogue (price: $50, or view as PDF), accompanying the next Entertainment & Music Memorabilia auction, to be held in Dallas (and online.) Among the MM-related items on offer are several sets of rare photographs, featuring Betty Grable, Joshua Logan and others.

Photo by David Hoyt Hastie

Fifty years after her death, Marilyn makes the front cover of US scandal sheet, the National Examiner. Their ‘new’ story is that she was murdered by mafioso, including Frank ‘The German’ Schweihs, at the order of the president’s father, Joseph Kennedy. (This seems somewhat unlikely, as Joe had recently suffered a  debilitating stroke and was then incapable of speech.)

The mobster’s daughter, Nora Schweihs, denied this long-standing rumour last year on the axed reality show, Chicago Mob Wives. She is now writing a book, Marilyn Monroe: Murder Cover-Up, and says dramatically, ‘My father didn’t take his secrets to the grave, he gave them to me!’

This conspiracy theory was, in fact, first mooted in Milo Speriglio and Adela Gregory‘s 1992 book, Crypt 33, now available on Kindle.

Writing for the Huffington Post, psychologist Romeo Vitelli considers a new study by Spanish psychiatrist Mercedes Fernandez-Cabana. Originally published in the medical journal, Crisis, the article speculates on what Marilyn’s personal writings, as collected in Fragments, may tell us about her possible suicidal intentions in the years leading up to her death.

But most of the writings date from the mid to late 1950s, and as far as we know, Marilyn left no suicide note when she died in 1962. These are Vitelli’s own thoughts on the investigation:

“Studying Fragments was made easier by the dates of the letters and notes left behind by Marilyn Monroe. Using the dated material as a timeline in the years leading up to Monroe’s death, Fernandez-Cabana and her colleagues were able to group the Fragments materials into four time periods ending in 1962. Statistical analysis showed a significant rise in health concerns, death issues and personal pronoun use over time. Also, the period just before her death showed a significant decrease in negative emotions, anxiety, and religious ideas.

Though there were no clear indications of suicidal intention in any of Marilyn’s Monroe’s writings, the notes written shortly before her death suggest a strong sense of isolation. The LIWC evidence does not reflect what has been typically found that depressed individuals but may indicate that her suicide death was an impulsive decision rather than a planned act.

In discussing Monroe’s death, Mercedes Fernandez-Cabana and her fellow authors avoided commenting on the elaborate theories that were raised about her possibly being murdered for political reasons. Also, the lack of any notes written in the critical few weeks leading up to Marilyn Monroe’s death means that important data may be missing from the final analysis.”

Two intriguing new books caught my eye recently: firstly, Hollywood Sketchbook: A Century of Costume Illustration, by Deborah Nadoolman Landis (who curated the V&A Hollywood Costume exhibit.)

The cover features a sketch by Travilla of Marilyn in one of his designs for There’s No Business Like Show Business. (For the film, the dress was made up in blue.) Inside are chapters on Charles LeMaire, Dorothy Jeakins and Orry-Kelly.

Marilyn’s friend and co-star, Betty Grable, features on the cover of Twentieth Century-Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, 1935-65, to be published by the University of Texas Press on March 25th.

‘The studio’s biggest new star of the 1950s was clearly Marilyn Monroe,’ writes author Peter Lev. It should be a useful reference tool for anyone interested in the history of Marilyn’s home studio.

 Carl Rollyson, author of Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, will give a lecture about MM, as part of the Chappell Great Lives series, at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on February 26 at 7.30 pm in Dodd Auditorium, George Washington Hall.

“A photograph of a dreamy-eyed Marilyn Monroe among a group of Hollywood starlets captures vividly the description of herself in My Story, the autobiography she collaborated on with screenwriter Ben Hecht.  The true dimensions of Monroe’s ambitions only began to be apparent when Norman Mailer wrote about her Napoleonic sensibility. She came to conquer her world in the same way as many of my other subjects—notably Dana Andrews and Sylvia Plath—did: through hard work, tenacity, talent, and the ability to see beyond their own cultural conditions. How did Marilyn Monroe and others like her overcome obstacles and setbacks? What is it that keeps a person going after so many rejections, and how does someone not only overcome self-doubt but became a star? Marilyn Monroe’s story contains the answers to these existential questions as well revealing both the promise and the peril awaiting those who aspire to greatness.”

The American poet Sylvia Plath, who died fifty years ago today, once dreamed of Marilyn (see here). Her latest biographer, Carl Rollyson – whom has also written about MM – argues in his just-published book, American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, that she was ‘the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature.’

He explained this comparison in a recent interview with Biographile:

“You begin your book by calling Sylvia Plath ‘the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature.’ Can you say more about that comparison, and how it shaped your writing?

It’s always struck me that Sylvia Plath was unusual for a woman of her generation in the range of her interests. She had such an interest in poetry, in prose, and in wanting to be a greater poet, but at the same time she saw no problem with also being a popular writer, for Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and other kinds of magazines. When you look at her journals, she really wanted to have a wide range of appeal. That made me think of Marilyn Monroe, in part because Sylvia Plath dreamed about Marilyn Monroe, and I thought that for a writer of Plath’s age and seriousness, to dream about Monroe was really quite striking – and not only to dream about her, but to take Monroe seriously as someone who would give her advice, comfort her, appear as a kind of fairy godmother. When I read biographies of Plath, biographers would say that this was odd or strange, but because of my own work on Monroe I thought no, that’s exactly what Sylvia Plath is. This is a woman firing on all cylinders, who wants to be that kind of cynosure or center of attention, that marks her as a figure in the culture.

It’s a fascinating connection that you develop as the biography moves forward: Marilyn Monroe’s relationship with Arthur Miller, for instance, has several parallels to Plath’s with Ted Hughes.

Marilyn Monroe was always looking for, in some sense, a father figure, and Arthur Miller served that function, as well as being her lover and a man she respected for his writing. Well, look at Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes – in her poetry, and Hughes’s own poetry, in Birthday Letters, he emerges as a kind of replacement for Plath’s father, and also of course as a respected writer, someone with whom Plath could identify in that way.”

Susan Bernard – daughter of photographer Bruno Bernard, and author of Marilyn: Intimate Exposures, is giving a one-hour at London’s National Portrait Gallery on March 14th at 7pm, to accompany the current exhibition, Marilyn Monroe: A British Love Affair, on display until March 24th.