Anthony Summers, whose book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe is the basis for the documentary The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, has strong opinions on what Marilyn Monroe fans should read after watching the film.
“An awful lot of garbage has been written about Marilyn Monroe,” Summers says. “I hope that I bettered that. But, surprise, surprise, two of the best books about Marilyn Monroe were written just before or just after she died.”
Here are his picks for what to read after watching the documentary.
Written and published two years before Monroe died in 1962, this book contains interviews with the actor and her contemporaries.
“The book by Maurice Zolotow... was a straight biography, in which Zolotow himself had access to her,” Summers says. “He was a very good journalist, a very careful writer. I spent a fair amount of time digging into his memories and notes.”
Arthur Miller, John Huston, Billy Wilder and Marilyn’s first husband, Jim Dougherty, among others, were all interviewed by the author of this biography, which not only gives additional context to the roller coaster of events that made up her life but also helps shed light on the circumstances of her death.
“I would recommend [this] book by Fred Guiles, which was written before mine but relatively soon after [Monroe’s] death,” Summers says. “He had had some insights into what had gone on in Los Angeles in the weeks and months before she died, and when she was seeing the Kennedys. To avoid libel and to satisfy the caution of his publishers, he had to dance around things, but it was nevertheless a good book.”
The New York Post named Casillo’s work one of the “most unforgettable books of 2018,” saying: “This biography from Casillo fleshes out the icon, telling Monroe’s tale in great and often harrowing detail and showing how the notorious blond pin-up was smarter and shrewder than most realize, yet just as tragic as we knew.”
“There’s a book by [Charles] Casillo,” Summers says. “I read it recently, it was published in 2018, and I was impressed. As someone not easily impressed, I was impressed... and have had a few exchanges [with him] while I prepared the new edition of Goddess, which has just come out.”
This autobiography by MGM’s head hairdresser during Hollywood’s golden age gives readers an inside look at what it was like to be a trusted ear for such stars as Greta Garbo — and Marilyn Monroe, of course.
“When I was working on the book, I went to a man called Sydney Guilaroff, who had been a legendary Hollywood hairdresser, and he’d been hairdresser to Marilyn Monroe, I think, on eight of her movies,” Summers says. “And he was known in Hollywood as a confidant, a real confidant. People like Elizabeth Taylor... and Ava Gardner had both gone on record as saying that they would, under stress, tell Guilaroff all sorts of things that they didn’t want to [have] creep into print. He was always totally diplomatic. And his lips were sealed when they used him as a confidant.
“I wanted to talk to him. I spent months with him when I was writing my book... and I got a lot of information about Marilyn’s character from him, but it was obvious to me that he was holding something back about her death. I’d be in touch with him over the years after my book came out in the ’80s. And finally, he found a way to let me know that he was writing his autobiography. And it contains a crucial piece of information... which is that he got a call from Marilyn Monroe at about 9:30 on the night that she would later be found dead.”
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