I Wanna Be Loved By You: Marilyn Monroe, A Life in 100 Takes
About this ebook
Featuring a wealth of unpublished material, Andrew Wilson’s biography of Marilyn Monroe presents the heroine in a startling new light.
Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, she had an uncertain and unforgiving upbringing with a mentally illmother, an absent father and cruel foster parents. She grew up in Los Angeles and would dream about Hollywood, believing that acting would be her one-way ticket to a different reality. Her dream was so powerful that she transformed herself into the ultimate goddess of the silver screen, and her image has been branded into the collective consciousness. Men lusted after her, and women wanted to be her. All her life, she just wanted to be happy – and loved.
Told through 100 captivating snapshots, we are thrown into the glamorous but dangerous world of old Hollywood. We see a young Marilyn navigating the highs and lows of the studio system as she attempts to free herself from the constraints of Twentieth Century-Fox and forge her own path. We also go behind the scenes of her marriages to teenage sweetheart Jim Dougherty, baseball star Joe DiMaggio and famous playwright Arthur Miller. We hear the voices of friends, lovers – and enemies.
Marilyn Monroe was more than just a goddess of the screen. She was highly intelligent and well-read, and formed long-term friendships with poets, philosophers, playwrights and political activists, such as with the avant-garde poet Edith Sitwell. After training with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, she worked hard to dismantle the common perception that she was nothing but a dumb blonde.
In the concluding chapters, Andrew Wilson unpicks what happened on the night Marilyn died after a suspected drug overdose – and investigates the rash of conspiracy theories that surround the star’s final moments. Were the Kennedys involved, or was she just let down by those closest to her?
I Wanna Be Loved By You is a revealing and nuanced portrait of the life, death and afterlife of an icon who still fascinates us today.
About the author
Andrew Wilson is an award-winning biographer, novelist and journalist. In 2003, his first book, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury) won an Edgar Allan Poe Award and the LAMBDA Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. Since then he has written the biographies Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex (Bloomsbury), currently being developed for TV/film; Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted (Simon & Schuster), which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week; Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin (Simon & Schuster), optioned by Damian Jones and Pathé; and the group biography, Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived (Simon & Schuster). His 2007 psychological thriller The Lying Tongue was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel award. In 2017, he published A Talent for Murder (Simon & Schuster), the first book in a series of crime novels featuring Agatha Christie as sleuth. The other novels in the series are A Different Kind of Evil (2018), Death in a Desert Land (2019) and I Saw Him Die (2020). The novels are published by Simon & Schuster in the UK and US, and in numerous territories around the world. Andrew is also the author of the psychological thrillers Five Strangers and Murder Grove (HarperFiction),which he wrote under the name E. V. Adamson. He is a tutor on the Faber Academy crime course and a mentor on the Gold Dust creative writing scheme. He is also a judge for the 2021 Costa Biography Prize.His journalism has appeared in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Tatler, Observer, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Smithsonian and the Washington Post. He is a frequent broadcaster and has appeared on BBC Front Row, Great Lives, Woman’s Hour, the Today programme and Sky News.
