Queen of Desire

A biographer uses his imagination to flesh out the straight facts of Marilyn Monroe's life with fictional yet probable scenes that take place in a surgeon's office, at Yankee Stadium, and in her bedroom, where she utters her last words

A mesmerizing present-tense narration and a spare but intense prose style are utilized by Toperoff as he builds dramas around real and imagined people and incidents in Marilyn Monroe's life. The effect is uncanny, touching and wholly convincing --one puts down the book feeling that Toperoff has captured the real woman: confused, complex, frustrated in her lifelong desire "to create something from the material of self." In 13 episodic chapters, Monroe is sexually abused at age nine by her mother's boyfriend, traumatized by a back-alley abortionist, altered by plastic surgery. She discusses breast size with friend Simone Signoret and defeats a psychoanalyst's attempts to pierce her defenses. We glimpse the star through the eyes of Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg, enamored Indonesian president Sukarnook as is/eed , director Billy Wilder and husbands Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, all of whom project onto her their needs and their fantasies. Toperoff ( Lost Sundays ) never resorts to sensationalism in this eerily plausible, oddly beautiful novel. 50,000 first printing; $65,000 ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fine, literate novel about Marilyn Monroe, in 13 set-pieces. Skirting clich‚s in the Marilyn literature, Toperoff (Lost Sundays, 1989, etc.) devises a dramatic mode of approaching the star that delivers a well-realized MM amid a fully satisfying bevy of supporting characters. The author excels at presence on the scene and dialogue that at its best has an inspired rightness. The 13 chapters include young-married Norma Jean accompanying a wisecracking friend to an abortion and putting herself out by arranging for the car, paying half the bill, and seeing her friend through the physical crisis. We watch her being ``raped'' at nine years old by her mother's boyfriend (Norma Jean's abed with a fake fever, and Mom's away for a half hour), who pretends to be taking the girl's temperature with a rectal thermometer while actually invading her vagina. Still during her teenage marriage, we are with her during a gig with a small band while she grows as a singer and learns to concentrate. If this scene is weak, it's nonetheless followed by a strong one as Marilyn's new agent/lover Johnny Hyde takes her to Hollywood's top plastic surgeon for fuzz removal and slight facial reconstruction. Then follows an amusing scene of Marilyn aloft and cabined with sportswriters in the press box at Yankee Stadium and melting such towering cynics as Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon while Joe DiMaggio fumes. And Joe fumes as Billy Wilder films Marilyn getting her skirts upblown by a New York subway. Then MM wows the Actors Studio. Arthur Miller fumes while Marilyn comes onto Frank Lloyd Wright and wants to accept Wright's high-priced plans for a Connecticut retreat. And so on, through Marilyn's last night, as she dies while talking on the phone with a talk-show host. Extremely skillful and moving. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Like any legend, Marilyn Monroe's persona, motivation, and tragic demise have been psychoanalyzed and speculated upon in the media ad nauseum. As a result, certain images of Monroe tower large and serve to obscure more subtle truths about the actress. Toperoff's ( Sug ar Ray Leonard & Other Noble Warriors , LJ 11/1/86) fictionalized account touches on various specific events in Monroe's brief, pained existence with an eye for new details. Monroe's physicality (her heavy-lidded eyes, sensual lips, coy platinum coif, et al.) offers its own attendant mythology: the rise of an innocent all-American and fall of a jaded movie goddess. All of this Toperoff reconsiders. Both the familiar (shooting the famous billowing white dress pose and Old Timers' Day with husband Joe DiMaggio at Yankee Stadium) and relatively obscure (helping a friend get an abortion, getting her hair dyed by Jean Harlow's hairdresser) are touched on in this fictional portrait of a very real woman.
- Lauren Bielski, New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.