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Lois Banner: "Marilyn"

August 2, 2012
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Marilyn Monroe is one of the most well-known American icons of the twentieth century. But did we really know her at all? A new book titled “Marilyn” reveals a deep and complicated woman full of contradiction. She was sensual but painfully insecure, devout but sexually uninhibited, disciplined but self-destructive, cerebral but naïf-like. Many of her complexities were rooted in her unstable childhood. She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in a charity ward in Los Angeles. She grew up in eleven different foster homes, with a mother in a mental institution and a father she never knew. Diane talks with Author Lois Banner about Marilyn Monroe.

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Excerpted from "Marilyn" by Lois Banner. Copyright © 2012 by Lois Banner. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.

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