The New York Review of books has a very well written article/review by the Western writer Larry McMurtry of a new book of photographs of Marilyn Monroe. The article is worth collecting by itself. There is a touching moment when it mentions a correspondence between Marilyn and the great writer Somerset Maugham.
Here is a link.
Reading the article reminds me of a piece the film critic Roger Ebert wrote about Marilyn taking a walk, holding her shoes in her hand, with Truman Capote in downtown Manhattan after a funeral of a friend they'd both attended. Monroe had worn an elaborate black veil, not just because it was a funeral but to try to escape the attention of reporters. It worked, and she and Capote were able to escape out a back door.
Ebert is an interesting critic who thankfully just reviews the movies he watches, and doesn't give us a lecture on every subject he knows and holds dear, and in that particular article he achieves the sort of poignancy that would grace a novel. I'll hunt it down.
Seeing the cover shot of Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil reminds me also that an excellent film version of the novel came out 3-4 years ago, one of the more successful book-to-film adaptions I've seen.
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