As E. L. Doctorow has done with

Dutch Schultz or Don DeLillo with

Lee Harvey Oswald, Sam Toperoff

has used both the freedoms and the

discipline of fiction to transform a

mythical figure into flesh and blood.

Toperoff creates thirteen crises in the

life of Marilyn Monroe that take her

from the precocious and abused ten-

year-old Norma Jean Baker through

an ill-fated teenage marriage to her

emergence as the determined starlet

who becomes America s own Venus.

Toperoff s mastery is in how he

uses the facts of Marilyn s life--her

marriages to Joe DiMaggio and

Arthur Miller, her relationships with

Lee Strasberg, Simone Signoret, and

Frank Lloyd Wright--to create a

complex character who displays wit,

guile, tenderness, and anxiety. Imag-

ined dramas that take place in a sur-

geon s office, President Sukarno s

hotel suite, the press bex at Yankee

Stadium, a house in Connecticut, and

finally in Marilyn s bedroom when

the Queen of Desire pours out her

last words to an all-night talk-show

host draw us closer to Marilyn than

any biography ever could.