This beautiful lady has a website, a recently released face powder by Physicians Formula and she'll be driving a Volkswagen in no time (still unavailable :-(

Here's a Telegraph review of the book previously posted about, titled

Marylin unadorned
In his beautiful free translation of Villon's elegiac Ballade des dames du temps jadis, Christopher Logue ends by bringing the medieval poet's catalogue of legendary women up to date. The line, which stretches back to Helen of Troy and Salome, ends, in Logue's version, with Marilyn Monroe, the 20th-century sex symbol who has become as resonant in our cultural memory as her classical and biblical predecessors were in earlier times.

Sarah Churchwell's book on the Marilyn Monroe phenomenon is as concerned with its subject's posthumous image as with the facts of her life. Indeed, one of Churchwell's purposes is to show how few undisputed facts there are about this woman whom everybody thinks they know.

Churchwell's sophisticated take on her subject – she is an English literature academic – analyses the ways in which this uncertainty has sparked lurid apocrypha from Monroe's biographers, who have usually been mired in a confused bog of downmarket psychobabble and literalistic interpretation of metaphor – and that's before you get to the conspiracy theories.

One of the standard clichés – encapsulated in Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" – has to do with Monroe's split persona: the innocent young "true" self, Norma Jeane, destroyed by the artificially created persona of "Marilyn Monroe". In some versions, the taking on of a stage name – hardly an unusual occurrence in Hollywood – becomes the basis for misplaced psychiatric diagnoses of schizophrenia.

Yet there isn't even any agreement on the actual name of the girl who was born in California in 1926: "Norma Jeane" or "Norma Jean" "Mortensen" or "Mortenson" or "Baker", depending on whether you trust her birth certificate, her baptismal certificate or her first marriage licence.

For some writers, this very uncertainty becomes fetishised as metaphysical proof of Monroe's fluid, volatile character. But, as Churchwell commonsensically retorts, it simply derives from the fact that Monroe's mother was twice married, though neither of these husbands was in fact the actress's biological father. "Monroe", the supposedly "fake" pseudonym, is, ironically, a truer reflection of her genetic identity, as it was her mother's maiden name.

The fact that no one knows for sure who Monroe's absent father was would become heavily symbolic in the pop-Freudian accounts of her life. In the eyes of her admirers and detractors – and it is often hard to distinguish one from the other, such is the love-hate response she inspires – everything about Monroe's life, from her periods to her hair-dye, is massively, even pathologically, overdetermined. This is as true for the portentous cultural studies monographs that have appeared as it is for the pulp biographies and the fictionalisations.

As she is the ultimate sex symbol, it is no surprise that Monroe triggers some misogynistic fantasies in male writers such as that shameless fictionaliser Norman Mailer; what is more interesting is Churchwell's convincing analysis of women commentators, such as Gloria Steinem and the novelist Joyce Carol Oates, whose feminism proves in the end to be as patronising and perverse as the attitudes taken by men. Oates, in particular, lets her imagination run unattractively wild on the subject of sodomy. Biographers' obsessions with Monroe's womb reveal how long-lasting crass Victorian assumptions about femininity have proved.

Churchwell is right to be intellectually suspicious of those who forgo the hard labour of researching a proper biography and choose to write fiction instead. Oates comes over as pious and fatuous in her postmodern defence of her Monroe novel Blonde, as if the idea of factual truth had no status whatsoever.

One wishes that, rather than limiting herself to the literary analysis of already published sources, Churchwell had taken the biographical plunge into primary research. Even if a biography concluded that there was disappointingly little that could be documented for certain, it would be well worth while.

When it surfaces, Churchwell's own take on Monroe as far more "grown-up" than she is usually given credit for is convincing. She emphasises her shrewdness, wit and ambition – it was professional competitiveness rather than sexual jealousy which, she suggests, drove the wedge between Monroe and her second husband, the baseball player Joe DiMaggio – and her political courage in supporting Arthur Miller, her third husband, against the House Un-American Activities Committee.

By not offering her own straight version of the life, Churchwell makes it harder for us to find our bearings within the confusing world of Monroe biography than it might otherwise have been. Nevertheless, her book remains a rewarding critique, full of fascinating insights.