"Marilyn Monroe: The Personal Archive" - features more than 170 photographs, some previously unseen, charting her rise to fame as well as removable facsimile documents explaining her extraordinary roller-coaster life.
Publisher Carlton Books said the new hardback ‘will uncover the private life of the star, revealing her insecurity, complicated childhood and her ambition to be the greatest actress the world had ever known’.
One of the earliest images shows her aged three in 1929 with her ‘twin’ Lester who was the adopted son of her first foster parents.
Her mother Gladys Monroe/Baker had given her up for fostering when she still a baby.
Her unhappy childhood is highlighted in a letter sent by her legal guardian, Grace Goddard, in 1935, when she was aged nine.
It is addressed to the orphanage where she was staying and requested that her foster mother not be allowed to visit.
Mrs Goddard wrote: ‘I especially do not want Mrs Ida Bollender to see her again, as her visits seem to upset the child.’ Another photo shows her as a slender teenager posing beside a car belonging to the man who was to become her first husband, Jim Dougherty.
He later said of that time: ‘She seemed to be playing some kind of part, rehearsing for a future I couldn’t figure out.’
But her playful side is shown in a telegram to her friend, the Vogue and Life photographer Milton Greene after they first met in 1949. In a rhyme, she tells him ‘I think you are superb.’
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