Guus Luijters, the Dutch journalist and poet whose subjects ranged from Marilyn Monroe to the Holocaust, has died, AT5 reports.
He was born in Amsterdam during the German occupation in 1943, and grew up in the Bos en Lommer district. A keen reader, he was first published in the Spinoza Lyceum school newspaper, and his career was launched with a story in the student magazine, Propria Cures.
Throughout his 48-year stint as a critic for Het Parool, Luijters also penned a regular column, ‘Klein Geluk,’ sharing his observations of city life. Some of his poetry was light-hearted, such as ‘The Girls of Kinkerstraat,’ in which he recalled admiring glamorous blondes from afar in his youth.
It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that Luijters would write about the most famous blonde of all. First published in 1983, Marilyn Monroe: A Never-Ending Dream combines assorted quotes from the lady herself with 450 black-and-white photographs – a visual feast for fans worldwide in those pre-Internet days.
An English-language version followed in 1986, with further editions in French, German and Spanish. It is still in print (via Plexus) after 40 years, one of the few Marilyn-themed books to achieve this distinction.
The text is drawn from vintage magazine articles, and also quotes liberally from Marilyn’s posthumously published memoir, My Story, based on her interviews with ghostwriter Ben Hecht.
While these sources are generally agreed as reliable, Luijters also used multiple extracts from Marilyn Monroe Confidential, the 1979 memoir of her New York maid, Lena Pepitone. However, the close friendship depicted in that book seems to have been greatly embellished by Ms. Pepitone and co-writer William Stadiem.
Therefore, the many strikingly candid remarks attributed to Marilyn by those authors are dubious to say the least – and as the quotes in Luijters’ Never-Ending Dream are placed randomly without citations, for readers new to Marilyn it’s difficult to judge which are genuine, or not.
Fortunately, the photographs in Luijters’ book are authentic, with one exception: the curvaceous blonde woman in a bath-towel – shown at left on P.27 of the English edition – is not Marilyn, but Hungarian actress Eva Six. (This mistake has provoked a lot of fan debate over the years!)
The book also includes selections from Marilyn’s own poetry, as well as a timeline, filmography, discography and suggested further reading.
Following his global success with Marilyn, Luijters turned his attention to another Hollywood blonde – but as his American translator Josh Pachter revealed, bringing Jayne Mansfield home was anything but straightforward.
“This has to be the strangest project I have ever been involved with. In 1985, Guus and Gerard put together 150-some pages of photos of and quotes from the blonde bombshell … By the time they sold the US rights to Citadel Press in New York, though, they’d lost the original Mansfield quotations — so, rather than going back and doing all the research all over again, they actually hired me to translate their Dutch-language translations back into English!”
But Luijters’ most important work came later in life, as he retraced the stolen lives of more than 18,000 Dutch children murdered by the Nazis.
His three-volume book series, In Memoriam (2012), included biographies for each victim, and exposed how a city transport company colluded with the occupiers, and thereby profited from their deaths. He also curated an accompanying exhibition, and published a book-length poem, Song of Stars.
In 2024, as the feature-length documentary Lost City premiered, Guus Luijters was honoured by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. He died aged 81 from metastatic bladder cancer on January 3, 2025, and is survived by his wife, Ruth Visser.
Thanks to Hans at Marilyn Remembered
The Marilyn Report 