Marilyn’s Style: The Dresses of William Travilla Designed for a Hollywood Goddess is available now in hardback and digital formats.
“Marilyn Monroe wore some of the most iconic dresses in cinema history, and many of them were designed by one man – William Travilla … Featuring Travilla’s original sketches, rare costume test shots, dress patterns, stills and photographs of Marilyn wearing the dresses, plus exclusive and never-before-seen extracts from interviews with Travilla, this swoonworthy book offers a fresh insight into the golden age of Hollywood and one of the most famous actresses of all time.”
Featuring Gene Kornman’s ubiquitous photo of Marilyn wearing a gold lamé Travilla dress on the cover, Marilyn’s Style is a reissue of Dressing Marilyn: How a Hollywood Icon Was Styled by William Travilla (2011.) This new edition is slightly smaller and with a different layout, but the content is largely the same.
Another reissue with a different cover (replacing a colour Baron photo with a pretty, if less distinctive portrait by Frank Powolny), Sheridan Morley’s ‘pocket biography’, Marilyn Monroe – co-written with Ruth Leon, and first published in 1998 – is now available in paperback and digital formats.
This new edition omits the photo section included with the original. While not immune to gossipy speculation, the text is largely sympathetic and occasionally insightful. Overall it’s rather muddled, though, with several quotes about Marilyn attributed to the wrong sources.
Given that early biographies by Maurice Zolotow, George Carpozi, and Edwin Hoyt – and memoirs by Eunice Murray, Norman Rosten, and Susan Strasberg – are now long out of print, this marginal entry in Monroe lore seems an odd choice.
Coming soon, Golden Marilyn is a hardback reissue of Marilyn Monroe and the Camera (1989.) Andy Warhol’s take on another Gene Kornman photo is featured on the cover, replacing the ‘Silver Marilyn’ of previous editions. With text in English and German, this book includes an introduction by Jane Russell, and Marilyn’s 1960 interview with Georges Belmont for Marie-Claire magazine.
First published in 1998, Marilyn Monroe: A Beautiful Child (aka Marilyn Monroe: Photographs 1945-1962) is back in print with the original cover image from Philippe Halsman’s ‘Jump’ series. This small paperback features 48 photos also seen in Golden Marilyn, alongside a poignant (if not entirely convincing) essay by Truman Capote in English and German.
And finally, Norman Mailer’s Marilyn: A Biography (1973) is now available in a new Spanish translation by David Paradela, in paperback and digital formats. As reported here, Mailer’s macho perspective was highly controversial. This edition is not illustrated, but you can view the original (in English) via the Internet Archive.
The Marilyn Report 