Using primary sources and interviews, Fred Guiles provides the life behind the legend. He reveals what really happened in the careening career of the pretty waif named Norma Jean Mortensen, who married the boy next door, became a model, an actress, a movie star, married an incompatible legend named Joe DiMaggio, sought to improve the mind that came with her near-perfect body, married playwright Arthur Miller, lent herself to the Svengali-like ministrations of Paul and Lee Strasberg, became the mistress of John and then Robert Kennedy when they ran the country, kept camera crews and studios waiting but not Death, which took her under most unusual circumstances at the age of thirty-six.