# The Fifth Helena Drive Bedroom *A Biography of Marilyn Monroe* — Legendary Biographies No. 187 - **Subject:** Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe) - **Written by:** Vivien Beauchamp - **Shelf:** Screen & Stage / Performing Arts - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 172 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 172 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 172 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-020-1) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-034-8) - **Content notes:** suspicious death; substance use; sexual harassment Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/187-the-fifth-helena-drive-bedroom.html ## About this book On the night of 14 September 1954, on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street, Twentieth Century Fox shoots a publicity sequence that will outlive every print of the film it advertises. The actress is twenty-eight. Her contract is in the third year of a seven-year hold. Her husband, watching from the rope line, will sign the divorce papers within two weeks. The fan beneath the subway grate runs on a generator the second-unit director hides on the next block, and the take is repeated, reportedly, more than fifteen times. Vivien Beauchamp reads Marilyn Monroe's life as the labour history that golden-age Hollywood spent fifty years insisting was a fairy tale. She follows the contract — Norma Jeane's at Twentieth Century Fox in 1946, Marilyn's at Fox in 1951, the renegotiated terms after the 1954 walkout, the company she formed in 1955 to escape, and the suspension that followed every refusal. She traces the rooms: the studio commissary, the photography sessions, the analyst's couch on East 93rd Street, the bungalow at Brentwood. Drawing on Monroe's papers at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, on production memoranda, on the day-rates of the dancers and stand-ins around her, and on the letters of her three husbands, Beauchamp assembles a portrait that takes its subject seriously as a working actor — and treats Hollywood's manufactured-icon model as the labour story it has always been. ## Contents 1. The Mother's Ward 2. The Foster Homes 3. The First Marriage 4. The Blue Book Agency 5. Marilyn 6. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 7. DiMaggio 8. The Subway Grate 9. Arthur Miller 10. Marilyn Monroe Productions 11. The Strasberg Method 12. Some Like It Hot 13. The Pills 14. The Kennedys 15. Happy Birthday, Mr. President 16. Something's Got to Give 17. August Fourth 18. Brentwood ## Questions **Who is The Fifth Helena Drive Bedroom about?** Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Fifth Helena Drive Bedroom — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,301 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,000 words, 18 chapters, 172 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: suspicious death; substance use; sexual harassment. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Vivien Beauchamp is a London-based culture writer whose biographies of women fashion designers and creative directors have been translated into nine languages. She spent a decade working in design archives and researching the social history of clothing before dedicating herself to full-time writing. Her published work includes the detailed industry histories Buttons and The East End Boy, alongside her acclaimed study of mid-century domestic aesthetics, The Fifth Helena Drive Bedroom. Her projects focus on the working lives of creative women and the material culture they left behind. She lives in North London, where she spends her weekends visiting local flea markets and restoring mid-century furniture.