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3,301 words · no email, no account
No. 187 · Screen & Stage · Performing Arts
The Fifth Helena Drive Bedroom
a biography of Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe)
What the book is
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.
At a glance
- Subject
- Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe)
- Shelf
- Screen & Stage · Performing Arts
- Written by
- Vivien Beauchamp
- Chapters
- 18 across 172 pages
- Narrated by
- Camille Rhodes
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
- Content notes
- suspicious death · substance use · sexual harassment
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The Mother's WardRead free
- 02The Foster Homes3,029 words
- 03The First Marriage2,473 words
- 04The Blue Book Agency2,565 words
- 05Marilyn2,940 words
- 06Gentlemen Prefer Blondes2,866 words
- 07DiMaggio2,496 words
- 08The Subway Grate2,539 words
- 09Arthur Miller3,015 words
- 10Marilyn Monroe Productions2,659 words
- 11The Strasberg Method2,486 words
- 12Some Like It Hot2,839 words
- 13The Pills3,882 words
- 14The Kennedys3,414 words
- 15Happy Birthday, Mr. President2,448 words
- 16Something's Got to Give2,948 words
- 17August Fourth3,438 words
- 18Brentwood3,527 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- 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
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who 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.
02Is 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.
03Can 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.
04How long is it?
About 59,000 words, 18 chapters, 172 pages in the paperback.
05What 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.
06Does 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
This book deals with
- suspicious death
- substance use
- sexual harassment
Listed before you buy, not after.
