“When We Were Brilliant” by Lynn Cullen

There’s probably no brighter star in the Hollywood heavens than Marilyn Monroe. The blonde bombshell who died at the age of 35 in 1962 has been the focus of hundreds of accounts, linking her with the leading celebrities of the day—John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, and Arthur Miller, to name a few. While linked to numerous conspiracy theories that resound more than 60 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains both a fixation and a mystery .Lynn Cullen, a writer whose past historical fiction has included books involving Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, recalled seeing Monroe for the first time on television in The Seven Year Itch when she was eight. “She seemed to be a glorious butterfly, flitting from everyone’s net just in the nick of time,” Cullen related in When We Were Brilliant. “I didn’t see sexy, I saw brave. When I grew up and became a writer, I longed to write a novel about her, just to understand her,” noted Cullen.But Cullen couldn’t find a fresh angle on Marilyn until she came upon photographer Eve Arnold, “Almost inconceivably, out of the hundreds of photographers for whom Marilyn sat, only one was a woman. Eve’s photos of Marilyn looked different from everyone else’s, easily identifiable when lined up with other photographers’ shots,” she said.When We Were Brilliant is the Marilyn and Eve story. To follow the blurb on the book’s back cover, “Eve is better than anyone she’s seen at capturing a person’s inner truth. Together they can help each other. Together, (Marilyn) says, they can make something brilliant.”There’s Marilyn’s real-life trip in 1955 to tiny Bement (a village of 1,700, some 75 miles southeast of Peoria), Illinois to help celebrate the little town’s centennial. Arnold recorded the trip for posterity with pictures as Marilyn, no diva, said Cullen, spent actual time with townspeople. Newspaper accounts of the trip testify to the charming unreality of it all. The first time I heard of Marilyn's Midwest visit was from Peoria writer Jack Mertes who wrote an account of Monroe’s time in Bement (pronounced be-meant), the small town where she judged a beard-growing contest. “In the 1980s, I went to Bement and talked to a lot of the people. They all remembered her,” said Mertes.As for her favorite Marilyn movie, Cullen says it’s The Misfits, the 1961 drama starring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. “Despite the horrible time she spent during filming, she delivered,” said Cullen.