I want to let Marilyn's fans see the human Marilyn behind the public image, to show this special woman as we knew her," writes Marilyn Monroe's half sister Berniece in this simple but affecting memoir, coauthored by her daughter. Miracle and Monroe were born seven years apart to Gladys Baker. Berniece, now 74, was raised by her father, Jasper, in Middlesboro, Ky., while Norma Jeane (later Marilyn), the daughter of one Martin E. Mortensen, grew up in Los Angeles with her mother's friends, Grace and Doc Goddard, after the mentally ill Baker was institutionalized in the mid-1930s. When Berniece was 19 and married, she learned she had a sister in a rambling letter from her mother.
This is not a book of secrets but of warm hugs and poignant family photographs. Berniece would have us believe that she became intimately connected to Marilyn, but the very story she tells suggests that Monroe was truly close to no one.
Still Berniece tries to explode whatever myths she can. She writes that Marilyn was not sexually assaulted as a child, as has been reported elsewhere, that Monroe did not have an affair with actor Yves Montand (other celebrated liaisons are not addressed) and that her half sibling was not a "dumb blonde" (her breathy voice was just a put-on). Ultimately, though, the public image of Monroe remains intact—a child-woman consumed by her image and exploited by those closest to her. In no way a definitive portrait, My Sister Marilyn adds one more dimension to the myth of an American icon. (Algonquin, $19.95)
by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Still smoking from the success of his last novel, The Road to Wellville (the movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Bridget Fonda arrives this fall), Boyle once again takes on American culture and excess in this fourth collection of wickedly comical stories.
His strange mix of characters includes Bernard Puff, proprietor of a game reserve in Bakersfield, Calif., who dreams of making his well-heeled clients "great white hunters," only to discover that his flea-bitten animals won't play along; Julian Laxner, a would-be astronomer who hires a professional organizer to dispose of his wife's "hundred and twenty potholders and six hundred doilies"; and Jim, who falls for an animal-rights activist and finds himself spray-painting Meat Is Death across shrink-wrapped supermarket specials. In Boyle's world anything can happen and usually does. It's worth a visit. (Viking, $21.95)
by Annette Funicello with Patricia Romanowski
Forget the squeaky-clean queen of beach-blanket movies; deep-six the suburban mom of peanut butter commercials. In the minds of many a middle-aged American male, Funicello is the once-and-forever pre-teen goddess of love. She may have been just a sweet, frizzle-haired kid of average talents from Utica, N.Y., yet a generation of males learned to spell by staring at the A-N-N-E-T-T-E on the front of her Mouseketee-shirt.
Funicello tells the story of her rapid rise in vivid detail and with considerable wit. She recounts how Walt Disney discovered her as she danced in a school pageant in 1955; and how the flood of fan mail addressed to Annette prompted Disney to offer her a movie contract. She loved her fans, she writes, but after she was a grown-up, and people would chastise her for smoking or taking a drink, she devised a ready answer: "I have three kids, so guess what else I do!"
The darker moments—the fan who wrote threatening to murder her on the day of her wedding to manager Jack Gilardi in 1965; her early love affair with the moody Paul Anka—are discussed honestly but also with a certain Disney-bred discretion. Her current struggle with multiple sclerosis, as well as her life with second husband Glen Holt, a horse trainer, is compellingly described. "I'm not just sitting around and waiting for a cure," she assures us. "Or as I used to sing about fifty years ago, I ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive."
Dream is proof that the true source of her stardom has always been her unbreakable spirit. (Hyperion, $22.95)
by Michael Thomas
The most interesting character in Thomas's latest thriller is money: the hundreds of millions from the drug trade and bond and stock scams that is moved around the globe in megabytes by digital highwaymen.
The story starts with a murder. When Clarence Greaves, an investigator for the Resolution Trust Corporation—the government agency charged with cleaning up the $500 billon savings-and-loan mess—stumbles on a small tax-evasion scheme at a failed California bank, he dies. Greaves, it seems, had discovered a chink in the well-armored money-laundering machinery of the Colombian drug cartel. The murder attracts Lee Boynton, reporter for—and patroness of—Capitol Steps, a small investigative paper. She teams up with Thurlowe Coole, a computer crusader who ferrets out electronic high jinks for stratospheric fees. When not rapturously pawing each other, this twosome battles the spreadsheet banditos in a series of cliff-hangers that stretches from Scotland lo Washington.
Along the way the author, an ex-investment banker, stops for colorful lectures on the morass of the '80's free-for-all market economy. This is a riveting and instructive novel. (Crown, $22)
>Berniece and Mona Rae Miracle
THE CURSE OF A CELEBRATED SIBLING
"MY EARLIEST MEMORY OF MY AUNT Norma Jeane was the scent of her," says Mona Rae Miracle, 54. "It was sweet, like a piece of fresh fruit." That was 1944. Norma Jeane, then 18, had taken a leave from her wartime job at an L.A. parachute factory and traveled to Detroit to meet her only sister for the first time. "She was just so pretty that day," Berniece remembers. "It was like finding that you had gotten the very thing you had always wanted for Christmas."
Early in her career, when Monroe asked Miracle never to talk to the press, Berniece "promised on my word of honor," though she admits that "it's been difficult to have to be on guard all these years."
To fend off snoopy reporters—one posed as a policeman, another as a Masonic-lodge member like Berniece's husband, Paris, who worked in an electrical-supply house and died in 1989—the Miracles unlisted their phone number, installed a security system and built a fence around their Florida property. "You'd never know when a reporter or photographer was going to show up," says Berniece. "Once Paris pretended he was a mute, another time he said I was dead. Years later he still felt bad about that," she recalls. "Today I still get crazy letters from people claiming to be relatives. I just burn'em in my backyard barbecue."
Why break the silence now? "It's been a great source of sadness to see Marilyn's life distorted over the years," says Mona Rae, who spent 10 years working on the memoir with her mother. "It's lime we told the truth."
>MEETING YOUR INNER POODLE
YOU MAY ASK, WHY ME? WHY SHOULD I run with the poodles? Why not moo with the cows or bleat with the sheep? How will acting like a member of an alternative species change my life?
It won't. Your life is fine the way it is—only you don't know it. How could you? Between the growth work and the grief work, you don't know whether you're coming or going or re-birthing. And now they're telling you to drop everything and run with the wolves. Well, it's okay to stay home.
I'll let you in on another secret: Evolution isn't a terrible thing. All you have to do is look al a poodle. Poodles are descended from wolves. But they've progressed. They know the importance of a good haircut.
PUTTING THE LID ON SELF-IMPROVEMENT
THE BEAUTY OF MY UNIQUE "HEELING Wholeness" program, as channeled directly to me by Ethel, a former lounge singer from Atlantis who was a good 50,000 years ahead of her time, is that you don't have to do anything. No meetings, no newsletters, no embarrassing goddess ceremonies, no camping, no drumming, no howling at the moon. (High heels, however, are a plus!)
Learn to reclaim your Sacred Inner Bitch and honor your mood swings. No more saying "yes" when you mean "no" or "c'mon down" when you mean "gel stuffed." As Ethel says in her infinite woman wisdom, "The purpose of life is to live it."
From WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE POODLES by Barbara Graham; illustrated by Victoria Roberts (Avon, $7.50)
- Contributors:
- Louisa Ermelino,
- F.X. Feeney,
- J.D. Reed,
- Kristin McMurran.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
