Anthony Summers has created virtually a Kennedy industry with his obsessively researched studies of the murkier regions of the lives of America's greatest dynasty. This, his study of the life of one of America's greatest icons, is over a decade old now, but apparently an awful lot of people still want to read it, for here it is in yet another paperback edition and it can still, with its cool, deadpan telling of its red-hot tale of stardom and sadness, pack quite a punch. From his insistence that she worked as a call- girl in her teens to his dogged pursuit of the facts surrounding her death of a barbiturate overdose in 1962, Summers spares not a single wart, yet the images of the beautiful, sexy Marilyn of Hollywood myth rather than the depressive druggie she became in her later years win out in the end.
