Greene eventually purchased the rights to the book and added photographs from some of his well-known shoots with the star. Greene, a celebrity photographer who frequently collaborated with Monroe on photo shoots, both also had a hand in the writing of My Story. Sidney Skolsky, an arts and entertainment columnist, and Milton H. Many of the passages are believed to be derived or even transcribed directly from those meetings. Monroe regularly met with Hecht to recount various periods of her life. The book’s voice is, to many, distinctly “Marilyn.”Īccording to the Marilyn Geek blog, Monroe’s agent, Charles Feldman, first commissioned the autobiography. Since the publication of My Story, many fans have wondered about its authorship. The book includes an unfinished account of her early years in foster homes and orphanages, the loss of her mother to institutionalization due to a mental illness, and her first two marriages – the first at age 16 to James Dougherty, and the second to Joe DiMaggio, a legendary baseball player known as the Yankee Clipper. My Story was published in 1974, 12 years after Monroe’s death in 1962, but it only covers her life up to 1954. Marilyn Monroe | Baron/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Monroe’s unfinished autobiography was published posthumously In one heartbreaking passage of My Story, Monroe even seems to evoke images of what ultimately became her real tragic ending. These include her experiences in the foster care system as a child, her struggles to make it as an actress, the tumult in her love life, and her symptoms of depression.

In My Story – her posthumous, unfinished autobiography, which Monroe wrote with the help of her friend, famed ghostwriter and screenwriter Ben Hecht – Monroe reflects on many aspects of her often troubled off-camera life. But the reality of the celebrity’s private life was often far darker than the stories of the campy seductresses and women-about-town she often played on-screen.

Pop culture icon and Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe often played bubbly blonde bombshell characters in her top-grossing films of the 1950s.

Ben hecht my story