Last month, at a parlor in West Hollywood, Emma Cooper got a tattoo of Marilyn Monroe’s face on the underside of her arm. The director of the new Netflix documentary The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes didn’t initially count herself among her subject’s fandom, just aware of the major building blocks in her movie-star mythology: white dress, blonde coiffure, beauty mark, natural sex-bomb charisma, undercurrent of psychological stress ending in tragedy. “But that’s the thing about Marilyn,” Cooper says. “She pulls you in.”
“I did not think I’d end up having her as part of my body, but you become obsessed with her,” she tells the Guardian. “On my first research trip in Los Angeles, I went to see her grave and visit the Academy. While I was in town, I also met one of her biographers. They said, ‘Strap yourself in. You’re going to go mad for her.’ I thought, ‘Of course I won’t.’ Cut to me on Sunset Boulevard, getting this done.”
