Dear TIME-Reader:

IAIHEN Walter Winchell confided "to his public recently that Marilyn Monroe was to be a TIME cover subject, he added this understandably skeptical comment: "I can't imagine them digging up anything people haven't read before." TIME'S readers can decide whether Winchell was too skeptical.

Around the world, 33 reporters in 26 cities sought out playwrights, directors, actors, producers, and--most significant--the all-but-forgotten principals in our subject's earliest years. TIME'S Hollywood reporter, Ezra Goodman, scribbled his way through 65 notebooks (see cut)--one for each person interviewed--and had enough energy left for a note to me.

Altogether, Goodman reports, our Los Angeles bureau staffers conducted more than 100 interviews in California, Arizona and Idaho over the course of the six weeks they were on the story. "It was an experience traveling with Marilyn," Goodman writes, in recollection of an interview that took place in a chartered plane en route to Sun Valley. For this occasion, Marilyn wore what she calls her "disguise." This consisted of a Venetian gondolier's brown straw hat with white band, smoked glasses, no makeup at all, a man's heavy black sweater, grey striped trousers, high heels and a floor-length mink coat.

"We can guarantee," wrote Goodman, "that anyone donning this getup would automatically get more attention than Khrushchev at Disneyland. But Marilyn appeared surprised that anyone noticed her." In the course of another interview in her dressing room, Marilyn suddenly said to Goodman: "You look like a writer."

Goodman (warily): "Oh, yes? I'm not sure that's a compliment."

Miss Monroe: "Writers, when you're talking to them, look like they're listening to you."

For how well Goodman and his colleagues listened, see Cinema Writer Brad Darrach's "To Aristophanes & Back," beginning on page 74.

Cordially yours,

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