Are Those Real?: True Tales of Plastic Surgery from Beverly Hills by Dr. Norman Leaf chronicles his journey as a cosmetic surgeon in Beverly Hills for 35 years. Dr. Leaf describes some of his most well known patients, and shares some medical information about Marilyn Monroe.
Dr. Leaf makes it clear in his book that he was not her doctor, but while sorting through files of his colleague Dr. Gurdin, after becoming the files' custodian, he found notes of a visit with her to review a chin implant surgery performed years earlier.
Marilyn had had an implant placed in her skin made up of carved bovine cartilege. Neither silicone chin implants nor breast implants had been invented yet, as the original surgery would have been performed in 1950. The chart notes that the implant had slowly reabsorbed, which was common among implants of that type.
The book also discusses Marilyn's nose. Referring to the chart, Dr. Leaf writes, "No mention is made in that document of her nose, but Dr. Michael Gurdin had told me several times that he and Dr. [John] Pangman had also performed a tip rhinoplasty on her. This would explain the obvious difference between her early photos as Norma Jean Baker and her later more glamorous appearance."
Marilyn is just a small part of the book, and Dr. Leaf discusses such famous patients as actor Yul Brenner, who sought out Dr. Leaf to treat a lipoma on his stomach. The actor was starring shirtless in The King and I at the time, and the lipoma made a strange shadow across his stomach. Though removing it was a simple matter of cutting the benign fatty tumor away, Dr. Leaf describes his reaction to treating a star of such magnitude, "And I had been in pratice in Beverly Hills for only about six months; I wasn't exactly a household name in the industry. Therefore I approached the situation with awe and curiosity."
