Mailer/Monroe: The Moth and the Star

NORMAN MAILER has stopped off in Hollywood once more. That this notorious literary moth would fail to return and singe his wings on the spotlights was unthinkable. A man whose nerves are so attuned, ay, unsheathed of any protective tissue, to the vibrations of sex and power must have found it difficult to have stayed away for so long. The last time he left quietly, his reputation on the decrescendo, his powers drained after grappling with his third novel, he dragged his speeded out carcass back to Brooklyn, the first act of his life as a serious artist a closed curtain.

Coming off a long string of successes in the nonfiction phase-second act if you please. This time around he has struck one of the main veins of the American consciousness with a biography of Marilyn Monroe, and he has mastered the art of eliciting a much vaster response with much less effort. Marilyn: a biography by Norman Mailer with pictures by the World's Greatest Photographers has made shock waves which have surpassed those the author is accustomed to creating in the literary pond, and has indeed touched the fancy of the masses.

It is hard to tell just how profoundly he has invaded this sphere, for several bellweathers have been struck, and it is debatable which one strikes the innermost chord of the people. It is like Mailer went on a binge at a country fair on several tests of strength, and his sledgehammer rang a merry tune. Listen to the prizes! Who can say which is the Blue Ribbon of the Vastest Common Denominator? His speculation upon the possibilities of FBI or Kennedy interests involved in her death made a hearty feast for The National Enquirer; his countersuit with one of his sources who had charged him with plagiarism found a willing niche in the news pages of the New York Times--this was no mere litery matter; The Ladies Home Journal wanted a blockbuster excerpt; the 25 million readers of that most self respecting Sunday supplement scandal sheet, Parade, were asked why Mailer couldn't let the poor tortured girl rest in Peace? Dick Cavett and Mike Wallace grilled him on their video griddles; and not least of these attentions was the cover of Time Magazine, which had Mailer's fuzzy silver bush of hair being fondled by Monroe, a composite creation made possible by the insertion of a picture of the fifty year old dean of American literary machismo into a slot vacated by the original fondlee, Monroe's third husband--the former saint of the liberal theater in America, Arthur Miller. Cruel scissors, ironic paste! Mailer had ballooned in stature by bringing to life the first casualty of the sixties' American royalty.

SOMEHOW this was not to be just another medical or archaeological triumph, for to have dented the news with a non-disaster item for so prolonged a time during the Watergate hearings was a tough task. Other non-unique stories that echoed the past passed with barely a ripple of eyebrows--Elizabeth Taylor divorced Richard Burton, Atlantis was rediscovered off Cadiz, Spain. Other biographies of Monroe had been done before and passed out of print without a whimper, and many questioned what Mailer had brought to the task that gave it such notoriety.

In the early fifties, while Monroe was rising through the ranks of hungry starlets to become the most popular blonde in the history of films--her rise included marriages to the two symbolic princes of midcentury America: Joe DiMaggio, the province of Muscle, and Arthur Miller, the state of Egghead,--Mailer had himself attacked Hollywood, largely on the strength of his first novel, and having failed as a scriptwriter, wrote a good, serious second echelon novel about Hollywood. While no Day of the Locust nor a Last Tycoon, Mailer's Deer Park was grudgingly accorded its own stubborn virtues a decade after its publication. At that point in his career, Mailer found the challenge of the novel paralyzingly demanding. In the appraisal which followed the finishing of the work, Mailer revealed that he had decided to make a virtue of the difficulty he was having. Good writing should not be easy to read, Mailer reasoned in Advertisements for Myself, it should be Nearly As Demandingas the act of writing itself. In consonance with this existential reformulation, of his style, Mailer spent agonizing months rewriting flowstoppers, involutions and other grammatical roadblocks into the Deer Park manuscript, ostensibly to keep the readers concentration as high as the threshold of pain of writing it.

NOW SEVENTEEN years later, Mailer is back at the top, a master of a new form--nonfiction infused with all the technique and daring of the novelist. His recovery from the strain of the novel has taken the route of retreat, with the MacArthurian pledge that he will one day return to the grail to overshadow his The Naked and The Dead. Since Armies of the Night in 1967, Mailer's reputation has been restored to prominence; the decade of inattention was revealed to have wounded Mailer but not to have changed his direction. In Armies of the Night, Mailer mentions that no matter what honors he might get in the literary world, he would consider himself a failure if he did not reach the masses of people that watched television in America, who watched and knew movie stars.

In his subsequent works, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of A Fire on the Moon, The Prisoner of Sex, and King of the Hill, and St. George and the Godfather, Mailer has continued to attack large public figures and topical issues. And the books, no matter what their worth, meet with an increasing critical impatience for him to move on. The mind which could declare that "God, in his wisdom, made me a fool" could show us so much about ourselves through an investigation of himself, with unrelenting honesty no matter how humiliating the incident. That mind became earmarked with certain refusals to be incorporated into the rational--Mailer's themes began to appear with clarity: man is primitive and mystical, the human psyche does not only contain multitudes of indenters, but uses those opposites as a dialectical mode of trying to discover new ways of acting. Indeed, the original metaphor of war held true for most regions of human personality, and Mailer, instead of avoiding such turmoil, would become a protypical 20th century American and seek out all such battles. Boxing became a useful metaphor, and he used it seriously.

THESE METAPHORS held up when he was writing about himself, but with Marilyn, Mailer has tread over a few ethical lines that, if they aren't legally or morally reprehensible, do vitiate his professional powers.

In his introduction to Marilyn, Mailer freely admits that the major portion of his sources for the book were two previously written works on Monroe--Norma Jean, by Fred Guiles, and Marilyn Monroe by Maurice Zolotow. Mailer said he first contracted to write a preface to this collection of over a hundred photographs organized by photographer and entrepreneur Larry Schiller because he needed money. $50,000 for 25,000 words in two months, and Mailer could once again make the alimony payment to his four former wives, repay his agent, Scott Meredith, and as he revealed on the Cavett show, pay off a debt to his mother. But fascinated with his subject, confessing that he at one time fantasized that he would have been man enough to satisfy Marilyn, Mailer reworks her life into 90,000 words--which make it clear that no man was the equal of her Napoleonic ambition.

The trouble with the formulation of this book is a philosophical premise that Mailer, in his God's Own Fool honesty, declares in the introduction, the trouble with trying the write a biography of Marilyn Monroe is that her life was based on the publicity of a string of newspaper gossip column lies which struck their way into the American consciousness deeper than the quiet facts. As her fame increased, Monroe became immersed in these tangled stories, living some

"... with the sanction of a novelist was going to look into the unspoken impulses of some of his real characters. At the end, if successful, he would have offered a literary hypothesis of a possible Marilyn Monroe who might have lived and fit most of the facts available. If his instincts were good, than future facts discovered about her would not have to war with the character he created."

With this groundwork, Mailer allows that everything about her was possible and proceeds to include, well, just about everything.

MAILER'S MONROE is a repository for hoary legends and dirty jokes told about starlets in general. And in the process reveals at least as much of the Mailer that we already knew than any new insight he has provided about his subject. His language is perhaps no flatter than anyone else who tried to write 90,000 words in 60 days, but it is not much better than his account of the Frazier Ali fight which he wrote on deadline for Life. In Marilyn, Mailer coins at least four new words: "fucky" as the description of her earlier roles with all their sexual abundance; "factoid" for the sort of press agent story which comes to life when it hits print; "bazzazz" for what she brought to Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend; and "squiblet" for one of her first small roles as a starlet, which first brought her to the attention of the hoary moguls of "Factoid Gulch."

Most of the excitement of the book comes from the inevitable progression of the narrative, which is mostly raced along by the facts which Mailer has gleaned from his sources. Still, he was not averse to citing before, and quoted extensively in all his nonfiction books. But in this case, his own interviews and not extensive newspaper research, and his own speculations and impressions do not carry that magic proportion of the book with which he can rest easy--he does not seem responsible for a majority of his material. He never met her. He doesn't even quite have hold of the metaphors in the book. He imagines Marilyn as a Napoleon of publicity who meets her end on a Fifth Helena Brentwood. As a starlet who made it seem easy as "ice cream." As a protean personality of opposites, sentimentality and Grand Bitchiness, soft as lamb's wool and cruel as steel; and finally Mailer has her at her core of sexual power bigger than any man she ever meets. Her movement is towards bigger and bigger fantasy kingdoms, from DiMaggio to Miller to some magical state of Princessdom--she has been rumored to have been offered a chance at marrying Prince Ranier before Grace Kelly. At the end of the book Mailer's novelistic imagination won't quit and he tries to make connections between a brief friendship with Robert Kennedy and singing Happy Birthday to President John Kennedy four months before his death. Mailer may have carefully hedged and qualified here, but the innuendo is there. Mailer sees right wing profit in allying her with the two men and uses that as a motive for a CIA or FBI plot to kill her, rather than the suicide by Nembutal cited by the coroner.

MAILER also has Monroe "winning her films," but the metaphor of the boxer wears thin by the end of the book. Perhaps the most insight is offered in the section on the making of The Misfits, which coincided with Monroe's breakup with Arthur Miller. Mailer here is able to offer his most credible insights into the nature of Miller's attraction to the uneducated woman and, hers to him in his failure to deal with her consumptive insecurity, congenital lateness, and the cancerous dependence on sleeping pills. Mailer also offers convincing testimony that the key to this insecurity was the lack of a father, which function Miller fulfilled for a time, but which Clark Gable in his role as her lover cowboy seemed to provide strongest, and filled at other times by DiMaggio and Yves Montand.

Without realizing precisely what he is doing, Mailer destroys Miller by character assasination. In the process of writing his story, the old competitor in Mailer cannot stop himself from taking vicious shots at Miller's intellectual capacity, trying to make Miller's reputation seem inflated. Finally, the liberties that Mailer takes as novelist sometimes just sicken:

Now when the Twentieth learns from her lips that she has, yes, posed in the nude, a novelist has the right to invent the following dialogue.

"Did you spread your legs?" asks a studio executive

"No."

"Is your asshole showing?"

"Certainly not."

"Any animals in it with you?"

"I'm alone. It's just a nude."

"You are going to deny your ever took those pictures."

It is curious that there is no ostensible decline in Monroe's beauty. Makeup was always part of her performance--although audiences saw her most often as a pale white angel with a moist red mouth. What struck many who met her for the first time in person was that she was strongly covered with freckles which were filtered out in almost all the color pictures included in the book. When she died, on August 5, 1962, she was 36 years old and was at the peak of her beauty, although some reviewers noted that the lines around her eyes in the Bern Stern portraits showed the outlines of a "harridan." To some others, those photographs show the most openess, the promise that all the pictures of her in bathtubs with gauze covering the defects could not deliver.