Two Myths Converge: NM Discovers MM

"Everybody is always tugging at you. They'd all like sort of a chunk of you. They kind of like to take pieces out of you."

-Marilyn Monroe

"I fantasized it would be a simple matter for me -I was the one to take Marilyn away from Arthur Miller. Now I'm older and wiser and I know better. I'd have been no improvement on Miller."

-Norman Mailer

He was three years old when she was born in 1926. At the age of 25, with Harvard, the war and a brilliant first novel behind him, he was an international celebrity. By then, with a history of foster homes, a wrecked marriage, a knockabout modeling career behind her, she was that classic Hollywood joke, a starlet -a person defined by Ben Hecht as any woman under 30 not actively employed in a brothel. But five years later, he was the one who was floundering, attacked as a writer whose promise had been tinsel and thunder; it was she who had become a global superstar. He was the one who fantasized about her. She did not know he existed.

It has taken Norman Mailer nearly five decades to achieve a truly Monrovian status. But he is still fantasizing. "I come from Brooklyn," says Mailer, "and she had the basic stuff out of which Brooklyn dream girls are made." Besides, "I felt some sort of existential similarities with Marilyn Monroe." Both, in fact, were seen as romantic symbols, larger than lifestyle. Both were reconciliations of opposites: Mailer described himself as a radical conservative, a combination of street toughness and book learning. Monroe was the essence of soft, vacuous femininity -but she could be as bright and unyielding as a diamond, and she had deep yearnings for intellectuality. Both were disproportionately rewarded and resented. What could be more fortuitous than the meeting of these two uniquely American superstars? The project belongs in lights: Gentleman Prefers Blonde: NM Meets MM. Out of such amalgams come great legends, heavy bestsellers -but alas, not great biographies.

Not that it matters. Mailer's new Marilyn is a book of gargantuan propensities. It is giant in format (9 in. by 11 in.), formidable in price and weight ($19.95, 3 Ibs. 3 oz.), and incalculable in impact. It will soon be excerpted for publication in a dozen countries -including Finland, France and Japan. More than a million Ibs. of paper will be used for its first American printing (in Monroe County, N.Y.) of 285,000 copies. The Book-of-the-Month Club has made Marilyn its main selection for August -the most expensive book ever so offered to the membership. A TV special and screen bio are being planned. Doubtless there will also be Marilyn Monroe posters, buttons, dresses and hair styles. An industry is under way, triggered by this irresistible shotgun wedding of talents.

After such a prepublication success story, the book's merits and flaws almost seem beside the point. There are brilliant passages, of course. Every book by Mailer is, in a sense, a trip with Virgil through the underground. Norman is a first-class infernist; in Marilyn he explores the violent desperation of small-town American life and finds it far more like Winesburg, Ohio than Our Town. He analyzes the malignant asylum of Hollywood -as he did in The Deer Park, one of the best noveis ever written about that town. In the rectilinear powerhouse of New York City, he finds himself truly at home. Yet overall, Marilyn runs a subnorman temperature.

In Marilyn's first chapter, the writer coins a word, factoids -facts that have no existence before publication. Let his own factoid-filled volume be known as a "biographoid" -an occasionally brilliant book marred by speculation, literary swagger and chrome-yellow journalism. Mailer never met Monroe, and despite his professed affinities, he can do little more than guesswork. For every intuitive leap he suffers ten existential pratfalls.

Mailer speaks of his subject's "karmic" qualities but only offers the inadmissible evidence of hearsay and conjecture. He can sometimes sum up an epoch in a phrase -as in his description of Monroe's cinema personality during the years of the DiMaggio marriage. On screen, "something as hard and blank as a New York Yankee out for a share of the spoils is now in her expression." Yet he can be as gaseous as a press agent. "Small wonder the back seat of her car looks like a crash pad," he writes. "She is an animal who needs the funky familiar of her lair." Evidently, Mailer has not been in the back seat of any family station wagons lately.

In his portrait of this ineluctable "castrator-queen," Mailer defines the essence of the star: "She was never for TV ... she was one of the last of cinema's aristocrats and may not have wanted to be examined, then ingested, in the neighborly reductive dimensions of America's living room. No, she belonged to the occult church of the film, and the last covens of Hollywood." But just as often, he can suggest Louella Parsons at her coyest: "Soon Sinatra will give her a white poodle which she calls 'Maf,' for she is forever teasing Sinatra about his connections."

Beyond Sex. Even Mailer's humor seems as heavy as the book itself: "The letters in Marilyn Monroe (if the "a" were used twice and the "o" but once) would spell his own name, leaving only the "y" for excess." Indeed so, and the letters in Norman Mailer are an anagram of "Nil, O rare man" with an M left over for Marilyn, Mailer or just plain moonshine.

Or money. The outsized potential of the book is no mystery. Marilyn's subject is, after all, the greatest float in the pageant of cinema's doomed blondes -women like Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Jayne Mansfield, Carole Landis -all of whom died young and under tragic circumstances. But unlike the others, the voluptuously tragic figure of Monroe continues to exert an attraction beyond nostalgia and, very possibly, beyond sex itself. Last October, for example, thousands of viewers queued up for hours in Tokyo to glimpse a gallery of Monroe poses. In Los Angeles, blow-ups of those photographs sold for $250 apiece. Was it merely libidinous curiosity? But there are more graphic shots in any porn shop in town. Could it have been a collective sigh for the irretrievable past? But no other '50s personality could have attracted such crowds or commanded such prices. A $19.95 biography of Kim Novak? Elizabeth Taylor? Jane Russell? Unthinkable.

As for her biographer, he too is beyond the calipers of ordinary critical measurements. The raunchy pug, the political candidate, the ultrajournalist has become, at 50, the grand middle-aged man of American letters. No longer the deafening celebrant of the Orgasm, the notorious wife stabber whose looming presence could constitute a threat, Mailer has grown almost mellow. A detached retina has taken him physically, if not metaphorically, out of the boxing ring. Past the middle of the journey, he is learning how to sail. His aesthetics tend to look to the 19th century's achievements of mythos and style. His ethics, full of references to "celestial or satanic endeavors," are astonishingly close to the medieval conception of original sin ("If society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?"). In his politics, Mailer, as always, remains a true original. The Procrustean brackets of liberalism, for example, have never been able to embrace him. Indeed, his tocsins often seem to have been recorded from the pulpit of some brimstone preacher: "This evil twentieth century with its curse on the species, its oppressive Faustian lusts, its technological excrement all over the conduits of nature, its entrapment of the innocence of the best."

He is secure in the knowledge that such books as Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago have altered the course and style of reportage, perhaps forever. Novels like An American Dream and Why Are We in Viet Nam? have been rediscovered. The once indifferent public now treats him as a figure of Hemingway proportions. The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award have been bestowed, as has election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. It is no wonder that Mailer was chosen to be the chronicler of the life and times of Marilyn. The wonder is that he was not the first choice.

For Marilyn was not Norman's conception. The project was assembled by the Barnum of still photography, Larry Schiller. From his earliest years, Schiller, 36, has been cursed with a sightless eye. But he was concomitantly blessed with the hustler's twin gifts: overweening ambition and an ability to be at the right place with the right lens. On assignment for Paris Match in 1962, he snapped the consecrated shots of Marilyn romping nude at poolside. "Do you think I should really send those pictures out?" she asked Schiller later. It was the rabbit asking the fox if she should venture into the meadow. "You're already famous, Marilyn," he counseled. "Now you can make me famous,"

From then on, Schiller never looked back. As Jack Ruby lay on his deathbed, Schiller smuggled a recorder into the hospital room to tape the dying man's confession -that he acted alone and on impulse. Soon afterward Schiller got out a record: Why Did Lenny Bruce Die?, a post-mortem by Bruceans; then, after the Manson murders, he homed in on Susan Atkins for yet another exclusive interview with a killer. The book became a Signet paperback quickie, The Killing of Sharon Tate.

Venus's-Flytrap. Last year Schiller came full circle -to the woman who had brought him his initial fame. With the success of his Monroe exhibitions Schiller decided that Marilyn was too big for galleries. She needed to be preserved between cloth covers. But the book business had been experiencing a soft market in coffee-table items. Publishers Grosset & Dunlap decided that if a picture was worth a thousand words, surely 111 pictures needed, say, 25,000! But who would write the text?

French Novelist Romain Gary seemed a likely choice. So did Gloria Steinem. Very likely, Gary would have provided a polished but unsurprising sketch. As for Steinem, there is no Mstery to her bias. Marilyn, in one of her last interviews, complained: "That's the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing." It takes little imagination to see the Venus's-flytrap that Steinem could have grown from that seedling. But, neither writer has quite the emotional magic of Norman Mailer. As another chance to roll the karmic dice?

Why was Mailer attracted to the book? Was it as a method of re-creating the object of the American dream? As a mode of escape for the prisoner of sex?

"As a way of making money," recalls Mailer, who tends to lag behind IRS demands. "I had some debts. Let me tell the truth. I was seriously behind. I called Scott Meredith, my agent, and said, 'Before I start work on my novel again, I think I need to take a short job that might pay well.' "

The novel is a formidable task -a 300,000-word chronicle that Meredith describes as the saga of a Jewish family from ancient Egypt to the present day. Given the temporal strictures of that project, it is not surprising that Mailer welcomed the chance to write some more recent history. The workman's compensation was also intriguing: a $50,000 advance against royalties. But for the first time, Mailer was not in full control of his property. The book's 24 photographers receive two-thirds of the author's royalty gross -and Schiller's Company gets 49% of their take. The other third is Mailer's alone.

In his Brooklyn Heights flat, the author settled back last week for a leisurely interview with TIME'S Marsh Clark. Mailer appeared a bit peaked after a 20-day fast (no solids, water but no booze) that brought him down from 188 to 165 Ibs. "I've really gotten to the point where I'm like an old prizefighter, and if my manager comes up to me and says, 'I've got you a tough fight with a good purse,' I go into the ring. Nothing makes an old fighter any madder than to do a charity benefit."

Five wives, two dwellings -he also owns a house near Stockbridge, Mass. -and seven children* populate the Mailer background. With enormous expenditures -the writer and his dependents need $200,000 before taxes per year -charity begins at Brooklyn Heights. Yet even with a sizable advance, Mailer could not fulfill the original terms of the contract. "I come from a long line of proud, competitive and vain American writers," says Mailer proudly, competitively and vainly. "We have looked upon ourselves as athletes rather than scholars -Ernest Hemingway and Crane and Melville and London. So part of the reason for this book is that I wanted to say to everyone that I know how to write about a woman. When I read the other biographies of Marilyn, I said to myself, 'I've found her; I know who I want to write about.' " As the obsession grew, the preface became a lengthy essay, then a full-length "novel ready to play by the rules of biography."

Blatant Chutzpah. Among the 93,000 words in the book are many by other Monroe biographers. Last week Freelance Writer Maurice Zolotow, author of Marilyn Monroe (1960), perused Mailer's Marilyn and pronounced the biography "one of the literary heists of the century ... at least a quarter of his book is made up of either direct big hunks of my book ... or other big chunks taken without attribution."

In England, Publisher Mark Goulden of W.H. Allen & Co. thought he spotted further borrowing in Marilyn. One of his authors, Fred Guiles, had written a book titled Norma Jean back in 1969 -a book Goulden saw reflected in nearly every one of Norman's pages. "In my 35 years in publishing," he fulminated, "I have never seen anything as blatant as this. In America you would call this chutzpah." Translation: Mailer quotes Norma Jean 255 times, with and without acknowledgment.

At the sound of the bell, Mailer always comes out swinging -often at the referee. "No one is going to call me a plagiarist and get away with it," he claims. "If I'm going to steal from other authors, let me use Shakespeare or Melville. I don't have to steal from Fred Guiles."

Or from Zolotow, for that matter. The literary phosphorescence, the wild hypotheses, are Mailer's alone. The influence of the other biographers is largely in the procession of biographical detail -though that represents a considerable and perhaps even ethically questionable influence.

Marilyn (nee Norma Jean) was, as the world is about to be reminded, a battered child whose mother and grandmother both went insane. As a child she was sent to an orphanage where, Mailer guesses, she began a rich fantasy life. "We are all steeped in the notion that lonely withdrawn people have a life of large inner fantasy," he writes. "What may be ignored is the tendency to become locked into a lifelong rapture with one's fantasy, to become a narcissist." It is a shrewd, knowing speculation, ruined a moment later by Mailer's Hollywood hindsight: across from the orphanage "a movie company's sound stages are visible from the window by her bed. At night, a repeating flash of forked neon lightning shows 'RKO' through the window. Sixteen years later, she will make Clash by Night for RKO release."

Through the tutelage of a foster parent, Norma Jean became a Christian Scientist -"the poorest," says Mailer, "in the history of the religion, for there was no pain she cared to bear if a drug could be found." It is the remark of an unwounded biographer jesting at scars.

By the time she was an adolescent, Norma Jean could not walk into a room without causing steam to form on the windows. Boys came around in packs; cars honked whenever she went for a walk. At 16 she was married to Jim Dougherty, a 21-year-old metalworker. The marriage lasted four years. Norma Jean soon began modeling, without much distinction, until a casting director named Ben Lyon got her a screen test at 20th Century-Fox. She emerged as Marilyn Monroe and started on her parabola of grandeur and agony.

Much of Mailer's chronicle is strictly pyrites -fool's gold in the Hollywood hills. He tells every hoary anal and oral joke about starlets that has circulated since The Birth of a Nation, and attaches them all to Marilyn Monroe. He makes her the part-time mistress of 20th Century-Fox Studio Founder Joe Schenck, but because the union is unprovable Mailer trails a disclaimer: "If there was sex, it was not necessarily the first of the qualities he found in her. We are not going to know. There is, on the other hand, no reason why they would not find each other interesting."

She did have numerous and provable affairs, but it was her marriages that made sensations. Tromping in the sexual battlefield, Mailer creates his most peculiar analogy: In her "capture of the attention of the world [she is]... Napoleonic." It is a conceit he follows through the entire book until at last Marilyn expires -the coincidence is almost too much for Mailer to bear -at Helena Drive in Brentwood.

No Nudes. Napoleon is followed through her complex marriage with Joe DiMaggio, though Mailer never directly attempted to talk to the Yankee Clipper -"I heard that he was impossible." So, apparently, were most of the people in the star's constellation; Mailer admits to only twelve interview sessions. One, however, is original -an encounter with Marilyn's photographer-lover Andre de Dienes, with whom she once traipsed across the West. Confessed De Dienes: when he wanted to photograph her in the nude, Marilyn screamed. "I won't! I won't! Don't you understand? I'm going to be a great movie star some day." The year before her death De Dienes made a sentimental journey to her home. "She was recovering from an operation for 'internal troubles, female troubles,' and the studio, she confessed, was trying to tell her she was insane."

With considerable acuity, the author analyzes Marilyn's years with her third husband, Arthur Miller. It is in this Actors Studio period that Mailer, like Monroe, enjoys his greatest successes. From the start he perceives Marilyn's enchantment with acting jargon: " 'Concentration,' 'sense memory' and 'penetrating the subject' had to impress a simple American mind with a prairie love of technology ..." As for the playwriting: "[Miller] spoke in leftist simples that might conceivably be profound, was reminiscent of such tall spare American models of virtue and valor as Lincoln and Gary Cooper, and so could certainly serve as a major figure for the Jewish middle class of New York (who were the economic bedrock of Broadway)... Miller knew how to compose drama out of middle-class values. No one else in that period did."

Cheap Shots. Marilyn, who had been locked out of that class by poverty, then fame, entered it with her third marriage. She began to cut loose from her old associates -her longtime acting coach, her early photographer friends, her former in-laws. If she was nearing her professional apogee, she was approaching her personal nadir.

Her life fluttered upward in a brief, delirious swirl, marked by such films as The Prince and the Showgirl, co-starring Sir Laurence Olivier. Yet success was not unabated. There were always cheap shots from the press, and even from actors -although none to compare with Mailer's " 'All right, Marilyn, be sexy [Olivier told her]!' One might as well ask a nun to have carnal relations for Christ."

Marilyn's ingestion of barbiturates seemed to rise in direct proportion to her recognition. Through The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot, she earned praise as an actress and comedienne of considerable skill. But she was also experiencing miscarriage after miscarriage. The goddess of sex was unable to bear a child -possibly, posits Mailer, because of her history of abortions. The Miller marriage dissolved long before its official conclusion in 1961. There was an affair with Yves Montand (who bore an ominous resemblance to DiMaggio) and a paralysis of will. During the filming of The Misfits she was chronically late, driving the cast up the wall and her costar, Clark Gable, to an early grave. Or so implies Mailer, who views the Gable-Monroe relationship in Freudian simples: Gable is her surrogate father. When he dies, she seeks to punish herself.

From the Monroe-Miller crackup downward, the biographer has few facts to exploit. He speculates about Marilyn's bedtime stories: "Was Sinatra good?" asks an unnamed "intimate." Replies the star: "He was no DiMaggio." With the death of Gable she began to sink into an irreversible depression. She was briefly institutionalized at Payne Whitney clinic ("The gate to the orphanage closes again") and later underwent an operation: "She seems to respond well to the [gall bladder] surgery -perhaps a knife in her belly pays part of the debt to Gable." She began to zigzag toward suicide.

Here Mailer begins his most irresponsible guesswork. From the beginning, Marilyn has served as one more arena in which he can parade his favorite devils: the Zeitgeist, the corrupt American instinct, the Republican Party, and of course its standard bearer. ("It is possible that Richard Nixon has spoken in nothing but factoids during his public life.") But Mailer allows no political favoritism. Of Marilyn's early success, he writes: "Down in Washington, ambitious young men like Jack Kennedy are gnashing their teeth. 'Why is it,' they will never be heard to cry aloud, 'that hard-working young Senators get less national attention than movie starlets?' "

Once a Senator has been quoted for something he never said, the gloves are off, and below the belt is the order of the day. Seizing the prevalent rumors of the period, Mailer amplifies the supposed infatuation with America's First Family, then affects to find traces of the famous Irish smile and style in every post-Kennedy photograph of Marilyn. Yet the author suddenly grows chaste when it comes to Bobby's gossip-mongered affair with her: "His hard Irish nose for the real was going to keep him as celibate as the happiest priest of the county holding hands with five pretty widows."

With Marilyn's death Mailer most dutifully obeys Oscar Wilde's dictum not to fall into "careless habits of accuracy." Did Marilyn take her own life? Possibly, says the biographer. But there is a pornucopia of other possibilities. Suppose, he offers, the FBI or the CIA or the Mafia found it of interest "that the brother of the President was reputed to be having an affair with a movie star who had once been married to a playwright denied a passport for 'supporting Communist movements' ... By the end political stakes were riding on her life, and even more on her death."

A sometime conspiracy theorist, Mailer offers a sheaf of contradictory gossip, much of it palpably false. Marilyn's psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, describes Mailer's final chapter as "all wrong, filled with fallacious statements that give rise to pure fantasy." Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles County coroner who performed Monroe's autopsy, has given the lie to more Mailerisms. Contrary to rumor, no stomach pump was used on Marilyn. Moreover, examination showed she had had no sexual intercourse on that final day, ending any speculation that she was in the arms of a lover on the night of her demise. The level of Nembutal in her bloodstream was 4.5 mg. per 100, equivalent to 40 or 50 capsules. It was not a case, says Noguchi, of "automatism" -that gray area in which a person used to taking pills becomes groggy, takes a few too many, and slips over the edge of death.

More persevering research might have given Mailer's conclusions a less shadowy quality. But haste, not pinpoint accuracy, was his rule with Marilyn. "I'm probably one of the better fast writers in the world now," he confesses, "but you never feel good writing a book that fast. I was driving under such march orders that I forgot to dedicate the book."

The next edition might make room for a small inscription to the star herself. For Marilyn is, in spite of its ambiguities and flaws, a tribute to her. Mailer's valedictory, however sentimental, is written with genuine affection: "And if there's a wish, pay your visit to Mr. Dickens. For he, like many another literary man, is bound to adore you, fatherless child." In truth, Mailer's uneven prose is a complement to the accompanying photographs. Many of the shots are evocative and glamorous, but insights are hard to find. In some pictures she resembles Doris Day; in others, one of her imitators, Jayne Mansfield. Schiller's work, rather surprisingly, is the most indulgent. Bert Stern's, full of crow's feet and harsh floodlit planes, suggests the outlines of a harridan.

In a brief critique of one of Marilyn's better films, Mailer writes, "By The Misfits, she is not so much a woman as a presence, not an actor but an essence -the language is hyperbole, yet her effects are not. She will appear in these final films as a visual existence different from other actors and so will leave her legend where it belongs, which is on the screen."

Just so. It is futile to look for it in Guiles' biography, or in Maurice Zolotow's, or in yet another book soon to be printed: Marilyn: An Untold Story, by Novelist Norman Rosten. Mailer has cannibalized all three sources, and because he is a larger talent, he emerges with a more sensational, compulsively readable book. Yet Marilyn has eluded Marilyn too. In the end she endures where she belongs, on the screen.

And Mailer -where does he belong? As he sees it, still at the top of the heap. Even with this biographoid, he is probably right. A writer who has contributed so many substantial and influential works may be forgiven a few piques and valleys. Still, one can hope that this is the last time he dedicates so much energy and metaphor to this kind of hurried history. For as Mailer admits, "journalism never does a writer any harm until he starts repeating himself, and if you do that, then you start presiding over the dissolution of your own literary empire."

Prowling the corridors of the Ervin hearings, searching for a possible contribution to the Atlantic Monthly, Mailer moves like a welterweight looking for a challenger -or a journalist in grave danger of repetition. That unfinished novel, it appears, may have to wait. Wait for what? For Mailer to produce more superjournalism? It has been argued, of course, that nonfiction is in the saddle and rides the bestseller list -that in the scorching light of contemporary events, reportage is stronger than fiction. It is a notion aptly refuted by a passage in The Assistant. Mailer's contemporary, Bernard Malamud, writes:

He asked her what book she was reading.

"The Idiot. Do you know it?"

"No. What's it about?"

"It's a novel."

"I'd rather read the truth."

"It is the truth."

It may seem rank ingratitude for a reader to ask for that sort of exemplary "truth" when Mailer has already contributed so much of his own kind. Yet in all his books, including Marilyn, Mailer has encouraged the reader to hope for more. It may be a forlorn hope. For Mailer now considers a novel "a grace. A gift from God. Either He gives it to you or He doesn't." Perhaps. Or it may just be Mailer's way of explaining away a terrifying writer's block.

In explaining away his recent treatment of the Kennedys, Mailer reasons, "Look, we're all taken aghast by Watergate. What we lose sight of is that this is great American drama and we're either going to come of age or we're not, and if we're going to come of age, we've got to stop this piety toward our leaders."

That piety must include the homage shown to literary as well as political and film stars. Perhaps Norman Mailer has been treated too piously; maybe he has been on top too long. Yet somehow one refuses to believe it. Half a century old, the writer hovers at the peak of his powers; the blue eyes still twinkle and the vigor appears undiminished. If Norman Mailer ever produces the book he once described as "a descendant of Moby Dick," his imperial qualities can be reinforced forever. And if he continues to pour forth Marilyns? Only then will it be time for him to stop talking like a champ.

* The children range in age from Susan, 23, to Maggie, 2, daughter by Mailer's present wife Carol Stevens, a jazz singer.

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