July 22, 1973

Marilyn: A Rip-Off With Genius

By PAULINE KAEL

A Biography by Norman Mailer Pictures by the World's Foremost Photographers

t's the glossiest of glossy books--the sexy waif-goddess spread out in over 100 photographs by two dozen photographers plus the Mailer text and all on shiny coated paper. It's a rich and creamy book, an offensive physical object, perhaps even a little sordid. On the jacket, her moist lips parted in a color photograph by Bert Stern taken just before her death in 1962. Marilyn Monroe has that blurry, slugged look of her later years: fleshy but pasty. A sacrificial woman--"Marilyn" to put beside "Zeeda." This glassy-eyed goddess is not the funny bunny the public wanted, it's Lolita become Medusa. The book was "produced" by the same Lawrence Schiller who packaged the 1962 Hedda Hopper story congratulating 20th Century-Fox for firing Monroe from her last picture; now there are new ways to take her. The cover-girl face on "Marilyn" is disintegrating; and the astuteness of the entrepreneurs in exploiting even her disintegration, using it as a Pop icon, gets to one. Who knows what to think about Marilyn Monroe or about those who turn her sickness to metaphor? I wish they'd let her die.

In his opening, Mailer describes Marilyn Monroe as "one of the last of cinema's aristocrats" and recalls that the sixties, which "began with Hemingway as the monarch of American arts, ended with Andy Warhol as its regent." Surely he's got it all wrong? He can't even believe it; it's just a conceit. Hemingway wasn't the monarch of American arts but our official literary celebrity--our big writer--and by the end of the sixties, after "An American Dream" and "Cannibals and Christians" and "The Armies of the Night" and "Miami and the Siege of Chicago," the title had passed to Mailer. And Marilyn Monroe wasn't a cinema aristocrat (whatever nostalgia reverie of the "old stars" is implied); a good case cold be made for her as the first of the Warhol superstars (funky caricatures of sexpot glamour, impersonators of stars) Jean Harlow with that voice of tin may have beat her to it, but it was Monroe who used her lack of an actress's skills to amuse the public. She had the wit or crassness or desperation to turn cheesecake into acting--and vice versa; she did what others had the "good taste" not to do, like Mailer, who puts in what other writers have been educated to leave out. She would bat her Bambi eyelashes, lick her messy suggestive open mouth, wiggle that pert and tempting bottom, and use her hushed voice to caress us with dizzying innuendos. Her extravagantly ripe body bulging and spilling out of her clothes, she dress herself at us with the off-color innocence of a baby whore. She wasn't the girl men dreamed of or wanted to know but the girl they wanted to go to bed with. She was Betty Grable without the coy modesty, the starlet in flagrante delicto forever because that's where everybody thought she belonged.

Her mixture of wide-eyed wonder and cuddly drugged sexiness seemed to get to just about every male; she turned on even homosexual men. And women couldn't take her seriously enough to be indignant; she was funny and impulsive in a way that made people feel protective. She was a little knocked out; her face looked as if, when nobody was paying attention to her, it would go utterly slack--as if she died between wolf calls.

She seemed to have become a camp siren out of confusion and ineptitude; her comedy was self-satire, and apologetic- -conscious parody that had begun unconsciously. She was not the first sex goddess with a trace of somnambulism; Garbo was often a little out-of-it, Dietrich was numb most of the time, and Hedy Lamarr was fairly zonked. But they were exotic and had accents, so maybe audiences didn't wonder why they were in a daze; Monroe's slow reaction time made her seem daffy, and she tricked it up into a comedy style. The mystique of Monroe--which accounts for the book "Marilyn"--is that she became spiritual as she fell apart. But as an actress she had no way of expressing what was deeper in her except in moodiness and weakness. When she was "sensitive" she was drab.

Norman Mailer inflates her career to cosmic proportions. She becomes "a proud, inviolate artist," and he suggests that "one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her." He pumps so much wind into his subject that the reader may suspect that he's trying to make Marilyn Monroe worthy of him, a subject to compare with the Pentagon and the moon. Laying his career calibrations before us, he speculates that "a great biography might be constructed some day" upon the foundation of Fred Lawrence Guiles's "Norma Jean" and proceeds to think upon himself as the candidate for the job: "By the logic of transcendence, it was exactly in the secret scheme of things that a man should be able to write about a beautiful woman, or a woman to write about a great novelist--that would be transcendence, indeed!" Has he somehow forgotten that even on the sternest reckings the "great" novelists include Jane Austen and George Eliot?

But no he decides that he cannot give the years needed for the task; he will write, instead, a "novel biography." "Set a thief to catch a thief and put an artist on an artist," he hums, and seeing the work already in terms to give Capote shivers, he describes it as "a species of novel ready to play by the rules of biography." The man is intolerable; he works out of the flourishes of the feat he's going to bring off before allowing his heroine to be born. After all this capework and the strain of the expanding chest on the buttons of his vest, the reader has every right to expect this blowhard to take a belly flop, and every reason to want him to. But though it's easy--in fact, natural--to speak of Mailer as crazy (and only half in admiration) nobody says dumb. "Marilyn" is a rip-off all right but a rip- off with genius.

Up to now we've had mostly contradictory views of Monroe. Those who have taken a hard line on her (most recently Walter Bernstein in the July Esquire) never accounted for the childlike tenderness, and those who have seen her as shy and loving (like the Strasbergs or Diana Trilling or Norman Rosten) didn't account for the shrill sluttiness, Arthur Miller had split her into "The Misfits" and the scandalous "After the Fall," and since each was only a side of her, either was believable. With his fox's ingenuity, Mailer puts her together and shows how she might have been torn apart, from the inside of her inheritance and her childhood, by the outside pressures of the movie business. But it's all conjecture and sometimes pretty wild conjecture; he's a long way from readiness "to play by the rules of biography" since his principal technique--how could the project interest him otherwise?--is to jump inside everyone's head and read thoughts.

He acknowledges his dependence for the putative facts on the standard biographies--principally Guiles's "Norma Jean," and also Maurice Zolotow's "Marilyn Monroe"--but deciding to interpret the data researched and already presented by others is a whopping putdown of them; their work thus becomes grist for his literary-star mill. Some of his milling is not so stellar. He quotes trashy passages (with a half-smile) and uses them for their same trashy charge. And his psychoanalytic detective work is fairly mawkish; we don't need Norman Mailer to tell us about Marilyn Monroe's search for parent figures--even fan magazines have become adept at this two-bit stuff about her claiming to her schoolmates that Clark Gable was her father and then winding up in Gable's arms in "The Misfits."

Mailer explains her insomnia and her supposed attraction to death by her own account of someone's attempt to suffocate her when she was 13 months old. But since there's no evidence for her account (except hindwise, in her insomnia) and since she apparently didn't start telling the story until the mid-fifties, when she was embroidering that raped and abused Little Nell legend that Time sent out to the world in a cover story, isn't it possible that before building a house of cards on the murderous incident one should consider if it wasn't linked to her having played (in "Don't Bother to Knock" in 1952) a psychopathic babysitter who blandly attacks a little girl? (The faintly anesthetized vagueness of her babysitter prefigured the ethereal vacuity of the face in the last photos.

When the author says that it was his "prejudice that a study of Marilyn's movies might offer more penetration into her early working years in film than a series of interviews. . . ." one may guess that his model is Freud's book on Leonardo da Vinci, which is also an ecstasy of hypothesis. But surprisingly, Mailer makes only perfunctory use of her movies. He can't be much interested: he doesn't even bother to discuss the tawdriness of "Niagara" (made in 1953, just before she won Hollywood over with "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"), in which her amoral destructive tramp--carnal as hell--must surely have represented Hollywood's lowest estimate of her.

Nor is he very astute about her career possibilities: He accepts the pious view that she should have worked with Chaplin and he says, complaining of 20th Century-Fox's lack of comprehension of her film art, that she could "have done 'Nana,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'Anna Christie' or 'Rain' to much profit, but they gave her 'Let's Make Love.'" Who would quarrel with his judgment of "Let's Make Love," but do the other titles represent his idea of what she should have done? (To her profit, he must mean, surely not the studio's.) Yes, probably she could have played a Grushenka (though not a Russian one), but does Mailer want to look at a Hollywood "Karamazov" or new versions of those other clumping war-horses? (Not a single one of those girls is American, and how could Monroe play anything else?)

Monroe might have "grown" as an actress but she would have died as a star. (Isn't the vision of the Reverend Davidson kneeling to her Sadie Thompson the purest camp?) The pity is that she didn't get more of the entertaining roles that were in her range; she hardly had the stability to play a mother or even a secretary and she was a shade too whorey for Daisy Miller or her descendants, but she was the heroine of every porny-spoof like "Candy" come to life, and she might have been right for "Sweet Charity" or for "Lord Love a Duck" or "Born Yesterday" or a remake of the Harlow comedy "Bombshell" or another "Red Dust." She might have had a triumph in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and she probably could have toned down for Tennessee Williams' "Period of Adjustment" and maybe even "Bonnie and Clyde." Plain awful when she suffered, she was best at demi-whores who enjoyed the tease, and she was too obviously a product of the movie age to appear in a period picture.

It isn't enough for Mailer that people enjoyed her; he cranks her up as great and an "angel of sex" and, yes, "Napoleonic was her capture of the attention of the world." Monroe the movie star with sexual clout overpowers Norman Mailer. But most of her late pictures (such as "The Prince and the Showgirl," "Let's Make Love" and "The Misfits") didn't capture the public. Audiences didn't want the nervous, soulful Monroe--never so dim as when she was being "luminous"; they wanted her to be a mock-dumb snuggly blonde and to have some snap. When Mailer writes about her "artist's intelligence" and "superb taste" and about the sort of work she did in "The Misfits" as "the fulfillment of her art," he just seems to be getting carried away by the importance of his subject. Back in 1962, he wrote that "she was bad in 'The Misfits,' she was finally too vague, and when emotion showed, it was unattractive and small," and he was right. It was already the Marilyn legend in that role--the baffled, vulnerable child-woman; she didn't have the double-edged defenselessness of her comedy hits, she looked unawakened yet sick--anguished.

But Mailer understands how Hollywood uses its starlets and how Marilyn Monroe the star might have reacted to that usage, and that is the key understanding that most commentators on her have lacked) though Clifford Odets's obit of her had it, also the story Ezra Goodman wrote for Time in 1956, which Time didn't print but which appears in his "The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood"). And who but Norman Mailer could have provided the analysis (that starts on page 35, the real beginning of the book) of the effect on Monroe of the torpor of her 21 months in an orphanage and why it probably confirmed her into a liar and reinforced "everything in her character that was secretive"? And who else, writing about a Pop figure, would even have thought about the relation of narcissism to institutional care? His strength--when he gets rolling--isn't in Freudian guesses but in his fusing his knowledge of how people behave with his worst suspicions of where they really live.

His best stuff derives from his having been on the scene, or close enough to smell it out. When it comes to reporting the way American rituals and institutions operate, Mailer's low cunning is maybe the best tool anyone ever had. He grasps the psychological and sexual rewards the studio system offered executives. He can describe why Zanuck, who had Monroe under contract, didn't like her; how she became "a protagonist in the great American soap opera" when her nude calendar was "discovered"--i.e. leaked to the press by Jerry Walk to publicize "Clash by Night"; and what it may have meant to her to date DiMaggio, "an American king--her first. The others have been merely Hollywood kings." He's elegantly cogent on the Method and his paragraphs on Lee Strasberg as a critic of acting are a classic.

About half of "Marilyn" is great as only a great writer using his brains and feelers could make it. Just when you get fed up with his flab and slop, he'll come through with a runaway string of perceptions and you have to recognize that, though it's a bumpy ride, the book still goes like a streak. His writing is close to the pleasures of movies; his immediacy makes him more accessible to those brought up with the media than, say, Bellow. You read him with a heightened consciousness because his performance has zing. It's the star system in literature; you can feel him bucking for the big time, and when he starts flying it's so exhilarating you want to applaud. But it's a good-bad book. When Mailer tries to elevate his intuitions into theories, the result is usually verbiage. (His theory that men impart their substance and qualities into women along with their semen is a typical macho Mailerism; he sees it as a one-way process, of course. Has no woman slipped a little something onto his privates?) There are countless bits of literary diddling: "--she had been alive for twenty years but not yet named!--"; the exclamation points are like sprinkles, Mailer the soothsayer with his rheumy metaphysics and huckster's magick is a carny quack, and this Hollywood milieu seems to bring out his fondness for the slacker reaches of the occult--reincarnation and sob-sister omens ("a bowl of tomato sauce dropped on her groom's white jacket the day of her first wedding"). We know his act already and those words (dread, existential, ontology, the imperatives) that he pours on like wella balsam to tone up the prose. And there's his familiar invocation of God, i.e. mystery. But it's less mysterious now because it has become a weapon: the club he holds over the villain of the book--respectable, agnostic Arthur Miller, a writer of Mailer's own generation (and closer than that) who won Marilyn Monroe. Set a thief to catch a thief, an artist on an artist, and one nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn on another.

It's not just a book about Monroe, it's Mailer's show. "Feedback has become the condition of our lives," he said in an interview in 1972. "It's the movies. We've passed the point in civilization where we can ever look at anything as an art work. There is always our knowledge of it and of the making of it." Whether true or false, this applies to Mailer, and he has made us more aware than we may want to be of this titles and campaigns, his aspiration to be more than a writer, to conquer the media and be monarch of American arts--a straight Jean Cocteau who'd meet anybody at high noon: Something has been withheld from Norman Mailer: his crown lacks a few jewels, a star. He has never triumphed in the theater, never been looked up to as a Jewish Lincoln, and never been married to a famous movie queen--a sex symbol. (He's also not a funny writer; to be funny you have to be totally unfettered, and he's too ambitious.) Mailer's waddle and crouch may look like a put-on, but he means it when he butts heads. "Marilyn" is his whammy to Arthur Miller.

In 1967, in an article written to promote the off-Broadway version of "The Deer Park," Mailer said of himself, "There were too many years when he dreamed of 'The Deer Park' on Broadway and the greatest first night of the decade, too many hours of rage when he declaimed to himself that his play was as good as 'Death of a Salesman,' or even, and here he gulped hard, 'A Streetcar Named Desire.'" The sly sonuvabitch coveted Miller's success and cut him down in the same sentence. ("The Deer Park" wasn't Mailer's "Salesman"; based on Mailer's own second marriage and dealing with integrity and the McCarthy period and sex and love, it was more like Mailer's "After the Fall.") In his warm-up in "Marilyn" Mailer points out that though he'd never met Marilyn Monroe, she had for a time lived with Miller in Connecticut "not five miles away from the younger author, who [was] not yet aware of what his final relation to Marilyn Monroe would be. . . . " It appears to be destiny's decree that he should take her over. Mailer isn't the protagonist of this book; Marilyn is. But Mailer and God are waiting in the wings.

How can we readers limit ourselves to the subject when he offers us this name-play: "it was fair to engraved coincidence that the letters in Marilyn Monroe" (if the 'a' were used twice and 'o' but once) would spell his own name leaving only the 'y' for excess, a trifling discrepancy, no more calculated to upset the heavens than the most minuscule diffraction of the red shift"? (What would happen to any other serious writer trying to foist his giddy acrostics on us?) He fails to record that both Miller and Mailer probably derive from M”hler. Siblings. He had said in "The Armies of the Night" that he dreaded winding up "the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn," that that was the one personality he considered "absolutely insupportable," but it was clearly a love-hate game--or why dread it? Actually he's in no danger. He's cut off from respectability, like our country; the greatest American writer is a bum, and a bum who's starting not to mind it. The time to begin worrying is when both he and the U.S. start finding virtues in this condition; we could all wind up like drunks doing a music-hall turn.

He can't get Arthur Miller's long bones, but he's busy trying to take off his skin; he wouldn't do it to Robert Lowell. But Miller and Mailer try for the same things he's catching Miller's hand in the gentile bookie jar. Mailer doesn't get into confessional self-analysis on Miller as he did with Lowell; he writes as if with lordly objectivity--but the reader can feel what's going on. He says Millers' possible fear of the marriage's failing, "a man who has lost confidence in his creative power sees ridicule as the broom that can sweep him to extinction" and then proceeds to make every kind of fool of him, attributing to him the impulses and motives that Mailer considers most contemptible. Ultimately what he's saying is that Miller wasn't smart enough to get any more out of Monroe than "After the Fall." With Mailer, if you're going to use, use big. The second half of the book is supremely cruel to Miller--and it infects and destroys one's pleasure in the good parts. The "novel biography" becomes Mailer's way to perform character assassination with the freedom of a novelist who has created fictional characters. He's so cold-blooded in imputing motives to others that he can say of Yves Montand, for example, that Marilyn Monroe was "his best ticket to notoriety." Is this how Mailer maneuvers--is Marilyn Monroe Norman Mailer's sure-fire subject after a few box- office flops? Is that why he shoots the works in his final orgies of gossipy conjecture and turns her death into another Chappaquiddick--safe in the knowledge no one is left to call him a liar?

He uses his gifts meanly this time--and that's not what we expect of Mailer, who is always billed as generous. This brilliant book gives off bad vibes--and vibes are what Mailer is supposed to be the master of. "Marilyn" is a feat all right: matchstick by matchstick, he's built a whole damned armada inside a bottle. (Surely he's getting ready to do "Norman"? Why leave it to someone who may care less?) But can we honor him for this book when it doesn't sit well ont he stomach? It's a metaphysical cocktail-table book, and probably not many will be able to resist looking for the vicious digs and the wrap-up on the accumulated apocrypha of many years, many parties. To be king of the bums isn't really much. What are we actually getting out of "Marilyn"? Good as the best parts of it are, there's also malevolence that needs to be recognized. Is the great reporter's arrogance so limitless that he now feels free to report on matters to which he's never been exposed? Neither the world nor Marilyn Monroe's life should be seen in Norman Mailer's image.

Pauline Kael is a movie critic for The New Yorker and author, most recently, of "Deeper Into Movies."

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