Marilyn: A Biography

Published at Smashwords

Published by Polaris Communications, Inc.

Original Copyright © 1973 by Alskog, Inc.
& Norman Mailer

Electronic Version, Copyright © 2011 by
Polaris Communications, Inc.

And The Norman Mailer Estate

So we think of Marilyn who was every Man’s
love affair with America, Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and
beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the
cleanliness of all the clean American backyards. She was our angel,
the sweet angel of sex, and the sugar of sex came up from her like
a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin. Across five
continents the men who knew the most about love would covet her,
and the classical pimples of the adolescent working his first gas
pump would also pump for her, since Marilyn was deliverance, a very
Stradivarius of sex, so gorgeous, forgiving, humorous, compliant
and tender that even the most mediocre musician would relax his
lack of art in the dissolving magic of her violin. “Divine love
always has met and always will meet every human need,” was the
sentiment she offered from the works of Mary Baker Eddy as “my
prayer for you always” (to the man who may have been her first
illicit lover), and if we change
love
to
sex,
we have
the subtext in the promise. “Marilyn Monroe’s sex,” said the smile
of the young star, “will meet every human need.” She gave the
feeling that if you made love to her, why then how could you not
move more easily into sweets and the purchase of the full promise
of future sweets, move into tender heavens where your flesh would
be restored. She could ask no price. She was not the dark contract
of those passionate brunette depths that speak of blood, vows taken
for life, and the furies of vengeance if you are untrue to the
depth of passion, no, Marilyn suggested sex might be difficult and
dangerous with others, but ice cream with her. If your taste
combined with her taste, how nice, how sweet would be that tender
dream of flesh there to share.

In her early career, in the time of
Asphalt Jungle
when the sexual immanence of her face came up
on the screen like a sweet peach bursting before one’s eyes, she
looked then like a new love ready and waiting between the sheets in
the unexpected clean breath of a rare sexy morning, looked like
she’d stepped fully clothed out of a chocolate box for Valentine’s
Day, so desirable as to fulfill each of the letters in that
favorite word of the publicity flack,
curvaceous
, so
curvaceous and yet without menace as to turn one’s fingertips into
ten happy prowlers. Sex was, yes, ice cream to her. “Take me,” said
her smile. “I’m easy. I’m happy. I’m an angel of sex, you bet.”

What a jolt to the dream life of the nation
that the angel died of an overdose. Whether calculated suicide by
barbiturates or accidental suicide by losing count of how many
barbiturates she had already taken, or an end even more sinister,
no one was able to say. Her death was covered over with ambiguity
even as Hemingway’s was exploded into horror, and as the deaths and
spiritual disasters of the decade of the Sixties came one by one to
American Kings and Queens, as Jack Kennedy was killed, and Bobby,
and Martin Luther King, as Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis
and Teddy Kennedy went off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, so the
decade that began with Hemingway as the monarch of American arts
ended with Andy Warhol as its regent, and the ghost of Marilyn’s
death gave a lavender edge to that dramatic American design of the
Sixties which seemed in retrospect to have done nothing so much as
to bring Richard Nixon to the threshold of imperial power. “Romance
is a nonsense bet,” said the jolt in the electric shock, and so
began that long decade of the Sixties which ended with television
living like an inchworm on the aesthetic gut of the drug-deadened
American belly.

In what a light does that leave the last
angel of the cinema! She was never for TV. She preferred a theatre
and those hundreds of bodies in the dark, those wandering lights on
the screen when the luminous life of her face grew ten feet tall.
It was possible she knew better than anyone that she was the last
of the myths to thrive in the long evening of the American dream —
she had been born, after all, in the year Valentino died, and his
footprints in the forecourt at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre were the
only ones that fit her feet. 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. She might be as modest in
her voice and as soft in her flesh as the girl next door, but she
was nonetheless larger than life up on the screen. Even down in the
Eisenhower shank of the early Fifties she was already promising
that a time was coming when sex would be easy and sweet, democratic
provender for all. Her stomach, untrammeled by girdles or sheaths,
popped forward in a full woman’s belly, inelegant as hell, an
avowal of a womb fairly salivating in seed — that belly which was
never to have a child — and her breasts popped buds and burgeons of
flesh over many a questing sweating moviegoer’s face. She was a
cornucopia. She excited dreams of honey for the horn.

Yet she was more. She was a presence. She was
ambiguous. She was the angel of sex, and the angel was in her
detachment. For she was separated from what she offered. “None but
Marilyn Monroe,” wrote Diana Trilling,

could suggest such a purity of sexual
delight: The boldness with which she could parade herself and yet
never be gross, her sexual flamboyance and bravado which yet
breathed an air of mystery and even reticence, her voice which
carried such ripe overtones of erotic excitement and yet was the
voice of a shy child — these complications were integral to her
gift. And they described a young woman trapped in some never-never
land of unawareness.

Or is it that behind the gift is the tender
wistful hint of another mood? For she also seems to say, “When an
absurd presence is perfect, some little god must have made it.” At
its best, the echo of her small and perfect creation reached to the
horizon of our mind. We heard her speak in that tiny tinkly voice
so much like a little dinner bell, and it tolled when she was dead
across all that decade of the Sixties she had helped to create,
across its promise, its excitement, its ghosts and its center of
tragedy.

Since she was also a movie star of the most
stubborn secretiveness and flamboyant candor, most conflicting
arrogance and on-rushing inferiority; great populist of
philosophers — she loved the working man — and most tyrannical of
mates, a queen of a castrator who was ready to weep for a dying
minnow; a lover of books who did not read, and a proud, inviolate
artist who could haunch over to publicity when the heat was upon
her faster than a whore could lust over a hot buck; a female spurt
of wit and sensitive energy who could hang like a sloth for days in
a muddy-mooded coma; a child-girl, yet an actress to loose a riot
by dropping her glove at a premiere; a fountain of charm and a
dreary bore; an ambulating cyclone of beauty when dressed to show,
a dank hunched-up drab at her worst — with a bad smell! — a giant
and an emotional pygmy; a lover of life and a cowardly hyena of
death who drenched herself in chemical stupors; a sexual oven whose
fire may rarely have been lit — she would go to bed with her
brassiere on — she was certainly more and less than the silver
witch of us all. In her ambition, so Faustian, and in her ignorance
of culture’s dimensions, in her liberation and her tyrannical
desires, her noble democratic longings intimately contradicted by
the widening pool of her narcissism (where every friend and slave
must bathe), we can see the magnified mirror of ourselves, our
exaggerated and now all but defeated generation, yes, she ran a
reconnaissance through the Fifties, and left a message for us in
her death, “Baby go boom.” Now she is the ghost of the Sixties. The
sorrow of her loss is in this passage her friend Norman Rosten
would write in
Marilyn – An Untold Story
:

She was proud of her dishwashing and held up
the glasses for inspection. She played badminton with a real flair,
occasionally banging someone on the head (no damage). She was just
herself, and herself was gay, noisy, giggling, tender. Seven
summers before her death….She liked her guest room; she’d say,
“Make it dark, and give me air.” She slept late, got her own
breakfast and went off for a walk in the woods with only the cat
for company.

Marilyn loved animals; she was drawn to all
living things. She would spend hundreds of dollars to try to save a
storm-damaged tree and would mourn its death. She welcomed birds,
providing tree houses and food for the many species that visited
her lawn, she worried about them in bad weather. She worried about
dogs and cats. She once had a dog that was by nature contemplative,
but she was convinced he was depressed. She did her best to make
him play, and that depressed him even more; on the rare occasions
when he did an antic pirouette, Marilyn would hug and kiss him,
delirious with joy.

They are loving lines. Rosten’s book must
offer the tenderest portrait available of Monroe, but those who
suspect such tender beauty can find other anecdotes in Maurice
Zolotow’s biography:

One evening, some of the cast – though not
Monroe – were watching the rushes of the yacht sequence. . . .
[Tony Curtis] is posing as a rich man’s son who suffers from a
frigid libido. Girls cannot excite him. Monroe decides to cure him
of his ailment by kissing him and making love to him. On the fifth
kiss, the treatment succeeds admirably.

In the darkness, someone said to Curtis, “You
seemed to enjoy kissing Marilyn.” And he said loudly, “It’s like
kissing Hitler.”

When the lights came on, Paula Strasberg was
crying. “How could you say a terrible thing like that, Tony?” she
said. “You try acting with her Paula,” he snapped, “and see how you
feel.”

During much of the shooting, Monroe was
reading
Paine’s Rights of Man
. One day, the second assistant
director, Hal Polaire, went to her dressing room. He knocked on the
door. He called out, “We’re ready for you, Miss Monroe.”

She replied with a simple obliterative. “Go
fuck yourself,” she said. Did she anticipate how a future
generation of women would evaluate the rights of men? Even so
consummate a wit as Billy Wilder would yet describe her as the
meanest woman in Hollywood, a remark of no spectacular humor that
was offered nonetheless in an interview four years after her death,
as though to suggest that even remembering Marilyn across the void
was still sufficiently irritating to strip his wit. Yet during the
filming of
Let’s Make Love
she was to write in her dressing
room notebook, “What am I afraid of? Why am I so afraid? Do I think
I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I am afraid and I
should not be and I must not be.” It is in fear and trembling that
she writes. In dread. Nothing less than some intimation of the
death of her soul may be in her fear. But then is it not hopeless
to comprehend her without some concept of a soul? One might
literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach
her. “What am I afraid of?”