The Tamesis
Mr. Mailer joins the ranks of those hungry (adjectives for curious) people who like to coin new words, and then he’s so obsessed with “facts” that you’d think he hadn’t coined a new word in a month of Sundays; In what he calls a “novel biography,” there are “statements of fact” and “statements of fact” every few pages. Supply far exceeds demand.
Of course, we know that the author is deliberately irritating in order to live up to his reputation as America’s most irritating writer. We also know that he has a point to make – though his revelations are not shocking – namely that no history of a life has been recorded as openly, secretly, intricately and narrowly as Miss Monroe’s, with more than a perfunctory fidelity to the truth. It is difficult to know what his intentions were: it was not, of course, to cull the truth and reveal a pearl of great price, for although he may have known that his facts were false, he nevertheless repeated them and examined them with his characteristic majestic womanizer sonority, using his characteristic obscene vocabulary with which he sought at once to sanctify sex as a sacrament and reduce it to a free goat. The sacred incense of one side is drowned out by the secular stench of the other.
Mr. Mailer is therefore no better cook than Mr. Zolotto: He provides a wealth of other writers’ research on the elusive Marilyn—he never met her—plus his own essays on insanity, Richard Nixon, the police (who lied and brutalized innocents; they were pigs), Richard Nixon, narcissism, Richard. Nixon, on acting method, on Richard Nixon, on astronauts, on Richard Nixon, on “psychohistory” (the quotes are mine), on Richard Nixon.
Nonetheless, this bittersweet story survives in Faustian, and we read it reluctantly, but with amusement, surprise and melancholy, feasting our eyes on the wonderful photos of the doll goddess and recalling her infinitely silly and infinitely sweet little voice. As a comedian, Marilyn Monroe kept us in the aisles: Gentlemen prefer blondes, as Lorelei Lee, and Some people like heat, As Sugar, she brings an almost intellectual wisdom that’s all the more enjoyable because it comes from what appears to be a typical blonde on the surface.
Our vicarious memories of her as a fatherless waif with a crazy mother, moved from one foster home to another, raped as a child, and unsuitably married when she was not even sixteen – memories that bring tears to our eyes and make us happy at the same time: how much grit she must have had to persevere and fight her way from the bottom to the top, the American way! Her second marriage, which had us on tenterhooks for two years, to Joe DiMaggio was so well-suited that it almost seemed like a royal union arranged by ambassadors from the most popular and local sports and the most popular and local entertainment. What her subjects in the glorious monarchy didn’t know yet was that the Queen had intellectual ambitions, and that a few years before she met DiMaggio, she had met Arthur Miller at a party in Hollywood and was enraged by the creator of Willy Loman – who was also a salesman and whose story was the story of her life. Later that night, she gasped (in that breathless little voice) to her trainer and confidante Natasha Leites. “‘Do you see my toes – this toe? Well, he sat down and held my toes, and we looked into each other’s eyes almost the entire evening.’ She had apparently taken off her glass slipper, and he had taken it away for later when she had tired of DiMaggio’s world of men’s sports and stadiums and pictures After the tense encounter, she and Miller met occasionally and kept up a sporadic correspondence: she told him she wanted a hero to look up to, and he recommended Abraham Lincoln, writing: “Carl Sandburg… has written a wonderful biography. ” (The late John Berryman once designated this book as Sandburg’s only work of fiction.)
