Norman Mailer

by J. Michael Lennon

  Crowther revisited the matter in a July 12, 1973, Village Voice article. He contacted all of Mailer’s detractors, and most of them ate some crow. Jimmy Breslin said that Mailer had been right, “and the asshole dilettantes who laughed didn’t know what they were talking about, as usual. The only two guys who should have been at the party were Woodward and Bernstein, but they couldn’t come because they were too busy.” Mailer, writing to Poirier about the party, said, “I have rarely behaved with less éclat.” But as Crowther reported, Mailer still saw merit in the Fifth Estate idea. “I still think there’s a function for it, when Watergate is over,” he said. “A continuing investigation can break a powerful institution, with extraordinary results.” Mailer helped establish the fledgling organization and was pleased when in March 1974 it merged with CARIC, the Committee for Action/Research on the Intelligence Community. It soon faded away, however. In an article in Counter-Spy, the magazine published by the new organization, he characterized its role as “homeopathic medicine—one small drop for a large disease.” He was vindicated by events, but his time at the pinnacle of celebrity was ending. Time now referred to him as “the grand middle-aged man of American letters.” What Gloria Steinem called the “breathless 10 years” were over.

  BACK IN STOCKBRIDGE after the party, Mailer picked up where he had left off with the preface to the Monroe photographs from the Schiller exhibition, 111 of them by twenty-four photographers. With the help of Schiller and Robert Markel, editor in chief at Grosset and Dunlap, Mailer obtained copies of twenty-four of her thirty films and watched them. Before that, he read Norma Jean by Fred Lawrence Guiles and Marilyn Monroe by Maurice Zolotow. He read a few more books, including Marilyn: An Untold Story by his Brooklyn pal Norman Rosten, who shared it with him in manuscript. He also consulted a series of gossip-crammed articles by Ben Hecht. Because he had only two months to write his piece, he interviewed—“in modest depth”—only fourteen people who had known her, including two of her ex-husbands, Jim Daugherty and Arthur Miller, several coworkers and friends. Pat Newcomb, Monroe’s publicist, lent him a nine-hour tape of Monroe talking informally, which Mailer said was “no small bonus.” He learned that Monroe’s favorite perfume was Chanel No. 5, and bought a bottle to experience the scent. His research agenda was modest but sufficient, he thought, for a preface of 25,000 words.

  As he wrote, he got “so excited” that the preface kept growing. “Let it be the longest preface ever written,” he thought. At some point, he realized that he was embarking on a biography. “I wanted to say to everyone,” he told a Time interviewer, “that I know how to write about a woman.” He would rely on Guiles and Zolotow for the basic facts, add new ones obtained from the interviews, and draw on his own experience: “I know an awful lot about living with one’s legend,” he said later. “And I know an awful lot, as a result, about the sort of separation of mind that goes on. I know what it’s like to live a little bit on the edge of schizophrenia.” His film work had given him insight into the sensibilities of actors, and his sports writing, especially his profile of Muhammad Ali, gave him a sense of how the ego of Monroe’s husband Joe DiMaggio might function. His Brooklyn roots were a factor, he said, not merely because Arthur Miller came from there, but because Monroe “had the basic stuff out of which Brooklyn dream girls are made.” For everything else, he said, “I speculated.”

  Beneath her celebrity, her comic ability, her beauty, and her sexuality (“the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin”), was her divided self. He believed that he shared “existential similarities” with her. Monroe was both sweetly vulnerable and a strong-minded careerist. Depending on whom you listened to, she was either sexually voracious or frigid. Lacking much formal education, she was intellectually ambitious and read Freud, Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Ulysses. She was brave, she was timid. Most appealing to Mailer was her determination to be a great movie star. His description of her intense desire to succeed recalls his own.

  She’d finally laid down a directive for herself. She’d become the instrument of her will. And her will said: you will succeed. Whenever anyone does that, they take everything that’s weak in them and they submerge it, very often for years. All hegemony is given to the strength. There’ll be a much weaker personality travelling with that strong personality which has its own habits, its own demands, and it will become more and more inflamed. At the first success there’s a tendency to relax just that little bit.

  He had done the same after Naked, engaging in what he called the “ego-gobblings” of celebrity.

  The manuscript was due on March 1, and as he approached the deadline, he saw that there was much he would not be able to write about, including an “indelible” impression he had of Monroe. In 1961 or early 1962, he had sat behind her at an Actors Studio performance. “She just looked like a tired blonde. She had a red nose and straw hair . . . really a great mound of straw hair wedged under a black babushka . . . all hair and big dark glasses in a forlorn little huddle. She had this sort of off-beat laugh, an irritating giggle not unlike the buzz of a bee or a wasp, an incredible sound.” The other thing he lacked time to investigate fully was her death, and when he was interviewed on 60 Minutes by his old adversary Mike Wallace just before publication, this fact would cause him grief.

  Mailer had seen many of the photographs that would be in the Monroe book, but hadn’t given much thought to how they would appear. But for Schiller, the layout of photographs by world-famous photographers such as Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, and Bert Stern was the main event; the text was secondary. Dyslexic and blind in one eye from a childhood accident, Schiller was not much of a reader; he had to lock himself in the bathroom and concentrate just to read a newspaper article. He said that when he was working on Marilyn he could count on one hand all the books he had read in his life. Despite this, he saw “The Legend and the Truth” exhibition of Monroe photographs he had assembled as the heart of an iconic book. He hired a leading book designer, Allen Hurlburt, and, initially gave as much thought to Mailer’s text as Mailer gave to the photographs. It was Mailer’s name and what he stood for that he wanted. “We’re laying out the book to make it exciting,” he said, “to make it lovable, huggable, and fuckable, you know, and so it doesn’t matter who the writer is, as long as the text is controversial.” All Schiller wanted, Mailer said, was “some nice grey matter between the photographs.” When Schiller went to Stockbridge at Mailer’s invitation, he discovered their opposed conceptions.

  Schiller was a bit nervous, remembering Mailer’s reputation as a brawler. “I expected somebody like the Hulk,” he said, but he found his host to be “very polite, overly courteous.” The evening started well. Mailer told Schiller that his wife was a jazz singer—“You’re going to love her,” he said—and for the first hour of his visit they listened to her records. “This guy’s easy for me to handle,” Schiller recalled thinking. But when they discussed the book and looked at the fifty photos that Schiller brought, Mailer wasn’t entirely pleased—he liked some pictures but not others, and asked questions about their placement. He felt that photographs of the younger Monroe should be near the beginning of the book to conform to his narrative. As Schiller drove back to New York that night, he was worried. He didn’t want to ask Hurlburt to redo his exquisite layout, but he saw that Mailer would not be easy to convince.

  Hurlburt called Schiller sometime in early March. He had received a copy of Mailer’s preface and was disturbed. He was prepared for up to forty thousand words, but not for the 105,000 he received. “We’ll have to tear the book apart,” Hurlburt said. Schiller convinced him that the basic layout would stand. The longer text could be handled by using longer runs of prose at various places. Mailer cut his text by about ten thousand words, and Hurlburt made the necessary changes. But when Mailer saw the new layout, he was unhappy. He wanted some pictures moved around or he wasn’t going to allow the book to be published. Grosset and Dunlap’s Markel passed this
on in a call to Schiller, who replied that Mailer didn’t own the book. If need be, he’d throw out Mailer’s text and get another writer—Schiller had final approval of the text. The book had been well publicized by Grosset and Dunlap; a deal had been made with the Book-of-the-Month Club and expectations were high. Markel, caught in a bind, suggested a meeting.

  By this time Schiller had read the text and liked most of it, but was worried and angry about Mailer’s discussion of Monroe’s close relationship with Robert Kennedy, and the lack of an interview with Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, who was at Monroe’s house the night she died. He told Markel that what Mailer had written could lead to a negative story on 60 Minutes. How much of this Mailer knew before the meeting is uncertain, but he recalled that by this time he and Schiller “were adversaries, and we remained adversaries.” Mailer came into the meeting “striding in like he’s coming out of the corner of the ring, ready to box,” Schiller said. Page by page they went through the book; Mailer suggested moving several photographs next to his text, violating the original design. Schiller fired back, “Your text is strong enough to stand alone, isn’t it? You’re a writer, aren’t you?” Mailer replied that this was the first time he had ever written anything illustrated by pictures, and “it’s going to be the way I want it.” They argued back and forth, and as Markel recalled, “There was a monumental stalking around and slamming of doors, and I had to go out with each of them for individual walks and cooling-off periods.” At some point, Mailer suggested that some photos be reduced in size and placed in the margins of the oversized book at chronologically pertinent points. “Schiller argued against it vehemently,” Markel said, but ultimately agreed to six small photos in the margins of the first two chapters. The basic design would stand. Realizing that he needed publicity photos, Schiller asked Mailer to go outside, which broke the tension. Schiller shot a role of black-and-white film with his Leica. Mailer was “pretty mad” when he left the meeting, Schiller said, but “I was on the train to success with the book and nothing was going to deter me.”

  Schiller’s exhibition had been given a Life cover story the previous summer and with Mailer writing the text, he believed the book could get a Time cover. Mike Wallace had arranged to interview Mailer, Schiller, and five of the photographers for 60 Minutes, and Grosset and Dunlap threw a $25,000 cocktail party for the book in Los Angeles on June 11. On June 21, the British publishing firm W. H. Allen accused Mailer of plagiarism, saying he had lifted portions of Marilyn from the biographies by Zolotow and Guiles, both published by Allen in England. “No one is going to call me a plagiarist and get away with it,” Mailer said. “I do not need other writers’ words or thoughts to make myself a book.” He had, however, definitely needed and used the work of both authors for his basic chronology and for many quotations, and Grosset and Dunlap had entered into permission agreements with them. Zolotow claimed Mailer had exceeded the limits of the agreement, and shortly after publication filed a $6 million suit against Mailer; Mailer threatened a countersuit. Then, as quickly as the controversy had arisen, it died. Both writers received additional payment, and Zolotow later issued a written statement apologizing for calling Marilyn “the literary heist of the century.” Whatever was paid to Zolotow and Guiles—reportedly $15,000 to Guiles and $22,500 to Zolotow—was well worth it, and the publicity did nothing to diminish interest in the biography.

  Nor did it harm Schiller’s effort to get Mailer and Monroe on the cover of Time. The magazine made the first move, asking for interviews and also for a dozen or more photos from the book. It was agreed that Marilyn would be the cover story for the magazine’s July 16 issue, and that the cover photo would be from the book or the earlier exhibition. When Time showed Schiller the proposed cover, he didn’t like it and refused to supply the photo—Mailer was unaware of all this. Time’s editors were getting angry. Then, one of Hurlburt’s associates, Will Hopkins, came up with an idea: send Time a layout of what we think the cover should look like—a photo of Monroe mussing up the hair of French actor Yves Montand (with whom she had a brief affair), but substitute Mailer for Montand using the photos of Mailer that Schiller had taken. It worked. Time’s picture editor contacted Schiller and asked for originals of the two photos, Monroe in color and Mailer in black and white.

  Mailer still had no idea what the cover would look like, and Schiller believed that when he found out, “It’s going to drive him fucking crazy.” The magazine appeared the same week as Mailer’s interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. Wallace focused on the last chapter of the biography, where Mailer theorizes that Monroe’s friendship with Robert Kennedy may have led to her murder by rogue elements of the FBI or the CIA. As Mailer put it, “If she could be murdered in such a way [she died from an overdose of sleeping pills] that it would look like a suicide for unrequited love of Bobby Kennedy, it would have been a huge embarrassment for the Kennedys.” Pressed by Wallace, he says the motive might have been anger at President Kennedy’s botched handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He had some basis for his theory; a young friend from Provincetown, Richard Stratton, had gone to Los Angeles to poke around at Mailer’s request. But Mailer made it clear that murder was only a possibility, saying that if he were giving a handicapper’s estimate, it would be ten to one that it was an accidental suicide. He also said that he did not think Kennedy and Monroe were having an affair. It was, however, 50-50 that Robert Kennedy had visited her the night that she died, he continued, despite the insistence of Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, that Kennedy had not been there—a statement Murray later recanted. Mailer stumbled when asked why he didn’t interview Murray, saying he had to meet a publishing deadline. Wallace was unrelenting on two points: that he wrote it for money—the segment was titled “Monroe, Mailer and the Fast Buck”—and that Mailer “failed to do the research that would have made it a good biography.” Mailer refuted the first point easily—what writer doesn’t write for money—but conceded that the book is “a half-finished exploration.”

  As painful as this admission was, the controversy didn’t hurt sales. Besides Time, the biography was a cover story for Atlantic, the NYRB, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Translation rights were purchased by publishers in at least fifteen countries. Including the printings by the Book-of-the-Month and other book clubs, over 400,000 copies were in print in the United States by the end of August, the largest number of any Mailer book since The Naked and the Dead. The paperback, which had a new final chapter on Monroe’s death, appeared eighteen months later and sold over 600,000 copies.

  No Mailer book was as widely reviewed as Marilyn. Every major and countless minor media outlets took a crack at it. The combination of Mailer as biographer of Hollywood’s sex goddess and an extraordinary selection of photographs elicited comment from almost every small-town newspaper book editor. At a certain combustible point, both crude critiques and elegant appreciations fed the bonfire. Although few were unequivocal in their praise, few panned it completely. John Simon, writing in The New Leader, was the exception; he referred to it as “a new genre called transcendental masturbation or metaphysical wet dreaming,” and called it “a very poorly written, very demented book.” Simon had become Mailer’s leading reviler. In contrast film critic Pauline Kael’s review of Marilyn on the front page of The New York Times Book Review was notably fair, chiding him for not paying enough attention to Monroe’s films, but finding much to admire. Half of the book, she says, “is great as only a great writer, using his brains and feelers could make it.”

  Mailer wrote in the biography that Monroe’s early years in an orphanage prepared her for “creating too wan a psyche and too glamorous a one.”

  Since the orphan’s presence in the world is obliged to turn drab, the life of fantasy, in compensation, can become extreme. We are all steeped in the notion that lonely withdrawn people have a life of large inner fantasy. What may be ignored is the tendency to become locked into a lifelong rapture with one’s fantasy, to become a narcissist. The word
, however, fails to suggest the hermetic imprisonment of such a love affair, or the depth of the incapacity to love anyone else, except as a servant to one’s dream of glamour.

  Laid bare here is what Mailer believed to be the mainspring of Monroe’s psychology, and with some qualifications, his own as well. He was no orphan, but his narcissism, born of early spectacular success, parallels hers. He uses the same word—“Napoleonic”—to describe her desire to capture the attention of the world that he often used in connection with his own. “She is her career, and her career is herself,” he says, and this shoe fits him as well, if not quite as snugly. Like him, she is an actor with many faces: “No one can be certain whether she was playing an old role, experimenting with a new one, or even being nothing less than the true self (which she had spent her life trying to discover).”

  The trying on of faces by great actors, Mailer continues, is the desperate search for an identity. “It is no ordinary identity that will suit them, and no ordinary desperation can drive them. The force that propels a great actor in his youth is insane ambition.” Monroe’s quicksilver nature can only be captured by a novelist, he says. His biography must be seen, therefore, as “a species of novel ready to play by the rules of biography.” He puts it another way: “Set a thief to catch a thief, and put an artist on an artist.” Great actors (Monroe, Brando), like great politicians (Kennedy, Nixon), great poets (Lowell, Ginsberg), and great boxers (Torres, Ali) are best grasped by the handles of identity and ambition. Novelists are best equipped to do the grasping, and great novelists have the surest hands.