Overview:
It'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?
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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