Getting Marilyn wrong

...If only Miller hadn't got there first...

...Nor is that the worst of it...

...Mailer is a serious and honorable man, a greatly gifted writer, and it would be scurrilous to suggest base motives...

...tabloid squalor and triviality-that the lady preferred not to wear underpants (or, for that matter, delighted in her body odors, is enamored of her "cuddly boobs," kisses her own arms) is merely the silliest example of a nagging, running bitchiness, the end result of which debasement is a portrait of the artist as a Dumb/Dizzy Blonde, indeed a perfection of the stereotype, with the superaddi-tion of infantile narcissism...

...Not until her Ed Murrow television interview, and only after all that loving, selfless tutelage, did she dare go public and "use one of the words I learned from Amy," the startling, recondite word being "long" as in desire, yearn, much want...

...Doesn't even know what "damask" is, poor kid-damask-though you'd suppose that's exactly the sort of thing she would know...

...but his literary conscience is larger still...

...True, he felt cheated of her in life: how could she have overlooked him, living as she did just down the road during her marriage to Arthur Miller, in the adjacent Connecticut village...

...some unquenchable horror, some incubus that lay over all later success...

...The pot in constant need of filling is a huge one, as Mailer keeps telling us...

...That Kismet can't possibly be other than a show-biz term-and an especially awful example of the argot at that-seems not to have occurred to Mailer recently...

...Why photos of Giacometti, Richard Rodgers, Dizzy Gil-lespie, Avedon, and other persons of both sexes in no way related to Marilyn's life should appear, except that they thicken the book and display Greene's versatility, must be left to others to explain...

...She's crazy about and is constantly edified by Amy's colorful and erudite language, though she herself, while knowing just enough to be awed by her friend's brilliance, can scarcely grunt...

...quite the contrary: he imagines he's embellishing her "legend" as "nice" and "charming"-the words are his...

...But first and last the question of motive: what is it with Mailer that he can't simply let her be after all these * Of Women And Their Elegance...

...she was always good for a laugh...

...Thus, by a tremendous effort of creative will, he imagines the explanatory acts...

...A dab of Miller, something of Sade, a lot of Mailer at his embarrassing worst and nuttiest-and an ill-used, badly soiled Marilyn...

...The uninteresting intelligence-"revelations" of...

...Life with Marilyn produced a snicker a minute...

...Having already presumed to ask us to accept the narrative voice as Marilyn's, Mailer goes so far as to tell us who the imagined characters are, the imagined scenes and conversations: in short the fictions outright...

...That is my Kismet," she says at another point, and adds hastily "Whatever Kismet may mean...

...Finally, however, Mailer rests his case as he must on the truths not of life but of art...

...Naturally the obscure phrase "embarras de richesse," an archaism preserved in aspic by a handful of reactionary academicians, left her paralyzed until dear Amy translated it for her as "Choose your candy, kiddo...

...Now perhaps we can declare the hunting season ended and at last leave her to heaven.last leave her to heaven...

...Here, under his own relentless interrogation of himself, he declares his steadfast affection, respect, admiration for Marilyn as artist and woman...

...Can't utter the word "enthralled" without confessing it's "one of Amy's words," lest we foolishly suppose she might have had a few of her own (especially a word gushing straight out of the lexicon of press agentry . . . such as "enthralled...

...The real fun is yet to come...

...Hedges, of course...

...Speaking the language of an antiquated psychologism, Mailer labors under the naive illusion of the old-fashioned psychological novelist that if only you search strenuously enough and dig deep enough you'll find the buried secret and key to all the mysteries-what might be called the Fallacy of the Primal Scene-a repressed wish, an unconscious yearning, an actual or fantasized Event-those platitudes of primitive Freudianism...

...They tell us so much about women in general and Marilyn in particular that I am encouraged to take these chances with my imagination...

...Writing about her is a way-as Tolstoy, Flaubert, and a thousand other writers know and have known-of getting her at last...

...but Mailer is Mailer, an original, like it or not, one of a kind (consider what life would be like with two or more Mailers in our midst), and unlike most other writers Mailer will, given enough rope, perform astonishing tricks with it, just before hanging himself...

...Greene, costuming her in white blouse and black pompom skirt for some picture-taking, tells her she looks like a "Day-God" ballerina and not until later does she realize "he meant the painter Degas, who I had always pronounced to myself as De Gas...

...and if you think that's not enough, an extended episode with an epicene youth who hosts Hollywood orgies, turns on by sniffing armpits, bedecks himself with stetson hat and cowboy boots and, otherwise stark naked, leads an amorous Doberman pinscher about among the bodies writhing on the floors of his apartment, the scene of these flagrant idylls...

...And so saying, Mailer calls upon his Muse one last time...

...and insists that his "imaginary memoir" is intended to validate those sentiments, though in places his artistic conscience impels him to darken the portrait by introducing imagined material designed, as he says, "not to add to Miss Monroe's legend but to shock its roots...

...For "we cannot comprehend her inability to live with her success, or her incapacity to make movies without torturing herself and others around her, unless we are ready to posit some awful secret in her past...

...a writer's way of protecting his flanks, and the publisher aids and abets by calling it a "fictional autobiography...

...and to compound the offense, Miller never asked him over to meet her, fearful, as Mailer goofily charges in that first incursion into the life denied him in life, lest Mailer make off with her...

...Greene and his wife Amy were close friends of Marilyn Monroe throughout that period in her life, pillars at a particularly difficult time when she was enmeshed in contract disputes with her studio, heavily burdened by her own celebrity, and trying, with Greene as her associate, to establish her own production company...

...with The Executioner's Song, his "true life novel" about the life and death of Gary Gilmore, Mailer goes to some pains to remind us that the present book occupies an intermediate zone between literary categories, inviting us to "call this an imaginary memoir, an as-told-to book, a set of interviews that never took place between Marilyn Monroe and Norman Mailer . . . ," adding "If Marilyn Monroe has been treated with more intimacy than is my right, well, blame Milton's photographs...

...nor, to be fair, is the prospect of turning a handsome Swiss franc...

...Sodomy on the handlebars of a souped-up motorcycle speeding wildly down Sunset Boulevard at eighty miles an hour with a smelly, scarred, toothless Hollywood stunt man no less...

...On a self-improving list of mystifying words far beyond her paltry means, she spelled Bordeaux (as in white Bordeaux), spelled it (get this, now) Bordello- Bordello - "until I asked Amy, who gave a little shiver...

...as if Amy Greene's generation-old recollections, clotted as they are with charged and conflicting emotions, were facts hard as bedrock...

...Amy Greene's recollections of her late friend are almost always self-serving and unpleasantly complacent, and Mailer, by unquestioningly accepting the lot of them, enters into a nasty collusion to mock and violate his subject...

...But then, her real crush was on that "famous President" Abraham Lincoln, whom she "truly adored...

...and she, obliging goddess, not about to let him down now, grants him a final request...

...But by his own account all this is subordinate to his principal motive in exhuming Marilyn...

...287 pp...

...As SAUL MALOFF, a novelist and critic, is a regular contributor...

...And wondered, when she ran across the names Paphos and Lesbos somewhere, whether they were "dikes...

...years, eighteen since her sad ending...

...But for all this, lending a helping hand to a friend is not sufficient motive for writing a book...

...getting into her head, so to speak, is the next best thing, and perhaps for a writer an even better one...

...So it was first time around: Mailer went on babbling in tongues until, almost by inadvertence, he burst suddenly into lyric, actually shedding unsuspected light on his subject...

...and having uncovered that, you need look no further, you need only assemble the pieces into the formal patterns of art...

...luckily for Miller she saw a certain resemblance between the two...

...By Norman Mailer...

...Mailer is glad to impart to us gory tales of failed pregnancies, of devastating menstrual agonies, of innumerable abortions (regarded by the patriarchal Mailer, with rabbinical ferocity, as baby-murder outright), of sexual debasement of the sort familiar to generations of aspiring "starlets," "maybe a dozen, maybe a hundred unrecorded episodes out of the near-anonymous years of her early career that left...

...Photographs by Milton H. Greene...

...Not to put too fine a point on it: porn plain and fancy, fancy and plain porn...

...hilarious as this is, it gets better when we add to the pleasure of mocking her the even more exquisite one of baiting Miller, as when all wide-eyed innocence she informs Amy with the political sagacity of the 50's Left and purportedly straight from the playwright's mouth that "The working classes of the West will never buy the Cold War...

...Woefully unlettered, at least until the intellectuals gladly undertook her education, she was fair game (in the sense of sitting duck...

...Astonishing how tone-deafness can overcome a writer whose sense of pitch can sometimes be so fine: Mailer is altogether unaware of the thousand little indignities, humiliations, mutilations...

...They are so resonant...

...29.95...

...And so it is here: Mailer will surprise you just as and long after despair sets in, as it does early and often...

...WITH FRIENDS LIKE NORMAN MAILER . . . Getting Marilyn wrong SAUL MALOFF NORMAN MAILER'S second assault upon the life of Marilyn Monroe*- the first, Marilyn, was on balance bloated and self-indulgent, immoderately long, grossly verbose, wantonly fanciful: our man's besetting sins-Mailer's return to the unquiet grave raises questions of motive: the author's...

...Not that the expensive, extravagantly illustrated table ornament is a potboiler- of course it is that...

...Throughout, when Miller is not being banal, posturing, gloomy, he is solemn and pompous...

...In the late phase of her education, after her marriage to Miller, Arthur, she says, "kept bringing me literature-Russian books and Dostoevsky-and we talked about my playing Grushenka someday...

...Overheated, crude as all this is, Mailer has further "revelations'' in store for us...

...Poor Marilyn: fair game while she lived, and fair game still...

...Simon and Schuster...

...yet in his preoccupation with root-shocking, with what are and what are painstakingly intended to be the lurid scandals of Marilyn's imagined life-fictions summoned like ghosts from the darkest regions of her early pre-celebrity years, which, in the absence of the actual biography we do not and apparently never will possess, have the explanatory power of art to penetrate otherwise unknowable mystery-pursuing these phantoms, Mailer seems wholly unaware of the less spectacular but no less damaging portrait he is actually executing...

...and, much worse, he is venal, tightfisted, manipulative, and in the Greene-Mailer version the diabolical agent who, driven by greed, dissolved the flourishing Monroe-Greene partnership...

...Certainly it is the duty of an artist to shock roots, however infelicitous the phrase...

...And it is with this pit-sniffer that Marilyn plots the murder of his wife so that they may marry...

...Greene's photographs range from the shallow, glittering, trite, showy disclosures of the too-familiar world of high fashion and celebrity as defined by press agents and gossip columnists-from these to the occasional truly revelatory accident when the shutter caught its subject out all unsuspecting, especially one of Marilyn that is used thematically: exhausted beneath tons of cosmetics, sad, (as if she had looked deep within and glimpsed the future), "wounded" (in the Maileresque and also the less arcane senses of that romantic condition), without defenses, movingly beautiful: not the "starlet," not the Hollywood beauty, not the movie sex-queen of legend, but an unforgettably beautiful woman...

...Still jittery about his handiwork, he conducted a rather kindly and gentle self-interview, in the form of a courtroom trial, in the garish clutter of New York magazine well in advance of publication, by way not only of promoting the book but also and foremost as a way of blunting anticipated moral and literary criticism by the well-known strategy of getting there first and charging oneself with malefactions that turn out on closer inspection to be surpassing virtues hard-won against intimidating odds...

...Milton Greene's photographs, because they existed, must have constituted a reason in someone's mind for producing the present book-there they were, a whole bursting portfolio of photos of Marilyn in her best years...

...After enough of this sort of thing, fervent protestation of affection, admiration, respect comes to look a little threadbare, just a touch shoddy, possibly even oddly suspect...

...He himself is evidently uneasy about what he has done and why he has done it...

...she knew nothing, nothing-a blank tablet...

...Maverick," she herself tells us (this is an "autobiography," bear in mind-this is Marilyn speaking of Marilyn), is only one of the countless words routinely used by her dazzling mentor which she doesn't understand...