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<span style="font-size:12px;""font=Alegreya Sans SC;""font-color=gray;"><div style="text-align:right;">M I M I{{pad|0.5em}}R E I S E L{{pad|0.5em}}G L A D S T E I N{{pad|1.0em}}</span><span style="font-size:20px;"font=Alegreya Sans SC;""font-color=gray;">&bull;{{pad|0.5em}}</span><span style="font-size:16px""font=Alegreya Sans SC;""font-color=gray;>269</div></span>ject and the self-revelatory hesitations he expressed created a correspondence between him and Monroe as they both projected a blatant forward sexuality that overlays an undercurrent of vulnerability.

Another service Monroe/''Marilyn'' performed for Mailer is facilitating his joys of linguistic excess.{{efn|I do not mean to imply that Mailer's linguistic virtuosity is sparing in other works, only that this work allows him even more occasion for unmonitored verbal hijinks.}} Given the spectacular and extravagant nature of his subject and her reputation, he allowed himself a surfeit of verbal highwire acts. On occasion the result was fun as when he cataloged the list of Monroe's early Hollywood relationships: "Snively, Schenck, Karger, and Hyde! If she had been a bargirl looking to sue an ex-lover in a raunchy case, she would have picked her law firm out of the yellow pages with a name like that".{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=89}} But at other times his unmonitored metaphors and imagery are definitely in need of a discerning editor.{{efn|My colleague Robert Gunn suggests that Mailer's prose flaunts a lack of monitoring, that in its "gleefully exhibitionistic (and highly erotic)" display demonstrates "not an absence of artistic control, but rather a deliberate choice to refuse propriety and proportionality."}} In one jarring instance he wrote of Monroe's final moments "the wings of death lay wet feathers across her face."{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=86}} "Wet feathers" is a clumsy image whereby to communicate the dark eminence of death. Rather than a sense of awe, what evoked was an annoyance; wet feathers would tickle or make one want to sneeze. Mailer's choice of metaphor to describe Monroe's inability to escape her past describes her behavior "as sluggish as a dinosaur's tail".{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=126}} This metaphor is equally inept. The image conveyed is awkward rather than apt. Experience repeated itself "with the breath of a turnip" as another of his odd images.{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=143}} "Wet feathers", "dinosaur tails", and the "breath of a turnip"--surely a wordsmith like Mailer could do better. Mailer pulled out even more over the top imagery as he explained that the "detritus of the insignificant" films she played in early on damaged her career and any goodwill she may have accumulated as a young woman which led to "retaliations" he described as "nihilistic."{{sfn|Mailer|1973|pp=89-90}} He continued by calling Monroe "a sly leviathan of survival, and, Faust among the Faustians".{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=90}} In addition to the linguistic abandon, he allowed himself such salaciously voyeuristic flights of the imagination as an invented dialogue after studio executives discovered their newest sensation had posed in the nude. Mailer excuses himself by pointing out that "a novelist has a right to invent the following dialogue".{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=92}} He then devised such questions as he cannot help but inflame the imagination: "Did you spread your legs?" "Is your asshole showing?" "Any animals in it with you?" Lest he missed the opportunity to use every profanity he knows, Mailer included the statement, when trying to describe the divided character of Monroe's personality, that while she could be an angel, she was also "one hard and calculating  

computer of a cold and ambitious cunt" and then he underlines his linguistic choice by stating parenthetically "(no other English word is near)".{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=97}}{{efn|I am reminded of an old graffiti:"Profanity is the crutch of the inarticulate mother-fucker." I can think of a number of words that would work as well. I am sure Mailer could too, but he liked to shock and as I argue throughout, he gives himself full license with this topic.}}

The publication of ''Marilyn'' was a boon to Mailer both personally and professionally--and then as a bonus benefit unexpectedly, it served him as a tool for seduction. In ''A Ticket to the Circus,'' Norris Church Mailer wrote of its role in their first encounter and subsequent courtship. In 1975, in anticipation of meeting the famous author, Barbara Norris--her name when they met--brought her copy of the book for him to sign. He did not sign it until February of 1976 when a relationship had already begun. Addressing it to Barbara Mailer he wrote, "Because I knew when I wrote this book that someone I had not yet met would read it and be with me".{{sfn|Mailer||p=89}} The Mailer chutzpah is in full force here.  

''Of Women and Their Elegance,'' Mailer's second appropriation of Monroe, came some seven years after the first. Like the first, it is heavily reliant on the visual. Here, however, rather than pictures only of Monroe, there are pictures of other women and their elegance. The photographs by Milton H. Greene run the gamut from Marlene Dietrich to Grandma Moses. In ''Marilyn,'' Mailer claimed to be writing a "novel biography" and he routinely referenced the biographical works of Maurice Zolotow, Fred Lawrence Guiles, and Norman Rosten, also often citing what he called "factoids." Here he baldly stated in a note before the text that he "does not pretend to offer factual representations."

Obviously foreseeing much of the kind of criticism that this book would engender, Mailer anticipated his detractors in a make-believe trial published in ''New York'' magazine. Deftly titled "Before the Literary Bar," besides his own voice he created the parts of the prosecutor, the defense, and the court. The charge was "criminal literary negligence" and Mailer himself characterized the work as a "false autobiography" or "an imaginary memoir".{{sfn|Mailer|10 Nov 1980|pp=27-8}} The thrust of his main argument about his fast-and-loose treatment of the facts is that what he portrayed in the book, "whether factual or not...[could] reasonably have occurred in Miss Monroe's life" and that they are therefore "aesthetically true" if not literally so.{{sfn|Mailer|10 Nov 1980|p=34}} Mailer assumed the variety of voices, both pro and con, in an adroit manner, convincingly developing the arguments of his detractors. In some spots he even demonstrated a delightful sense of self-irony. An example is when, after having been instructed numerous times to reply only to the questions asked of him, he has the court remark, "Maybe Mr. Mailer thinks he is being paid by the word".{{sfn|Mailer|10 Nov 1980|p=34}} In another instance he  

has the court assure him, after a question of whether or not he would like it if someone made up facts about him when he is dead, that they "do not wish to rush that occasion".{{sfn|Mailer|10 Nov 1980|p=45-6}}

Mailer's self-defense in "Before the Literary Bar" is that made-up parts of his fictional autobiography can be justified as having reasonably occurred in Monroe's life. However, his creation of the Bobby de Peralta character pushes the boundaries of a reader's willing suspension of disbelief. Mailer claimed to have made him up to try to explain the tragic ambiguities in Monroe's character, attributing them to buried matters in her psyche. He rationalized that something in her unrecorded years in Hollywood must contain a "psychic cyst" or memories so bad that she could not face them.{{sfn|Mailer|10 Nov 1980|p=45}}

Mailer's rationalizations are unconvinicing and this sordid and sensational section of ''Of Women and Their Elegance'' is a prime example of Mailer's "piling on." To demonstrate the appropriateness of this football metaphor, at the point in her life at which Mailer claimed to need a defining episode, like a downed quarterback, Monroes's background of illegitimacy, foster homes, absent father, family insanity, and a remembered attempted strangling in her crib have effectively already left her "sacked." Any one or any combination of the events of her childhood could more than adequately explain why she would be the unhappy and disturbed person Mailer portrayed. Dumping more excrement on her can serve little purpose other than to warrant the author's desire to give license to his lascivious imagination. The pictures he painted are almost cliché in their pornographic purpose. For Monroe's first Hollywood party Mailer evoked rooms of filthy pictures filled with naked people and the imaginary Bobby "naked except for cowboy boots and a Stetson hat," walking a Doberman named Romulus who tried to get in on the sexual action of the lustful couples.{{sfn|Mailer|1980|p=130}}

But the party is only the destination point for the heart of this imaginary episode. Traveling to this party, Mailer indulged his fantasy by having Monroe engage in a brief fling with a fictional "Rod" (the double entendre is almost funny).^ They rode to the party on his motorcycle, all the while having sexual intercourse at eighty miles an hour. Making the most of his imaginary license, Mailer has Monroe explain how she had only "to lean up on the handlebars a little, and he was in the proper place, if from behind, my dear. I could have become an addict".{{sfn|Mailer|1980|p=129}} The situation only gets more sordid after that.{{efn|Stephan Morrow writes of Shelley Winters getting up and objecting when he played that scene in ''Strawhead''}} As if picturing Marilyn as so dissolute that she would ride to the party on a motorcycle having sex with the fictional Rod, after which she gives him  

a "blow-job" only to spend the night in an orgy with Bobby is not enough, Mailer also gave her murderous inclinations. When the nefarious Bobby suggested they go over and cut his wife's throat, Mailer's Monroe creation responded with "excitement." The prospect of murder stimulated her to the declaration that "I was nearer to myself than I ever wanted to be".{{sfn|Mailer|1980|p=137}} She relished the idea that "everyone would talk of me," seeing it as "beautiful".{{sfn|Mailer|1980|pp=137-8}} She acknowledged that she is "ready to commit murder."{{sfn|Mailer|1980|p=138}} ***Murder is so appealing to her that it vanquishes her headache. If Mailer's excuse for this sensationalism is that he had to create something awful in her past to explain her future bad behavior, his is a sharply flawed argument. In this fictional episode, Mailer's Marilyn is already so lacking in any moral compass that she goes through all the motions of participating in murder, only prevented from the act because it turns out that the designated victim is not there. She is willing to commit murder with a man who does not even know her "phone number or my address, or even my last name".{{sfn|Mailer|1980|p=142}} Logically, whatever brought her to this morally bankrupt state had happened earlier and Mailer's invention should be flagged by the referee as unnecessary roughness. Two days after this imaginary episode, Mailer adds the information that she has an abortion. Cleverly, in his self-defense before the imaginary literary bar, Mailer has the Prosecutor question him about the factual basis for Bobby de Peralta and the murder plot. He acknowledges that he has none and even allows his Prosecutor creation to describe is actions as "outrageous" ("Before" 40). And I would add self-indulgent.