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“ What is it about Marilyn Monroe that obsesses you so? ” — Mimi Reisel Gladstein

IN A LENGTHY, SINGLE-SPACED, TWO-AND-A-HALF-PAGE TYPEWRITTEN CRITIQUE

THE MAILER REVIEW VOL. 5, NO. 1, FALL 2011. Copyright 2011. The Norman Mailer Society. Published by The Norman Mailer Society.

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ject and the self-revelatory hesitations he expresses creates a correspondence between him and Monroe as they both projected a blatant forward sexuality that overlays an undercurrent of vulnerability.

Another service Marilyn/Marilyn performs for Mailer is facilitating his joys of linguistic excess. Given the spectacular and extravagant nature of his subject and her reputation, he allows himself a surfeit of verbal highwire acts. On occasion the result is fun as when he catalogs the list of Monroe's early Hollywood relationships: "Snively, Schenck, Karger, and Hyde! If she had been a bargirl lookng 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". But at other times his unmonitored metaphors and imagery are definitely in need of a discerning editor. In one jarring instance he writes of Monroe's final moments when "the wings of death lay wet feathers across her face." "Wet feathers" is a clumsy image whereby to communicate the dark eminence of death. Rather than a sense of awe, what is evoked is 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 is to describe her behavior "as sluggish as a dinosaur's tail". This metaphor is equally inept. The image conveyed is awkward rather than apt. Experience that repeats itself "with the breath of a turnip" is another of his odd images. Wet feathers, dinosaur tails, and the breath of a turnip--surely a wordsmith like Mailer could do better. In his explanation of why the "detritus of the insignificant" films she played in early in her career so damaged any good will she may hav accumulated as young women and led to "retaliations" he descibes as "nihilistic," Mailer pulls out more over-the-top verbal imagery. He calls Monroe "a sly leviathan of survival, and, Faust among the Faustians". In addition to the lingustic abandon, he also allows himself such salaciously voyeuristic flights of the imagination as an nvented dialogue after the discovery by studie executives that 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". He then devises such questions as cannot help but inflame the imagination: "Did you spread your legs?""Is your asshole showing?""Any animals in it with you?" Lest he miss the opportunity to use every profanity he knows, Mailer includes the statement, when trying to describe the divided character of Monroe's personality, that while she could be an angel, she was also "on hard and calculating

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computer of a cold and ambitious cunt" and then underlines his linguistic choice by stating parenthetically "(no other English word is near)".

The publication of Marilyn was a boon to Mailer both personally and professionally--and then as a bonus benefit unexpectedly, it was to serve him as a tool for seduction. In A Ticket to the Circus, Norris Church Mailer writes 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 writes, "Because I knew when I wrote this book that someone I had not yet met would read it and be with me". The Mailer chutzpah is in full force here.

Of Women and Their Elegance, Mailer's second appropriation of Marilyn 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 Marilyn, 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 states 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 anticipates his detractors in a make-believe trial published in New York magazine. Deftly titled "Before the Literary Bar," besides his own voice he creates the parts of the Prosecutor, the Defense, and The Court. The charge is "criminal literary negligence" and Mailer himself characterizes the work as a "falso autobiography" or "an imaginary memoir". The thrust of his main argument about his fast-and-loose treatment of the facts is that what he portrays 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. Mailer assumes the variety of voices, both pro and con, in an adroit manner, convincingly developing the arguments of his detractors. In some spots he even demonstartes 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". In another instance he

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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 with to rush that occasion".

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 claims 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 rationalizes that something in her unrecorded years in Hollywood must contain a "psychic cyst" or memories so bad that she could face them.

Mailer's rationalizations are unconvinicing and his 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 claims to need a defining episode, like a downed quarterback, Marilyn'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 unahappy and disturbed person Mailer portrays. 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 paints are almost cliché in their pornographic purpose. For Marilyn's first Hollywood party Mailer evokes 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 tries to get in on the sexual action of the lustful couples.

But the party is only the destination point for the heart of this imaginary episode. Traveling to this party, Mailer indulges his fantasy by having Marilyn engage in a brief fling with a fictional "Rod" (the double entendre is almost funny). They ride 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 Marilyn 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". The situation only gets more sordid after that. As if picturing Marilyn as so dissolute that she rides to the party on a motorcycle having sex with the fictional Rod, after which she gives him

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a "blow-job" only to spend the night in an orgy with Bobby is not enough, Mailer also givees her murderous inclinations. When the nefarious Bobby suggests they go over and cut his wife's throat, Mailer's Marilyn creation responds with "excitement." The prospect of murder stimulates her to the declaration that "I was nearer to myself than I ever wanted to be". She relishes the idea that "everyone would talk of me," seeing it as "beautiful". She acknowledges that she is "ready to commit murder." 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". 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.

Even on his own terms, with himself as judge and jury, Mailer's defense rings hollow. He claims that without such an episode the reader would be left with a characterization of Marilyn that presents only her "sweet, charming, madcap" side, thereby unable to understand why on so attractive would end so badly. Acknowledging what might have been "a failure of invention," he concedes that it is difficult "to conceive of one powerful dramatic episode that will substitute satisfactorily for the sum of a thousand smaller episodes". And that is, I would argue, because the thousand smaller episodees are more than sufficient explanation by themselves. Mailer, on the basis of what he calls "general knowledge" about the life of a Hollywood starlet., gives Marilyn the kind of demeaning and humiliating experiences that, along with her genetic and childhood history, could adequately explain her later behavior. Mailer has her remember being sent to perform fellatio on three executives in a row, on the half hour, before going to acting class. He even

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remarks to the prosecutor's question about the episode that "the scars" of that period in her life explain why a woman with her "angelic appearance" came to be so difficult to work with and inconsiderate of co-stars, directors and crew. Calling the excerpt "factual" he quotes both Lee Strasberg and Arthur Miller to verify the "call girl" and "chewed and spat out" quality of Monroe's early Hollywood days.

Mailer's sly manipulation here is blatantly self-serving in an additional manner. By making this particularly egregious episode Exhibit B in the trial, he can enjoy his imaginary voyeurism again. Not only are the offenisve events in the book, but in case the reader of New York does not buy the book, Mailer has the opportunity to present his self-indulgent imaginings for a different audience--those who might pick up the magazine. He has the prosecution make him read the whole episode to the court as Exhibit B. The titillation quotient is high.

As a sidelight, it can be said that still another use Mailer made of his writing about Marilyn is payback or appreciation to Milton and Amy Greene. Whatever the realities of their behavior in their relationship with Monroe, in both Of Women and Their Elegance and Strawhead, Mailer casts them a very positive light and puts complimentary language in Marilyn's mouth when she speaks of them. Milton Greene's particular charm is portrayed with Marilyn's initial reaction at their first meeting: "You're just a boy". Her expectation, given his fame as a fashion photographer, was for an older man. Mailer also tries to make him appealing in a scruffy kind of way when he has Marilyn describe him as looking like a young John Garfield if Garfield had been chewed a bit a by a toothless lion. He is portrayed as the only man who did not take advantage of Marilyn and she blames Arthur Miller for ruining their relationship. Besides the direct compliments, such as when Marilyn tells Amy her eyes are like stars and compliments her performance during the Edward R. Murrow interview as "truly scintillating" and done with "real poise" and "real vivacity". Mailer also portrays Amy Greene as a mentor to Marilyn in matters of fashion, introducing her to the fashions of Norman Norell. Marilyn lauds Amy's organization down to her color coordination of her underwear with her clothing. Of course, the Greenes are his co-authors in a way as they provided the reminiscences and the photographs that make up the bulk of the book. Milton Greene's ethics are also presented in a most favorable light when the break-up of Marilyn Monroe Productions occurs. With the comment, "It was not my idea to make

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money on Marilyn Monroe," Greene explains why he takes only $100,000 for his share when all had expected him to hold out for five times that much. The irony is not lost that Mailer, who is trying to make money on Marilyn Monroe, chooses this vindication for Greene. One might also say that Mailer uses this opportunity to pay the Greenes back by telling their stories along with Marilyn's. We learn a lot of their histories and talents. One of the last things Mailer has Marilyn do is recall how beautiful Milton's photographs are and remember, "Oh, how exquisite he could be".

The reception of Of Women and Their Elegance was mixed. The exploitive nature of Mailer's use of Monroe did not go without notice. Although David Marshall considered it a "wonderful treasure," mainly because of the photographs, he also remarked that Mailer was "squeezing the last dollar out of a woman he never met." Lawrence Wright's Texas Monthly article that explores the connections between fact and fiction, particularly in what is called the "new journalism," compares Mailer's Of Women and Their Elegance unfavorably to The Executioner's Song. Wright terms the former "reader abuse" and concludes that Mailer's depiction of Marilyn is unconvincing as he is "trying to fill the unexplored spaces in her personlaity with his own". In addition, beyond the critiques of the text of the book, it has the dubious distinction that the 1999 Esquire Book Awards named Of Women and Their Elegance as Worst Title.

It took Mailer a few years to get back to "piling on" Marilyn. This time, the medium was theatre. Although Strawhead is often categorized as a dramatization of Of Women and Their Elegance, there are a number of variances, probably occasioned by the differences in media and perhaps by Mailer's desire to emphasize the imaginary truth aspect of his take on Marilyn. Richard Hannum is listed as the co-author of the play. Among the number of drafts housed at the Harry Ransom Center is a bound copy that emphasizes the "staged" quality of the production. It begins with the ACTRESS, the DIRECTOR, and the PLAYWRIGHT discussing the issue of whether or not the ACTRESS should take the part and whether she feels up to it. She names her boyfriend, her agent and her consciousness-raising group as reason not to take the part. In terms of the latter, Mailer's cognizance of previous feminist reations to his "Marilyn" works may be in play. The ACTRESS names feminist indecision about whether to consider Marilyn a martyr, a victim, or a collaborator with the enemy. Further removal of the distance between audience and subject is accom-

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plished by the way, when the play is ready to begin, the audience watches as the Marilyn character is created. The actress draws a small black mole on her cheek and puts on a blonde wig. In addition, Mailer uses the timeworn theatrical technique of the aside to indicate that the "mirror of her mind" is being reflected to the audience. These he indentifcies as D.A.--Direct Address. There are many occasions for this. Much of the action begins at Marilyn's dressing table as she remembers. Stage directions call for the "actors who paly varying roles in Marilyn Monroe's life [to] appear...like 'cat calls.' "They are verbal memories for Marilyn".

Among the changes from text to stage is a different initial setting. Whereas Of Women and Their Elegance begins with an excerpt from a Life magazine interview shortly before she died and then moves to a Waldorf Towers suite, all of Strawhead takes place in Marilyn's mind. Added sound effects contribute to the wistful and tragic tone of the piece. In a number of scenes there are claps of thunder heard and in one version, "Smile Though Your Heart is Aching" is played at the end of the play as Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chapline walk off together.

Although Strawhead was never produced on Broadway, it did recieve some attention before going "kerflooie" in Mailer's words. In 1983, The American Repertory Theatre at Harvard had a staged reading for alum of Mailer's spec script. That same year, Provincetown Playhouse also produced a version. Mailer's sexual obession was blatantly evident in the early script that began with a fantasy interview wherein the Marilyn character gives a blowjob to the Mailer-interviewer character. Shelley Winters had such a negative response that it resulted in a Mailer rewrite. The 1986 Actor's Studio production was attended by many of Mailer's friends, some of whom, such as Kitty Carlyle wrote that she found herself "enormously interested." Less complimentary is a letter from Elia Kazan who diplogatically writes, "Your play is worth more work. You can and should improve it."

On three occasions, Norman Mailer made use of Marilyn Monroe and I choose my language advisedly. He "used" her shamelessly. In an earlier study, I argue that Mailer, in Marilyn, creates an auto-erotic fantasy to satisfy his actual inability to consummate a sexual relationship with her. Obviously, the illusion was not fulfilling enough and so he was to attempt satisfaction two more times--again through photograph and text and finally, when those did not suffice, by bodying forth his imaginative vision with live actors in a theatrical production of his script Strawhead. Barry Leeds has a less cyni-

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Works Cited

• Bailey, Jennifer (1979). Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist (Print). London: Macmillan.
• Carlyle, Kitty, Letter to Norman Mailer. N.d. MS., Norman Mailer Collection, Harry Ransom Center Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
• Dearborn, Marilyn V. (1999). Mailer: A Biography (Print). New York: Houghton Mifflin.
• Kazan, Elia, Letter to Norman Mailer. N.d. MS., Norman Mailer Collection, Harry Ransom Center Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
• Leeds, Barry H. (2002). The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer (Print). Bainbridge Island, WA: Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press.
• Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (16 July 1973). "Aquarius ON Gemini - I". New York Times (Print). 27.
• Mailer, Norman (10 Nov 1980). "Before the Literary Bar". New York Magazine (Print). pp. 27–46.
• Mailer, Norman (7 May 1986), Letter to Loren Plotkin, Norman Mailer Collection, Harry Ransom Center Humanities Research Center, University of Texas-Austin
• Mailer, Norman (1980). Of Women and Their Elegance (Print). New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Mailer, Norman (1973). Marilyn (Print). New York: Galahad Books.
• Mailer, Norris Church (2010). A Ticket To The Circus (Print). New York: Random House.
• Manso, Peter (1985). Mailer (Print). New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Merrill, Robert (1992). Norman Mailer Revisited (Print). New York: Twayne Publishers.
• Rollyson, Carl (1991). The Lives of Norman Mailer: A Biography (Print). New York: Paragon House.
• By Norman Mailer (Director) Norris Church Mailer, Robert Heller and Mickey Knox (Performers) (January 1986), Strawhead (Performance), Actors Studio, New York
• Morrow, Stephan (2008). "The Unknown and the General". The Mailer Review 2.1 (Print): 273–297.
• Wright, Lawrence (June 1981). "Shades of Gray". Texas Monthly (Print). pp. 196–207.