From the Archives: Jean Stafford on Norman Mailer’s Prurient Marilyn Monroe Biography
“Norman Mailer should be bull-whipped for what he did to Marilyn Monroe,” wrote Stafford in 1973.
“Norman Mailer’s Marilyn Monroe,” by Jean Stafford, was originally published in the September 1973 issue of Vogue.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Norman Mailer—who looks at the newspapers the way other people look in mirrors: to make sure he is still himself—pulled down a newsslide of publicity with his lawsuit-threatening, critic-stumping para-biography Marilyn: a big, heavy, glossy volume with overfed but hasty Mailer prose wrapped around pictures of Marilyn Monroe taken by two dozen photographers, some with names almost as well known as hers. The book was published by Grosset & Dunlap, who share with Mailer the rattles of legal sabers from authors and publishers of books from which parts of the story came. Star Mailer and Star Monroe seem obviously fated for each other; but since HE didn’t meet HER in this life, Jean Stafford, who did meet Marilyn Monroe and tells us about it, thinks HE should have waited for heaven.
One hot July afternoon in the early 1950s I met Marilyn Monroe in Westport, Connecticut, at a house where I was lunching. She’d been brought there by her pro tem impresario, the fashion photographer Milton Greene, for the purpose of learning to water-ski. Milton Greene was a friend of my host Joseph Thorndike; and Thorndike’s house, situated somewhat obscurely on Long Island Sound, had been selected as being sufficiently out of the way not to draw crowds. Miss Monroe wouldn’t have drawn them anyhow unless the town crier had heralded her name; for she was, to look at, as undistinguished as the multitudes that sunned on Compo Beach nearby. Without the prophylactics of maquillage, her face was unremarkable; her hair needed a brisk comb and brush; she was unseemly plump; and the shape of her physical accouterments were just short of displeasing. She looked to me like a Slavic waitress on her day off from a truck drivers’ diner. She was so meek and mild that I do not recall a word she said and it is quite possible that she said none.
I saw her again ten years later on the set of The Misfits in Nevada when, though interiorly ravaged, she was to look as ethereal as a mist, as incandescent as a shooting star, so pensive, so bewildered and heartsore that she would have brought out the mother instinct in a stone. She was complicated, no doubt of that, but whether she was as complicated as Norman Mailer makes her out is open to question. What is even more open to question is whether Norman Mailer, our Self-Advertised expert on so many subjects (did you see the television cameras panning to him at the Watergate hearings?), is equipped to write her definitive biography and to examine her as the anthropological quintessence of an America that killed John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King and brought about the emergence of Richard Nixon. Mr. Mailer likes the word “existential” better even than he does the nicknames for fornication; and so, because I do not know what “existential” means (and am too set in my ways to find out), I have perhaps read his book on Miss Monroe with unseemly frivolity.
Of Maurice Zolotow’s biography of Marilyn Monroe, Mailer writes “. . . his material is reamed [the use of this word is, if not inaccurate, at least doubtful] with overstressed and hollow anecdotes untrustworthy by the very style of their prose, a feature writer heating up the old dishes of other feature writers, and so a book which has fewer facts than factoids (to join the hungry ranks of those who coin a word), that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or a newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority. (It is possible, for example, that Richard Nixon has spoken in nothing but factoids during his public life.)” I would hate to have to parse this prose, which is about as trustworthy as a banana peel.
Having joined the hungry (curious adjective) ranks of those who like to coin a word, Mr. Mailer then takes such a fancy to “factoid” that you’d think he hadn’t had a neologism in a month of Sundays; “factoids” and “factoidals” litter every few pages of what he calls his “Novel Biography.” The supply is far greater than the demand.
We know, of course, that the author is deliberately being irritating in order to live up to his reputation as the most irritating writer in America. We know, as well, that he has a point to make—although his revelation is hardly staggering—i.e., that no history of a life lived as publicly, and as secretly, as intricately, and as narrowly as Miss Monroe’s can possibly be set down with more than a perfunctory fidelity to the truth. It is hard to know what his intention is: certainly it is not to scrape away the factoids and to reveal a pearl of great price, for, while he may know his facts to be bogus, he nonetheless repeats them and sonorously examines them with his particular sort of majesterial prurience, using his particular vocabulary of obscenity with which he seeks at once to hallow sex as a sacrament and to debase it to a free-for-all of goats. The divine incense of the one is overwhelmed by the profane effluvia of the other.
In consequence, Mr. Mailer is no better a cook than Mr. Zolotow: he serves up a slumgullion of other writers’ studies of the elusive Marilyn—whom he never met—and, in addition, chucks in disquisitions of his own on insanity, on Richard Nixon, on policemen (they tell lies and brutalize the blameless; they are pigs), on Richard Nixon, on narcissism, on Richard Nixon, on Method Acting, on Richard Nixon, on astronauts, on Richard Nixon, on “psychohistory” (the inverted commas are mine), on Richard Nixon.
All the same, the bittersweet story survives the fustian, and we read reluctantly but with amusement and amazement and melancholy and feast our eyes on the splendid photographs of the baby-doll goddess and recall her infinitely foolish and infinitely sweet little voice. As a comedienne, Marilyn Monroe laid us in the aisles: to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as Lorelei Lee, and to Some Like It Hot, as Sugar, she brought a wit that was almost wise and was the more delectable because it emanated from what on the surface appeared to be the archetypal dizzy blonde.
Our vicarious memories of her as a fatherless waif with a mad mother, shunted from one foster home to another, raped as a child, unsuitably married when she was barely sixteen—these memories, while they brought tears to our eyes, at the same time gladdened us: what gumption she had to persevere and fight her way (in the American way) from the very bottom to the very top! Her second marriage, after a courtship that kept us on tenterhooks for two years, to Joe Di Maggio was so appropriate that it seemed almost like a royal union arranged by ambassadors from the realms of the most popular and indigenous of sports and of the most popular and indigenous of entertainment. What the subjects in the resplendent monarchy did not yet know was that the queen had intellectual aspirations and that, some years before she met DiMaggio, she had seen Arthur Miller at a party in Hollywood and had been inflamed by the creator of Willy Loman—she, too, was a salesman and Willy’s story was the story of her life. She breathlessly (in that breathless wee voice) exclaimed later that evening to Natasha Lytess, her coach and confidante. “ ‘You see my toe—this toe? Well, he sat and held my toe and we just looked into each other’s eyes almost all evening.’ ” She had apparently taken off her glass slipper and he had carried it away with him for a fitting later on when she would weary of DiMaggio’s man’s world of sports and gin rummy lived at stadiums and at Toots Shor’s. After the toe-holding encounter, she and Miller met occasionally and kept up a sporadic correspondence: she wanted, she told him, a hero to worship and he suggested Abraham Lincoln and wrote, “Carl Sandburg . . . has written a magnificent biography.” (The late John Berryman once designated this book as Sandburg’s only work of fiction.)
From the beginning, her life was a Southern California story: Norma Jean Baker, born out of wedlock, was a baptized member of the Foursquare Gospel Church. Later, in one of her foster homes she was introduced to Christian Science, and, says Mailer: “her mind, muddy, drifting, fevered, possessed of unconnected desires and extraordinary fillips of vision, could of course not help but respond to the thought that ‘Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.’ That offered the possibility of a future success that was not to be measured by aptitude but by need. The more she needed, the more she would get, if only she could trust the voice of her instinct which was the manifestation of Mind.”
