From the Archives: Jean Stafford on Norman Mailer’s Prurient Marilyn Monroe Biography
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 M aggio 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 sub- jects 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.)
