Authors: Norman Mailer
Mind of an Outlaw (49 page)
MAILER:
Some of my impressions.
PROSECUTOR:
So Mrs. Greene told you that Miss Monroe was wearing no panties on this occasion?
MAILER:
I don’t recollect that Mrs. Greene told me that.
PROSECUTOR:
Then how did you arrive at such a conclusion?
MAILER:
On the basis of many conversations with many people who knew Marilyn Monroe, it seems to be established that Miss Monroe did not like to wear panties.
PROSECUTOR:
So you took the liberty of deciding she was wearing none that day?
MAILER:
It seemed a fair assumption. You try to be fair.
PROSECUTOR:
You weren’t just trying to sell copies?
DEFENSE:
Objection. The witness is being manhandled.
THE COURT:
Overruled. I want to hear the answer.
MAILER:
I wasn’t trying
just
to sell copies, although I didn’t think the description would hurt sales—I’ll give you that much. What I was trying to do, however …
PROSECUTOR:
We’re not interested in what you’re trying to do, Mr. Mailer, but in what you did.
THE COURT:
Let him give it.
MAILER:
I was trying to get across Miss Monroe’s sense of fun. She may not literally have been wearing no panties on that day, but it was in her nature to have been wearing none. I think she could certainly have been engaged in such a scene and have enjoyed it. So I chose to write it that way. It seemed right to me. That is what I must go by.
PROSECUTOR:
I will continue with Exhibit A, page 24 to page 26.
[Reads]
After two days of such shopping, Amy said, “That’s it, kiddo. From now on, we stay in the St. Regis and have everything brought up.” I began to see how it worked. Some designers came by, friends of Amy’s; I could tell by the way she said the name of one that it was another case of Laurence Olivier, Milton Greene, Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, or Elia Kazan. First in category. So I said, “Oh, yes, Norman Norell, greatest dress designer in the world.” And he had a couple of the second-greatests with him—George Nardiello, John Moore. They were the nicest men. It was not only that they were well groomed and slim and fit into their clothes like a beautiful hand has gone inside a beautiful glove, but they were so happy inside their suits. It was like the person within themselves also had a good suit which was their own skin. Moreover, they liked me. I could tell. Oh. I felt open as a sponge. I knew they were going to help me. Norell said, “Marilyn, everyone has a problem. I have a friend who’s very ugly and she’s the princess of
fashion in New York. She takes that ugliness and makes it dramatic.” Yet, he said, after she was done with her dress and coiffeur, she looked like a samurai warrior. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. Besides, she was smart enough to wear jewelry that clanked and gonged with every move she made. You could have been in a Chinese temple. “Her little beauty tricks, if tried on anyone else, would have been a disaster,” Norman Norell said and gave me my first lesson in style. “It’s not enough to find the problem,” he said, “and avoid it. Elegance is magic. The problem,
presto
, has to become the solution.”
Sure enough, Norman Norell got around to informing me very kindly that my neck was too short, only he didn’t put it that way. My neck, I was told, wasn’t that long. I wouldn’t be happy in a
Vogue
collar. Ruffles were death. “Let me,” he said, “show you a shawl collar.” I got it instantly. A nice, thin dinner-jacket set of lapels and a long V-neck. Society cleavage. I felt as if I had spent my life until that point being sort of very fluffy à la Hollywood. Now I could see the way Amy saw me with my head sitting on my shoulders like an armchair in the middle of a saggy floor.
PROSECUTOR:
Mr. Mailer, would you say your account of conversations between Miss Monroe and Mr. Norell is factual?
MAILER:
Miss Monroe met Norman Norell, he designed dresses for her, he had many conversations with her. I attempted to capture the flavor of those conversations as they might have occurred. They are imaginary conversations, but, hopefully, not too far away in mood from what was said.
PROSECUTOR:
Not too far away in mood. But not in fact. In fact, they have no relation to what was said.
MAILER:
Most conversations are lost. We reconstruct the past by our recollection of the mood fully as much as by our grasp of fact. When facts are skimpy, one hopes to do well at sensing the mood.
PROSECUTOR:
I will continue Exhibit A, pages 26 and 27.
[Reads]
Of course, this new interest in clothes had all started on the trip to Palm Springs, when I told Milton I wanted to be immensely respected and he told me, “First step: Don’t act like a slob.” He held up a finger. “Be a woman.”
“You say, ‘Don’t look like a slob.’ ”
“That dress you’re wearing,” said Milton. “It’s a
shmatte
.”
“A what …? No, don’t tell me.” I once saw a guy in a delicatessen spearing kosher pickles out of a barrel. That was what Yiddish sounded like to me. One more pickle on the prong.
“You want to be the greatest actress in the world,” said Milton, “but you’re exhibiting neither class nor taste. They call you a dumb blonde, and they are getting away with it. You have to carry yourself different. Don’t walk around like you’re nothing. Never forget you have something fantastic on the screen.”
That was now prominent in my thoughts after meeting Norman Norell. I felt as if I was getting out from the carpet I had been living under all my life. I was beginning to see that class was not beyond me, nor was I beneath it.
PROSECUTOR:
Would you say Miss Monroe’s conversation with Milton Greene is also based on skimpy facts?
MAILER:
Less skimpy. I take it from Mr. Greene’s recollection. Of course, his conversations with Miss Monroe were held more than twenty-five years ago. In my case, I am not trying to delineate a boundary line between fact and fiction here. In this book, I want to explore the elusive nature of a most talented woman and artist.
PROSECUTOR:
Let me now conclude Exhibit A with the rest of page 27.
It was the scene in
The Seven Year Itch
where I stand over a subway grating and my skirts blow up. Now I guess the studio had given me a white
shmatte
that night and tight white panties, and my hair had a hundred marcelled waves, and I certainly had no neck and lots of back and shoulders, where I was pleasantly plump, to say the least, but I paid no attention. I threw caution to the winds, which is one cliché I could die saying and hold it in my arms, I can’t help it, give me a ton of caution to throw to the winds. There were two thousand people on the street, watching, and they had a million whistles. All the while Joe D. was on the outskirts of the crowd dying because he knew the secret of acting. Maybe it was because he was a ballplayer, but he knew it didn’t have to be false when you acted that you were in love; sometimes it was real, and when that happened, it could be more real than anything else. So I guess he knew—no secrets between husband and wife; that’s what the ceremony is for—guess he knew I was feeling a little moist every time my skirt blew up. Immortality would be immortalized if I ever took those white panties off. It’s true, I wanted to throw myself to the crowd.
PROSECUTOR:
Mr. Mailer, did your researches bring you to ask various friends of Miss Monroe’s if, on this occasion when her skirts were flying, she wanted, and I quote from your text, “to throw myself to the crowd”?
MAILER:
No, I asked no one.
PROSECUTOR:
To your knowledge, she told no friends of such a feeling?
MAILER:
No.
PROSECUTOR:
Never mentioned it to you?
MAILER:
I never met her.
DEFENSE:
Would the court instruct my client that he need only answer the prosecutor’s questions. He does not have to add supplementary information.
THE COURT:
Mr. Mailer is now twice instructed.
PROSECUTOR:
Norman Mailer, you never met Marilyn Monroe?
MAILER:
No, but I sat behind her once at Actors’ Studio.
[Laughter]
PROSECUTOR:
On the basis of the firm insight you gathered from having once sat behind her, you presume to write of Marilyn Monroe’s inner physical condition. You declare that she wanted to throw herself to the crowd.
MAILER:
Yes.
PROSECUTOR:
Would you call this a fair conclusion?
DEFENSE:
Objection. The prosecutor is trying to make my client characterize his replies.
THE COURT:
Sustained.
MAILER:
I wish to answer anyway.
DEFENSE:
Please obey the court.
MAILER:
Your Honor, with all due respect to my own attorney, I wish to say that such perceptions and such liberties as I took on trying to enter Miss Monroe’s mind are considered fair in literary practice.
PROSECUTOR:
Objection. I think this ought to be cut off.
THE COURT:
You started it. Let him go on.
MAILER:
I have been thinking about Miss Monroe’s life for many years. I have already written one other book about her, called
Marilyn
, and in that work did not enter her mind once. It was out of respect for the intricacies of her mind. I only dare in this case because I believe I know more about her by now. The experience of looking at Milton Greene’s photographs of Marilyn Monroe over several years is part of that greater knowledge. Sides of her nature are revealed by Mr. Greene’s photographs that I do not find anywhere else. I would also submit that I have been fair to Miss Monroe in my heart. In fact, I find her charming in those passages you read, and not at all maligned. She is a humorous woman.
PROSECUTOR:
Mr. Mailer, concerning Exhibit A, which has just been read, you say you do not malign Miss Monroe but find her charming.
MAILER:
Yessir.
PROSECUTOR:
I will not argue with your conception of female charm. I will ask you instead to read aloud from Exhibit B, pages 83 and 84. May it please the court, Exhibit B is selected from a later part of the work but is concerned with earlier episodes in Miss Monroe’s life when she was still in Hollywood. I believe this comes under the technical heading of “flashback.”
MAILER:
You could call it that.
[The defendant reads Exhibit B, pages 83 and 84]
Now, of course, even in those days I had a sheltered life. I wasn’t respected, but I was sheltered. I might be considered the property of the studio and so be sent at a moment’s notice with ten other girls to Denver or Modesto to help out with publicity, knowing full well that in such situations, the studio liked to hold the broadest view of publicity, that is—breed a little goodwill. I wasn’t being sent out in my sweater to strew ill will. All the same, it was a sheltered life. I might have to go through certain experiences with a big laugh when I was actually feeling a little queasy inside, but, still, who ever had to be afraid of a local movie reviewer or a small-town theater manager? Most of them didn’t have poison in their system. In fact, they were really grateful, and some of them were nice people. Anyway, back on the studio lot, I also had to keep appointments. One day I saw three executives on the half hour—2:30
P.M.
, 3:30
P.M.
, and 4:30
P.M.
—before going off to acting class in the evening, although, of course, those kind of assignments only took five minutes. “How are you, Mr. Farnsworth, how nice to see you again,” and he had you behind the desk. Sometimes he never got out of his chair. Sometimes you never got off your knees. I knew the pleats on some executives’ trousers better than their face. All the same, most of such people were not that
rude, and I had an orphan’s philosophy: Cheer up, it could be worse. They could take off their socks and ask you to kiss their feet.
The key thing, however, was that I was on contract at the studio. A girl might have to do one little despicable deed or another, but you were not out there where you really had to know how to protect yourself. You were sort of more in the very bottom reaches of the middle class. You had to be obedient, that’s all.
PROSECUTOR:
Mr. Mailer, thank you for reading from your work. Would you summarize for the court your sources for this material.
MAILER:
I would say it is based on general knowledge. I have read many books about Hollywood, I have known many people who lived and worked in Hollywood, I spent a year there myself in just the period of which the exhibit speaks, and have also drawn on many stories I heard about Miss Monroe’s life during that period, or, for that matter, the life of many other starlets on studio contracts. I believe I can say that the scene described is not exceptional but common to life in Hollywood in the early fifties. It was well known that Miss Monroe had such a life during that period, and the scars of it were probably responsible in part for her future personality. I am trying to explain a woman of angelic appearance who, by the end of her career, was notoriously difficult to work with. Such scenes help me to understand her.
PROSECUTOR:
Still, you are taking liberties with the facts.
MAILER:
I would say this excerpt is factual. I can’t certify it as a fact, but I believe it is a fact. She had the life of a stock girl on contract in Hollywood studios in the fifties. Her drama coach, Lee Strasberg, who is one of the beneficiaries of her will and had the highest regard for her talent, did say, “She was a call girl … she was on call for things the studio wanted.” Arthur Miller once wrote, “She was chewed and spat out by a long line of grinning men! Her name floating in the stench of locker rooms and parlor-car cigar smoke!”