Reliable Essays (27 page)

In tracing Marilyn’s narcissism back to her fatherless childhood, our author is at his strongest. His propensity for scaling the mystical ramparts notwithstanding, Mailer in his Aquarius/Prisoner role is a lay psychologist of formidable prowess. The self-love and the unassuageable need to have it confirmed – any fatherless child is bound to recognize the pattern, and be astonished at how the writing generates the authentic air of continuous panic. But good as this analysis is, it still doesn’t make Marilyn’s narcissism ours. There is narcissism and there is narcissism, and to a depressing degree Marilyn’s was the sadly recognizable version of the actress who could read a part but could never be bothered reading a complete script. Mailer knows what it took Marilyn to get to the top: everything from betraying friends to lying down under geriatric strangers. Given the system, Marilyn was the kind of monster equipped to climb through it. What’s debilitating is that Mailer seems to have given up imagining other systems. He is right to involve himself in the dynamics of Hollywood; he does better by enthusiastically replaying its vanished games than by standing aloof; but for a man of his brains he doesn’t
despise
the place enough. His early gift for submitting himself to the grotesqueness of reality is softening with the years into a disinclination to argue with it. In politics he still fights on, although with what effect on his allies one hesitates to think. But in questions of culture – including, damagingly, the cultural aspects of politics – he has by now come within an ace of accepting whatever is as right. His determination to place on Marilyn the same valuation conferred by any sentimentalist is a sure token.

*

On the point of Marilyn’s putative talents, Mailer wants it both ways. He wants her to be an important natural screen presence, which she certainly was; and he wants her to be an important natural actress, which she certainly wasn’t. So long as he wants it the first way, he gets it:
Marilyn
is an outstandingly sympathetic analysis of what makes somebody look special on screen, and reads all the better for its periodic eruptions into incoherent lyricism. But so long as he wants it the second way, he gets nowhere. He is quite right to talk of
Some Like It Hot
as her best film, but drastically overestimates her strength in it. Mailer knows all about the hundreds of takes and the thousands of fluffs, and faithfully records the paroxysms of anguish she caused Billy Wilder and Tony Curtis. But he seems to assume that once a given scene was in the can it became established as a miracle of assurance. And the plain fact is that her salient weakness – the inability to read a line – was ineradicable. Every phrase came out as if it had just been memorized.
Just
been memorized. And that film was the high point of the short-winded, monotonous attack she had developed for getting lines across. In earlier films, all the way back to the beginning, we are assailed with varying degrees of the irrepressible panic which infected a voice that couldn’t tell where to place emphasis. As a natural silent comedian Marilyn might possibly have qualified, with the proviso that she was not to be depended upon to invent anything. But as a natural comedian in sound she had the conclusive disadvantage of not being able to speak. She was limited ineluctably to characters who rented language but could never possess it, and all her best roles fell into that category. She was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.

To hear Mailer overpraising Marilyn’s performance in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
is to wonder if he has any sense of humour at all. Leaving out of account an aberration like
Man’s Favourite Sport
(in which Paula Prentiss, a comedienne who actually knows something about being funny, was entirely wasted),
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
is the least entertaining comedy Howard Hawks ever made. With its manic exaggeration of Hawks’s already heavy emphasis on male aggressiveness transplanted to the female, the film later became a touchstone for the Hawksian cinéastes (who also lacked a sense of humour, and tended to talk ponderously about the role-reversals in
Bringing Up Baby
before passing with relief to the supposed wonders of
Hatari
), but the awkward truth is that with this project Hawks landed himself with the kind of challenge he was least likely to find liberating – dealing with dumb sex instead of the bright kind. Hawks supplied a robust professional framework for Marilyn’s accomplishments, such as they were. Where I lived, at any rate, her performance in the film was generally regarded as mildly winning in spite of her obvious, fundamental inadequacies – the
in spite of
being regarded as the secret of any uniqueness her appeal might have. Mailer tells it differently:

This is the language of critical self-deception, fine judgement suppressed in the name of a broader cause. What does it mean to dance with all the grace you are ever going to need? It doesn’t sound the same as being good at dancing. The fact was that she could handle a number like the ‘Running Wild’ routine in the train corridor in
Some Like It Hot
(Wilder covered it with the marvellous cutaways of Lemmon slapping the back of the bull-fiddle and Curtis making ping-pong-ball eyes while blowing sax), but anything harder than that was pure pack-drill. And if Zanuck really believed that her voice was dubbed, then for once in his life he must have made an intuitive leap, because to say that her singing voice didn’t sound as if it belonged to her was to characterize it with perfect accuracy. Like her speaking voice, it was full of panic.

It took more than sympathy for her horrible death and nostalgia for her atavistic cuddlesomeness to blur these judgements, which at one time all intelligent people shared. The thing that tipped the balance towards adulation was Camp – Camp’s yen for the vulnerable in women, which is just as inexorable as its hunger for the strident. When Mailer talks about Marilyn’s vulnerability, he means the inadequacy of her sense of self. Camp, however, knew that the vulnerability which mattered was centred in the inadequacy of her talent. She just wasn’t very good, and was thus eligible for membership in the ever-increasing squad of Camp heroines who make their gender seem less threatening by being so patently unaware of how they’re going over. On the strident wing of the team, Judy Garland is a perennial favourite for the same reason. If common sense weren’t enough to do it, the Camp enthusiasm for Monroe should have told Mailer – Mailer of all people – that the sexuality he was getting set to rave about was the kind that leaves the viewer uncommitted.

Mailer longs to talk of Monroe as a symbolic figure, node of a death wish and foretaste of the fog. Embroiled in such higher criticism, he doesn’t much concern himself with the twin questions of what shape Hollywood took in the 50s and of how resonantly apposite a representative Marilyn turned out to be of the old studio system’s last gasp. As the third-string blonde at Fox (behind Betty Grable and June Haver) Marilyn was not – as Mailer would have it – in all that unpromising a spot. She was in luck, like Kim Novak at Columbia, who was groomed by Harry Cohn to follow Rita Hayworth in the characteristic 50s transposition which substituted apprehensiveness for ability. For girls like them, the roles would eventually be there – mainly crummy roles in mainly crummy movies, but they were the movies the studios were banking on. For the real actresses, times were tougher, and didn’t ease for more than a decade. Anne Bancroft, for example, also started out at Fox, but couldn’t get the ghost of a break. Mailer isn’t careful enough about pointing out that Fox’s record as a starmaker was hopeless in all departments: Marilyn was by no means a unique case of neglect, and in comparison with Bancroft got a smooth ride. Marilyn was just another item in the endless catalogue of Zanuck’s imperviousness to box-office potential. James Robert Parish, in his useful history,
The Fox Girls
, sums up the vicissitudes of Marilyn’s career at Fox with admirable brevity and good sense, and if the reader would like to make up his own mind about the facts, it’s to that book he should turn.

Right across Hollywood, as the films got worse, the dummies and the sex-bombs came into their own, while the actresses dropped deeper into limbo. Considering the magnitude of the luminary he is celebrating, it might seem funny to Mailer if one were to mention the names of people like, say, Patricia Neal, or (even more obscure) Lola Albright. Soon only the most fanatic of students will be aware that such actresses were available but could not be used. It’s not that history has been rewritten. Just that the studio-handout version of history has been unexpectedly confirmed – by Norman Mailer, the very stamp of writer who ought to know better. The studios created a climate for new talent that went on stifling the best of it until recent times. How, for example, does Mailer think Marilyn stacks up against an artist like Tuesday Weld? By the criteria of approval manifested in
Marilyn
, it would be impossible for Mailer to find Weld even mildly interesting. To that extent, the senescent dream-factories succeeded in imposing their view: first of all on the masses, which was no surprise, but now on the elite, which is.

*

Mailer is ready to detect all manner of bad vibes in the 50s, but unaccountably fails to include in his read-out of portents the one omen pertinent to his immediate subject. The way that Hollywood divested itself of
intelligence
in that decade frightened the civilized world. And far into the 60s this potato-blight of the intellect went on. The screen was crawling with cosmeticized androids. Not content with gnawing her knuckles through the long days of being married to a test pilot or the long nights of being married to a band leader, June Allyson sang and danced. Betty Hutton, the ultimate in projected insecurity, handed over to Doris Day, a yelping freckle. The last Tracy-Hepburn comedies gurgled nostalgically in the straw like the lees of a soda. The new Hepburn, Audrey, was a Givenchy clothes-horse who piped her lines in a style composed entirely of mannerisms. And
she
was supposed to be class. Comedy of the 30s and 40s, the chief glory of the American sound cinema, was gone as if it had never been. For those who had seen and heard the great Hollywood high-speed talkers (Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Jean Arthur) strut their brainy stuff, the letdown was unbelievable. Comic writing was pretty nearly wiped out, and indeed has never fully recovered as a genre. In a context of unprecedented mindlessness, Marilyn Monroe rose indefatigably to success. She just wasn’t clever enough to fail.

Marilyn came in on the 50s tide of vulgarity, and stayed to take an exemplary part in the Kennedy era’s uproar of cultural pretension. Mailer follows her commitment to the Actors’ Studio with a credulousness that is pure New Frontier. The cruelty with which he satirizes Arthur Miller’s ponderous aspirations to greatness is transmuted instantly to mush when he deals with Mrs Miller’s efforts to explore the possibilities hitherto dormant within her gift. That such possibilities existed was by no means taken as gospel at the time of her first forays into New York, but with the advent of the Kennedy era the quality of scepticism seemed to drain out of American cultural life.
Marilyn
is a latter-day Kennedy-era text, whose prose, acrid with the tang of free-floating charisma, could have been written a few weeks after Robert Kennedy’s death rounded out the period of the family’s power. Mailer’s facility for confusing the intention with the deed fits that epoch’s trust in façades to perfection. He is delicately tender when evoking the pathos of Marilyn’s anxious quest for self-fulfilment, but never doubts that the treasure of buried ability was there to be uncovered, if only she could have found the way. The true pathos – that she was simply not fitted for the kind of art she had been led to admire – eludes him. Just as he gets over the problem of Marilyn’s intellectual limitations by suggesting that a mind can be occupied with more interesting things than thoughts, so he gets over the problem of her circumscribed accomplishments by suggesting that true talent is founded not on ability but on a state of being. Nobody denies that the snorts of derision which first greeted the glamour queen’s strivings towards seriousness were inhuman, visionless. In rebuttal, it was correctly insisted that her self-exploration was the exercise of an undeniable right. But the next, fatal step was to assume that her self-exploration was an artistic activity in itself, and had a right to results.

*

Scattered throughout the book are hints that Mailer is aware that his loved one had limited abilities. But he doesn’t let it matter, preferring to insist that her talent – a different thing – was boundless. Having overcome so much deprivation in order to see that certain kinds of achievement were desirable, she had an automatic entitlement to them. That, at any rate, seems to be his line of reasoning. A line of reasoning which is really an act of faith. The profundity of his belief in the significance of what went on during those secret sessions at the Actors’ Studio is unplumbable. She possessed, he vows, the talent to play Cordelia. One examines this statement from front-on, from both sides, through a mirror, and with rubber gloves. Is there a hint of a put-on? There is not. Doesn’t he really mean something like: she possessed enough nerve and critical awareness to see the point of trying to extend her range by playing a few fragments of a Shakespearean role out of the public eye? He does not. He means what he says, that Marilyn Monroe possessed the talent to play Cordelia. Who, let it be remembered, is required, in the first scene of the play, to deliver a speech like this: