Between You and Me

by Mike Wallace

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  his life was Ernest Hemingway, who, with his passion for bullfight-ing, big-game hunting, and other blood sports, had preceded Mailer as the chest-thumping master of machismo, at least in literary circles. Mailer had recently proposed in a newspaper article that Hemingway run for president, “because this country could stand a man for President since for all too many years our lives have been guided by men who were essentially women.” One of my first questions in our Night Beat interview was about that article.

  W A L L A C E : What do you mean by that, “men who were essentially women”? Who among our leaders is so unmasculine that you regard him in that light?

  M A I L E R : Well, I think President Eisenhower is a bit of a woman.

  W A L L A C E : What do you mean by that?

  M A I L E R : Well, he’s very passive. . . . If we’re en terin g a crisis, he’s not exactly the kind of man, I believe, who would have any imagination, any particular grasp of how to change things.

  Inasmuch as Dwight Eisenhower was a former five-star general who had been the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, it was patently absurd to characterize him as “a bit of a woman”—and Mailer knew it. He later admitted that he had expected me to quote what he had written about the effeminacy of our male leaders, and he had planned to make the remark about Eisenhower merely to create some mischief and get my reaction. It worked, for when he said it, I nearly fell out of my chair. Mailer later compared my facial response to “the wince of a wounded Indian.” Although this was still fairly early in his career, he already was going out of his way to play provocateur.

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  I interviewed him again in the fall of 1960, when he was on the verge of announcing his candidacy in the upcoming race for mayor of New York City, a decision based entirely on chutzpah, since he had no visible base of support and no political credentials whatsoever. Still, I decided to humor him and his ego trip, so I asked him questions about various local issues, as though his views on such matters were worthy of serious consideration. I brought up the concern over a recent rise in teenage violence, and Mailer was quick to offer a bold and imaginative remedy. The kids, he said, should not be disarmed, because to a male adolescent, “the knife is an instrument of manhood.” After extolling the heroic spirit of the Middle Ages, he proposed holding modern “jousting tournaments” between teenage gangs in Central Park. In the meantime, I had noticed that Mailer was sporting a black eye—a real shiner—and when I asked him how he got it, Mailer replied, “Oh, I was in quite a scrape Saturday night.”

  That was true enough, but it wasn’t the whole story. Mailer neglected to mention that when he came home from that Saturday-night scrape, he had quarreled with his wife, Adele, and stabbed her with a three-inch penknife. Our interview was taped on Monday, and while Mailer nattered on about the knife as “an instrument of manhood,” his wife was undergoing intensive care following an emergency operation at a nearby hospital. Shortly after the interview, Mailer went to a police station and turned himself in. Only then did the press—and the public—learn about the incident. Adele recovered, but even Mailer recognized that being exposed as a wife-stabber was not a promising way to launch an election campaign. He put his political ambitions on hold until 1969, the year he made his maverick run for mayor of New York. Although his hope of capturing city hall was utterly doomed from the start, his quixotic campaign was stimulating, boisterous, and hugely entertaining.

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  So here it was, four years after his foray into politics, and he and I were once again crossing swords, this time over what he had written in his latest book. The flap over his biography of Marilyn Monroe was a new kind of controversy for Mailer. He was accustomed to detractors who, over the years, had disparaged him for his raucous behavior, his public displays of bravado, and other excesses that were so much a part of his expansive personality. But even his critics (or most of them, anyway) had acknowledged that at his best, Norman Mailer was one of America’s most gifted writers, and his reputation had been enhanced by the highly charged, intensely personal works of journalism that became his forte in the 1960s.

  But now, in 1973—and for the first time in his colorful career—

  serious questions were being raised about Mailer’s professional integrity. Most of the criticism of his biography centered on the sensationalism of the final chapter, with its lurid speculations about Monroe’s death, but that was by no means the only objection. Mailer wrote the book at a frantic pace (he bragged about having dashed it off in a mere two months), and in doing so, he did not take the time to do any fresh reporting of his own. He gathered almost all his information from previously published books and articles, and he bor-rowed so heavily from those sources that he was charged with plagiarism. Finally, both Mailer and his publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, were accused of crassly exploiting the tabloid gossip about Monroe and the two Kennedy brothers so they could cash in on the reputations of three deeply admired American legends who were conve-niently dead and in no position to respond to all the scandalous stories. That charge of exploitation was uppermost in our minds when we chose to call our 60 Minutes piece “Monroe, Mailer and the Fast Buck.” When I interviewed the author at his home in Brooklyn Heights, I began with a question about his own motives.

  “Why did you write the book?” I asked.

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  “I started to write it as—to do a preface, to pick up a sum of money,” Mailer replied. “It was a book which was a commercial venture for me. I needed the money very badly. And then what happens?

  I fell in love with the material.”

  As I pointed out to our viewers when we broadcast the story in July 1973, Mailer had never met Monroe, and the material he “fell in love with” was her films and various books and magazine articles that others had written about the actress. Later in our interview, I asked him to explain how he came up with his off-the-wall theory about the cause of Monroe’s death.

  M A I L E R : All Hollywood was gossiping about Marilyn having an affair with Bobby Kennedy . . . which I believe in fact she was not having. Although they were dear and close friends.

  So, if she could be murdered in such a way that it would look like a suicide for unrequited love of Bobby Kennedy, it would be a huge embarrassment for the Kennedys. And there were people around in those days, in the CIA and the FBI, who hated the Kennedys. . . . I’m saying that some of them may have decided it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to knock off Marilyn Monroe.

  W A L L A C E : You don’t believe that she was murdered, though, really. Down bottom.

  M A I L E R : Well— No, I don’t know. I didn’t know her.

  W A L L A C E : I say you don’t believe it.

  M A I L E R : If you ask me to give a handicapper’s estimate of what it was, I’d say it’s ten to one that it was an accidental suicide. Ten to one, anyway.

  W A L L A C E : At least.

  M A I L E R : But I would not—I could not ignore the possibility of a murder.

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  W A L L A C E : And do you believe that Bobby Kennedy was there, had been with her that night?

  M A I L E R : It’s possible.

  W A L L A C E : I’m asking you again.

  M A I L E R : I don’t know.

  W A L L A C E : Handicap it!

  M A I L E R : I’d say it’s even money.

  Elaborating on the uncertainty of it all, Mailer insisted that it was impossible to know for sure what had happened to Monroe because

  “no one’s talking, and no one’s going to talk about that night.”

  Mailer was wrong about that. Someone was willing to talk ab
out that night, and she happened to be the one person who could refute his convoluted theory about Monroe’s death. Eunice Murray was Marilyn’s housekeeper at the time, and prior to my interview with Mailer, I talked to her about the night her employer died. I asked her directly if Monroe could have been murdered.

  M U R R A Y : Definitely not.

  W A L L A C E : You say definitely not. Why?

  M U R R A Y : Impossible. Because I was alone there with her, the doors were locked, we had been— We had gone to bed and there wasn’t any— No one was around. . . .

  W A L L A C E : Bobby Kennedy was not there that night?

  M U R R A Y : No.

  W A L L A C E : You were?

  M U R R A Y : That’s right.

  W A L L A C E : In doing his research for the book, Norman Mailer never got to you?

  M U R R A Y : That’s right. I think it was reported that I was in hiding.

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  W A L L A C E : Yes, it was.

  M U R R A Y : It’s very funny. My name is in the telephone direc-tory, and I have never made any effort to hide.

  I had to conclude that the only reason Mailer couldn’t find Eunice Murray was because he didn’t really try, and I later stressed that point in my interview with him.

  W A L L A C E : It’s as though you and your publishers didn’t want too many of the facts, but were more anxious for the controversy, for the mystery . . . a mystery on which a considerable amount of light could be shed by the simple expedient of picking up a telephone and calling Eunice Murray.

  M A I L E R : No, no, no, wait a moment. We obviously discussed the possibility of calling Eunice Murray. . . . I vetoed it because I hate telephone interviews. And I do. As a writer, I hate them. I hate that way of getting facts.

  W A L L A C E : Then you get on a plane and go to Los Angeles—

  M A I L E R : I told you, I had a choice. I was coming down to a deadline. I had something like twenty thousand words to finish in the last week—

  W A L L A C E : But facts, Norman!

  M A I L E R : Now, wait a minute, Mike. Let me just give you my attitude on it. What I knew was I was sailing into a sea of troubles, and I said, “Fine, that’s what we’re going to sail into.”

  Because the alternative was this: I did not have the time to do both.

  Mailer was thoroughly flustered. He clearly had not expected me to grill him about his slipshod reporting methods or the deeply flawed

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  judgments he had set down in the last chapter. I must say, that surprised me. After all, Norman Mailer was hardly one of those reclusive, academic writers who had spent most of his life in the pristine confines of some ivory tower. He was known to be an astute and savvy media warrior who had long been accustomed to mixing it up on television shows; even more to the point, this was not the first time he had been interviewed by me. Hence, he should have been much better prepared to deal with my line of questioning.

  When the piece ran on 60 Minutes and Mailer saw how defensive and unconvincingly he came across in our interview, he was hop-ping mad. A few days after it aired, he was quoted as saying that the next time he saw me, he was going to beat me up. Ever the macho man, Mailer specified that he would confine his assault to body blows, because “Wallace’s face is already so ugly that there’s no point in doing any damage to it.” That lively remark was passed on to me by a reporter who called to get my reaction to Mailer’s threat. I just laughed and said, “Ah yes, that sounds like Norman. What would we do without him? The man’s a national treasure.”

  It was no laughing matter to Mailer. He nursed his grievance against me for many years thereafter, and invariably, when I ran into him, as I did from time to time, he would look at me like I was a hair in his soup.

  Marilyn Monroe was also a prime topic of conversation when I interviewed another famous author in 1987. Except on that occasion, the writer also happened to have been her last husband—the esteemed playwright Arthur Miller.

  The three men who married Monroe had almost nothing else in common. She was only sixteen and was still known by her real name—Norma Jeane Baker—when she tied the knot with her starter husband in 1942. His name was Jim Dougherty, and his sole claim to

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  distinction was that he was the first mate of the woman who went on to become Marilyn Monroe. Their marriage lasted four years, but during most of that time, Dougherty was away at sea, serving in the Merchant Marines.

  In 1954, not long after her big burst to stardom, Monroe married Joe DiMaggio, who was, if anything, even more of a living legend than she was. To their millions of fans, the bond between the Yankee Clipper and the Blond Bombshell was the great storybook romance of the age. Alas, what began as a starry-eyed liaison soon turned into a star-crossed mismatch: Their marriage lasted only nine months.

  Brief though it was, it produced a terse comment that must be regarded as one of the most telling rejoinders in the history of American pop culture.

  While Mr. and Mrs. DiMaggio were on their honeymoon in Tokyo, Marilyn was persuaded to make a brief visit to South Korea to entertain U.S. troops stationed in that grim, battle-scarred country.

  (The Korean War had come to an end just a few months earlier.) Although DiMaggio did not go with her, the trip was a howling success.

  To no one’s surprise, the GIs greeted the appearance of this stunning glamour queen in their midst with thunderous applause and frenzied screams of rapture. When Monroe returned to Tokyo and her new husband, one of the first things she said to him was “Oh, Joe, you’ve never heard such cheering.”

  To which he replied: “Oh, yes I have.”

  After her divorce from DiMaggio, Monroe was more determined than ever to prove her worth as an actress, and toward that end, she moved to New York and began taking lessons at the Actors Studio.

  Her mentor was the longtime guru of that famous workshop, Lee Strasberg, and guided by his influence, she began to hobnob with the intelligentsia of the Broadway theater, a social path that led her into the arms of Arthur Miller.

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  Miller had his own considerable reputation as one of America’s finest dramatists, a man who wrote plays that were relentlessly serious. His masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, was nothing less than an audacious attempt to create a drama that would be viewed as a modern counterpart of the classical tragedies that dominated the theater of ancient Greece and the Shakespearean tragedies that were the glory of the Elizabethan Age. Salesman and some of Miller’s other plays were built around his concept that the common man could be as much of a tragic hero as the kings and princes of yore. Moreover, his personality reflected the gravity of his work. In almost every respect, Miller projected the image of an earnest intellectual who brooded over the fate of mankind. As such, he didn’t seem at all like the sort of fellow who would wind up with Marilyn Monroe.

  At the time of my 60 Minutes interview with Miller, whom I had known when both of us were students at the University of Michigan, thirty-one years had passed since the day in June 1956 when he and Monroe were married. I recalled how the two of them were portrayed in the tabloids as “the odd couple” long before Neil Simon chose that phrase for the title of one of his comedies. And not only in the tabloids, for even in those days, Norman Mailer couldn’t resist commenting on Monroe’s love life. He described her marriage to Miller as a union between “the Great American Brain and the Great American Body.” That was among the reactions I had in mind when I interviewed Miller three decades later.

  W A L L A C E : You know that people said at the time that you were together, what in the world is Arthur doing this for?

  Arthur is an innocent. What in the world—Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe?

  M I L L E R : That is
exactly the point. She also in a way was moving in a world she knew nothing about, a world of getting up

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  in the morning, making breakfast, and living in a— That was an innocence there.

  W A L L A C E : Did she want that, do you think?

  M I L L E R : With part of herself. She wanted it with part of herself, yes.

  W A L L A C E : And with the rest?

  M I L L E R : She wanted to be a great star.

  When we broadcast our profile of Miller in the fall of 1987, he had just published an autobiography called Time Bends: A Life, in which he set down some observations about the Marilyn Monroe he knew. I quoted some of them in our 60 Minutes story.

  “I never saw her unhappy in a crowd,” Miller wrote. “Her stardom was her triumph, nothing less. It was her life’s achievement. The simple fact, terrible and lethal, was that no space existed between herself and this star. She was Marilyn Monroe, and that was what was killing her.” That led to the following exchange in our interview.

  W A L L A C E : You knew that it was doomed?

  M I L L E R : I didn’t know it was doomed, but I certainly felt it had a good chance to be.

  W A L L A C E : You said to her, “I keep trying to teach myself how to lose you, but I can’t learn yet.” And she says, “Why must you lose me?”

  M I L L E R : Well, it just shows you the power of instinct over what’s left of your brains at such moments when you’re being drawn to someone, and you sense that it may not work, and you can’t stop it anyway. . . .

  W A L L A C E : Those were tough years. Wonderful years, and terrible years.

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  M I L L E R : Sure. They were. Oh, there was a lot of pain, certainly for her, and certainly for me.

  W A L L A C E : Why? What did it do to you?