Mind of an Outlaw

by Norman Mailer

  Two days later, I had the abortion. Whenever I looked into my mirror now in my apartment in the Waldorf Towers, on the thirty-seventh floor, I could still see how something ended in me that day, I don’t know what, but it is still in my expression.

  PROSECUTOR: Mr. Mailer, concerning these last two excerpts, what percentage of fact and fiction would you estimate are there?

  MAILER: I would say those passages are fiction.

  PROSECUTOR: This Bobby, as he is called, he is based on no one?

  MAILER: No one.

  PROSECUTOR: His wife?

  MAILER: She is imaginary.

  PROSECUTOR: The man named Rod?

  MAILER: Equally fictional.

  PROSECUTOR: Do you have knowledge that Miss Monroe at any time in her life made a compact to help a husband murder his wife?

  MAILER: To my knowledge, she never did.

  PROSECUTOR: There is nothing on record anywhere that she ever contemplated such an act?

  MAILER: Not so far as I know.

  PROSECUTOR: Did anyone suggest this possibility in an interview?

  MAILER: No one.

  PROSECUTOR: Yet, in a fictional situation, you make Marilyn Monroe accomplice to a conspiracy to commit murder.

  MAILER: I suppose that’s the legal description.

  PROSECUTOR: How can you ever justify yourself? If Miss Monroe were alive, she could sue you for libel. And win.

  DEFENSE: Objection.

  THE COURT: Prosecution knows better than to draw conclusions.

  PROSECUTOR: Forgive me, Your Honor. I consider the action of the defendant outrageous.

  DEFENSE: Objection, Your Honor.

  THE COURT: I’m putting the prosecution on notice.

  PROSECUTOR: You wrote Exhibit B, pages 88 to 95, knowing there was no basis for them?

  MAILER: No factual basis.

  PROSECUTOR: What makes you think there is a fictional basis?

  MAILER: I’m not sure a fictional basis is possible. I’m not even certain Marilyn Monroe could have gotten into such a situation, fictionally speaking, and still be Marilyn Monroe. I’ve pondered the question. All the while I was writing this book, I kept asking myself, Is this true to Marilyn?

  PROSECUTOR: Are you telling us that you doubt your ethics?

  MAILER: I call them in question.

  PROSECUTOR: You think yourself guilty of literary malpractice?

  MAILER: I hope not, but it’s possible.

  PROSECUTOR: We rest our case.

  THE COURT: Let’s take ten minutes.

  [Recess]

  DEFENSE: Your Honor, while court was out, I discussed his testimony with Mr. Mailer, and he has made clear to me again that he is not interested in an adversary proceeding so much as to ask the court for a discovery of his motives. That is the legal position out of which my questions will be asked.

  THE COURT: You want to let us know where your questions are coming from.

  DEFENSE: Yes, Your Honor.

  THE COURT: I hope they are not coming from left field.

  DEFENSE: It is my fervent hope, Your Honor.

  THE COURT: Please proceed.

  DEFENSE: Mr. Mailer, when you conceived this work, did you plan to have such scenes with the character named Bobby as are described in Exhibit B?

  MAILER: I can say that I planned to have such passages, yes. There is a period in Marilyn Monroe’s life about which very little is known. I would locate it during 1948, 1949, and 1950, sometime after she became a model but before she made The Asphalt Jungle. In those years, she was one of many girls around Hollywood, and there is no telling what kind of adventures she got into, or with what sort of men she went out, other than a few movie people we know she knew. So I thought I would try to invent some episode that might, in a few pages, capture the impact and probable horror of those years upon her.

  THE COURT: Mr. Mailer, how did you form the conclusion that those years from 1948 to 1950 were horrible for Miss Monroe?

  MAILER: On the basis of her later life, Your Honor. The tragedy that surrounds Marilyn Monroe is that as her career succeeded, so did she begin to come apart. It is tragic to be destroyed in the years of one’s success. Right when she was most happily married is when she became most unhappily married. There is no simple explanation for such matters. We have to assume there are buried matters in the psyche.

  THE COURT: Does that justify endowing her with murderous instincts?

  MAILER: It is my understanding of Marilyn Monroe that she was murderous. I would say she was a killer in the way most of us are. On the set, she killed time and slaughtered expectations. She wore people out, she chilled their talent. Finally, with her husbands, she exhausted their hopes. She left not one death but a thousand little deaths in many of the people around her, nice people and awful people both, at least by her measure of nice and awful. When we slay indiscriminately, I think it is a sign we are trying to hold off our own doom. Any portrait of Marilyn Monroe that restricted itself to showing how attractive she could be in the panoply of all her tender wit had to be an untrue portrait which would mislead the reader.

  DEFENSE: We wish to point out that the prosecution has offered excerpts that show Miss Monroe only in an unattractive or controversial light. Such passages are but a small part of this book, Of Women and Their Elegance, and give a distorted portrait.

  MAILER: Yes, most of the time, in fact, since Marilyn Monroe is telling the story in her own voice, I did my best to show her as quintessentially charming.

  THE COURT: Mr. Mailer, would you care to define your use of “charming”?

  MAILER: Unpredictable but positive, Your Honor. We don’t know how we’ll get there, but we’re looking to find our way to someplace nice. Miss Monroe is presented in most of my pages as nice.

  DEFENSE: Exhibit C, page 96, may be an example of this, Your Honor.

  [Defense reads]

  I didn’t like television because it made me want to burp. On the other hand, it was a little like having another person in the room. Nobody impressive, of course. Somebody who was pale and had a lot of stomach noises. Color TV was like they were putting makeup on that pale person. A very unhealthy person with a wheeze in his lungs and a twitch—if you got to know them well they would tell you about their operations. So I used to think TV was ridiculous. The entertainment industry, instead of understanding that they had this unhealthy individual who could only do a little bit, had it out instead working hard. Maybe one year it would come down with some awful disease, but in the meantime they were giving it dancing lessons.

  DEFENSE: We will also offer Exhibit C, page 33, as typical of characteristic aspects of this work.

  THE COURT: Do you object? I see you are standing.

  PROSECUTOR: We will not object. Our case does not rest on the presence or absence of agreeable passages concerning Miss Monroe. It is based instead on one outrageously unfounded presentation of her character.

  DEFENSE: I proceed to read Exhibit C, page 33.

  [Reads]

  Once in a while, to put myself to sleep, I would think of Amy’s underwear, which was not only immaculate but color-coordinated. If she was wearing a purple dress, why, she would also put on a purple bra and a purple girdle and a purple half-slip. “Why?” I asked her. “People can’t see what you have on underneath.”

  “I like the feeling of being altogether in the color I wear.” I got it. She did everything for the inner feeling. I was so impressed.

  “Besides,” said Amy, “if my husband comes wandering through while I’m getting dressed, I want him to see something pretty. Why should I show Milton cotton underwear? With his eyes!”

  Her lingerie cabinet was like a rainbow. All those colors arranged in a fan. When I thought about it, going to sleep, the lingerie gave off sounds like organ pipes. I felt so much love for Amy because we could be friends, she who had every color of the rainbow for her underwear, and I who never wore any.

  DEFENSE: Would you say, Mr. Mailer, that it was to balance such f
avorable impressions of Miss Monroe that you invented the scenes concerning the imaginary man named Bobby?

  MAILER: No, not to balance the portrait so much as to disturb it.

  THE COURT: To disturb it?

  MAILER: Yes, Your Honor. I did not wish to add to Miss Monroe’s legend but to shock its roots. So I decided to take a chance.

  THE COURT: Can you expatiate on this chance you were taking?

  MAILER: One reader, close to me, so hated the section in question that it spoiled the manuscript for her. She is a practical woman, just the sort of levelheaded reader one looks for, and I knew her reaction would be common to many. Yet I felt no desire to remove that part—indeed, I knew I would keep it. For to contemplate my book without such a passage is intolerable. The work would then present Miss Monroe as sweet, charming, madcap, a natural soul. That could only deepen the confusion surrounding her life and her legend. We would be farther away from understanding how it is that someone so attractive could end so badly.

  DEFENSE: Yet the prosecution has asked in effect why you chose the explanation you did.

  MAILER: That still bothers me. The tone of the episode itself. There may have been a failure of invention. It is not easy to conceive of one powerful dramatic episode that will substitute satisfactorily for the sum of a thousand smaller episodes.

  DEFENSE: Yet, what is this sum—to use your word—that you are trying to show the reader?

  MAILER: It is Marilyn Monroe’s unrecorded years in Hollywood. They must make up a large-size bag of foul encounters and small ruthless impulses that wakened in her one by one. In later years, I believe they were like a psychic cyst within her. Memories so bad cannot be called upon. It is exactly the memories we cannot face that destroy us. We are always carrying them uphill.

  DEFENSE: So you felt it was fair to invent this extraordinary episode at the home of Bobby de P.?

  MAILER: Yes. Fair to the reader, that is I wanted the reader to be jarred into comprehension of the size and spectrum of a movie star’s soul. There is more to a movie star than we think, not less. I wanted to deepen the legend of Marilyn Monroe, not sweeten it. I thought it would be better for our comprehension of many things if we understood that art comes out of more contracts than are written, and the artist’s inner negotiations with evil are often as comprehensive as the generosity of the artistic offering. So I do not think I was unfair to her at large. I expect the total of the little horrors she committed in those years would equal the one large horror I gave her. But whether I caught the taste and tone of her personality by that episode, or lost the flavor of her voice for a little while, is another matter.

  DEFENSE: We rest.

  THE COURT: A question. How would you feel, Mr. Mailer, if some other author were to characterize you in such extreme fashion after your death? Let me say I do not wish to rush that occasion. Still, how do you think you would feel?

  MAILER: Your Honor, I have already been characterized in many books as if I were dead. Jacqueline Susann, from what I am told, depicted me as the improbable and repulsive villain of one of her novels. Mario Puzo once portrayed me as a fat man who smoked cigars and strangled a poodle with his bare hands on an airplane. That sounds more like a description of Puzo than myself. I also resent what Puzo’s fiction had me doing. I owned a standard poodle once, and he was a great dog and lived to be eighteen years old. I do not go around killing poodles. Another writer gave one of his characters my name, literally! and then had him drop his pants obediently at gunpoint, for which compliance, he—I should say I—was shot in the anus and killed. There have been other such portraits. I do not say that because I have been, on occasion, poorly treated in print I have a right, therefore, to distort Marilyn Monroe’s life. I say, rather, that I think uneasily of her opinion, and I hope she accepts, wherever she is, the equation I drew between her many lost episodes and the single one I gave her. For if I have been unfair to her, as I believe those authors have been unfair to me, then I must shift uncomfortably before any bar of judgment, since I know how deep is the contempt I hold for authors who would write about me and yet do not have the imagination to come up with some equivalent of my life that may be extreme but is fair. I would not like to think Miss Monroe feels an equal contempt for me. I guess that is all.

  DEFENSE: Can we ask for an immediate verdict of exoneration?

  THE COURT: Some might think your client lucky to escape hanging. I am going to take this under advisement. There is a lot to mull over here, and I am hardly going to let you off on the spot. I will say that I have read the book and consider it a serious enough work to give Mr. Mailer a fair opportunity of avoiding outright censure. But there is no escaping the conclusion that what he has done is downright dangerous. He almost certainly will be reprimanded for making up false and sordid episodes concerning public figures. What if a lot of bad authors were to act as Mr. Mailer has?

  DEFENSE: They have, Your Honor. Ever since Gutenberg.

  THE COURT: Well, I’m going to have to live with this for a while. Let me tell you that once again Mr. Mailer has done his best to take over my weekend. I’m going to close this court for now.

  [Adjournment]

  Until Dead: Thoughts on Capital Punishment

  (1981)

  I HATE THE QUESTION. It confuses me. Every time I am obliged to give an opinion whether capital punishment should or should not be abolished, I say something different. Once I was on The Phil Donahue Show trying to sell copies of my book The Executioner’s Song. It’s a poor way for a grown man to live, perched on a stage full of pale orange and pale blue plastic furniture, hot lights up, your stomach rumbling. There you are, trying to vend your creation. It behooves you to know on such occasions what you are talking about.

  When my host asked about the death penalty, I phumphered. “I’m not for it,” I allowed, “but I’m not against it, altogether, either. I think we need a little capital punishment.”

  Donahue said, “I don’t understand how a little bit of shooting people and dropping cyanide tablets is good for us.”

  “Well,” I replied, “I get mystical on this … I don’t have a clear answer.”

  “You know, what you’re saying,” said Donahue, “is, ‘Let’s knock off three or four a year so we can feel strong.’ ”

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” I told him, but maybe I was. I’m not sure I know now. Every time I contemplate the problem, I find finer reasons for confusion. The subject becomes bottomless. Of course, there are times when you have to live with questions you cannot answer in ten seconds. We may be face-to-face with that difficulty now.

  Certainly, it is easy to be against capital punishment. Should you think of yourself as civilized and liberal, it is almost impossible not to wish it abolished. Capital punishment simply does not appear to serve as a deterrent. In 1957, among the thirty-three nations that chose not to exercise the death penalty, the number of murders never increased. That gives pause.

  Look at it. Some killings are committed in heat, and some in the coldest regions of the heart, but a man who murders in passion is, by definition, blind to restraints. Passion, or for that matter, rage and panic, causes us to act in a way we never would if our cautions were heard. On the other hand, anyone who murders by calculation can have a real fear of future execution, but it is only one factor in his calculations. Even if it all goes wrong, and he is caught and sentenced, there are still, by way of appeals, many years between him and his execution, so much as a decade, conceivably two decades. In fact, such a death is so far away that he is in more danger of being killed by a bust on the street. (For how often can a cop make a street arrest in an atmosphere free of the craziest tension?)

  All right, replies the argument for deterrence: Change the calculations of the man who commits cold murder. Up the consequences. It sounds simple until you examine it. Up the consequences.

  As, for example, from an Associated Press release: “Turkey’s new military government hanged a leftist terrorist and a rightist terroris
t in front of their families before dawn today, informed sources said. The execution ended an eight-year suspension of capital punishment in Turkey and was aimed at deterring further terrorism.”

  Hanging a terrorist in front of his family will certainly deter some of his friends—the timid ones. It will inspire the brave to more martyrdom. SAVAK tortured political prisoners in Iran by the thousands, and executed hundreds: the answer was provided by the Ayatollah Khomeini. To up the consequences is to face the consequences. It is a gamble. There may be more rather than less violence. Besides, we would have to throw out the appeal system of the courts to speed up execution. You can’t accelerate the law and bypass legal procedures without removing the safeguards that protect us against too little justice.

  Well, then, continues the argument, keep the safeguards. Let the law take its time. But execute those killers even if it requires ten years.

  It still won’t work. If there is agreement about one common denominator to the psychopath—hot psychopaths and cold, calculating psychopaths—it is their need for quick gratification. Patience is not part of their powers. The present looms large, and the future seems hazy. To conceive of one’s own execution in years to come does not offer much check against the immediate impulse to murder.

  Deterrence is overwhelmed by the excitement which capital punishment offers the killer. Convicts are the first to comprehend that any man who can slay another has crossed a barrier not all others are ready to follow. Men who end up on death row have true charisma, therefore. They may live in cages and grow wild and demented in the isolation of their lives, but they are the most important figures in any prison. Everyone knows their names. Celebrity, we may as well recognize, is even more electrifying to a convict than to an entertainer. A man leading a dull life, full of oppression, who finds himself a little more choked with rage each year, will secretly be drawn to the idea of capital punishment as a release from the monotony of his existence. So it works as a stimulant long before it is felt as a deterrent. The fear of retribution, if there is any, is more likely to occur after the act, not before. In England in 1900, 250 men were hanged; 170 of them had previously witnessed an execution. 1900 is not 1980, but the burden of proof is hardly reduced since capital punishment was a daily event in those years.