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!”
What is poignant about Marilyn is that all her life she wanted to become a lady. Elegance was as elusive and fearful and attractive and as awesome to her in these somewhat sordid early years as the hidden desire to be macho can feel to a young and wimpy intellectual.
THE COURT: Would Mr. Mailer define “wimpy”?
MAILER: Muscles like cold spaghetti might do it, Your Honor.
THE COURT: You are saying that women feel about elegance the way men feel about machismo?
MAILER: Well, sir, I would say many men decide to reject machismo. They see it as a trap that can dominate them. I expect many women feel that any undue longings toward elegance might direct them from more individual solutions to their lives. Nonetheless, I expect no man puts down machismo without a little uneasiness, and I think it is the same for women and elegance. The rejection of elegance can be haunting. Miss Monroe, having her voluptuous figure and no neck, was not free of the desire to be elegant. In fact, I think it was a major force in her life, a true source of motivation.
THE COURT: Hmmm.
PROSECUTOR: Mr. Mailer is doing his best to be his eloquent best. Still, you are saying, if I may dare to summarize, that your imaginary autobiography wishes to study her desire to rise above sordid beginnings, to become elegant.
MAILER: Something of the sort.
PROSECUTOR: Please forgive these inelegant expressions of your elegant intentions.
THE COURT: Will the prosecution forgo this? The prosecution is elegant enough for all of us.
PROSECUTOR: Thank you, Your Honor. Mr. Mailer, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that every excerpt read in court until now can be justified by you, whether factual or not, as material that can reasonably have occurred in Miss Monroe’s life.
MAILER: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: Not literally true, but aesthetically true.
MAILER: Yessir. Well put.
PROSECUTOR: So you believe that up to here, through the exhibits cited, you have not maligned Miss Monroe’s nature nor denigrated her character.
MAILER: I believe that.
PROSECUTOR: Even though you mix the real and the fictional, you have succeeded in giving a portrait of her that, hopefully, is more true than fact itself.
MAILER: Yessir.
PROSECUTOR: Would you also agree that when a portrait cheapens a character, the portrait can hurt the reader’s mind, that is, injure his future powers of perception?
MAILER: Yessir. There are some who would say that is what the moral nature of literature is all about.
PROSECUTOR: How then would you characterize our next excerpt? Please read Exhibit
B, page 88 to 91.
DEFENSE: Before Mr. Mailer begins, would the court again instruct the witness that he need only reply to the prosecutor’s questions. He does not have to expatiate on them.
THE COURT: Maybe Mr. Mailer thinks he is being paid by the word.
[The defendant reads]
We passed through several rooms, and one had knives and guns on the wall, and another with zebra stripes for wallpaper, and then a room with nothing but filthy pictures all nicely framed, and the last room was big and had a photograph and a table with drinks, and a lot of couches on which guys and girls, and guys and guys, were lying around in a very dim purple light, just enough to see that there was a lot of purple nakedness in this neck of the woods, worse—I couldn’t believe it. This was the first Hollywood party of the sort I’d grown up hearing about. I was used to walking in on a roommate who was under the covers with a fellow, but never anything like this. There were twenty people.
Then I saw our host. Bobby was naked except for cowboy boots and a Stetson hat, and he was walking a Doberman pinscher on a leash around the room, a huge female I suppose, because she had a diamond collar around her neck. But as the dog came up to one couple, it tried to mount, and I saw my mistake. She had a lot of male in the rear. Bobby was giggling like a two-year-old, because the dog kept jumping forcibly into all these lovers’ midsts, if you can say such a thing. There were screams and shouts galore—“Bobby, get Romulus away! Bobby, you’re a madman.”
I would have thought our host was horrible, but when he came up to me, he gave the sweetest smile I’d seen in a year, as if he’d spent his childhood eating nothing but berries and grapes, and when he kissed me, his mouth was tender. I couldn’t get over that, his mouth was as good as Edward’s, who had the best mouth I’d ever kissed, but Bobby was also strong. I’d never been introduced to a man who was naked before, you learn so much that way, and his skin felt smooth as a seal and terrific to the touch. I couldn’t keep my hands off. It was as if he was one boy who everybody had been rubbing love into since he was a baby. Oh, did his lower lip pout.
“Come on,” he said, “you and me are going to leave these people.”
He handed Romulus’s leash to Rod and took me down the tunnel to a room at the other end that turned out to be another apartment. I didn’t have time to look around; it didn’t matter. We were on the floor. I was embarrassed for a little while, for I reeked of Rod, but Bobby de P. loved smells, I think he had a nose instead of a brain, and besides, he had his own aroma, as I have said. Maybe something in him had the answer to my secret, or maybe I had just been prepared for Bobby by that crazy ride with Rod, and so had kept nothing, absolutely nothing, with which to protect myself, but it was as if the very inside of me was pushing to get over to him as desperate as the feeling you know in a dream.
We went on all night. Somewhere in the middle I said, “Oh, you’re the best, I never knew anything like this before,” and I hadn’t, I felt things start in me and go flying off into the universe or somewhere, they were sensations going out to far space, so I meant what I said, except even as I opened my mouth, I knew I had always had the same thing to say to any fellow who was any good at all, in fact I had said it to Rod as soon as he could hear me after the motorcycle stopped. I had even been tempted to compliment Mr. Farnsworth (after all, Farnsworth would say to himself, “Nobody sits in a chair like me!”), it was exactly the remark to make if you wanted to keep a fellow happy and on your string. I once had eight great lovers on eight strings. Three more and I would have run out of fingers. Saying it to Bobby was true, however, I meant it, maybe I meant it for the first time since I’d begun to say it, and Bobby just roared with a crazy kind of laughter. Then we just started reaching into one another as if we were really going to catch something never caught before.
After a while, we moved over to the bed, and later he even turned on the lights, and there were a lot of mirrors. The room was full of antiques who sat there like rich and famous people, and I could see the Persian rug we had been doing it on, red and gold and purple and green. The bed was the largest I’d been in till then. We must have used every inch of it; he was one rich boy who wouldn’t stop. All through the night, there were knocks on the door and people yelling, “Bobby, where are you?” or “Join in the fun, for God’s sake,” but in the morning, when we wandered out (and by then I was so comfortable I wore nothing but high-heeled shoes, and Mr. de P. was back in his Stetson hat), we came to the dead smoky smell of old reefers and cartons of cigarette butts in ashtrays and nobody around but the dog. Romulus was lying in the middle of the floor with his diamond collar gone and his throat cut. His eyes were open, and he had the peculiar expression of a young pup learning to sit on his hind legs. A simple dog look. Plus all that blood on the carpet which you couldn’t see at first it was such a dark carpet.
Bobby started to blubber like a five-year-old kid. He cried and his belly shook a little and his big jaw looked really prominent the way a five-year-old kid with a big jaw can impress you with how mad they are going to be when they grow up. Then he came to a stop and knelt by the dog and got a little blood on his fingers and touched it to himself and to me, but so softly that I wasn’t offended, as if that was a nice way to say goodbye to Romulus, and then we went back to the bedroom and made love, which turned out to be sweeter than anything because it was full of sorrow, and I cried for the baby in my stomach who would soon be gone and the dead dog and for myself, and felt very sweet toward Bobby.
Later that day I asked him, “Do you know who killed Romulus?” and he nodded.
I asked, “Are you going to do anything about it?”
“You bet,” he said.
PROSECUTOR: We would like Mr. Mailer to continue directly to Exhibit B, page 92 to page 95. May it please the court, the new excerpt concludes the description after skipping over a brief account of the household of this Bobby de P., and his business connections, and his family.
[The defendant reads Exhibit B, page 92 to page 95]
Then I began to have this ferocious headache. When we weren’t making love, I felt nauseated and wondered if it was morning sickness, and slowly, day by day, Bobby de P. and me began to fight. Except they weren’t quarrels so much as savage displays, you might say, of bad nerves, after which we’d be off once more. All the while we’d talk about getting married. Only it was like we were flipping a switch. Maybe it was the benzedrine. He kept feeding us pills until I couldn’t sleep, and every time I came near to something fabulous, my chest also came near to exploding.
On the fifth day Bobby said to me, “You want to get married?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ll get married.”
“Let’s,” I said.
“We can’t,” he said. “I’m married already,” and he bit me on the lip. I flung him off. “You said you were divorced.”
“She won’t give it.”
His wife was living with Rod. Rod, he told me, had killed the dog and then stole the collar. Of course, that diamond collar had used to belong to Bobby’s wife, except that Bobby had taken it back from her the day they broke up and put it on the dog.
“Rod is away now,” he said, “on location in Utah. Let’s go over and visit my old lady.”
“And tell her you want a divorce?”
He squeezed my arm so hard I could feel the bruise instantly. “No,” he said, “we’ll finish her off like the dog.”
What I couldn’t believe was the excitement it gave me. I was nearer to myself than I ever wanted to be. I saw inside myself to the other soul, the one that never spoke. It was ready to think of murder. In truth, my headache went away.
“Let’s drive up to her house,” he said. “I’ll do it and you watch. Then we’ll come back here. If we stick together, nobody can prove a thing. We can say we were in bed.”
I could see us looking at each other forever, one year into the next. I could see my pictures in the newspapers. STARLET QUESTIONED IN MURDER CASE. The pictures would be printed
in all the newspapers over the world. A candle could burn in a dark church at such a thought. The idea that everyone would talk of me was beautiful. Killing Bobby’s wife felt almost comfortable. Maybe if I hadn’t seen Romulus with that funny expression on his face where he was dead but still seemed to be learning to sit on his paws, maybe if I hadn’t seen something in that animal lying there so calmly after his throat was cut, I might have worried about Bobby’s wife, but now I just felt as if it was all fair somehow. Maybe Bobby would even let me keep my baby. I remember thinking of how I felt when I first saw my face on film in Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! and decided I was very interesting, except I had what you might call a space in my expression. There was something in me that didn’t show itself to others. Like: I’m ready to commit murder.
We got into Bobby’s car and drove across Bel Air into Beverly Hills, and in one of the houses off Rodeo Drive was where she lived. It was dark, and there were no cars outside, and the garage was locked, so Bobby and I went to the back of the house. He found the wire to the burglar alarm and cut it and cracked the latch on the window. There we were standing in her kitchen. He looked in the rack for the carving knife and found one. Then we went up the stairs to her bedroom. I remember it was on the side that would have a view of the hills above Beverly Hills, and all the while he was doing this, despite the benzedrine, I never felt more calm as if, ha ha, I was on This Is Your Life, and they were talking about me looking for the woman’s door. I even held Bobby’s hand, the one that did not have the knife.
There was no lock to the master bedroom. By the light of the street lamps coming through the window, we could see that there was also no woman in the bed. The house was empty. We went through every room, but it was empty. Bobby’s wife must have gone on location with Rod.
We went home. Before the night was over, Bobby beat me up, or at least he started to, but he was too drunk to catch me. I was awful sick of sex. I grabbed up my clothes and ran out the door and had the luck to find a taxi on those lonely streets and went home to Hollywood. I didn’t even cry in the backseat. It just occurred to me that Bobby didn’t even know my phone number or address, or even my last name, just my first, and maybe he would never try to find me, and he never did.
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Page 37