Marilyn: A Biography Read Free

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impossible solution up out of the soup, as if the soup itself were
sympathetic to the effort. By the logic of transcendence, it was
exactly in the secret scheme of things that a man should be able to
write about a beautiful woman, or a woman to write about a great
novelist – that would be transcendence, indeed! The new candidate
for biographer now bought a bottle of Chanel No. 5 – Monroe was
famous for having worn it – and thought it was the operative
definition of a dime-store stink. But he would never have a real
clue to how it smelled on her skin. Not having known her was going
to prove, he knew, a recurrent wound in the writing, analogous to
the regret, let us say of not having been alone and in love in
Paris when one was young. No matter how much he could learn about
her, he could never have the simple invaluable knowledge of knowing
that he liked her a little, or did not like her, and so could have
a sense that they were working for the same god, or at odds.
    If the temptation, then, to undertake such a
work of psychohistory was present, he still knew he was not
serious. It would consume years, and he was not the type to bed
down into the curious hollow of writing about a strange woman whose
career had so often passed through places where he had lived at the
same time. One of the frustrations of his life was that he had
never met her, especially since a few people he knew had been so
near to her. Once in Brooklyn, long before anyone had heard of
Marilyn Monroe – she had been alive for twenty years but not yet
named! – he had live in the same brownstone house in which Arthur
Miller was working on Death of a Salesman and this at just
the time he was himself doing The Naked and the Dead . The
authors, meeting occasionally on the stairs, or at the mail box in
the hall, would chat with diffidence as they looked for a bit of
politics or literary business to mouth upon – each certainly
convinced on parting that the other’s modest personality would
never amount to much. In later years, when Miller was married to
Monroe, the playwright and he movie star lived in a farmhouse in
Connecticut not five miles away from the younger author, who, not
yet aware of what his final relation to Marilyn Monroe would be,
waited for the call to visit, which of course never came. The
playwright and the novelist in conscience condemn the playwright
for such avoidance of drama. The secret ambition, after all had
been to steal Marilyn; in all his vanity he thought no one was so
well suited to bring out the best in her as himself, a conceit
which fifty million other men may also have held – he was still too
untested to recognize that the foundation of her art might be able
to speak to each man as if he were all of male existence available
to her. It was only a few marriages (which is to say a few
failures) later that he could recognize how he would have done no
better than Miller and probably have been damaged further in the
process. In retrospect, it might be conceded that Miller had been
made of the toughest middle-class stuff – which, existentially
speaking, is tough as hard synthetic material.
    So there would be then no immense job on
Monroe by himself, no, rather a study like this bound to stray
toward the borders of magic. For a man with a cabalistic turn of
mind, it was fair and engraved coincidence that the letters in
Marilyn Monroe (if the “a” were used twice and the “o” but once)
would spell his own name leaving only the “y” for excess, a
trifling discrepancy, no more calculated to upset the heavens than
the most minuscule diffraction of the red shift.
    Of course, if he wished to play anagrams, she
was also Marlon Y. Normie, and an unlimited use of the letters in el amor gave Marolem Mamroe, a forthright Latin sound
(considerably better than Mormam Maeler). But let us back off such
pleasures. It is possible there is no instrument more ready to
capture the elusive quality of her nature than a novel. Set a