thief
to catch a thief, and put an artist on an artist. Could the
solution be nothing less vainglorious than a novel of Marilyn
Monroe? Written in the form of biography? Since it would rely in
the main on other sources, it could hardly be more than a long
biographical article – nonetheless, a species of novel ready
to play by the rules of biography. No items could be made up and
evidence would be provided when facts were moot. Speculation had to be underlined. Yet he would never delude himself that
he might be telling a story which could possibly be more accurate
than a fiction since he would often be quick to imagine the
interior of many a closed and silent life, and with the sanction of
a novelist was going to look into the unspoken impulses of some of
his real characters. At the end, if successful, he would have
offered a literary hypothesis of a possible Marilyn Monroe
who might actually have lived and fit most of the facts available.
If his instincts were good, then future facts discovered about her
would not have to war with the character he created. A reasonable
virtue! It satisfied his fundamental idea that acquisition of
knowledge for a literary man was best achieved in those imaginative
acts of appropriation picked up by the disciplined exercise of
one’s skill. Let us hasten, then, to the story of her life. Magic
is worked by the working.
* * *
She was born on June 1, 1926 at 9:30 in the
morning, an easy birth, easiest of her mother’s three deliveries.
As the world knows, it was out of wedlock. At the time of Marilyn’s
first marriage to James Dougherty, the name of Norma Jean Baker was
put on the marriage license (Baker by way of her mother’s first
husband). On the second marriage to Joe DiMaggio, the last name
became Mortenson, taken from the second husband. (Even the middle
name, Jean, was originally written like Choreanne for Corinne).
There is no need to look for any purpose behind the use of the
names. Uneducated (that familiar woe of a beautiful blonde), she
was also cultureless — can we guess she would not care to say
whether Rococo was three hundred years before the Renaissance, any
more than she would be ready to swear the retreat of Napoleon from
Moscow didn’t come about because his railroad trains couldn’t run
in the cold. Historically empty, she was nonetheless sensitive — as
sensitive as she was historically empty — and her normal state when
not under too much sedation was, by many an account, vibrant to new
perception. It is as if she was ready when exhilarated to reach out
to the washes of a psychedelic tide. So, talking to one publicity
man, it would seem natural in the scheme of things that her last
name was Baker — maybe that sounded better as she looked at the
man’s nose. Another flack with something flaccid in the look of his
muscles from the solar plexus to the gut would inspire Mortenson.
Since it was all movie publicity, nobody bothered to check. To what
end? Who knew the real legal situation? If the mother, Gladys
Monroe Baker, had been married to Edward Mortenson, “an itinerant
lover,” he had already disappeared by the time Marilyn was born;
some reports even had him dead of a motorcycle accident before
Norma Jean was conceived. There may also have been some question
whether Gladys Monroe was ever divorced from the first husband,
Baker, or merely separated. And the real father, according to Fred
Guiles, was C. Stanley Gifford, an employee of Consolidated Film
Industries, where Gladys Baker worked. A handsome man. Shown a
picture of him by her mother when still a child, Marilyn described
him later “wearing a slouch hat cocked on one side of his head. He
had a little mustache and a smile. He looked kind of like Clark
Gable, you know, strong and manly.” In her early teens, she kept a
picture of Gable on her wall and lied to high school friends that
Gable was her secret father. Not too long out of the orphanage
where she had just spent twenty-one months,